(This is the fourth of four parts.)
At HotWired, staff members were inventing the future without a roadmap, so the only kind of manager they needed was somebody who was calm and knew how to stay out of their way most of the time.
But they also needed someone with a direct channel to Wired CEO Louis Rossetto, who was directing the Starship Enterprise into uncharted galaxies.
So I quickly established an open-door style of management, which wasn't terribly difficult since there were no doors -- we all sat together in one big open space.
But there were a few airless conference rooms where I could meet with staffers privately. My assistant soon was booking consecutive 15-minute sessions from early morning until late at night.
We had a lot to talk about.
It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the Gen Xers reporting to me. For the most part, they were a bunch of smart, nerdy iconoclasts stretching the limits of Internet technology to interact and tell stories in new ways and disrupt the established media industry.
At the same time the were partying in their own way with sex, drugs, and rock & roll every bit as openly as we had two decades earlier right across the street at Rolling Stone.
In fact, the neighborhood still contained some of the same bars and cafes we'd hung out at back then, although South Park had since gentrified from a quiet tree-lined loop where black families lived into a frenetic hipster lunch hangout at the epicenter of the digital revolution.
Louis and the leadership of Wired Inc. wanted to take the company public and cash in like the dot.com entrepreneurs we celebrated, but when they first tried to do that in the summer of 1996, a temporary hiccup in the stock market for the 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 the first sign of the trouble that would lay ahead. But I was too busy managing the emergence of a viable web-based media company to give it more than a passing thought.
Collectively, we'd become proficient not only at launching new websites, but instituting efficient production systems. Publishing stories required a series of actions by different staff members; we devised a process that ushered each piece through the various stages of production quickly before going live.
Meanwhile, I started to meet with the handful of other media executives doing similar work at CNET, Knight-Ridder, Yahoo, the @Home Network and so on work out an ad-hoc set of standards for our websites.
The issues were basic ones: How to position banner ads, display color-coded links, indicate sponsored content and the like. (Some of these same folks went on to help form the nonprofit Online News Association in 1999.)
Throughout 1996 and the first half of 1997 HotWired was entering into new partnerships and business deals. The global news service Reuters embedded an editor in our newsroom and we negotiated a deal to distribute digital news jointly.
In order to rationalize the chaotic jumble of sub-brands into a cohesive whole, we decided to rebrand the entire enterprise Wired Digital, with the main product a new service called Wired News. This was a logical but difficult process that required all of my skill managing up to convince Louis Rossetto that it was the right direction for us to take.
We also sold off some of our properties, including the popular alt-health channel "Ask Dr. Weil" to Time Inc., which led to a visit from Time executive Dan Okrent, an old colleague from Michigan Daily days.
As I showed him around our shop, we compared notes on our separate journeys through the world of media -- him at the pinnacle of the traditional media world in New York; me at the bleeding edge of new media world coming to life on the left coast.
In order to fill out the staff for Wired News, we hired a few experienced editors to provide guidance to the younger staff members, few of whom had actually attended journalism school or spent time at newspapers, magazines or broadcast media companies.
During the spring and summer of 1997, despite our best efforts on the content side, dark storm clouds were beginning to appear on the company's horizon. The failed IPOs had undermined confidence in Louis's leadership and an ambitious set of younger execs had moved into positions of influence inside the company.
Aware of the rumblings for management change, I doubled down on my loyalty to Louis and his vision as the founder; especially because my dozens of young staff members were literally pouring their hearts out building a company according to that vision -- also one where their own dreams might have a fighting chance to come true.
But time was growing short. Eventually, plans for an internal coup were set in motion that would require the removal of key people, including me, and ultimately Louis and his co-founder and partner Jane Metcalfe as well.
The traitors thought their plan was secret but I'd been tipped off by loyal staffers, down to the details of the weekend gathering at Tahoe where they set their final takeover plan in motion.
So when the day came that I was summoned to the climactic meeting where I was to be thanked for my service, handed a severance check, and told to go home, I had prepared myself emotionally as much as possible.
In reality, however, I was an emotional wreck. My personal life had been just as disrupted as the traditional media world I'd come from. I was in the tender first years of my second marriage, with teenagers from the first to consider, plus new babies coming into my life every other year, usually around 4 a.m. after another long night at the office.
A few days after my youngest son was born, my mother-in-law had visited us.
Seeing me get up in our Bernal Heights cottage at 6 a.m., drive to the Golden Gate Bridge to pick up my oldest daughter to take her to Lowell High School in the City, then race downtown to start my day at Wired, working until 8 p.m., then driving back to Marin to handle some matter involving my older children, then back to Elsie Street to help calm the babies, only to go back online and field emails for another hour or two, she noted: "David, you won't survive burning the candle at both ends. Nobody does."
She was right of course. By the time I finally got laid off I was fundamentally exhausted physically and emotionally. My marriage was in trouble and my finances were a mess. All I remember is collapsing into a chair and sobbing. I'd driven myself and my staff to reach an unrealistic dream that was never going to be realized, and the worst part of it was that dozens and dozens of my young colleagues were going to lose their jobs as well.
Their names were all on the corporate hit list that some of the engineers had hacked into. It was going to be a bloodbath.
Those with the means to do so quit before they were fired and fled the place using the code message "Leaving for Las Vegas."
