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CEO Merrill Brown says he founded The News Project to address one of the big problems in the journalism business: “It costs too much to launch and operate news sites.”

It’s an issue that Brown knows well — he’s a former journalist, journalism executive and educator who served as the founding editor in chief of MNSBC.com. He announced earlier this year that The News Project has raised a six-figure investment from WordPress VIP, and now it’s actually launching with its first customer, the nonprofit site CALmatters, which offers news and analysis around California politics.

Last week, Brown and The News Project’s product lead Miguel Ferrer walked me through what the the company does, both for CALmatters and more generally. The company’s pitch, in a nutshell, is to provide a “news business in box.”

Ferrer explained, “Not only is it what you need for a news business in a box, it’s also understood to be more than a technical toolset, more than a CMS, even as the CMS is ultimately the core of everything.”

Put another way: The News Project has stitched together a publishing platform by working with a number of different partners, offering content management and hosting from WordPress VIP, website development by 10up, reader engagement tools from Piano, design by Charming Robot and ads by Google Ad Manager. (TechCrunch works with a number of these companies, including WordPress VIP, 10up and Piano.)

News organizations can get access to all of that by paying $25,000 to get on the platform, followed by a monthly subscription fee.

It’s exactly not a small investment, but Brown said that normally, “Unless all you’re going to do is hire a couple of kids, $25,000 not going to get you competing in the complicated news ecosystem we’re working in today.” So instead of seeing a newsroom spend $250,000 or more on a website launch or redesign, “We want to see that money spent against words on the screen.”

When the new CALmatters website goes live, the obvious change will be a fresh look, but Ferrer said that’s just scratching the surface. For one thing, The News Project has built templates to support more sophisticated article formats, like feature stories that are driven by images and videos.

“We never forget that UX and designs have to be performance-oriented,” Ferrer added. By that, he means that when The News Project works with partners to create a website, a great deal of “care and attention” are given to “how are we giving [content] space in a design to breathe, how are we assuring that there’s opportunities for recirculation, and we’re equally attentive to opportunities around messaging or advertising that’s ultimately so important to the business side of the equation.”

Brown noted that these tools support a variety of businesses models and forms of reader engagement, but they’re built around “the belief that reader revenue is the future.”

When asked about the broader issues facing the journalism business, Brown acknowledged that the industry is “going through a very significant restructuring” — but he suggested that this doesn’t mean newsrooms are going away.

“It isn’t about large daily metropolitan newspapers, it’s about sites in important vertical categories getting developed at the right scale, with the right kind of overhead — smaller and regional sites solving the problem of local news,” he said. “Certainly, the future of local news is not about newsrooms with 200 people in it, it’s about newsrooms with 20 people in it.”

And naturally, those are the kinds of newsroom that The News Project has been built to serve.

Apple officially stopped selling the 12-inch MacBook today, a computer that hasn’t had an update since June 2017 and that is also maybe one of the most contentious Macs in Apple’s lineup. The 12-inch MacBook at one time seemed like Apple’s path forward (plenty of Apple fans and analysts saw it as a sign of things to come when it launched in 2015), but ultimately ended up representing some of Apple’s biggest challenges with its Macs in general.

The biggest indicator that Apple felt the MacBook was a showcase and crucial product was the name – it was just THE MacBook, without any addition epithets or qualifiers like “Air” or “Pro” (both of which predated its existence. And when it debuted, it brought a number of firsts for Apple’s laptop lineup, including USB-C for both data and power, a keyboard with butterfly mechanisms, a Force Touch trackpad and a new way of “terracing” batteries that allowed Apple to maximize the power available to the diminutive notebook without making any compromises on size.

For sheer portability and screen-to-size ratio, the MacBook was an absolute feat. But this computer was one of Apple’s boldest statements yet when it came to a separation from current standards and opinions about what users did and didn’t need in a laptop. It only came with a single USB-C port (‘just one!’ people gasped, and that’s for power, too!); the butterfly keyboard was strange and different. This last thing would later prove possibly Apple’s biggest technical gaffe in terms of fundamental component design, which has impact even today in that the company released brand new computers using butterfly keyboards and immediately added them to an extended keyboard replacement program.

