Hi — I’m Paul McAvinchey, and this is StackTimes.

Over the last two decades, I’ve lived at the intersection of media and technology — building digital platforms, designing content systems, leading product innovation, and helping teams scale what they publish and how they operate. I’ve been a founder, a strategist, a technologist, and a builder inside early-stage startups and legacy media orgs.

In an age where everyone’s a publisher — from indie newsletter writers to billion-dollar brands — how media gets made has become an invisible advantage. The tools we use. The workflows we build. The monetization models we test. The audiences we serve. All of it forms what could be called the modern media stack — and it's changing fast.

StackTimes is my attempt to document and make sense of that change.

What You Can Expect

At its core, StackTimes is a blog and newsletter about the systems behind modern media. I’ll be talking to:

• Builders of editorial operations and content systems

• Founders and CTOs of media-tech platforms

• Media operators navigating the messy middle of tools, teams, and process

I’m especially interested in the underexplored parts of digital media:
The workflows. The platforms. The analytics dashboards nobody talks about. The publishing rituals and operational philosophies. The jobs-to-be-done of a content team at scale.

There are plenty of places to read hot takes on content strategy or the future of journalism. StackTimes is not that. It’s about infrastructure. It’s for people who care about how things actually get built and run — not just how they look on the homepage.

Why Now?

Because digital media is being rebuilt in real time. The traditional gatekeepers are gone, but the platforms that replaced them are just as fragile. AI is reshaping creation. Subscriptions are back. Distribution is increasingly owned. Newsrooms are looking more like product teams. Creators are building org charts.

We’re not just in a media moment — we’re in a media re-architecture. But we lack a shared vocabulary and playbook for how this stuff gets done.

StackTimes is here to fill that gap — through smart conversations, frameworks, and field notes from the people making it work.

Who It’s For

This is for you if you’re:

• A media operator building or scaling a content business

• A technologist working on tools that support publishing and storytelling

• A strategist or founder trying to make sense of what media looks like at the systems level

• Or just curious about what’s under the hood of your favorite platforms, newsletters, and podcasts

What’s Next

In the coming months, I’ll be sharing:

• Interviews with the builders and thinkers inside the stack

• Updates with high-signal tools, tactics, and frameworks

• Longform teardowns and reports on what’s working and what’s shifting

If that sounds like something you want in your feed — subscribe, share, and let me know what you'd love to see covered.

— Paul