(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 the media industry. There was no roadmap but there was a sense of urgency. And as one of those in charge, I figured the kind of manager the staff really needed was one who knew when to stay out of their way and when to provide guidance.
We were inventing at hyper-speed.
And at the online side of the company, our staffers 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.
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 much more 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 boy, I occasionally had trouble staying alert in them. But my assistant booked consecutive 15-30 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 people on each team.
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 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, tiny South Park had gotten completely 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 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.
One of those steps was 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.
A few years later, one of Drudge’s rumors would turn out to be true and it would almost destroy Bill Clinton’s presidency. But by then, the events I’m describing here would feel like ancient history.
(To be continued.)
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