Ernie Smith

tedium.co — My twice-weekly newsletter that takes a deep-dive into the depths of the long tail. The newsletter is widely syndicated on a variety of sites, including Vice's Motherboard, Atlas Obscura, and Neatorama. The newsletter, which has nearly 10,000 subscribers, has open rates that hover around 30 percent for each issue, and is seen as one of the more innovative newsletter offerings out there. The newsletter has been featured on a number of media outlets, most notably Vice, NPR, Digg, and Wired UK.

shortformblog.com — In late 2008, after getting laid off from a newspaper job, I set out to build a site that broke down news into short bites and blurbs. Soon, it became one of Tumblr's most popular sites. At the time I shut it down in late 2014, the site had just north of 160,000 followers on Tumblr. It was nominated for a Shorty Award in 2012 and has been featured in such publications as Time Magazine, ReadWriteWeb, Mediaite and BuzzFeed.

associationsnow.com — One of my main projects at Manifest has been running this site for ASAE's Associations Now, which had a limited Web presence prior to the launch of the site. While I didn't design the site, I have played an active role in its strategy, content, and social media approach. Since launching in October 2012, we've seen a dramatic increase in interest in this content from the world of association executives, and things will only get better from here.

Motherboard, Vice — A 3,000+ word deep dive into the true story of the first popular Nintendo Entertainment System emulator for the PC, NESticle. The program was extremely influential on modern-day retro gaming, as highlighted by the existence of the NES Classic. The story featured sources that were active in the online video game scene more than 20 years ago.

Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet — One of my most popular Tedium pieces, this story highlighted the unlikely circumstances that led to the creation of one of our most popular junk foods, the cheese curl.

Atlas Obscura — As the Cold War thawed, Microsoft was there with a chisel to break the ice. The story of how Microsoft became a prominent player in the Russian market by launching a localized version of MS-DOS just a year before the USSR disintegrated.

Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet — How Hot Pockets made billionaires out of two Iranian Jews who used their wealth to help revive the culture that they left behind.

Associations Now — If you’d like to push the envelope with an email message, you might be in for a world of pain. Like web design in general a decade ago, email design remains mired in a set of inconsistent standards and poor rendering support by popular clients. The result is that email marketers are often stuck playing it safe.