I was born a long time ago at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, and I must have formed some kind of mystical bond with the place, because later I would earn my journalism degree from that same institution.
This was back when journalists—and those who aspired to enter the profession — worked with unwieldy contraptions known as "typewriters." I was a reasonably proficient typist, but frequently edited myself, prompting an instructor to remark that I was single-handedly keeping the "Wite-Out" company in business. He thought this would be a serious obstacle to my career, since no editor would tolerate so much extra gunk on the page. Little did he know that a Harvard dropout named Bill Gates was plotting world domination, and eventually would lead a global campaign to eradicate correction fluid and install Microsoft Word on every desktop.
Most of my fellow journalism students made a beeline for the Temple News, the campus newspaper. But my main extracurricular activity was Spice, the student-run humor magazine. I was officially the editor, though my title on the masthead was "Emperor-in-Chief."
"El Presidente Rizzo" At the time, Philadelphia was a motherlode for parody, much of it inspired by Frank L. Rizzo, the larger-than-life mayor. In one of his many memorable moments, Rizzo went on national TV to declare that the Philadelphia Police Dept. had enough firepower "to invade Cuba and win." This prompted my second-in-command, the Managing Emperor, to write a news story headlined "Rizzo Invades Cuba."
"Surprised Cubans awoke this morning to learn that their country had been swiftly taken and the Castro regime imprisoned by heavily armed Philadelphia Police, all in the space of one night," he reported. "In a related development, several Cuban embassies in large European cities were seized by students wearing Villanova T-shirts and wielding billy clubs."
We used a felt-tipped pen to paint a Castro-like beard on a picture of the mayor and captioned it "El Presidente Rizzo in his new official photograph." Oh, the mischief we could have caused if Photoshop had been available back then.
Go West, Young Man But those carefree days of braving the Broad Street Subway and eagle-eyed J-school instructors came to an end, and after a particularly brutal winter, I accepted an invitation from my mother and stepfather to take my newly minted B.A. degree to California.
They lived in the Ventura-Oxnard area about 50 miles northwest of L.A. This wasn't exactly a West Coast glamour spot, but I soon fell in love with the mountainous vistas and Mediterranean climate. I sent resumes to publishers throughout the region, but being in the midst of a recession, I settled for a job in the classified ad department of the Oxnard Press-Courier.
Oxnard is a largely working-class city cursed by a name that made it a frequent butt of jokes (an apocryphal story has it that the city leaders, theorizing that "Ox" was the offending syllable, considered changing the name to "Nard").
My job consisted of typing up ads submitted by customers, but armed with my journalism degree, I also tried to suggest helpful changes, with mixed results. "You mean the car runs well," I'd say. "No," the customer would reply, "it runs good." Nevertheless, I think I produced some of the best-edited classified ads in all of Oxnard.
As a sideline to this less-than-fulfilling occupation, I got involved in Democratic Party politics and ended up volunteering for a state Assembly candidate named Jack O'Connell.
A former schoolteacher, he was a clear underdog in a race against a millionaire vintner named Brooks Firestone (of the tire-making family). But Jack won in a squeaker and went on to become state Superintendent of Public Instruction.
On to Paradise Fortune smiled upon me in other ways, and two years after moving to California, I was offered a job in Santa Barbara editing a soon-to-be-launched newsletter called Veterinary Computing. It had the lofty goal of ushering veterinarians into the new Information Age.
I knew little about veterinary medicine and even less about computers, but the guy who hired me, Fred Hamlin of American Veterinary Publications, thought this made me perfect for the job. He explained that many veterinarians wanted to computerize their practices, but just like me, they didn't know much about the technology.
So I'd undergo a crash course in computerese, and then use my writing skills to impart my knowledge in a non-intimidating manner. (It helped that he had a sense of humor, because most of my clips were parodies I had written for Spice.)
It didn't take much persuasion on his part. Not only would I have a paying job in my chosen profession, but it would be in Santa Barbara, which is about as close to paradise as you can get in the Continental United States. So I packed my bags and trekked up the 101 Freeway to my new home.