The MacBook also always lagged significantly behind its Pro and Air companions in terms of processor power, thanks to the energy-sipping Intel chips required in its construction to minimize heat. As a former MacBook owner myself, it was enough that you noticed the chug when you were doing stuff that wasn’t necessarily heavy-duty, and painfully apparent if you used the little notebook simultaneously with a home desktop, for instance.

But the MacBook was also excellent in its own way. It was so portable as to be almost forgotten as an addition to a bag. It was maybe the ultimate pure writing notebook, because that’s not something that ever felt the lack of processor power under the hood. And as often maligned as it was for being a single-port machine (besides the headphone jack, which is now a luxury in the smartphone world), there was a certain amount of focus necessitated by this monk-like approach to I/O.

Ultimately, the MacBook resembles the original MacBook Air more than anything – an oddball that had both lovers and haters, but that didn’t meet the needs or expectations of the masses. Like the Air, the MacBook could rise from the ashes with a future incarnation, too – perhaps one made possible by the much-speculated future Apple transition to ARM processor architecture. Or maybe it’ll just make way for an ever-evolving iPad powered by the more sophisticated iPadOS coming this fall.

Regardless, the MacBook was an eccentric machine that I enjoyed using (and was potentially considering using again pending an update), so here’s hoping it’s not gone forever.

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos recently sat down with VC-turned-professional coach Jerry Colonna for a chat about founder mental health, his less than predictable career path and his new book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.

After years as a successful venture investor, Colonna found himself confronting his own personal struggles with mental health. As a result, Colonna shifted his focus towards coaching founders and executives through the tensions that exist between personal happiness, mental health and traditional leadership practices.

In his book and in his conversation with Connie, Jerry discusses how one’s previously developed standards of success can impact their ability to lead and realize fulfillment from their work. Jerry elaborates on why many Valley executives encounter mental health pressures as their careers evolve, and details advice he gives to his own clients to help them re-engage with themselves.

“First, to unpack that ambition itself, is not a negative. It’s just ambition. But when we don’t understand the context of that ambition, what is it that’s driving us forward? Is it fear? Or is it excitement and enthusiasm about what’s possible?

Generally, it’s about both, right? When our ambition is primarily unconsciously driven be our fear, the likelihood is high that we’re going to drive the people who work for us crazy. Because nothing that they do, is ever going to make the fear go away. No matter how successful our ambition makes us.

Because the underlying motivation is fear. I am looking to become safe by what I’m driving towards. Now, if we were to flip it and say the thing that is really driving the ambition, is dreaming of a world that is possible. “I can’t imagine how cool it would be if this company were X.” Well, I may still act in a way that’s driven, but I don’t necessarily have to drive the people around me crazy.

And so by understanding the complicated nature of that word ambition, we get to, as I say, dial up the positive aspect of it and release a little bit from the less healthy more negative aspects of it.”

Jerry and Connie dive deeper into how media coverage impacts founder psyches and how it has evolved amidst an increased awareness around mental health. The two also discuss how external pressures are changing for younger generations of founders, as well as how society as a whole can truly tackle widespread mental health issues.

For access to the full transcription and the call audio, and for the opportunity to participate in future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Connie Loizos: Jerry, it’s a pleasure to be talking to you. We’ve been talking for many, many years. I’m afraid to say how many years…

Jerry Colonna: It’ll reveal how old we are.

Loizos: I know exactly. But I do remember you starting Flatiron, with Fred Wilson, many, many years ago and then going on to JP Morgan and I know that many of the listeners on the phone right now probably have traced your story because you are one of those characters of great interest in Silicon Valley. Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to leave venture capital and become a full-time coach?

