This final week of the year, I’m looking back over our best work in 2022. Yesterday was the 10-part Betty Van Patter series. Today, here in one place is the five-part series on the coming of Internet journalism and the beginning of the end of the old media world I grew up in…
Give It Away, circa 1995 (part one)
During my long chaotic career as a journalist, I periodically landed at the bleeding edge of new media, including late in 1995.
At that time, I had been helping a small team launch the web-based magazine Salon.com in an architect’s office down by the Bay after leaving a high-level position at public media giant KQED as executive vice-president.
I also was sort of looking for a new full-time job.
So one afternoon, at the invitation of a former student at U-C Berkeley (where I taught investigative reporting for 14 years) I took a tour of the warehouse headquarters of the award-winning Wired magazine down in Soma. I liked the feel of the office — it was open, casual, with lots of light rock music discreetly playing in some parts, and the occasional dog wandering around.
But the real attraction lay next door on the other side of a common kitchen area where HotWired was located. This was the online experiment created by Wired’s founders, and I knew it was already getting funding from some of the same corporations we had been unsuccessfully courting while I was at KQED.
HotWired’s headquarters presented a striking scene. Row after row of mostly 20-somethings were working on keyboards with large monitors perched on wooden doors balanced over sawhorses, with pink ethernet cables snaking everywhere, the Chili Peppers blasting overhead and a whiff of marijuana in the air. Two or three former interns of mine stood up to greet me and showed how they were designing content for a whole range of wild-looking websites.
The atmosphere of the place seemed to vibrate, pulsating with the beat. Right after I left the office, I made a call home to say, "I've just found the next place I want to work."
Several weeks later a call came in from a HotWired executive half my age asking me if I’d like to become the producer of what would be the web's first daily political news site, branded “The Netizen.”
Although the starting salary was barely half what I'd previously been making, and I did have the needs of a new family at home to consider, I accepted the offer without hesitation and said I could start the very next day.
On that first day, I was introduced to a small staff of very young producers and designers with little or no journalism experience. But they were smart, technically savvy, highly motivated and ready to invent something cool.
I quickly hired two of the brightest former journalism students I knew from Berkeley to the team and set out to work with the head engineer, whom I knew from our work together at Mother Jones, and we set a crash course to launch The Netizen.
It took us something like 28 days. And our timing was perfect.
1996 was a presidential election year, so we hired three semi-experienced political writers as our correspondents and they fanned out across the campaign trail to cover the re-election effort of incumbent Bill Clinton and his Republican challengers, including the eventual nominee, Bob Dole.
I had insisted on complete editorial independence for the operation, which quickly attracted a very large audience among the early adopters then flocking to the web. Day after day we published smart, snarky takes from all sides of the political spectrum.
New ideas for features sprouted daily; we quickly added audio, polls, photos, and interactive tools. We were able to generate controversy almost without trying.
Email was still relatively new and the messages from readers that poured in upon publication included some that were outright abusive, often misogynistic or racist, which disturbed me and was a harbinger of bad things to come. But other than that, I loved the chaotic two-way communication cacophony of the web compared to the old “voice of God” broadcast model.
Free to say whatever they wanted to us and each other, readers blasted off at our writers in a way that traditional journalists would never have tolerated. Traditional journalists were used to being the last word on a topic, not the first. We even decided which “letters to the editor” were to be published weeks later, furthering our control.
But it was immediately apparent to me that those days were dead and gone. There was absolutely no censorship at The Netizen and we quickly rocketed into position as a leading daily political news source on the web.
Another thing that was gone was the ability to charge for the content. We just gave it away for free. This was a harbinger of very bad things to come indeed for the traditional journalism world I had been a part of over the previous three decades.
Honestly I didn’t know where this would all lead. It felt like I was sort of trying to help co-pilot a runaway rocket ship headed toward outer space.
(To be continued.)
Give It Away.2: Ground Zero of the Digital Revolution (part two)
By the time I joined the HotWired team in late 1995, I'd already been working in media for almost 30 years, since I was a teenager. This was not necessarily a good thing in the eyes of my new colleagues, who were busily upending the analog media world I came from with a digital alternative they considered superior.
“Content wants to be free” was a standard rallying cry at HotWired, which was not yet two years old and was undergoing a massive growth spurt fueled by corporate advertising revenue.
