Wired tech journalist leaves to run startup

Ryan Singel of Wired has left the business news magazine to run a startup, reports Anthony Ha of TechCrunch.

Ha writes, “Ryan Singel, editor of Wired’s security blog Threat Level, told me that today is his last day on the job, because he’s leaving to run his startup Contextly. Over the past decade, Singel has held various reporting and editing roles at Wired — apparently he helped start Threat Level back in 2006, and I got to know him few years later, when he was writing for the site’s Epicenter business blog.

“With Contextly, he said his goal is to ‘make tools for journalists actually designed by journalists, rather than marketers or advertisers or techie guys that don’t actually get how journalism works.’ It turns out that he’s been testing one of Contextly’s tools on Wired.com for the past few months — if you read any story on the site and see links to related stories at the end, those are provided by Contextly. (Also, the fact that Wired is using Singel’s product suggests that the departure is amicable.) Other early testers include BoingBoing and CultOfMac.

“There are two main components to the recommended stories widget — a section for “Related” stories, which are actually selected by the writer , and another area called ‘You Might Like,’ where the links are algorithmically selected and point to a wider range of content on the site. The idea is to balance editorial control with the automation and random discoveries that technology can provide.”

Read more here.