The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

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  The Machiavelli Club (1,641)

  MY ASSIGNMENT TO DEVELOP that tablet edition for SI had come after a dutiful Time cover story in early 2009 on the death of newspapers that included a sidebar by Josh Quittner on e-readers and these new things called “apps.” That jump-started a CEO trip to Silicon Valley on one of the Time Warner jets, and after a couple days of meetings with the developers mentioned in the sidebar, it was decided on the flight back to New York to invest in some strategic R&D.

  Inexplicably, I seemed to be the only Time Inc. editor interested in developing a magazine app except for Quittner, who was parked at Time as an editor at large. He had edited Business 2.0—covering the “new economy”—until Time Inc. closed it, and he knew technology better than any other editor in the company. He was also a prankster who had registered “mcdonalds.com” in his name for an early Wired piece on domain-name squatting. I got him detached from Time (where he was viewed with suspicion) and gave him an office next to mine at SI (where he was viewed with suspicion).

  The old business school adage that culture trumps strategy was much more than a punch line at Time Inc., where there were three distinct cultures. The executive culture was risk-averse but desperate—thus my green light. The edit culture was defensive and clueless about what was coming, thinking in abstract clichés that IT was responsible only for fixing the e-mail and maybe even the air-conditioning. The IT culture was ironic and vaguely bitter about being underappreciated. That changing-the-light-bulb joke was no joke on many levels.

  Creating the SI app promised nothing but extra work, but there were volunteers, and whenever someone joined the project I e-mailed them this quote and welcomed them to the Machiavelli Club:

  There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to be a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for enemies all those who are well off under the old order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.

  —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE, 1532

  I was looking for swagger. I said engineering would set editors free. I said that if type was the sushi of the ’90s, code was the typography of the ’00s. I gave presentations that celebrated the editorial appetite for change across Time Inc. even as management was living in dread—trying to protect a bottom line with over 85 percent of its (falling) revenues coming from print. If you were managing one of those P&Ls, it felt like trying to catch falling knives.

  It helped that SI’s outside developing partner, a digital agency called the Wonderfactory, was led by the bearishly handsome entrepreneur David Link and was itself subversive. The Machiavelli Club grew in reputation as cool. Engineers started showing up for drinks with editors at the bar downstairs. SI’s creative director, Chris Hercik, got hold of Quittner’s Time Inc. ID and changed it to a Machiavelli Club ID with the name “Robespierre.”

  Management’s meetings took on a different tone. Digital strategy sessions turned into platitude festivals about building a twenty-first-Century Media Company but were mostly about saving obsolete business models. The lack of confidence in consumer demand for quality journalism was always the subtext. My argument was that it wasn’t that people wouldn’t pay for our stuff, it was just too hard, too complicated to find it and then sign up to get it. And what were we selling anyway? We weren’t selling our journalism very hard. For a while you couldn’t get a digital subscription to SI without also receiving a “FREE NFL Team Performer Jacket.” There was no mention of our writing or photography. And they were shitty jackets.

  It was also dimly perceived that our websites were already more important than our magazines. This was especially true at the newsweeklies, which, in the case of SI, was a twenty-four/seven operation and had been for some time—though this surprised some top executives. Someone told me at one of those meetings that “mobile seems to be coming pretty fast.” We needed a lot of help, but by then editors who had not become entrepreneurs were losing control of their content to a wave of new “digital” vice presidents and general managers on the publishing side. Their boss e-mailed me after his “on-boarding” as the newly created chief digital officer of Time Inc. that he wanted to “download” my guidance.

  Everything was up for grabs. I hoped that my proposed subscription models, paywalls, news on demand, apps, mobile Web, second screens, e-books, e-commerce, brand extensions, video, social media, dashboards, even events and conferences could all be part of the mix. My only rule was that everything had to be authentic, not cosmetic, and take advantage of the native technology of the new platforms.

  That some of the best magazine editors were already becoming “brand managers” was another way to look at it, even though that verges on jargon. Traditional brand managers, meanwhile, wanted to be digital officers so they could control the content with the digital vice presidents. Now that I’ve written that word again, I want to be on the record that “content” had come to mean so many things it meant nothing. I sat through too many PowerPoint presentations by scalp-hunting consultants thinking, Fuck content! That goes double when you put the word “amazing” or “incredible” in front of it. I have noticed that the “content” I’m told is “amazing” or “incredible” is never amazing or incredible. Editors should not talk like that.

  In the numerous “digital content” meetings I attended, there was very little discussion about the quality of our journalism. Some of the most annoying talk had to do with the complaint that we had not built commerce into browsers in the first place. In other words, why didn’t we charge for anything in the beginning? Whose fault was that? I said that if we didn’t have the confidence to charge for our journalism, there was no way anyone was going to pay for it—a tautological argument I know, but it felt right. Many editors were already working on turning their magazines into stores. That was fine with me; let them become stores, righteous stores in service of readers and users, stores that were not for sale. I said I would shop at those stores.