On the Frontier This was back in the olden days, when computers were powered by steam turbines and illuminated by gaslight (at least it seemed that way). I took a couple courses at Santa Barbara City College, read some books and devoured every computer magazine I could find. The company had several veterinarians on staff who explained to me how the profession operates. So before long, I was one of the foremost authorities on veterinary computer applications. This would become a running theme in my career—working for a trade publication in some arcane subject area, and then absorbing sufficient knowledge to be seen as an expert (if only they knew).
I had not given up my satirical aspirations, and created a one-off newsletter called Veterinary Collating that covered the latest advances in desktop stapling and other cutting-edge analog technologies (parody is easier when the target is your own publication).
Raking the Muck But I also did some serious journalism, and broke a major story about a controversial effort by the American Animal Hospital Association to certify veterinary computer systems. The article ultimately garnered a Newsletter Association Journalism Award for "Best Spot News or Exclusive Single News Story." Second place went to a newsletter from Dow Jones. (The Newsletter Association is now the Specialized Information Publishers Association.)
In the meantime, I had continued my political activities, and after a convoluted series of events, became chair of the Santa Barbara County Democratic Central Committee. In essence, I was the Democratic Boss of Santa Barbara County. This might have meant some serious clout if I had been in Chicago or Philadelphia. But alas, I had no patronage jobs to hand out (not even to myself) and continued to drive a beat-up Volkswagen.
Still, it was heady stuff for a 25-year-old who was relatively new to California. Running the committee meetings, I'd bang the gavel and tell a bunch of lawyers to shut up, and they'd shut up.
A New Job Unfortunately, things were going downhill at American Veterinary Publications and new management had taken over. The newsletter, perhaps doing its job too well, had lost subscribers and was re-invented as a small section within the company's peer-reviewed journal, Modern Veterinary Practice. So I jumped ship to another publishing venture across town, Hispanic Business, and entered the world of business journalism.
It might have seemed like another mismatch, since I don't even speak Spanish, but this proved to be only a minor limitation since the magazine was published in English.
The Phantom Family I became a human copy machine, generating so many articles that I used a list of Latino pseudonyms: Juan Guedella, Esteban Velez, and so on. Each month, I would pick two or three of my favorite articles to get my own byline, then assign the others to Juan or Esteban. I wrote travel articles under the name "Gabriella Reyes," which created awkward situations when people would call to speak with her.
The practice of using the pseudonyms began with my predecessor, a fellow from England named John Coombs, who referred to them as his "phantom family." So if you had asked for Gabriella back then, you would have been connected to a guy with an English accent.
As before, I was also the in-house computer guru. My big achievement was a dBase program that converted data about Latino-owned businesses into typesetting codes used to generate the Hispanic Business 500 listing. It was similar to the approach now used to generate data-driven web pages. My editorial highlights included a major piece on the history of Spanish-language TV, which prompted a college professor in El Paso to invite me to be the keynote speaker for a conference on Spanish-language media. He said I could deliver it in English, but I still had to turn him down.
Go South, Young Man At that point, I had set my career sights southward and accepted a job in Torrance (near L.A.) with Micro Publishing Press, which produced newsletters and market studies on the then-nascent technology known as "desktop publishing." At first, there were just two of us in a small office—Jim Cavuoto and I—plus Cavuoto's fiancee helping out on the phones. Once again, I had to embark on a new learning experience, though it was easier this time because I was already familiar with much of the technology.
This was 1987, when "desktop publishing" was something distinct from "real" publishing, and computers were seen as low-end interlopers in a world of typesetting, wax machines and X-acto knives. Now, of course, computers are so ubiquitous that we just call it "publishing." It can be difficult to appreciate how revolutionary it was at the time.
A Publishing Empire The company took off in 1989 when we launched Micro Publishing News, a regional newspaper for end-users of the technology. These were graphic designers, art directors, production managers, etc. who were seeking to get a handle on all this futuristic computer stuff. We began with an edition for Southern California, one of the few places big enough to support such a specialized publication, and eventually expanded to Northern California and then New York.
The timing was perfect, since regional digital imaging services were springing up and we provided the perfect advertising medium. The paper kept growing, and within a few years, the Southern California edition hit more than 100 pages per month. We were twice named as a finalist for best computer newspaper in the Computer Press Association awards. The company expanded from two to 15 employees.