The sharks had surrounded and were entering the fishtank. Before long the Wired empire would be completely dismembered and sold off to the highest bidders. Louis and Jane were pushed out, and other founders left to create new ventures like The Industry Standard.
I went back to the office one last time to collect my belongings and say good-bye. For eleven straight hours, staffers came by one by one, sometimes in pairs or threes, to hug and exchange contact information.
***
Wired magazine and Wired News did survive the purge but under separate ownership and it was years later before they were reunited. In an ironic twist, my oldest daughter as a young journalist interned at Wired News during the first decade of the new millennium.
None of her colleagues knew her father had been one of the executives involved in the birth of their news service, and she didn't enlighten them. By that point there wasn't much institutional memory lingering at the offices on Third Street anyway.
Everyone had scattered to the four winds, where they would carry on the digital revolution under new guises.
I too went on to other things, first to Salon, where we mounted an investigative unit that probably saved President Bill Clinton's butt from conviction in his impeachment trial (at least that's what he said afterwards); and subsequently to many other web-based media jobs over the next quarter century until I retired at the end of 2019.
END OF STORY
(Dedicated to Mary, John & Scamp and all the other Tiredlings.)
***
THE HEADLINES:
* The Senator Who Decided to Tell the Truth -- A Michigan Republican spent eight months searching for evidence of election fraud, but all he found was lies. (Atlantic)
* Trump Organization Is Charged With Running 15-Year Employee Tax Scheme -- The company was accused of helping its executives evade taxes on compensation by hiding luxury perks and bonuses. (NYT)
* Trump seeks to use indictments as a political rallying cry as he tries to survive latest legal threat (WP)
* Trump Was Not Indicted. But the Charges Still Threaten Him. -- The criminal case against the former president’s business could deliver a blow to his finances, and he remains the focus of a broader investigation in New York. (NYT)
* Allen Weisselberg, the top Trump Organization executive not named Trump, now knows the price of loyalty to the former president: He was led into court in handcuffs to face charges of conspiracy, grand larceny, criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. The indictments of Donald Trump's company and finance chief in a long-running tax fraud are the first shoe to drop in what looks like a determined investigation. There's a lot more legal trouble dogging Trump. And his "poor-me" witch-hunt defense may not work on a jury. [HuffPost]
* Trump’s business made him famous. Now it faces felonies, debt and toxic brand. (WP)
* Tax law experts see ‘strong’ case against Trump Org. CFO (AP)
* How Pro-Trump Local News Sites Keep Pushing 2020 Election Misinformation (Georgia Public Radio)
* India’s death toll tops 400,000 as delta variant gains ground worldwide (WP)
* The Delta variant has now been detected in all 50 states and Washington, DC (CNN)
* Johnson & Johnson says its coronavirus vaccine is effective against delta variant (WP)
* Almost five out of every six coronavirus cases went undetected in the first months of the pandemic. (Los Angeles Times)
* As the World Health Organization draws up plans for the next phase of its probe of how the coronavirus pandemic started, an increasing number of scientists say the U.N. agency it isn’t up to the task and shouldn’t be the one to investigate. (AP)
* Firefighters are tackling three major wildfires in California in worrying sign as summer begins (WP)
* The 1,000 residents of Lytton, British Columbia, scattered with just a few minutes' warning after a wildfire overcame the town and burned everything to the ground. Some residents are still missing. Lytton set a temperature record of 121 degrees the previous day. (AP)
*Extreme heat is killing people in Arizona’s mobile homes (WP)
* The $300 per child monthly checks that have begun flowing to parents are about to become a key feature for American families. But Democrats have no idea what to call the life-changing money. [HuffPost]
* Era ends, war looms as U.S. forces quit main base in Afghanistan (Reuters)
* A Crippling 3rd Wave Of COVID Adds To Afghanistan's Woes (NPR)
* China and India have deployed tens of thousands of troops, placed advanced military equipment and built new infrastructure at their disputed border in recent months, as the rivals escalate their long-running standoff. (WSJ)
* The Supreme Court Abandons Voting Rights (Editorial Board/NYT)
* The Roberts court systematically dismantles the Voting Rights Act (Editorial Board/WP)
* The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday turned away a case challenging libel protections for journalists and media organizations, but conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch disagreed with the action and questioned such protections enshrined in a landmark 1964 ruling. (Reuters)
* Homicides in California jumped by 31 percent last year, making it the worst year for homicides since 2007 (AP)
* MLB places Dodgers star pitcher Trevor Bauer on leave, investigates sexual violence accusation (WP)
* At the midpoint of the baseball season, no team has a better record than the surprising San Francisco Giants (51-30) or more homers (119). (MLB.com)
* The Data Behind Baseball’s Stickiest Problem (WSJ)
* Elsa rapidly strengthens into hurricane, could affect Florida next week (WP)
* Older Americans Stockpiled a Record $35 Trillion. The Time Has Come to Give It Away. (WSJ)
* Richard Branson announces trip to space, ahead of Jeff Bezos (AP)
* Robert Gottlieb on the Man Who Saw America (And We Mean, All of It) (NYT Book Review)
* U.S. sprinter tests positive for cannabis (Reuters) [DW note: So what? When did pot ever speed anyone up?]
* Woman All Geared Up To Complain About Work Sidelined By Friend With Marital Problems (The Onion)
***
Songwriters: Bert Berns / Jerry Ragavoy
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