The Verge
Tech writer Paul Miller's dreams of an analogue existence during his year away from the Internet didn't come true: "I just didn't really do much of that," he says about going to the library and using the post office.

He planned to leave reporting altogether, feeling like "there's always more and more news to cover," as he says in a video about his experiment. But instead of feeling free, he writes in an essay, he became something of a hermit: "Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat."

A year in, I don't ride my bike so much. My frisbee gathers dust. Most weeks I don't go out with people even once. My favorite place is the couch. I prop my feet up on the coffee table, play a video game, and listen to an audiobook. I pick a mindless game, like Borderlands 2 or Skate 3, and absently thumb the sticks through the game-world while my mind rests on the audiobook, or maybe just on nothing.

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Greg Sandoval | The New York Times
"I’m saved," Greg Sandoval wrote on his blog Sunday, announcing he was joining tech site The Verge as a senior reporter. Sandoval quit his previous employer CNET after he announced on Twitter, "I no longer have confidence that CBS is committed to editorial independence." CBS owns CNET and forbade the site to give an award to a product from Dish Network, with which it is engaged in litigation.

"He’s obsessed with getting the news — the real news — and I find that kind of energy infectious,” Verge Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky told Brian Stelter.

Sandoval writes that he has a "written guarantee from management that nobody from the business side of the company will ever have any authority over my stories."

Related: Carl Franzen also joins The Verge; he comes from Talking Points Memo, where he was a tech reporter.

Previously: CNET reporter quits after reports that CBS impinged on editorial decision | CBS again impinges on CNET’s editorial independence | In BitTorrent case, CBS argues for CNET’s editorial independence

Techdirt | BuzzFeed

It might be hard to understand why staffers at tech site The Verge complained so loudly about a Huffington Post "linkout" that sent readers to a Verge feature. After all, isn't the Web built on such selfless acts of curation?

"I'm sort of at a loss as to how anyone might think that the HuffPo snippet and link takes away from the original," Techdirt Editor Mike Masnick wrote Wednesday.

Also on Wednesday, Huffington Post Senior News Editor Whitney Snyder roared to the defense of his organization's linking practices. (more...)