The March of Progress Along the way, we had a front-row seat as the technology evolved. Product managers from places like HP, Kodak and Epson would come in wielding non-disclosure agreements so we could preview forthcoming scanners, digital cameras, printers, storage devices, etc.
Often they had features that seemed revolutionary at the time, but are almost laughable now. We once had a front-page story about an 88MB removable hard drive selling at the bargain price of $1000. Today you can buy an 8GB (8192MB) flash drive for about $12 on Amazon.
We also followed the graphics software as it steadily improved. This included the original release of Adobe Photoshop, back when it competed with a similar program called Letraset ColorStudio and there was some doubt about which one would prevail. ColorStudio was arguably the better product at first, but Letraset doomed it by setting a $1995 price tag.
It's Just a Fad At the 1994 Seybold San Francisco publishing conference—where we produced the official show daily—keynote speaker John Gage of Sun Microsystems demonstrated a new-fangled online technology called the "World Wide Web." As we reported, Gage showed "hypertext capabilities that allow users to jump from one document to another by clicking on links. He accessed CommerceNet, a repository of corporate information, and jumped from there to the Apple Computer 'home page.'"
It was a "vision of the future in which multimedia documents replace much of what is now published on paper, and the Internet becomes an important new publication medium."
All this led to internal discussions about whether this "World Wide Web thing" was likely to go anywhere and if it was a topic we should include in our coverage.
In addition to the paper (and Seybold show dailies), we produced books on desktop publishing, and I ended up authoring or co-authoring six of these. The first was The Scanner Book in 1989, which got a nice plug from Peter Lewis at The New York Times. This was followed by GATF Guide to Desktop Publishing (1990, 1995), Linotronic Imaging Handbook (1991), Color Image Editing on the PC (1993), The Color Scanner Book (1995) and Plug-In Power (1996). We also launched a spin-off of Micro Publishing News called Digital Imaging, which we distributed nationally.
In the Limelight Being in L.A., we had our share of Hollywood experiences. One day, I returned from lunch to find a note on my desk informing me that a fellow named "Marlon Brando" had called.
"Isn't this funny," I said to the receptionist. "This guy has the same name as Marlon Brando."
"No," she replied. "That was Marlon Brando." It turned out he had read about The Scanner Book in The New York Times and wanted to buy a copy. My boss ended up talking to him for a while, answering questions about scanners. If only I had skipped lunch that day...
One of MPN's readers was Graham Nash of CSN&Y fame, who's also an accomplished photographer and owner of a digital imaging service in Manhattan Beach. He agreed to be a judge in our digital art contest, and came into the office with the other judge, a well-known photographer named Rick Smolan. We were under strict orders not to ask for autographs, but I guess Graham never got the message, because he pulled out A Day in the Life of America and asked Rick to sign it.
Graham and his co-horts at Nash Editions had incredible stories to tell about some of their clients, the most memorable being Horace Bristol, a legendary photojournalist from Ojai, Calif. Graham had volunteered his company's services to digitally scan, restore and archive prints from Bristol's collection. As they worked on the project, Bristol told them about going into the San Joaquin Valley in 1938 with a journalist from San Francisco to document the lives of the migrant farmers. Later, the journalist called Bristol and apologetically explained that he wouldn't be able to complete the assignment. He said he had been so moved by what he saw, he wanted to write a novel instead. The journalist's name was John Steinbeck, and the novel was The Grapes of Wrath.
Musical Interlude In June, 1995, we did a special entertainment issue in which I profiled Lol Creme, Ray Manzarek and Steve Vai and did a news story about Herbie Hancock's Rhythm of Life Foundation. Lol, best known for his work with 10cc and as a music video producer, also painted landscapes using computer software, and we reproduced one of his pieces in the newspaper. After the issue appeared, I ran into him during a media event at the House of Blues and he told me he liked my article so much, he sent a copy to his mother.
That was my moment in the limelight, and the following month it was back to writing about workflow applications in the printing industry. (I had previously interviewed Kit Watkins, who isn't nearly as well known but is one of my favorite musicians.)
