Since the beginning of October I have been working two days a week for The Register. I am still freelance for the other three days so also available for other work.
Why the Register? I have been contributing for some years and there are several things I like about the publication. It is known of course for its attention-grabbing headlines but you will also find solid technical content there; it was one of the first sites to report the Linux Shellshock bug, for example, and did so in detail with strong follow-up posts, making the site a good one for admins to follow. There is also a strong developer readership which is good from my perspective. Editorially it is diverse and you will find plenty of different opinions expressed by the staff and contributors, which I consider a strength. Organisationally, The Register is refreshingly unbureaucratic.
It reminds me in some ways of the best days of Personal Computer World, a famous print magazine which ceased publication in 2009. PCW was a delight because it was not shy about covering small niches as well as mainstream technology, in the days when it had plenty of editorial pages to fill.
The comments are worth reading too; not all of them, but there are plenty of smart readers. On any specific topic, logic suggests that some of the readers will know more about it than the journalist; you should always glance at the comments.
The Register is also a well-read site; number 513 in the UK according to Alexa, and 2204 in the USA. Judging by Alexa it is seems to be the most popular tech news site in the UK though I am not an expert on web stats.
I will continue to post here of course, as well as covering hardware, gadgets and audio on http://gadgets.itwriting.com/.
In case you missed it, this is what I came up with in October – it was a bit more than 2 days a week as it turned out, I am not superhuman:
Programming Office 365- Hands On with Microsoft’s new APIs
Microsoft unwraps new auto data-protection in Office 365 tools
Mozilla- Spidermonkey ATE Apple’s JavaScriptCore, THRASHED Google V8
Microsoft shows off spanking Win 10 PCs, compute-tastic Azure
Happy 2nd birthday, Windows 8 and Surface- Anatomy of a disaster
Entity Framework goes ‘code first’ as Microsoft pulls visual design tool
Lollipop unwrapped- Chromium WebView will update via Google Play
Microsoft and Dell’s cloud in a box- Instant Azure for the data centre
Migrate to the cloud and watch your business take flight
Docker’s app containers are coming to Windows Server, says Microsoft
Sway- Microsoft’s new Office app doesn’t have an Undo function
Influential scribe Charles Petzold- How I figured out the Windows API
Software gurus- Only developers can defeat mass surveillance
Xamarin, IBM lob cross-platform mobile app dev tools at Microsoft coders
Windows 10 feedback- ‘Microsoft, please do a deal with Google to use its browser’
No tiles, no NAP – next Windows for data centre looks promising
Vanished blog posts- Enterprise gaps- Welcome to Windows 10
One Windows- How does that work… and WTF is a Universal App-
Windows 10- One for the suits, right Microsoft- Or so one THOUGHT
Do you write the Reg headlines too or just the copy?!
It is the same as with most large publications (eg newspapers); the sub-editors do the headlines. The journalist does write a headline but it is a placeholder.
Tim
The Register also unfortunately publishes anti-science articles from loony global warming “skeptics”. So I stopped reading the site.
The global-warming skepticism does get addressed by commenters, so it’s not entirely one-sided.
They must have a department devoted to thinking up double entendres for some of the headlines. Or maybe that’s considered a perk to be claimed by the editors.