(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. But a few specific individuals preferred to meet me one-on-one — these were among the more personally ambitious types.
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.
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 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 gotten 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 now 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 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 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.
Meanwhile, the hourglass for all of us was quickly running out.
(To Be Continued)
HEADLINES:
