Saturday, June 27, 2026

A Biblical Dispute

Authorities in Texas have voted to require that the Bible be taught in schools. They’ve already forced educators to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

As far as the Bible as a textbook is concerned, it contains lots of stories. Some are well told, others less so. There is a great deal of redundancy.

The stories are anecdotal in nature, as the authors provide little in the way of documentation. From a journalistic perspective, you could say the book would benefit from a strong edit.

But all of that said, I think it is generally a good thing for everyone to know about the stories in the Bible and their meaning. It is an essential part of Judeo-Christian history, and therefore critical for understanding how we got from there to here.

Students need to be capable of critical thinking before taking on this task. High school or college would be the ideal place to study the Bible, I believe, not elementary school as in Texas. 

And the problem with the Texas approach is that it blurs, if not violates the separation of church and state, which is a cornerstone of our democracy.

Politically, the Texas initiative is part of a conservative push to suppress religious diversity and impose a form of Christian nationalism on everybody. 

“Kids of all faith backgrounds and no faith are served by Texas schools and they should all feel welcome in Texas schools,” said Elva Mendoza, legislative communications associate for the progressive Texas Freedom Network. “But this is sending the message to children that one and only one religious text — a Christian one — is worthy of making this required reading list.”

Ultimately, the legality of the Texas approach will probably be decided by the courts.

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Friday, June 26, 2026

Friday Mix

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Thursday, June 25, 2026

Land of Immigrants

They come from every corner of the world, carrying flags and whistles, banners and bells.

They’re wearing the jerseys of their heroes and they are here to cheer them on with songs and chants and wild celebrations when they score goals and win games.

They are livening up our bars and restaurants. They turn up at baseball games, looking slightly out of place.

For the most part, they are good-natured and curious about Americans.

They wonder how we can be led by a man like Trump, who stokes fear about foreigners and spreads rumors about Haitians eating our pets. (Meanwhile, the actual Haitians rooting for their heroes could not be more delightful guests.)

Welcome to America, land of contradictions. Where the Supreme Court sided with Trump today to stop those coming not in joy, but in desperation, at our borders.

Go elsewhere, they said.

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Wednesday, June 24, 2026

All News Is Local

Some news stories are national and some are international in scope. Some news stories are regional and some are state. But think about it — all news is local.

Take the green algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It may be receiving national, even international coverage but it is a local story for Washington, D.C. and hyperlocal to the Washington Mall.

Every story has to start somewhere.

Which brings me to my friends at Local NEWS Network, headquartered in Durango, Colorado. LNN has recently launched its redesigned websites serving small towns across the U.S.

You can check out the Durango site or watch the LNN.news Overview Video. You also can read my essay from a year ago about the importance of small town news.

***

Many people now realize that the closure of small-town newspapers has created a vast news desert covering virtually all of rural America. And that this has had dire consequences, in the form of conspiracy theories, lies and misinformation.

While it may be a stretch to claim this has led directly to the rise of MAGA, the lack of vibrant small-town journalism certainly has been a contributing factor.

Among the various efforts to do something about this problem, many take a national, non-profit, top-down approach, whereas the Local NEWS Network, based in Durango, CO, takes a local, for-profit, bottom-up approach. Through its digital network, LNN delivers local news and local advertising to communities that otherwise would be part of the news desert.

This week, LNN’s Laurie Sigillito published an article on LinkedIn titled “Advertising in Small Towns: It’s About Trust, Not Clicks.”

In it, she says: “Attempts to introduce advertising-supported digital media in small towns and rural areas hit up against the reality that the metrics used to measure effectiveness nationally—impressions, CTRs and programmatic segmentation—are all optimized for dense urban markets.”

Meanwhile, she continues, “What actually works in small towns is visibility. You need to be seen by everyone, not just target segments. Neighbors talk to neighbors and word gets around town organically.”

Her article pinpoints the main business reason national efforts to succeed in small towns fail more often than succeed. “Our conclusion is that national ad tools don’t work in small towns. The goal here is not more data, it’s more connection. Rural advertising should feel more like a handshake than a sales funnel—personal, human, and built to last.”

I’ve thought about the news desert problem a lot and have concluded that to re-establish media in localized settings, we need to address the business plan first, then get to the question of content,

LNN does that. 

***

Nieman reports that local news sites across the country are in trouble because people are “abandoning them for social media.”

By basing its content in video, LNN may be able to counter this trend. LNN is built to scale.

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Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Getting Wired.6

In the autumn of 1997, along with the arrival of cooler weather and light rain in San Francisco came the final plans for a house-cleaning at Wired Inc. The in-house coup d’é·tat would result in the removal of scores of people, including the founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe.

