Behind the Blog: Nothing to Hide Here
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss parenting blogs, Pinterest sawing its own legs off, and legal guardrails.
EMANUEL: I felt a great relief this week getting out this story about Alpha School, an AI-powered private school where—shockingly—the AI is not working as promised. I’ve been working on it intensely for a few weeks and it always feels good getting a big investigation off your plate, especially when people seem to appreciate it, which I’m glad they did in this case.
When my wife was pregnant, Sam, Jason, Joe and I joked about how we were about to get a lot of baby and parenting related content on the site. Historically, a lot of our reporting was influenced by subjects we were interested in in our personal lives. Being a parent is an all-consuming life change, so we all assumed I’d be writing about baby monitor hacking or something like this. I’ve definitely done a little bit of that (please check out this podcast I did with Patrick Klepek about screen time and kids), but not as much as I expected.
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The Screen Time Panic Sets Parents Up to Fail
I listened to hours of podcasts about how screen time affects kids of all ages and how parents should manage screen time but I still felt completely unprepared for this challenge when I had a kid.I think the reason for that is that there’s a lot of reporting about how screens are impacting kids, and a lot of reporting about the research into this subject, but rarely did I encounter a conversation between parents that talks about how any of that information can be realistically applied in the real world.
This week on the podcast we’re joined by Patrick Klepek in order to have the kind of conversation I wish I heard before I became a parent, but I think there’s something here for everyone. Patrick is the cofounder of Remap, a website and one of my favorite podcasts about video games, and the writer behind Crossplay, a newsletter about the intersection of parenting and games. Patrick is also my former colleague at Vice, back when I worked at Motherboard and he at Waypoint. Patrick has been reporting about video games for most of his life, is a wonderful writer, and a parent. I find his perspective on many of these issues—screen time, parental controls, YouTube, Roblox—extremely useful and interesting, and I hope you do as well.
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