Rather like a toddler in an American suburb.
But this toddler was hiring people almost as fast as it could; I joked to friends that its interviewing strategy was to lock the door behind candidates so they couldn't leave once they were inside. That didn't really matter because nobody wanted to leave -- if you were Gen-X and into creative media work in the mid-1990s, this is exactly where you wanted to be.
As for me, I was twice as old as them, and my career had been almost entirely in the alternative media, not the mainstream. From my days in the underground press to SunDance to Rolling Stone to the Center for Investigative Reporting and from New West to Mother Jones and public radio plus a dozen other stops along the way, I had pretty much remained outside of traditional journalism institutions.
But in those jobs I did adhere strictly to the values and standards of traditional journalists.
My new colleagues were early-stage writers and reporters and editors and designers and photographers and engineers and interface experts and audience research specialists and several other categories of workers, almost all of them in their mid-to-late 20s.
I was sort of like their uncool Dad.
They all used a techno lingo unfamiliar to me, with terms like web browser, domain name, interactivity, bandwidth, interface, pixels, TCP/IP, url, html, coding, style sheets, IP address, network domain and on and on -- so many strange words that I scribbled them down on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket exactly as I did with foreign language phrases when visiting non-English-speaking countries overseas.
After a few months, I finally got around to asking someone what all of these words actually meant. He smirked and quipped: "Don't worry what they mean; just sprinkle them liberally into your speech and your market value will triple."
As I pondered that, the daily political site my team produced called The Netizen began to flourish. We rapidly built a large audience during the early months of election cycle 1996, which attracted the interest of Wired's CEO, Louis Rossetto.
He had a reputation as an articulate visionary but an extremely difficult boss; many employees seemed fearful of his ill-temper. He was a fierce advocate of libertarian political views, a lifelong Republican, pro-corporate and bluntly dismissive of leftist ideas, I was told.
So when Rossetto first summoned me to a private meeting I really didn't know what to expect. Most of my previous work had appeared in left-leaning publications, and he probably assumed my politics were defined by that. Maybe he wanted to fire me.
From our very first meeting, however, the person I got to know was quite different from his image. He was smart and opinionated, true, but also quiet-spoken, thoughtful and happy to debate the issues of the day with me at great length. Most importantly, he was committed to remaining open-minded about how we covered those issues in The Netizen.
That kind of tolerance was essential if I was to remain part of the Wired organization, which I already knew I wanted to do. Louis and I quickly developed a mutual trust that allowed us to argue through the various sides of the issues we were covering and agree to disagree when we could not reach a consensus.
Meanwhile he never interfered in my actual editorial choices, though they repeatedly differed from what I know he would have preferred.
The ultimate test came when one of our cantankerous Netizen columnists decided to write a piece savagely critical of Wired itself. He decided to lambast the institution and everything it stood for in his daily column.
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! This surely would be too much for Louis to handle, I thought.
As the hit piece was about to post, I was gathering up my family pictures from my desk to put in my briefcase since I'd soon be out of a job again. But first, as a courtesy to Louis I let him know what was coming. His response was shocking and refreshingly direct:
"Let him rant!"
We ran the piece unedited. My job was secure.
For me, that moment confirmed that Louis Rossetto was truly committed to his principles, which started with free speech for everyone.
Looking back on that incident, I realize that by then dealing with bosses other people considered difficult was nothing new for me; after all, I'd studied under one the masters, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. Others may have feared these men and their legendary outbursts, but I genuinely liked them and developed a deep fondness for both Jann and Louis that lasts to this day.
A few months after the “Let him rant” episode, Louis suddenly summoned me to his office again for an unscheduled meeting. Again, I assumed there must be bad news of some sort, but instead he surprised me by saying he wanted to move me to the top of the org chart as V.P. of Content Management for all of the websites in the HotWired network.
I was content producing The Netizen and hadn't sought this role at all but of course I agreed to it, especially because it came with a hefty raise. (And at home we had another baby on the way.)
Throughout my so-called “career,” this sort of thing happened over and over. I started somewhere in the middle of an organization and the top person eventually tapped me to become one of the top bosses. It always came as a surprise to me; I never sought those positions.
But I almost always accepted them. In my new role at HotWired, dozens of people who used to be peers now reported to me, including my former bosses who were about half my age and now seemed traumatized by the change. I immediately set forth on a mission to implement their best ideas and forge collaboration between the somewhat fractious teams that made up the company's online network.