BMW has finished a nearly two-year project to bring 100 electric vehicle charging stations to America’s national parks.

The automaker partnered in 2017 with several U.S. agencies, including the National Park Foundation, National Park Service, and Department of Energy, to donate 100 electric vehicle charging stations in and near to national parks throughout the United States.

More than 90 of the charging stations have been installed. The remaining few will open this month, the company said.

The effort is small compared to some of the broader infrastructure campaigns in the U.S. But it has the potential to ease the EV charging desert that exists on the open road and at national parks. And as more electric vehicles come on the market, the demand for these chargers will only increase.

The charging stations, which include Level 2 and DC fast chargers, are concentrated in popular areas where there’s a strong electric vehicle market. The agencies and BMW also considered the distance from nearby charging locations.

BMW’s charging stations can be found in Everglades and Grand Canyon, two of the most visited U.S. national parks, as well Death Valley in California, Rainier and Olympic National parks in Washington and Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.

BMW worked with the National Park Service and National Park Foundation to identify sites, address technical considerations and coordinate with state and local authorities.

“The automobile has long been central to the great American vacation in national parks,” said National Park Service Deputy Director P. Daniel Smith. “While our treasured landscapes offer familiar vistas time after time, the automobile has changed greatly, and parks want to meet the needs of our visitors who electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.”

The all-electric Mini Cooper was once just a demonstration car and a dream for EV fans, but now it’s a car people will actually be able to buy, with truly competitive range and a ground-up purely electric drivetrain. The new Mini Cooper SE is the brand’s first purely electric small car, with a range of between 235 and 270 kilometres (146 to 168 miles) and a fast-charing possible at up to 50 kW.

The Cooper SE can also manage zero to 60 acceleration in just over 7 seconds, and has an engine under the hood that’s capable of delivering the equivalent of up to 181 HP. You’ll get that instant acceleration which is a natural benefit of all-electric engines, and really a really quick jump off the line to 37 mph in just 3.9 seconds.

Of course, these performance numbers don’t match up to something like the Tesla Model S (or even the Model 3 for that matter) and the range likewise isn’t quite on par, which may be its biggest challenge. But the classic 3-door Mini Cooper design is a draw in itself, and the pricing on the vehicle is around $36,400 U.S. when converted from the 32,500 Euro starting cost, which could make it attractive for buyers at the entry-level of the luxury scale.

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Meanwhile, this is also the first electric car in the BMW Group family that offers the driver a choice between full regenerative breaking or light, meaning you can tweak how aggressively the vehicle decelerates when you take your foot off the gas. It’s another nice option for people switching from gas cars, or who just like to be able to tune performance as much as possible.

BMW Group says it’s going to start shipping these ASAP, and already has extensive interest from pre-registered customers.

You can get access to Uber’s controversial Quiet Ride button that lets you ask your driver for silence if you’ll pay a 20% to 40% premium atop the UberX price. Today the Uber Comfort tier launches in 43 cities and smaller states in the US plus Ottawa, offering those willing to pay the premium access to newer mid-size cars with more legroom, higher rated drivers, and Rider Preferences for requesting specific climate control or no talking.

Before users hail an Uber Comfort car, they can request “quiet preferred”, “happy to chat” or leave the default of “no preference”, as well as warmer or colder temperature settings. These Rider Preferences launched in May as part of Uber’s pricier Black and SUV cars alongside a way to request help with luggage, but now they’re becoming more affordable.

The move allows Uber to charge more for slightly better vehicles and higher-rated drivers that used to be lumped in with its budget UberX tier. This also lets Uber compensate drivers better if they’re willing to forgo the small talk or crank the air conditioning. “Uber Comfort should result in fares for drivers that are at least 20% higher than UberX (not including surge or promotions) for a trip with the same time and distance” an Uber spokesperson tells me. 

Some critics consider the Quiet Ride button an affront to the dignity of Uber’s contractors, saying it makes them act like robots when their jobs will soon be threatened by self-driving vehicles. But others just see it as enhanced customer service that’s reasonable to request given riders are paying for a driver’s professional services.

