Remembering 6+ Years at 'E&P'

By: Carl Sullivan Just over six years ago, a wide-eyed young man who really wanted to be a newspaper journalist found the next best thing -- working for a magazine about newspapers. When I joined Editor & Publisher, the magazine was in the midst of a dot-com buildup, driven by dreams of a brighter digital future and -- who knew? -- maybe even an IPO some day. Don't laugh, anything seemed possible back then.

Before my arrival, the then-family-owned E&P worked on a proprietary dial-up service, Ampersand, that never quite got off the ground.

By the time I arrived, the magazine had built its own Web site, complete with online-only reporting staff, and was nurturing a very successful interactive conference business. I was hired as deputy editor for mediainfo.com, a bimonthly print supplement to E&P that covered online publishing. The goal was to possibly spinoff mediainfo.com into its own monthly or perhaps even weekly mag, with coverage expanding beyond newspapers to include TV, radio and other media.

Like many media organizations, E&P gave its dot-com group a great deal of freedom. We were set up in a satellite office that was on the same floor as E&P's main offices, but nonetheless distinctly separate. There was not a little tension between the print and Web guys back then, as many E&P old-timers understandably viewed the mediainfo.com group with suspicion. Our Webmaster had a red mohawk at one point -- which reportedly prompted longtime E&P President and Editor Emeritus Robert U. Brown to remark, "So, it's come to this, has it?" That was the watercooler talk, anyway!

The dot-com advertising poured in -- both to the Web site and the print edition as companies like FizzyLab, Zip2 and Koz.com were burning a lot of their investors' cash in an effort to attract the newspaper industry's attention. (Even Enron was a regular advertiser in the late '90s, pimping their financial hedging instruments to publishers looking to control paper costs.)

The start-ups were beating down the news staff's door, hoping to get even a smidge of ink. We were inundated with briefing requests from entrepreneurs who were going to change the newspaper industry forever -- many wanting me to sign nondisclosure agreements restricting what I could write about (I usually refused). Point & Shop was going to turn newspapers into online shopping malls ("Join the Get Rich Clique," they teased). SpotOn promised to "play the Internet like a VCR plays TV" with new Web navigation tools. Annotate.net was going to be the "world's first find engine." FindtheDot's microscopic Klingon language was going to be printed in newspapers, allowing readers to scan them with a Dot reader to bring up Web information (not unlike the more infamous :CueCat, which still hangs on my desk as a reminder of that period's hubris).

E&P's old offices on West 19th Street were in the heart of New York's Silicon Alley, and I'll never forget the frantic, celebratory crescendo of screams coming through the wall as our neighbors, Webstakes.com, secured several million more dollars in financing, all on the march toward their inevitable IPO.

Somewhere along the way, the eager entrepreneurs stopped calling, the advertising dried up, and we all got a little nervous ... before getting really nervous. What followed were a tough couple of years for the newspaper industry and the magazine that chronicles it. I remember thinking, "It can't get any worse." It did of course, with Sept. 11, 2001, and the ensuing economic turmoil. I think the low point for me was the February 2002 E&P interactive conference in San Jose, Calif., which was chosen months in advance as the ideal setting for a booming online newspaper event. Instead, attendance was way down, many Silicon Valley storefronts were empty, and a deep depression had descended.

Fortunately, that really was the low point. After many painful cuts, newspaper new-media operations now regularly post profitable quarters. A lot of those revenues still come from classifieds, but at least the digital groups are no longer bleeding red ink while talking about profitability as if it were some distant goal of the future. At E&P, the print and Web have been bundled into one subscription, and circulation is increasing while Web traffic breaks records.

Much work remains to be done, both for the newspaper industry and the magazine that reports on it. We all need to figure out how to serve younger readers and how to help advertisers reach this elusive group. And we must be on a vigilant watch for the next technologies and platforms that will be used to present content. This is a fast-moving and changing target, and requires that publishers devote some smart thinkers to keeping an eye on the horizon. Finally, we need to find ways to make prudent investments in those new technologies, to be willing to take risks again -- not the multi-million dollar risks of the dot-com boom, but risks that will at least keep us in the game.

Before I depart to accept a new position at Newsweek.com, I'll recall just a few of favorite moments from the last few years.

At an April 1997 NAA meeting in Chicago, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said: "I doubt the print newspaper will look dramatically different 10 years from now than it does today."

Two years later, Gates predicted the demise of newspapers and all print products, as the electronic "tablet" came on the scene.

The dot-com craze really increased the zany factor in our news columns. In January 2001, the Associated Press reported on a study that found Internet usage runs in regular 29-day cycles that peak during the seven days before each full moon.

And the era left us many quotes to remember, such as this zinger from Salon.com Editor David Talbot: "The Schadenfreude happy dance that breaks out in the pages of the press whenever a Web site hits choppy waters or starts to sink strikes me as one of the oddest demonstrations of professional self-mutilation I've ever witnessed."

February 2000 was a big month. Consider this item from an E&P newsletter: "The newspaper industry finally joined the dot-com stock frenzy when the venerable New York Times co. announced late Friday plans for a Web IPO. ... the Gray Lady said she expects to raise $100 million from shares of Times Co. Digital. ... The news ends a race among the big newspaper companies to be first in joining the dot-com stock craze. Who's next? The short list includes Knight Ridder, Tribune Co., Belo, Times Mirror and The Washington Post Co."

That same month, The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition was a Super Bowl advertiser, which boosted traffic to WSJ.com by 23% after the commercial ran.

Also in February 2000, E&P's Interactive Newspapers Conference in New Orleans drew over 1,200 attendees, including representatives from 35 countries -- all eager to figure out how the Americans were making so much money on the Web -- ha!

In April 2001, Media General President, Chairman and CEO J. Stewart Bryan III told E&P that giving away free access to newspaper Web sites was "dumb." Alas, this debate still continues in one form or another.

In 2004, Google News became the newspaper industry's new bogeyman, as evidenced by the reaction when the site was announced as a finalist for a best news service EPpy award in May. Google didn't win, but the audience applauded wildly when MarketWatch.com CEO Larry Kramer blasted Google's nomination.

Probably the most unforgettable was the afternoon that a certain powerful publisher called to scream at me, threatening libel if we didn't remove from our Web site a wickedly scandalous quote about him made by an employee who had just been laid off at one of his newspapers. The quote was a little off-color, but libelous? I doubt it. We never got to find out because we dropped the most salacious part of the quote, and the publisher (who should have known better than to threaten libel) cooled down. If nothing else, I was sure that day of the power of the press, including a little Web site called E&P Online.

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I'm leaving E&P Online in the capable hands of its new editor, Jesse Oxfeld, editor in chief of Mediabistro.com. He starts work on Sept. 20. In the meantime, please address any queries to E&P Editor Greg Mitchell at gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com.