If I was going to head up this brilliant, unruly band of revolutionaries, by acting as “the adult in the room” (as some of them called me), I was going to do it my way.
(To be continued)
Give It Away.3: Up with the dot.com bubble (part three)
Early in 1996 as our workforce at HotWired expanded, we outgrew the original office, which was adjacent to Wired magazine, so we moved a block south to another converted warehouse at 660 Third Street.
For me, if the parallels from my time at Rolling Stone two decades earlier weren't already in my mind, they now became inescapable. From a window next to my desk at HotWired I could look directly into the office across the street at 625 where Howard Kohn and I had written our three-part series about Patty Hearst and the SLA (1975-6).
One of many similarities between the two companies was the almost constant stream of celebrities who wanted to visit us when they came to San Francisco. At Rolling Stone, it had been rock stars, of course, but also journalists, professors, actors and politicians.
HotWired was no different, but the visitors now included future billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as well as virtually every other aspiring Internet entrepreneur on the planet. Also there were tech-savvy musicians like Brian Eno and politicians like Bill Bradley, a former Olympic basketball player and senator who was running for president.
Among those who wanted to speak with me specifically were reporters from the Washington Post, Newsweek, the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, NPR and the major TV networks. They marveled at the scene as I sprinkled web terms liberally into my sound bites, which made me sound like an expert.
But many of the reporters also confided to me that this whole scene made them uncomfortable because if the digital revolution succeeded it seemed likely to deep-six our profession. Not to mention what it would mean for our society at large.
I was hopeful they were wrong on both counts.
A quarter-century later, it’s clear my optimism was misplaced. The devastation to the media world is obvious for all to see. Just look around. So many newspapers have closed that in most cities it is a surprise to discover that one still exists. Exact figures vary but somewhere around 2,000 important newspapers have closed their operations since the Web started disrupting their business model circa 1994.
Old media companies couldn’t just “give it away”when it came to content. They needed the revenue from subscribers and sponsors and newsstand sales and classified ads to keep operating. One of the early harbingers of their doom was the overnight success of Craigslist, launched across town in 1995 by an unassuming fellow named Craig Newmark.
San Francisco newspaper executive Phil Bronstein reminded me many years later that I had warned him when Craigslist first appeared that he should try to get the Hearst Corp. to buy it. Apparently I said they they might regret not doing so later. That was a serious understatement.
TV and radio have suffered greatly from the digital revolution as well, losing audiences and advertising share. As have magazines. Book publishing has been decimated.
Meanwhile, the new media world has splintered into a thousand shards of digital sites catering to niche audiences and even more niche opinions. Losing the media industry was one thing. Losing our democracy is another. Fringe theories, conspiracy thinking, extremist movements have all flourished in the Digital Age, ultimately threatening our most precious freedoms in the process.
But that was not the story we envisioned back at HotWired in 1996.
At that moment, a stock market frenzy was making Internet millionaires out of 26-year-olds right and left. It was widely known that Wired, too, was preparing for its own IPO -- initial public offering — later that year.
One of the documents I carried around with me as a reminder of where we headed was the Wired prospectus for potential investors. It described how Wired Inc. would help lead the rise of an Internet economy to become a global media empire.
No small part of that vision hinged on the efforts of our team at HotWired, since the kinds of multiples envisioned in the prospectus could never be generated by an analog magazine alone.
So at HotWired we were experimenting with a wide range of content strategies, including a search engine (HotBot), advertising models (the banner ad was a HotWired creation), the earliest web blogs (like Suck), interactive bulletin boards, audio programs (presaging podcasts) and digital video, which included a fledgling TV program called Netizen TV.
We also foresaw the future of interactive broadband video. We were involved with Microsoft and NBC when they created MSNBC with that in mind. I was among a small group of Wired execs who flew to New York during the negotiations that led to the cable network’s formation — we ate steak and smoked cigars and toasted a future we thought might include Wired and by extension each of us.
They were heady times.
For the first time in my working life, I held options to purchase shares in a company that would vest over time — four years to be exact. And as a vice-president, my holdings were large enough to potentially make me a modestly wealthy man in the process -- a prospect that had never even occurred to me before.