“The reception to Quiet Mode has been generally positive among drivers and riders” an Uber spokesperson tells me. “Riders appreciate the consistency and control they have over the type of their travel; business travelers in particular have shared how rider preferences have helped them be more productive en route to the airport, important meetings, or other work-related destinations. Drivers have shared how these new rider preferences have helped take the guesswork out of riders’ expectations, and helped them provide the best service possible.” They also noted that Quiet Mode is described in app as a “conversation preference” rather than a firm mandate to be silent.

To qualify for Uber Comfort, drivers need a car that meets higher and consistence vehicle make, model, year, and legroom requirements. They also must maintain a 4.85 or higher rating to be eligible. If these drivers don’t want to receive Rider Preferences requests, they can opt out of being classified as Comfort.

Uber Comfort is now available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Charlotte,  Dallas, Fresno, Hampton Roads, Houston, Honolulu, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Madison, Memphis, Milwaukee, Nashville, New Orleans, Omaha, Orange County, Palm Springs, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa Bay, Tucson, and Wichita plus Ottawa, Canada as well as the full states of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

Here’s the breakdown of Uber’s tiers from cheapest to most expensive:

• Uber Express Pool – The least pricey shared rides where you have to walk a few blocks
• Uber Pool – Cheaper shared rides
• UberX – Private rides without extra Rider Preferences or better vehicles
• UberX Diamond – Better rated drivers and occasionally nicer cars but no Rider Preferences for top Uber Rewards loyalty members for no extra cost
• Uber Comfort – 20% to 40% more than UberX for Rider Preferences like Quiet Rides plus better rated drivers, nicer cars, and minimum legroom requirements
• Uber Select – Even more expensive for high-end cars but no Rider Preferences
• Uber Black & SUV – The highest price for Rider Preferences including luggage help and premium town cars or big vehicles

Back in December, I recommended Uber add a Quiet Ride option that can be nice if you’re trying to work or rest during your trip. Users told me it was awkward having to ask drivers mid-ride for quiet since some would become offended or even hostile.

That’s especially problematic for women, some who said their male drivers’ probing questions would escalate to unwanted flirtation. Uber needs to do better at training drivers that this is unacceptable and weed them out of the system. But the reactive approach of waiting for negative ratings to come in after drivers have annoyed passenger can be augmented by allowing riders to ask for quiet ahead of time.

Bringing Rider Preferences to a wider swath if its vehicles could help Uber differentiate itself from competitors like Lyft and squeeze more cash out of passengers by training them to use its upgraded tiers as it tries to maintain momentum in the public market. Two months after its IPO, it’s finally recovered and exceeded its opening price.

Building apps and tools on the web shouldn’t just be for the technically inclined. In the early days of the web, it was easy to make your MySpace account, for example, unique to your personal aesthetic. Glitch is doing that for the modern era.

Glitch, formerly known as Fog Greek Software, is an online community where people can upload projects and enable others to remix them. Dash likens coding on Glitch to working together inside Google Docs.

“The biggest thing I see is the creative impulse for recreating the web never went away,” Glitch CEO Anil Dash told TechCrunch. “There was a latent desire, so we didn’t need to do much.”

Glitch started inside Fog Greek Software as Gomix, which similarly aimed to democratize app building. In March 2017, Gomix became Glitch and has since ballooned into a community that has created more than 2.6 million remixed apps. These apps range from tools to tidying up your Twitter timeline to randomizing who is forced to take notes or do other tasks during the meeting to creating animations using CSS, and much more.

This 2.6 million-plus remixed apps milestone is notable, Dash said, because Glitch crossed 1 million apps just one year ago. It shows that “people are building stuff all day, every day.”

