Mathew Yurow

The publishing industry is currently in the midst of a similar crisis. Just as the music industry experienced in the ‘90s, the once-standard unit of media consumption — the newspaper or program — has been unbundled into millions of individual articles, Tweets and YouTube clips. This unbundling — along with a swell of upstart media companies — has increasingly conditioned users to believe that media should be free to consume. Social saviors?

There’s been a lot of commentary on comments lately. Last month, Reuters announced that it would be removing comments from its news stories. The publisher stated that the decision was in response to the “realities of behavior in the marketplace,” as news dialogue has increasingly shifted to social media. A few weeks later, tech blog Re/code followed suit, sharing a similar explanation.

If you had asked me a few years ago whether all web developers should be building sites with responsive design, my answer would have been an emphatic “yes.” However, I’ve been giving that question a lot of thought recently, and I think my opinion has changed.