  When we did talk about our journalism, the naïve thinking among most of the editors was that we just needed our resources back. We should have been thinking about content-management systems to deliver what we still had. It was like the cautionary allegory of being in the railroad business instead of the shipping business when public works projects were laying down the national highway system. To stretch the metaphor: if you were in the news business, you needed to jump off the traditional tracks. What we did instead was cut costs. Watching some of the SI writers take buyouts, it felt like a great library was burning down.

  I eliminated too many jobs to count here. This was difficult and frustrating because every firing reflected the lack of business leadership that I had been brooding about since I’d been a young editor in the late 1970s. That was when magazines began leveraging their circulations against advertising revenue, inflating readerships with cheap subscriptions and charging advertisers for the larger rate base.

  This was fine until the economy turned, as it always did, and you had to cut costs with smaller formats, cheaper paper, reduced staff, fewer assignments, less enterprise, and so it went. When the economy would turn up again, the cycle would repeat. But you never got anything you’d cut back. Pretty soon great magazines were selling subscriptions for five dollars a year, and the investment in edit was lost in the funhouse mirrors of outside consultants and the grueling platitudes of spooked executives undermining their own stated objectives.

  I don’t think I was naïve about economic realities, and I was responsible for an editorial budget of more than $50 million, but I believed that in the journalism business, journalism had to come first. Financial support would follow the quality of the work. That’s where I was naïve. Our nearsighted mandate was “build only if sold.”

  So maybe the Machiavelli Club was our best shot, and the press we got around our first prototype seemed to prove that. I thought SI’s was the best a
pp, updating every day and completely refreshed when the new print edition came out, but good ones for monthly magazines were popping out of every traditional media company, all of us trying to convince ourselves that these new digital editions were going to “save” us. That’s why Apple’s business model put all of us in such a bad place.

  Time Inc. needed a subscription model, which, as Steve Jobs had been telling us all along, was fine with him as long as Apple kept the credit card data. But this meant Apple would own Time Inc.’s subscribers and prevent us from having a direct billing relationship. We wanted to create apps that would direct readers to our website in order to buy a subscription. This was not going to happen. When SI, Time and other magazines submitted apps that did this, they were rejected by Apple’s App Store. The negotiation moved to what were said to be “no bullshit” phone calls between Jobs and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. Nothing happened. Canny player that he is, Bewkes was already several moves ahead and deep in plans to spin off Time Inc. so he could focus on Turner, Warner Bros., HBO and cable. Where the real money was.

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  Google (602)

  WHEN SI’S ZOMBIE-HANDS VIDEO first went up on YouTube, we heard immediately from Google where a team of developers had reverse-engineered it. They had some ideas about how to create an SI app we could offer free in the Google Chrome Web Store, and they invited us out to Mountain View to talk about it.

  We sat with them in a small conference room and spitballed ideas for an SI app that would be available not just on iPads but on laptops, netbooks, phones and whatever new devices were on the way—SI Everywhere, we called it. Two months later we presented a prototype live to three thousand developers at Google’s I/O Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, with video feeds streaming on the Web.

  The Wonderfactory’s David Link and I demonstrated a live HTML5 Web app focusing on our edit but showing off the app’s speed, ability to stream various media, and location awareness. I said that empowered engineers and developers like those in the room were inspiring and empowering editors like me. I said that code was becoming content across all of our platforms. I said that advertising had to be more than brand messaging—a service, not a nuisance. A click on “Lenses” in a camera ad allowed zooming in or out to replicate different lenses. Selecting “Buy” brought up Google maps of a mile radius outside the Moscone Center, with pins flagging camera stores. I conducted a live poll that asked who should be the MVP of the ongoing NBA play-offs and the data updated live. I said we could combine the best of the magazine with the best of the Web in an edited, curated, live take on sports that you could customize to follow your local teams. The audience was cheering and I ended with an image of some Third World kids playing soccer that animated into the first frame of a video of that week’s cover coming together. SI was suddenly open and searchable and social and available everywhere, a perfect storm of innovation. The presentation played like a pinball machine, with the app hitting every bumper.

  The next morning in an e-mail to Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, Ann Moore included thirty tweets from the hundreds collected during the presentation, sent either by people in the audience or those watching the live stream. She suggested combining them with video highlights: “This is what we want to cut down to a minute for the Investor Presentation. We need to show that Steve Jobs isn’t the only game in town.”

  Those tweets—under “Subject: From Terry’s prez”—sent the Machiavelli Club to the bar that night to celebrate.

  This Sports Illustrated experience is unbelievable. This is how content SHOULD be. Interactive. Personalized. Rich.

  Fuck the iPad App Store. The Sports Illustrated app looks fantastic, and is just HTML5.

  I think Sports Illustrated just leap-frogged the entire media sector with their demo of live, curated, pro-am multi-media storytelling.

  The HTML5 version of Sports Illustrated they are showing off at #googleIO right now is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

  This Sports Illustrated stuff is badass. Now give it to me for Game Informer, EGM, PopSci, and Wired. I’m in.