Hitting this milestone is partly why Glitch waited to announce its $30 million Series A round from Tiger Global, Dash said. The round — the first-ever institutional investment for the 19-year-old company — closed in November 2018, but Dash said he wanted to be able to show people that the company did what it said it would do: grow the team, which has doubled in size in the last year, and grow the community.

“We wanted to show people that you can judge us by what we did over the last year,” Dash said. “If anything, we have only gotten more outspoken and thoughtful about how we grow.”

As Glitch has grown the team, Dash says the company has been pushing hard to set the bar around diversity and inclusion, as well as tech ethics.

On the D&I side, 47% of the company identifies as cisgender women, 40% identify as cisgender men, 9% identify as non-binary/gender non-conforming/questioning and 4% did not disclose. On the race and ethnicity front, the company is 65% white, 7% Asian, 11% black, 4% Latinx, 11% two or more races and 2% did not disclose. Meanwhile, 29% of the company identifies as queer and 11% of people reported having a disability. These numbers are pretty good.

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“[Diverse representation] is not impossible,” Dash said. “It’s not science fiction. It’s not this thing that exceeds your grasp, and you can do it while going through massive growth in the community and on the team.”

On the ethics side, Dash says the company thinks deeply about privacy and ensuring school kids, for example, never have to log in in order to use it. While Glitch is free to the masses, it does charge companies who are looking to reach developers, like Slack and Google. Google, however, has been under heavy scrutiny as of late for a variety of reasons pertaining to ethics. Dash, himself, has been an outspoken critic of Google.

“We talk about it a lot internally,” Dash said. “On one level, there’s the very pragmatic conversation of how do you be in it but not of it. The filter we’ve used is are we enabling what our community seriously wants to create.”

Glitch specifically works with the team at Google focused on the open web, open frameworks and web standards. But as Glitch moves toward products like Tensor Flow, an open source artificial intelligence library, the company makes sure every example includes education around responsible use of technologies, Dash said. Ultimately, it’s hard to completely discount Google from the experience because of how core its technologies have become.

“You can’t be credibly showing people how to make tools for their work or learning to code and not show them some of Google’s technologies,” Dash said. “For better or worse, that’s the web we live on. I think everyone engages with that on a real authentic level…The hard part is how do you strike the balance of being as ethical as you want to be while still existing in the ecosystem we’re in. We’re going to be a for-profit capitalist company until the revolution comes. But within that framework, can we be something that proves all the things people say about recruiting, business models, diversity — that those constraints they imagine are not true.”

Facebook will take a cut of up to 30% on fan subscriptions, beginning on January 1, 2020.

The social network is revealing its plans as part of a broader slate of monetization-related announcements this week at VidCon. The news confirms a TechCrunch report earlier this year that Facebook would be taking a 30% share of subscription revenue.

Facebook first started rolling out fan subscriptions in early 2018, allowing creators to charge their fans $4.99 per month in exchange for access to exclusive content and a fan badge. During this initial testing period, Facebook didn’t keep any of the subscription revenue for itself, allowing creators to take everything, minus the fee collected by Apple and Google on mobile subscriptions.

Director of Media Monetization Kate Orseth told journalists at a briefing last week that Facebook is committed to allowing creators to keep 70% of subscription revenue (minus “applicable taxes and fees”). So when the mobile platforms collect their 30% fee on first-year subscriptions, Facebook won’t take a cut. Then, as the platforms lower their share to 15% in the second year, Facebook will take the other 15%.

Again, that’s all on mobile, which Orseth said represents the majority of subscriptions thus far. On desktop, Facebook will be able to take the full 30% from the start. (This compares to a 5% subscription fee collected by Patreon, a 30% fee collected by YouTube and a 50% fee collected by Twitch.) And Orseth noted that all of this only applies to new subscribers starting in January — Facebook won’t be taking a revenue share on subscribers who signed up before then.

