Tom Standage is the digital editor of the Economist, responsible for its appearance in many electronic forms: web, native apps, digital audio, and more. Tom also regularly writes fascinating non-fiction titles that teach us about the present through the lens of the past, such as The Victorian Internet about the business and culture of telegraphy and Writing on the Wall, about the first 2,000 years of social networking.

Host Glenn Fleishman spoke with Tom about finishability, completism, and the raging endless river of content. We also discuss the reasoning behind the Economist's new bite-sized daily Espresso app, pulling back from blogs, and the importance of audio — both podcasts and the professionally read-aloud versions of every article.

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Links to items discussed in this episode:

• Somethin’ Else runs six studios in parallel on Thursdays for the Economist audio edition.

• Phil Gyford coined the term "finishability."

• Tom wrote about wet-plate photography on Vantage, a collection at Medium: "A First-Timer’s Foray Into Wet-Plate Photography."

• Economist editor John Micklethwait, the 16th since its founding in 1843 and in charge for the last nine years, is departing after nearly three decades at the newspaper for Bloomberg News.

• My blog entry about Twitter friendship was mentioned by company founder Biz Stone and the link heavily retweeted, and yet had only modest readership.

• App-download completion rates vary by app size in megabytes and the country in which it's downloaded.

• Mark Zuckerberg explained the rationale for splitting messaging function into a separate mobile app

• Why are The Economist’s writers anonymous?