The Inspiration behind Mission Critical
Beginnings
Back in 1998, when I moved to begin a ten year period of living in NYC and working throughout North America, there were very few alternatives to the paper medium when travelling - no smartphone, no onboard Wi-Fi.
Newspapers, magazines, briefing documents and books had to satisfy our thirst for information on-board aircraft and that usually necessitated a ‘book bag’ which, depending on your reading appetite, ended up weighing a lot.
My solution was self curation. When I picked up a magazine or newspaper I would skim through it and immediately start ‘filleting’ - ripping out the articles which I wanted to read later. These piles would accumulate in two trays marked ‘must read’ at home and in the office and they would then make it into the bag just before the journey.
That solved the weight problem but then technology came along and created the wait problem. Too much content, a deluge of information which ended up waiting in the inbox to be read, which meant it wasn’t. Signing up for newsletters helped in the short term but then you find you have a dozen waiting for you, every morning guilting you. Before long you mark them as spam and watch the counter of unread emails in that box rise exponentially.
It’s ironic that in an age where information is plentiful we’ve probably never been more ill-informed, no - make that misinformed. All too easy to find the wrong information at the right time or the right information at the wrong time.
And that’s been the inspiration behind Mission Critical, for over twenty years I’ve had a burning desire to create and curate content for a very select group of people, all with missions of their own. All time-poor but with the need to be better informed than everyone else in the room.
Mission Critical is not reliant on AI or algorithms. It’s built on the news value judgement I’ve built over thirty years on four continents, in politics, commerce and the third sector. It’s about having the insight and confidence to say, I know what you need and this is it.
Once a week, every week. Concise and with clarity.
If it’s going to be critical to your mission it will be in Mission Critical.
Mark
Founder