In their stead, the company was going to be dismantled and sold off in pieces. The founders would be rewarded with a fair amount of compensation for their efforts, so they would be “fine.” Not so much everyone else.

Near the top of the hit list was my name. The very fact that made me irreplaceable in the old order — my relationship with Louis — made me all too disposable in the new one.

So, on a late afternoon when the sun was going down to the west, suddenly and strangely there were no further meetings on my calendar. It was wide open. Then I was summoned to Louis’s office. 

I walked in to see three people waiting, none of smiling. Just three senior execs stiff and grim in manner. I was thanked for my service, given a small severance check, and summarily dismissed. 

Louis was one of the three and he looked immensely sad. But he had nothing to say. This was not of his doing. And that, I suppose, is the end of my story at Wired.

Unlike many of the other difficult transitions in my life, I had prepared myself emotionally as much as possible for this one. I’d packed up my family pictures and prepared my goodbye message. But as I drove away from 660 Third Street, I realized you can't really prepare yourself for losing something you love. 

EPILOGUE

Perhaps the most significant accomplishment during my tenure on Third Street was Wired News, which survived the purge in 1997 and exists to this day.

And in one of life’s strange ironic twists, my oldest daughter, who would soon become an award-winning journalist herself, worked as as an intern at Wired News during the first decade of the new millennium.

Apparently none of her colleagues knew that her father had been one of the executives involved in creating their company or what that experience had been like. 

Many years later, now that our society has become divided by conspiracy theories, fake news and social media demagogues, I remember how hard in the 1990s a few of us tried to prevent that outcome.

I’d be less than truthful if I said we fully anticipated how bad the media collapse would turn out to be. We saw the danger signs, but we could not imagine the world as it’s turned out to be.

The problem is once the old media world — like Humpty Dumpty — teetered and fell off of the great digital wall of the Internet and burst into a thousand pieces, how could we ever put it together again?

The answer is, sadly, I don’t know how we can.

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Monday, June 22, 2026

Getting Wired.5

In 1996 at the corporate level of Wired Inc., big plans were afoot. Louis Rossetto and the leadership wanted to take the company public and cash in like the dot.com entrepreneurs the magazine celebrated, so they put together an all-star cast of VC’s to do it. But when they first tried in the summer of that year, a temporary hiccup in the stock market for red-hot tech stocks caused them to withdraw the offer.

Later in the year a second try at an IPO failed as well, which was a much more serious signal that trouble lay ahead. But by then I was too busy managing our scores of workers and our emergence as a viable web-based media company to give it more than a passing thought.

On the industrial level, we were becoming extremely proficient not only at launching new websites, but building production systems to push out our voluminous flows of content. Publishing stories on the web required a series of editorial and technical steps by staff members with different skills and this all had to be done by hand. (Automated platforms like Wordpress didn’t appear until years later.)

So we had to devise our own process that ushered each piece through the various stages of production quickly and efficiently until it was ready to go live.

One of those steps be fact-checking. Among our numerous correspondents was a young fellow named Matt Drudge in L.A., who seemed to have his finger on the pulse of rumors circulating around Hollywood and Washington D.C. But we discovered many of his reports required serious fact-checking before we could publish them.

(Very soon one of Drudge’s rumors would almost take down President Clinton.)

The traditional production schedule of a daily or a weekly print outlet simply couldn’t work for us since we were able to publish pretty much anytime we wished, which was all the time. This was the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, which had just been ushered in by the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the maturing of cable TV, but there were no real news industry standards yet for how to manage organizations on the web facing this kind of “always-on” reality.

That meant that some of us at the top had to be always-on as well.

Looking for advice, I started to meet with a handful of other Bay Area executives pondering similar workflow problems at CNET, Knight-Ridder, Yahoo, @Home and others.

The specific website issues were basic ones: How to position banner ads, display color-coded links, indicate sponsored content and the like. Some of the folks in our ad-hoc group went on to help form the nonprofit Online News Association in 1999.

Meanwhile, throughout 1996 and the first half of 1997, Wired was aggressively entering into new partnerships and business deals. The global news service Reuters embedded a personable editor named Dick Satran in our newsroom as we negotiated a deal to distribute our digital news globally.

This was a major development. Now the Wired brand could circle the globe like the Associated Press with a strong technology focus. We felt we could quickly take ownership over this new content space. That was an external goal we set for ourselves.

Internally, in order to rationalize the chaotic jumble of sub-brands into a cohesive whole, we decided to rebrand the entire enterprise Wired Digital, with one main product called Wired News. Our prior identity as HotWired would have to hit the dust. This was a logical but difficult decision that required all of my skill managing up to convince Louis that it was the right thing to do.

