You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t… whatever you do next, you’ve shipped. You’ve joined the club.

It’s great because it appeals to you, if you’re a member of the club, at least. It’s particularly gratifying when he uses it to take a pop at the “braying media who have never shipped anything in their lives”. That line is a brilliant kick in the shins for the legions of critics who moan constantly in the press about this product or that service and so on.

Except I don’t agree.

Tom’s assessment is that these people (let’s call them critics) have never shipped anything and therefore don’t understand what they’re talking about. I’d suggest the opposite is in fact the case: the trouble is that media ships constantly, and therefore becomes inured to the difficulties and delicacies of launching a product of any size or scale.

Yeah, in the media it’s by-and-large intellectual content rather than physical objects that we’re talking about — but then that’s the same for almost everything online. Google doesn’t ship physical product any more than Gawker.

I’ve had a lot of problems recently trying to explain to people that producing a news website or magazine or even a big article is actually product management, and a sort of high-pitched, super-cyclical version of product management at that (something I tried to point out when I wrote Newspapers are always in beta).

The media is very good at making itself seem like something other than a business (and there are a lot of problems with what business it does manage) — but if you realise that every edition, every issue, every article, every bulletin, every thing made by the media is a product, then you start to think differently about these situations.

Writers and editors and broadcasters and publishers hold their breath in thousands of fragile moments when something goes live, or hits the newsstands. They read the comments, they trawl twitter, they feel the crushing defeat of seeing a mistake or a flaw or understanding a weakness in what they’ve done.

It’s not that the media critics have never shipped, it’s that they do so much shipping they’ve stopped caring about product like anyone else would.

Update: Tom has responded in a far more contrite manner than I’d expected, suggesting contritely that “a good attitude to have, in any walk of life, is to assume that it’s always more complicated than it appears”. A good point, but I still think his original post was on point because it felt true — and therefore was as much about a state of mind as anything. Feeling this way about the media is not unusual: and that makes it the media’s problem.