Description: "Champion of the non-geeks."

Question: How did you get into your line of work?

Transcript: Well I went to a public high school in Warwick, Rhode Island. And you know I was a little bit involved in journalism in the school, but not much. And the Providence Journal Bulletin, which was the name of the newspaper – still . . . today I think it’s just the Providence Journal – was a, you know, a small city newspaper probably with a circulation of a couple of hundred thousand. So it wasn’t a tiny town newspaper, but it obviously wasn’t a major metropolitan city. But it was a very high quality newspaper. It was well regarded. It had won some Pulitzer prizes. People who had worked there had gone on to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and places like that. But they had a problem. They had an economic problem, which is afternoon newspapers were dying. They couldn’t get a lot of advertising for their afternoon newspapers. And in particular they had a Saturday afternoon newspaper which, you know, who reads the newspaper on Saturday afternoons? So they decided to take a bunch of space in that paper and devote it to teenagers, because the other thing that, of course, was going on at that time was establishment authority figures like politicians and newspaper editors were thinking, “We better figure out what’s going on with these students,” because the students were running around having demonstrations and all that ‘60s stuff. So in 19 . . . I guess it must have been ’64 and ’65, they started this experiment. And they gave . . . They provided space for a column for every high school in their metro area. And it was not a democratic process. The English department or the principal or somebody in all these high schools appointed the columnists. And in my case, out of the blue they asked me to do it. And they asked me to do it together with the guy who was, at the time, my best friend in high school. And it’s somebody whose name is now well known. It’s James Woods, the Hollywood actor who went to high school with me. And he and I started to write this little column together. It was a completely uncontroversial column. All of them were. It was just like what was going on at the school; but not really what was going on. It was sort of officially what was going on. And he was then and now very interested in acting. So he dropped out of doing this after about a month and I kept it up on my own. And at the end . . . And I got bitten by the bug of journalism. I used to have to take a bus and go down to the headquarters of the newspaper and turn in my copy. And the editor would . . . Somebody would edit it, and explain to me why they were editing it in a certain way, and how I could improve it and all of that. And it was just kind of exciting to me. And unbeknownst to me, because nobody had told me this, they actually had a prize for the student whose high school column was the best in the area at the end of every school year. And the prize was that you were flown out to Chicago to Northwestern University to the journalism school where they had a “summer institute” they called it. I think they still have it for high school kids interested in becoming reporters and editors. And I won this thing, and it was the most bizarre thing because I didn’t even know it was a contest. And all of a sudden they say, “Hey, you won this.” So I . . . It was my first plane flight. It was my first trip west of Connecticut. And it was my first time really on a college campus. And it was a fabulous experience, and it just sort of cemented my feeling that I wanted to be a journalist.

Question: When did technology first spark your interest?

Transcript: Not ‘til much, much later. I had no . . . I have . . . I am not an engineer. I am not a computer science degree person. I majored in . . . I went to Brandeis University undergrad. I majored in politics. Not political science – politics. And I worked on the school paper. I was a stringer for The New York Times in the summers. I worked at the Providence Journal first as a copy boy, then I was a reporter. And I was working my way to a career in journalism. And I went to Columbia University’s grad school of journalism and got a Masters, and I was hired by The Wall Street Journal. And what I really wanted to do was go to Washington and cover politics and policy, and I did that eventually. Not immediately, but after a few years they transferred me to their Washington bureau. I actually started in the Detroit bureau covering the automobile industry and organized labor. And so I spent over 20 years at the Journal, first for a few years covering business and labor, and then covering Washington beats. I was the Chief Pentagon Correspondent . . . national security, foreign policy, economics. I was the Deputy Bureau Chief. None of this had anything to do with technology. But somewhere along the way, I picked up as my hobby computers. I knew nothing about engineering, but I just was fascinated by it. And I bought a little . . . I think it cost me . . . a $100 computer called the Timex Sinclair around 1981. And I began tinkering with it. Learned a little bit of basic programming, and I just did it at home on the weekends and at night as a hobby. And I began to . . . Then I bought a much more expensive computer in around, I wanna say 1983 or so, something like that. I bought an Apple IIe, and that cost me like thousands of dollars for the computer and the disk drives and all that kind of stuff. It didn’t have a hard disk, of course. Eventually I bought a hard disk for it which also was unbelievably expensive. And I think what fascinated me about it was the communications aspects of it, which were very crude in those days; but you could . . . I was very early on what used to be called bulletin boards. You know, like forums that you would . . . you see today on the Web. But they were all text, and they were just local. And then I got on CompuServe. And then I got on AOL. And almost as soon as the Internet became publically available I was on that. So it was my hobby, and that’s how I got into it. And you know eventually I came up with the idea to stop writing about serious, global, national security kind of things which I was doing, and to start a new and different kind of technology column.

