…having made the same decision, to offer [The Times] website for free. Many people have said that this was a good decision. Many people have said this was a terrible decision. There are people, in fact, who we’ve interviewed, that are on both sides of…
…o investigate the changing landscape and [was] remarkably accurate in its focus and prediction. I remember sitting with the grad students in the Media Lab and hearing a view of news that was digital, that was interactive, and was community based. I ac…
…e. They knew how to go after [and] cover [a] story in real time, which NBC didn’t know how to do. NBC didn’t have any years of doing that. The only solution to the problem was to build significant, original journalistic capability, largely in Seattle,…
…d: copious information, services, email, community, community connectivity, and massive lollygagging opportunities. It was also the first large interactive company to offer a test of the value of news to paying customers — the first place where the va…
…ch was interesting in all sorts of ways. [The] advent of technologies…made it easier to distribute news, geographically and with less friction in time, starting with the printing press, then radio, broadcast television, cable, on and on. It was always…
…re coming at you and you’re like, “Okay, [but] I’ve got to reinvent myself to do something that those machines, those algorithms, can’t do that delivers value to the advertiser. There’s a lot of things, if you put your thinking cap on, your innovation…
…estments, the big four — AOL, Yahoo, CNN.com, and MSNBC.com — were all well on their way to dominating the early days of the digital news “space,” as it came to be known. But the exploding popularity of the web seemed to be good news for almost all in…
…e was started. And I get online at 1,200 [baud], but what do I do? We were talking about content and interactive shopping and communications apps. We were all young, and it was populist. Our message was ease of use and take the drudgery out of your bu…
…Meg Hourihan: Meg Hourihan, who I ended [up] working with later; Evan Williams, who I was going to partner with before he was acquired by Google. I was entranced by Blogger. Michael Sippey of Twitter talks about competition online for the user’s atte…
…I drove to the Valley and met Tim Koogle [CEO], Jerry Yang and David Filo. And Jeff Mallett [an early employee and the president and chief operating officer], actually. I came away from that meeting feeling like, “This is very different in every respe…
…retired as dean of the journalism school [at] Columbia [University], says whenever he has these discussions — and in his 10 years there he’s had plenty — he says the one thing you’re not allowed to say in these discussions is, “It’ll all work out some…
…m Computing guys are starting up [what becomes] AOL. That must have seemed trivial at the time. Gerald M. Levin It was always an issue. A large corporation…makes most of its money — and therefore its Wall Street success is based on — its inbred busine…
…getting the reader to pay us. But we are learning how to do that. There needs to be a cultural shift; society must accept that payment has to be made for all kinds of news. News is not free. And there will be a fierce fight over ‘fair use’ as the aggr…
…rends. It was in Google Labs at the time [2006]. We took these [Google] engineers around to meet various senior producers and executive producers. I said, “This is fantastic.” You could change your lineups for the evening news based on what’s trending…
…our second post. These posts represent just the kind of conversation we hope to continue to engender going forward. Please feel free to reach out to us with questions and comments. You can reach any of us from the About page or all of us from the Fee…