The Wired Revolution

(Late 1995) 

After helping a tiny group of entrepreneurs launch Salon, I was invited over to tour the headquarters of Wired magazine by one of the magazine's editors who knew me from my years teaching at U-C Berkeley.  

The magazine’s office culture was casual with cubicles, computers, rock music playing in the background and a few dogs lounging around.

But the real attraction lay on the other side of a common kitchen area where HotWired — the online side of Wired magazine was located.

It was a striking scene. Row after row of 20-somethings sat working on laptops perched on doors balanced over sawhorses, with the Chili Peppers blasting and a whiff of marijuana in the air. A couple of my former interns stood up to greet me and showed how they were designing content for a wide range of websites.

Right after I left the office, I made a call home to say, "I've just found the next place I want to work." I put the word out on my network -- if anyone heard of a job at HotWired, throw my name into the mix.

It took several weeks for the call to come from HotWired offering me a job as producer of what would be the web's first daily political news site, called 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 next day.

On day one, I was introduced to a small staff of producers and designers with hardly any journalism experience. But they were smart, highly motivated and ready to invent something cool.

I quickly hired two of the brightest young journalists (and former students) I knew from Berkeley and set out to work with the engineering team -- the head of which was a former colleague from Mother Jones, and we set a crash course to build The Netizen.

We launched the website in something like 28 days. 

It was a presidential election year, so we hired three 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 been assured complete editorial independence for the operation, and it 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 with a decidedly libertarian streak, in accordance with the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley.

For me it was exciting -- new ideas sprouted daily, young staffers were quickly developing editorial skills, and we were able collectively to generate controversy almost without trying.

Email was still a new phenomenon, and the feedback from readers that poured in upon publication included some that were outright abusive, often misogynistic, which disturbed me and was a harbinger of things to come. 

Thinking back with the benefit of hindsight, I had an early glimpse of how hate, lies and conspiracies might flourish in this new environment, but I didn’t know what to do about that.

Free speech was free speech, I told myself somewhat naively. And outside of the negative stuff, I liked the chaotic two-way communication cacophony of the web.

Our readers blasted off at our writers in ways traditional journalism never had tolerated. Those of us from “legacy media” were used to being the last word on a topic. In this new media, we were only the first. It was a conversation, not a broadcast. 

Everyone handled it in relatively good spirits at The Netizen as we quickly rocketed into position as one of the leading news sites on the web.

If I was the pilot, it felt like I was guiding a ship into open space, destination unknown.

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

• Death toll at Hajj pilgrimage rises to 1,300 amid scorching temperatures (AP)

• US heat wave continues to bring scorching temperatures along East Coast (The Hill)

• Washington Post publisher retains ties to past business ventures (WP)

• For Post’s Lewis, Credibility Dies in Silence (Politico)

• Readers Don’t Trust Dirty Tricks (Atlantic)

• Trump cranks up false, inflammatory messages to rake in campaign cash (WP)

• Turner says US is at ‘highest level of a possible terrorist threat’ (The Hill)

• What Happens When Migrants Arrive in America’s Suburbs? (WSJ)

• Can you inherit memories from your ancestors? (Guardian)

• What the Arrival of A.I. Phones and Computers Means for Our Data (NYT)

• Is artificial intelligence making big tech too big? (Economist)

• A peek inside San Francisco’s AI boom (WP)

• Scientists: ‘Don’t Get Mad, But We Accidentally Found The Cure For Homosexuality’ (The Onion)