thehustledaily

A decent amount, actually. It depends on the topic, but once I have a good story idea I'll often look for reddit threads related to that topic for background research. Sometimes, I'll reach out to people on Reddit who have interesting posts and see if they'd like to be interviewed. Lately, for instance, I've been talking to restaurant workers who have left their jobs and have found a few people for that story via Reddit. --Mark

I love this question. For starters, I'm sad that there aren't as many brick and mortar businesses out there, a la Glamour Shots, that rose up to meet the demands of a fad/trend and then wear off. It seems like with the biggest fads of the 2010s -- fidget spinners, avocado toast come to mind -- there isn't like one store or one business that encompasses the entirety of that fad. It's spread out, so there's not one major enterprise that we'll see falling off a cliff in a few years.

However, I think the biggest shifts or extinctions we'll be seeing are with companies that provide services in the gig economy/ecommerce world. There's already been consolidation in food delivery, and Uber and Lyft have yet to find steady footing. For years, people have been talking about ghost kitchens rising up and there will be lots of winners and losers there. So I think the new companies/industries that undergo shifts and may no longer exist are those in this newer wave of ecommerce. And the weakest links will just get subsumed by a few bigger powers. Which is kind of depressing!

And not nearly as fun as thinking back on Glamour Shots... --Mark

The key for any great story, no matter the topic, is good characters. I'd recommend trying to find somebody really interesting or eccentric or who is studying something really cutting edge in your field. You can use that person to drive the narrative of your story -- and then bam you can have an entertaining read. --Mark

Recently, I'd say this is my most contrarian piece https://thehustle.co/to-reinvent-work-we-have-to-destroy-the-clock/ -- on the need for us to reconsider the traditional relationship of time and work.

I've never worked anywhere that I've been pressured to not write certain stories. Journalists usually have free reign to report and write and are unencumbered from corporate interests (with some exceptions; every so often you hear of a story being spiked by a major organization but then it usually surfaces at another). I really don't think labor interests influence most business reporting, and that journalists oftentimes intentionally try to steer away from labor interests or at least take anything gleaned from them with a grain of salt.

From the reporting I did, I saw the Florida State drink was called Seminole Fire Water. And it definitely existed before Gatorade and was being ingested by FSU football players and written about in local newspapers. But I couldn't find any record of the makers of Seminole Fire Water or FSU trying to sell the drink. Robert Cade and the other Gatorade inventors were not the first to make a sports drink; they were just the first to really sell it.