Eric Umansky

Changes

I've joined ProPublica, a non-profit investigative news outfit that's starting. I'm going to be writing for and helping oversee the Web site. Which means 1) health care! 2) posts to this here blog will probably continue at their current, eh, less-than-torrid pace.

The Toddler Boogie

Steve Wonder and my nieces, all getting funky. The best moves come about 25 seconds in.

Boogie-Down Nieces from ericumansky on Vimeo.

My Nieces Are Cuter Than Yours

In-House Notes

So it looks like our Internet is kinda, sorta back up. Hopefully that will continue. In other news, you might notice that I've added a few tweaks to the site--making it least contemporary to, oh, say, 2001.  For the geekily-inclined, I've changed the RSS feed so that it now includes full posts rather than teasers. (I was convinced to do that by this article.*)

Also, for those who don't want to deal with RSS or don't know what I'm talking about,  you can now get new posts emailed to you. Just put your address in the box there on the top left. (And I promise, no emails about how you can win BIG BIG BIG, by donating to ericumansky.com.)

*At one point when I was at Slate, the bosses decided to stop giving readers a full email version of Today's Papers (the column I used to write for them). Instead, they  switched the email to give readers only the first couple of paragraphs of the column. I argued against the plan, saying that not only we were going to piss of readers, but it would result in a net loss of readership.

I lost the argument. We got about 500 angry letters. And no new readers (though as I recall, we didn't lose that many either). All in all it seemed like a bad trade. Especially since an eyeball should be an eyeball regardless of whether they're reading the column on the Web  or  via email. All of which to  say is that it's taken me two years--and reading that article, to come to the same conclusion about my own Web site. No good reason for the delay really. Just my own thick-headedness.