(This is the fifth in a series.)
At HotWired, the traditional production schedule of a daily or a weekly print outlet simply didn’t work for us since we could publish pretty much anytime we wished, which is what we did. 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 set news industry standards yet for how to manage organizations on the web facing that 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 over ownership of this new content space. That was an ambitious 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 umbrella 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 already seemed dated on the ever-changing web.
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 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 some 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 corporate Wired Inc.'s horizon. The failed IPOs had undermined confidence in Louis's leadership and an ambitious set of younger execs had been moved into positions of influence inside the company by outside investors.
They began plotting a takeover.
Aware of the 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.
But it also proved to be fatal. For us, the hourglass was running out.
(To be concluded tomorrow.)
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