  Sports Illustrated gets IT! They are going through their HTML5 app that is in the Google web app store. Oh man, they GET IT!

  Sports Illustrated == Now I got my swaggah back.

  Bewkes responded: “This is fantastic.” But as the months rolled on, there was no significant investment in digital at Time Inc., let alone SI. By August, Ann Moore was gone.

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  Tenure (1,153)

  MANY JOBS CHANGED when the Machiavelli Club started working on the SI tablet app. Copy editors became project managers, engineers became designers, creative directors wanted to write code. Within a year SI was on eight platforms, publishing twenty-nine thousand pages with the same staff and headcount that had been closing twenty-nine hundred print pages the year before. This looked wild and mysterious from the outside, but it was simply a matter of making some small adjustments of SI’s content management system to accommodate the aspect ratios of various screens. SI got a lot of press for this, and I was invited to speak at conferences in Europe, but we were still cutting jobs. Even all the presidents of digital and two new CEOs within six months couldn’t find a business model.

  In a report on mobile strategy for the latter of those CEOs, Laura Lang, I wrote that journalism and innovation had built the most respected media companies in the world, and now the lack of one or the other was taking the greatest of them down. Fingers were pointed. I concentrated on products and wrote strategy “one-sheets” for the publishing side—the last one for Lang, who walked away with $19 million when she was fired after fifteen months in the CEO job. When I wondered about the effectiveness of my memos, Quittner—Robespierre of the Machiavelli Club—assured me, dripping irony, they were making a huge impact. Otherwise my exact language wouldn’t be popping up in so many strategic documents and e-mails from various digital vice presidents, digital directors and general managers, digital.

  I adopted howling jargon: Done was better than perfect. But so-called perfection paralysis had never been the problem at Sports Illustrated. In my final column I wrote that SI had found a new velocity, and that integrating editorial across new platforms felt like climbing into a speed suit. I said that LeBron had come a long way too, now an archetype of the sports-media celebrity. Maybe that first of his many SI covers had been the right call—he was, as the headline had said, “The Chosen One.” Even with all the newsweekly fuckedupedness, the editorial was never the problem.

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  I HAD THOUGHT OF MYSELF as a journalist since the day I’d landed as a twenty-six-year-old in Lebanon during what became known as Black September. In 1970, most of the journalists in Beirut lived in the Phoenicia Hotel and hired cars or even taxis to take them to the civil war in Jordan—usually getting back to the hotel in time for a few drinks with Air France stewardesses.

  We were covering the rise of Al Fatah, the PLO faction controlled by Yasser Arafat. Terrorism was the emerging story. Peace looked more unlikely with every dispatch that moved on the wire. The tragedy of the Munich Olympics was forming on the horizon. The news was complexing, even though we got it firsthand or in simplified delivery from the BBC and a couple of wire machines that clattered in a corner of the bar at the Phoenicia. That was our context.

  Back in the States, Clay Felker’s idea to put shopping and politics together in New York magazine seemed outrageous. What was a lifestyle magazine anyway? Soon it was obvious. So was the brilliance of the New Journalism, which came with it. Forty years later, the Media Lab at MIT was offering a class that treated journalism as an engineering problem. The arc between the two was the timeline of my career, and through all the disruption—“creative” or otherwise—the demand for clear storytelling from trustworthy news sources only got stronger.

  “The act of witness, a foundation of war reporting,” David Carr wrote in the New York Times in 2014, “has been democratized and disseminated in new ways. The same devi
ce that carries photos of your mother’s new puppy or hosts aimless video games also serves up news from the front.” The implication is huge if you agree that democracy cannot succeed unless all citizens have access to a free press and the same quality of information. It means reaching Afghan fighters in Helmand who get their media on their phones—watching satirical videos of politicians on the same screen where they download porn and listen to inspirational songs with lyrics like “Either fight or be like a woman.” It also means ISIS is a click away from disenchantment with suburban life in California. More context.

  That new witnessing Carr wrote about also marks the difference between what we can know now about the caliphate in Mosul and rumors I reported about Syrian tanks joining the PLO in the streets of Amman. Anyone can be a journalist: blogging, tweeting, crowdsourcing and so on. Sorting out what you know from what you think you know is where the work gets tougher. News can be embedded in the most democratic of new technologies, but it doesn’t have to be. What it has to be is true.

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  THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I learned about magazines is that original reporting is crucial. But reporting is expensive. Especially in the traditional chain of bureau dispatches, fact-checking and legal vetting. At the same time, the sense of responsibility that long existed at many news organizations is badly eroded, if not completely gone. You didn’t have to sit through a budget review at a big media company like Time Inc. to know that journalism was losing value. Worse, there was a creeping sense among investigative and foreign reporters that their bravest efforts were not appreciated, even not wanted by corporate managers—too much trouble. And few true journalists sat at decision-making tables in their own companies.