In addition, Facebook says it’s allowing creators to launch exclusive groups for subscribers. And it’s expanding the Facebook Stars program, the virtual currency that allows users to tip game streamers — it’s now testing the feature with non-gaming video creators. The company says creators should earn 1 cent for each Star a fan sends to them. And yes, Facebook is also taking a cut here, though it says its share decreases as fans buy larger packs of Stars.

Facebook is also making  a number of ad-related announcements. Among them: creators will be able to limit ads on a video to “non-interruptive” formats like pre-roll and image ads, so there are no ad breaks inserted. In addition, they’ll be able to share their audiences with advertisers in the Brand Collabs Manager for ad targeting. And they can start viewing their Instagram data in Facebook’s Creator Studio.

Orseth said the company’s goal is “to create suite of monetization products that can be used individually” or in a bundle. She suggested that while ad breaks work best for creators with a broad audience, subscriptions are better for those with a “hyperloyal audience” and brand collaborations “work well across the board.”

As part of the briefing, Orseth introduced journalists to Mark Ian Hoyle and Roxanne Hoyle, the parents behind the popular LadBaby Facebook Page, where they share videos of their family and children. The Hoyles said that by using the full suite of Facebook monetization tools, they’ve been able to focus on making videos (Mark still works as a freelance graphic designer as well), and to afford trips to make more videos.

Given the broader controversies over who gets to make money on major online platforms, Orseth and the Facebook team were also asked about eligibility for monetization. The company says that each product has its own eligibility requirements, and that for now, humans are reviewing each application to participate in the Brand Collabs Manager and Fan Subscriptions.

Apple just announced a handful of key updates to its most popular Mac devices, timed for back to school purchases. The entry-level MacBook Pro gets the biggest bump from the this update, bringing the TouchBar and TouchID do the low end model for the first time.

The 13-inch system also gets the updated keyboards announced recently, which should reduce some of the widespread issues users have reported with earlier generations, along with 8th gen quad-core Core i5 and i7 processors, which Apple promises will perform up to two times faster than previous models.

Also inside are slightly boosted graphics and the addition of T2 security chip. The display, meanwhile, gets True Tone technology for improved color, while the speakers are getting a bit of a sound boost. The system starts at $1,299, or $1,199, if you’re a qualified student.

The Air’s improvements are a bit less dramatic, including the addition of True Tone tech and the new keyboard. The bigger news on that end is the lower point, starting at $999 for students and  $1,099 for the rest of us. The new models are available today, and for a limited time, the company will also be tossing in a fair pair of Beats Studio wireless headphones for students who pick up a new Air, Pro or iMac.

Unmortgage, the London-based startup that lets you buy as little as 5% of a home and rent the rest, has announced a partnership with Allianz Global Investors (AllianzGI) to create a new fund to be used to purchase properties offered via the platform.

The AllianzGI-managed fund is targeting a size of £500 million, according to my sources, while I understand that the deal was actually signed mid last year but is only being disclosed today. That’s undoubtedly a clever bit of PR timing as it gives the impression of continued momentum for Unmortgage after founder and CEO Ray Rafiq-Omar departed last month. In other words, Rafiq-Omar was actually the CEO when the AllianzGI deal got across the line.

Founded in 2016, Unmortgage attempts to solve the increasing difficulty first time buyers face trying to get on the housing ladder as rising house prices typically outstrip wages. If people rent, they often cannot save the large deposit required for a mortgage. It is this “vicious circle” that Unmortgage want to break: by helping families that can afford to rent gradually buy a home.

Under the Unmortgage part-own part-rent proposition, renters can purchase as little as 5% of the property they want to live in, without taking out a mortgage, and then rent the rest. Unlike traditional ‘shared ownership’ schemes, the offer isn’t limited to new build properties and tenants can “staircase” (i.e. buy more of the property, thus reduce their rent) whenever they want and by as much or as little as they choose.

Meanwhile, AllianzGI’s fund will enable Unmortgage to purchase its ownership stake of the homes it buys in partnership with renters. In turn, it enables AllianzGI’s institutional investor clients to invest in residential property as an asset class.