While this was going on, I continued my political activities in what (at first) was a solidly Republican part of L.A. County. Our fortunes turned in 1992, when Bill Clinton swept the area and we won big upsets in elections for Assembly and Congress. Our new Assembly member was Debra Bowen, who went on to become California Secretary of State. Our Congressional rep was Jane Harman, who's now well known for her involvement in national security issues.
I was glad they won, but soon lost interest in being a party volunteer. It was a combination of burnout and bad feelings from a 1994 state Senate race in which an old-school politician named Ralph Dills moved into our district to run for re-election. He had a lousy environmental record and I didn't like the way he ran his campaign, so it seemed like the right time to leave those activities behind. I also realized that I'm happier being an underdog. Since then, I've described myself as a "recovering activist."
Go North, Young Man I was ready to move on in other ways. I had been with Micro Publishing for nine years and figured I was ready for a bigger stage. So I looked north and in May 1996 landed a job in San Francisco as news editor for Macworld, the leading magazine for Macintosh users.
Life in the Majors Nevertheless, I felt like a long-time Triple-A baseball player who had just been promoted to the big leagues. When you work for a small publishing company, you're the staff writer, assigning editor, copy chief, proofreader, product tester and IT technician all rolled up into one overworked employee. But at Macworld, I discovered the novel concept known as "division of labor."
When the network went down, you didn't crawl under the desk to find a loose wire—you called the IT department. We had a fully staffed copy desk that proofread the articles and made sure everything was grammatically and stylistically correct (they were impressed that I turned in such clean copy because I was so used to editing my own articles). We had a lab with trained engineers who provided the hardware-performance benchmarks we used in news stories and reviews. And we had editors who specialized in each key technology segment: networking, Internet, multimedia, productivity, etc. My area was graphics.
We also had an all-star roster of freelance contributors that included David Pogue (now with The New York Times) and Douglas Adams (may he rest in peace) of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame.
It soon became apparent that Jobs was more than just a consultant, and months later he ousted Amelio and became interim CEO. Word leaked out that he was planning to kill the clone program, and many observers feared this would be the final nail in Apple's coffin. Even if the company survived, it didn't augur well for the business side of the magazine, since the clone-makers were big advertisers.
When Worlds Collide So we received a second shock on the eve of the August 1997 Macworld Expo in Boston, when we were called into a companywide meeting and told that we would be merging with our archrivals, Ziff Davis' MacUser and MacWeek. Under the deal, MacUser would be folded into Macworld, and MacWeek would remain as a separate newsweekly. Both would be managed by a new joint venture known as Mac Publishing LLC. It was as if the Hatfields and McCoys had agreed to hold a joint family reunion. Layoffs ensued, and though I remained, many of my former colleagues did not.
Meanwhile, a miracle was brewing in Cupertino, though it would be months before this became apparent. The first hint came at the October 1997 Seybold San Francisco conference, where Jobs gave a keynote in which he defended killing the clone program and previewed the iconic "Think Different" ad campaign. But what impressed me most was an emotional follow-up session in which Adobe Systems CEO John Warnock, Quark founder Tim Gill and Macromedia chairman Bud Colligan all stepped to the stage to proclaim their support for Jobs' actions. Warnock noted that for the first time in years, he could see employees' cars parked at Apple's HQ on weekends, indicating that morale was on the rise.
Think Profit A month later, Apple announced its first quarterly profit in more than a year, and in August 1998, the company introduced the all-in-one iMac. This became a big seller, and its groundbreaking industrial design was a major influence on other hardware makers.
That same August, Mac Publishing LLC relaunched MacWeek as eMediaWeekly, with a new mission to cover electronic publishing applications on all computer platforms. However, the publication folded six months later, with MacWeek.com remaining as a daily news site with a skeletal staff.
The Mac Faithful Apple always had been an interesting company to follow, but with Jobs in charge, I found myself witnessing one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history. His Macworld Expo keynotes became the stuff of legend, equal parts rock concert and religious revival, as the "Mac faithful" flocked to San Francisco in winter and New York in summer to see the latest gizmos that Apple had in store.