In the aftermath of the failed IPOs, Louis had become somewhat isolated from the senior execs on the digital side, so they asked me to convince him of the branding change, since he and I continued to have our spirited weekly discussions as always.

Plus I fully supported the change myself; HotWired seemed dated by then.

Louis didn’t like the idea, but I worked with him and eventually he came around to it.

As part of this transition, we had to sell off some of our popular but less brand-relevant properties, notably the successful alt-health channel “Ask Dr. Weil,” edited by Steven Petrow. We sold it to Time Inc., which led to a personal reunion for me with Time senior executive Dan Okrent, an old colleague from The Michigan Daily days (1966-9).

As I showed Okrent around our shop, we compared notes on our separate journeys since college through competing media worlds -- him at the pinnacle of the traditional media world in New York; me at the bleeding edge of new media world in San Francisco.

We both knew our worlds were colliding head-on in real time; neither of us knew which one, if either, would prevail.

In order to fill out the staff for Wired News, we hired a few experienced editors to provide guidance to the younger staff members, since few of the latter had actually attended journalism school or spent time at newspapers, magazines or broadcast media companies. What I hoped was that we would create a blend of the old and the new that preserved journalistic standards while breaking new ground.

And we did break stories, for example by revealing clues in the html coding behind the website of the Heaven’s Gate cult about why 40 of them committed mass suicide in San Diego in 1997.

But during the spring and summer of 1997, despite our best efforts on the digital side, dark storm clouds were beginning to appear on Wired Inc.’s horizon. The failed IPOs had undermined confidence in Louis’s leadership and an ambitious set of younger execs had been moved by outside investors into positions of influence inside the company.

They began plotting a coup.

Aware of these rumblings for management change, I chose to double down on my loyalty to Louis and his vision; especially because my dozens of young staff members were literally pouring their hearts out building a new media company according to that vision -- one where their own dreams might also have a fighting chance to come true.

This was all probably going to be ending badly for me, I began to realize, but it wouldn’t be the first or the last time for that to happen. Besides, loyalty to the person who had believed in me and given me the freedom to build a successful product called Wired News was the right thing to do — for me, for him and for my staff.

In any event, the hourglass was quickly running out.

(To be continued.)

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Sunday, June 21, 2026

Getting Wired.4

(Fourth in a series.)

Whether we were aware of it or not, our creative teams at HotWired (Wired Digital) in 1996-7 were helping design the future of media. There was no roadmap but there was a sense of urgency. And as one of those ostensibly in charge, I figured the kind of manager the staff really needed was one who knew when to stay out of their way.

This was a time of invention.

But our staffers also desperately needed someone with a direct channel to Wired co-founder and CEO Louis Rossetto. Without Louis’s blessing, many of their promising new ideas would die on the vine.

So I became that person.

Politics of the left-right variety had very little to do with how the events I am chronicling here unfolded. Politics of the inter-personal variety would have everything to do with the outcome, however.

Before I could lobby Louis on my staff’s behalf, I had to understand in detail the ideas they were proposing, which ranged from simple to complex, original, flaky, redundant, cynical, silly or promising. So I established an open-door style of management, which wasn’t terribly difficult because there were no doors on my office. We all sat together in one big open space spread over two floors connected by a spiral staircase in the middle.

There were a few airless conference rooms so we gathered there when we could, although as the sleep-deprived father of a new baby, I occasionally had trouble staying alert in them. But my assistant booked consecutive 15-minute sessions from early morning until evening for me every workday and repeated cups of coffee took care of the rest.

There were endless subjects to talk over because initially we were in essence a multimedia company covering everything. The staffers usually wanted to meet me in groups — there were several on each team. 

It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the Gen X cohort. They were a tad older than my oldest child, who was born when I was at Rolling Stone. They were a bunch of smart, cranky iconoclasts stretching the limits of Internet technology to tell stories in new ways. They were cynically idealistic with a creative spirit that was infectious. They were rebellious.

They reminded me of the Rolling Stone crowd, actually, from 20 years earlier. They had their own interpretation of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, which was displayed usually — but not always —after closing time, sometimes on the roof. A few of them partied hard. But I didn’t join my staff members in any of these activities. While they partied, I was singing babies to sleep to “You’re So Pretty” by the Cranberries.

But I did know that the neighborhood around our office still contained some of the same bars and clubs we’d hung out at back in my RS days, although probably under new management. Over the years, South Park had gentrified from a quaint tree-lined loop where black families lived in a tight community into what was now a disjointed hipster lunch hangout/epicenter of the digital revolution.

You might say the music was different while the geography stayed the same. 

(To Be Continued)

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