I have spent most of my working life on the receiving end of technology that did not do what someone said it would. First answering the phone to people whose software had stopped working, then writing the manuals that were supposed to stop them calling, then editing other people’s attempts at the same. Twenty years of that teaches you one question, and I ask it so often that colleagues have started saying it for me before I open my mouth: have you checked?
Not “is it good”. Not “is it popular”. Have you checked that it does what you are about to tell a reader it does, and can you tell them how to check it too?
That question is the whole idea behind The Next Digit. There is no shortage of writing about technology. There is a shortage of writing that explains how a tool works, admits what it does badly, and leaves the reader able to verify the advice instead of taking it on trust. A great deal of what is published is written to sell you something, or to be first with a story that will be wrong by Thursday. We are trying to be useful for longer than that.
How the magazine is organized
We have six sections, and each is built around a kind of reader rather than a kind of product. Founders, creators, businesses, people at work, developers and households all use some of the same tools, but they need them explained differently. A CRM means one thing to a founder with three customers and something else to an operations team migrating forty thousand records. So each section has its own editor, who knows that reader well, and you will notice that they do not all sound like me. That is deliberate. I hired them for what they know, not to imitate my prose, which is, I am told, an acquired taste.
What we promise
We will tell you when a figure was correct, and we will update it when it stops being correct. We will tell you how to test what we recommend. We will tell you when a tool has a real weakness, even when the tool is otherwise good. We will not invent results, and we will not let anyone pay for a verdict. The rules are written down in our Editorial Standards, so you can hold us to them.
What I would like from you
Tell us when we are wrong. Corrections go to [email protected] and are read by a person, usually me. And if you know a tool well enough to explain it plainly, read the Contribute page. Some of the best explainers I have edited were written by people who had never published anything before and simply knew their subject properly.
Thank you for reading. Start wherever your problem is.
Seb Ashby, Editor-in-Chief