(This one is about covering the emergence of Web 2.0. I was enthusiastic at the beginning. Obviously things didn’t turn out so well for the age of social media. This essay was originally published two years ago in January 2022.)
One of the unforeseen consequences of digging up stories about what is wrong with the world over the course of a long career is the desire, every now and again, to celebrate what is right. Or at least what isn’t outright wrong.
Maybe it’s a natural corrective mechanism in our brains, some sort of a serotonin-induced urge to bring our overall story-telling function back into balance.
I often think of this like a brake job on a car. When you feel the thing pulling too much to the right or the left when you press down the brake pedal, you know it’s time to get an adjustment.
Same with our stories? Maybe so.
In any event, I was in just such a mood one evening in 2011 when I attended an anniversary party celebrating the tenth year of publication for San Francisco’s 7x7 magazine.
As the magazine’s founding editor, albeit long-departed, I was reuniting with my former colleagues that night and agreed on impulse to write a short piece recalling our launch back in September 2001. It would have to be a bittersweet sort of story, of course, because we launched to great local fanfare just one week before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
That the magazine subsequently survived the total loss of advertising income that resulted in the collapse of San Francisco’s tourist industry is remarkable, although one of the casualties of the extended economic downturn was my job.
I had to leave 7x7 after a year (without pay) but the magazine persisted, thanks to the efforts of a determined team that survived until the economy bounced back. Now, ten years later, they asked me if besides the retrospective, I’d also be willing to write blog posts for the magazine about some of the Web 2.0 startups then springing up all over town.
Yes.
Thus I wrote pieces about Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, Nextdoor, TaskRabbit and dozens of others in the early days of their existence. Most of them hired boutique PR firms to get publicity, so once my name was on their lists, my inbox filled up with dozens of invitations to meet their founders.
And meet them I did — scores of mostly young entrepreneurs armed with their founding myths and dreams of changing the way we live our lives. Almost all of them came to me. We’d set a time and I’d walk around the corner, past the little markets where my kids bought candy, past the guys hanging out, past the restaurants where we’d sometimes order takeout, to one of the coffee houses nearby.
Most of the founders were idealistic, articulate young people and I found them easy to like. My job, as 7x7 and I envisioned it, was essentially promotional. I wanted to celebrate San Francisco as the new center of Silicon Valley. The original dot.com boom had been headquartered south on the peninsula, more in the vicinity of Palo Alto and San Jose than its more famous neighbor to the north.
But Wed 2.0 was different.
It may seem strange that an old investigative reporter would agree to write mostly positive profiles of these startups, and I suppose I have no good excuse, other than it felt good to finally be telling some happy stories for a change.
(In my defense, I also published some mini-investigations, such as the fact that none of the five largest social media companies yet had a woman on their boards of directors. That was zero women among 44 men.)
Not all of the companies would survive, of course, let alone thrive, but the strongest among them did. One can reasonably argue about whether those that survived have made things better or worse in the world. But all of that was pretty much beside the point for me, the story-teller. I just remember enjoying the walk around the corner to Atlas Cafe or another familiar venue, meeting new people, sipping coffee for an hour or so, and hearing stories they were excited to tell.
And then going back home to write up my version of how somebody’s dream might just — this time — come true.
At this point, a decade later, I guess all I can hope is that my old muckraker friends will forgive me.
Or blame it on the serotonin.
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