Friday, January 10, 2025

Brighter Side

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Donald Trump 1st US President To Be Sentenced As Felon, But Avoids Jail, Penalty (NDTV)

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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.

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, 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 was a bittersweet sort of story, because we had 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 of working without pay and 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.

Why not?

Thus I wrote blog posts about Lyft, Uber, Airbnb, Nextdoor, TaskRabbit and dozens of others in the early days of their existence. I met their founders — 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 for the interviews. 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 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 in its more famous neighbor to the north.

But Web 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.)

But I was genuinely optimistic about this new wave of change.

Not all of the companies would survive, of course, let alone thrive, but the strongest among them did. One can reasonably argue now about whether those that survived have made things better or not. But all of that was pretty much beside the point for me as a story-teller. I just remember enjoying the chance to write up my version of how somebody’s dream might come true.

Looking back, I just hope my old muckraker friends can forgive me.

After all, it must have been the serotonin.

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