But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself in the story, which is much bigger than the fate of any one person. Back in 1996, pretty much anything still seemed possible.
(To be continued.)
Give It Away.4: The Beginning of the End (part four)
Our creative teams at HotWired/Wired Digital in 1996-7, whether we were fully aware of it or not, were inventing the future of media. There was no roadmap but there was a sense of urgency. And as one of those in charge, I figured the kind of manager they really needed was one who knew how to stay out of their way.
But they also desperately needed someone with a direct channel to Wired co-Founder and CEO Louis Rossetto, who was piloting this Starship Enterprise toward uncharted galaxies. Without Louis’s blessing, many of their promising new ideas would die on the vine.
I was 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 (number five), I occasionally had trouble staying alert in them. But my assistant Mark booked consecutive 15-minute sessions from early morning until early evening for me every workday and repeated cups of coffee took care of the rest.
There were endless subjects to talk over because we were in essence a multimedia company covering everything. The staffers usually wanted to meet me in groups — there were several on each team. But a few specific individuals preferred to meet me one-on-one — these were the more personally ambitious ones.
It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the Gen X cohort as a group. 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 also were rebellious and not particularly impressed with my baby boomer credentials.
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. Alas, I didn’t join my staff members in any of these activities. While they partied, I was singing babies to sleep.
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 gotten seriously gentrified from a quaint tree-lined loop where black families lived in a community to what was now a disjointed hipster lunch hangout/epicenter of the digital revolution.
You could say the music was different but the venue the same. Meanwhile, at the corporate level of Wired Inc., big plans were afoot. Louis and the leadership wanted to take the company public and cash in like the dot.com entrepreneurs the magazine celebrated, and they put together an all-star cast of VC’s to do it. But when they first tried to do that in the summer of 1996, 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 paranoid 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 appeared 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.
I insisted that 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.
(In the spirit of the times, very soon one of Drudge’s rumors would almost take down the President of the U.S., but that’s another story.)
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 that 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 over ownership of 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 had always seemed a bit too adolescent for my tastes.
Well Louis didn’t like the idea.
Bur 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 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 into positions of influence inside the company by outside investors.
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.
Alas, the hourglass for all of us was quickly running out.
(To Be Continued)
Give It Away.5 -- The Ending
(Sometime later in 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. that 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 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.
At the top of the hit list was my name. I was to be replaced, naturally, by one of those who was always clamoring for my time in one-on-ones.
On a late afternoon when the sun was going down to the west, strangely there were no meetings on my calendar. It was wide open. I was suddenly 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 them and he looked sad. But he had nothing to say. This was not of his doing. And that, I suppose, is the end of my story.
I had prepared myself emotionally as much as possible for this moment. I’d packed up my family pictures. As I drove away from 660 Third Street, I started humming an old song by Merle Haggard, “That’s the Way Love Goes.”
EPILOGUE
Probably our most significant accomplishment during my tenure, Wired News, survived the purge and exists to this day.
And in one of life’s strangely 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.
None of her colleagues knew that her father had been one of the executives involved in creating Wired News or what that experience had been like, and neither did she.
But I think about this now and then when I see how our society has become divided by conspiracy theories, fake news and the like. Once upon a time a few of us tried to prevent that.
NEWS LINKS:
Man sentenced to 16 years for plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (NBC)
Time is running short for McCarthy to lock up Speakership (The Hill)
McConnell team raised worries about attack on Biden inauguration, ex-NSA O’Brien told Jan. 6 committee (Politico)
Trump attacks reporter after she revealed his 2024 adviser thinks ‘the magic is gone’ (Independent)
In Afghanistan, the lights go out for women (Edit Bd/WP)
Aid Groups in Afghanistan Suspend Work After Taliban Bar Female Staff (NYT)
Covid in China: People rush to book travel as borders finally reopen (BBC)
Serbia places its troops on Kosovo border on combat alert (AP)
Ukraine Converts $21.9 Billion In U.S. Military Surplus Into Fearsome Force (Forbes)
Russian Lawmaker Who Slammed Putin’s War Dies After Falling From a Window (Daily Beast)
Shifting gears: why US cities are falling out of love with the parking lot (Guardian)
When did humans first start to speak? How language evolved in Africa (The Conversation)
Pride At Using Big Word Causes Man To Completely Lose Train Of Thought (The Onion)