At the January 1999 event, Apple became the first computer maker to offer a choice of colors, unveiling new iMacs in grape, lime, strawberry, blueberry and tangerine. In July that year, we saw the first iBooks, this time in tangerine and blueberry. Back in San Francisco six months later, Jobs previewed Mac OS X and its Aqua user interface. The following year, it was iTunes and the PowerBook G4. Jobs presented these with the panache of a master showman, as he strode back and forth across the big stage, highlighting some "amazing" or "awesome" new feature.
No Comment But Apple could also be frustrating to deal with if you were a journalist. It had never been particularly open, and one of the first things you learned as a Mac journalist was to program a function key to automatically insert "Apple declined to comment" into your stories. But Jobs instituted a culture of secrecy and message control that even the CIA would envy, and the most innocuous requests for information often met a stone wall. (It wouldn't surprise me if Apple's PR folks had a function key programmed to say, "We don't comment on unannounced products.") Still, it's hard to argue with the company's success.
Mac Publishing got into the action in June 1999 by acquiring MacCentral.com, which had the highest traffic of all Mac websites, and operating it side-by-side with Macworld.com and MacWeek.com.
I had done some work for Macworld.com, but MacWeek.com had much more traffic and a mission to deliver a steady flow of daily news while maintaining high editorial standards. I went from the pace of a monthly print magazine to something more akin to broadcast TV, reacting quickly to news developments and posting stories throughout the day. The hours were long and tempers were often short, and with four people on the editorial team, we were woefully understaffed.
Things got really interesting a couple months into my tenure, when we added the ability for users to post comments directly on stories. Suddenly, we had 20,000 proofreaders, copy editors and media critics looking over our shoulders, and no mistake went unnoticed. One fellow posted a well-written report about an event he attended, and we ended up recruiting him as a regular contributor.
Not Quite Worth a Pulitizer, But... One of my crowning achievements came on April 3, 2000, when Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled against Microsoft in a landmark antitrust case and decreed that the company be split in two. As The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other outlets scrambled to cover the story, I was the first to report that Apple had no comment. (The ruling was later overturned.)
A few months later, I was second only to Bill Gates as a pariah in the Mac community when I killed "Mac the Knife," a popular rumor column. We had been running it only sporadically, so it wasn't a dramatic change, but angry readers spent days lighting up the comment section, alternately accusing me of being a toady for Apple or Microsoft (or worse). It was an early taste of what you often see now in the comment sections of newspaper websites, but back then it was unsettling.
As this was happening, the dot-com bubble on Wall Street had burst, and the Internet start-ups that had bloomed in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch and other places began to go under. It took a while to catch up to us, but eventually it did (along with some other internal factors at the company). In March 2001, Mac Publishing shut down the site and laid us off.
Out on the Street It was my first taste of unemployment since I began working at the Press-Courier nearly 20 years before, and also my first extended time off (I had never taken a vacation of more than a week). So I relaxed for a while, limiting myself to some freelancing for HOW, a magazine for graphic designers I had worked with previously. For fun, I made videos for some friends in a local rock group.
Months later, I began seriously looking for work, but the dot-com crash was in full swing. The Bay Area had been a magnet for legions of writers and editors who were now laid off and scrambling for the few jobs that remained. It got even worse after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
I continued to write for HOW, doing features on regional design cultures and the future of design. Rockport Publishers in Gloucester, Mass., assigned me to write Photo Manipulation: Fast Solutions for Hands-On Web Design, a book on Adobe Photoshop. I later edited Rockport's Graphic Designer's Color Handbook by Rick Sutherland and Barbara Karg, and Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler. I even spent a while doing phone surveys for a market research company in SF.
Finally, in October 2003, I landed my current job with Infocom Group, publisher of the Bulldog Reporter newsletters for PR pros (see "Day Job").
Looking back, it was a wild ride, and one I never would have anticipated when I began my journey to California. Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham famously remarked that journalism is "the first rough draft of history," and I've been privileged to write some of that history and watch the people making it. The sad part is that given the current state of the media business, it's an open question as to whether younger folks will have the same opportunities. But somehow those first drafts of history will be written, whether via blog or Twitter or the reminiscences of a middle-aged tech journalist.