Question: When did you start writing a technology column?

Transcript: So in 1990, I was . . . By then my designation at the Journal was National Security Correspondent. And at that time at the paper, what that meant was that you were the person in charge of covering really the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet relations, NATO and that sort of stuff. I had a very good colleague whose title was Diplomatic Correspondent, but he covered more Latin America, Central America, Asia, not . . . Obviously we had bureaus on the ground in those places. He covered U.S. policy toward those areas of the world; but I covered U.S.-Soviet, which was the big deal. Remember this was in the first Bush administration, the first President Bush. And this was the concluding few years of the Cold War – the end of a 50 year struggle against communism; and the collapse of communism; the liberation of Eastern Europe; the reunification of Germany. And I got to cover all those things, and it was amazing. Obviously we had reporters on the ground in Berlin and Moscow, and places who wrote a tremendous amount. But I got to cover kind of the U.S. diplomatic and military end of these things. I also was involved in covering the Gulf War in 1991 for the Journal on our team – not in the region, but in Washington in terms of the policy, and the strategy, and the diplomacy, and lining up the coalition and all that stuff. So I was doing all that, and I was motivated to change what I was doing. And the reason was partly personal and partly journalistic. Personal reason was I was traveling all the time, all over the world on the airplane of the Secretary of State, who was at the time James Baker. And it was phenomenally exciting and a great professional opportunity, but I wasn’t seeing my kids enough. I have two sons who were, at the time, I wanna say 12 and 9 or something like that. And the trips were not within your control. If the Secretary of State decided . . . or the President decided to send him to go meet with Gorbachev and some . . . the King of Saudi Arabia and five other people, they would call and say, “We’re leaving. Are you gonna cover this?” And if you didn’t cover it, the newspaper would lose its seat on the airplane. They only had a very limited number of press seats, and the big news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, got a claim to one of those seats; but you would lost it if you didn’t go. So that meant you couldn’t plan things like being there for the school play, or whatever it is that your kids needed you for. The other problem was once you left, you didn’t exactly know when you were coming back. They would say, “Oh we’re leaving on Tuesday. We’ll be back on Saturday.” But in fact on Friday, the President might call and say, “I need you to do three more cities,” and so the trip would go on until Monday. And again professionally, it was very wonderful and exciting. And I still had the occasional reunion with the people I traveled with. But it was not good for you as a father. So that was one reason I began to think about changing jobs.

And the other was I knew a great deal about computers, personal computers. And I knew that it was way too hard to use them and way too hard to learn about them. And I knew that it was about to explode and democratize, and that many millions of people were gonna get these things or have to use them at work who weren’t up to that point. Obviously there were a lot of people using them; but in 1990 it was just about to like, I don’t know, grow 10-fold or 20-fold or whatever, and that there would be a lot of other digital devices. We were beginning to see some digital . . . some very crude digital cameras, some very crude cell phones, and I thought, you know, there’s a lot of columns . . . A lot of newspapers have columns written about this, but they’re written by geeks for geeks for the most part. And there were . . . And they are reverential about the industry. And so in 1990 I went to the managing editor of the Journal. His name was Norm Pearlstine who later went on to be the Editor-in-Chief of Time, Inc. and to do some other things. And I said, “I have an idea for us to do a computer technology column, but I wanna flip the formula on its head that the other newspapers are using. I wanna write it as a champion of the non-geeks. I wanna write it for the smart, busy person who has absolutely no interest in how these things work, never ever wants to be a techie, but just wants to get results.” And by results that could be anything from, you know, building a spreadsheet to playing a video game. It didn’t matter to me. Or music or whatever it was, but they wanted the thing to work the way it was supposed to work with a very minimum of training and hassle and all of that. And the other thing I wanted to do was be tough on the industry. Instead of being reverential toward Intel, or Microsoft, or Apple or whoever it was, I wanted to be critical when I felt they weren’t meeting the needs of this very, very large group of readers who were not techies. And Pearlstine loved the idea, but said, “I can’t spare you from covering national security in the middle of, you know . . . The whole world is changing, so you gotta give me at least another year on that and then we’ll do this other thing.” So we went through all the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We went through the Gulf War in ’91 . . . in the fall of ’91. About 60 days before the Soviet Union collapsed, they let me switch over to writing this column. And the column was not only for us, different in that it was a regular, weekly technology column; but it was different because they had resisted having opinions – subjective opinion – in the news pages of the Journal, even clearly identified. And I personally am very much against mixing the editorial pages of newspapers with the news pages; or the editorial views of television networks with the news reporting. But it’s an old tradition to demarcate that this is a column. This is your sports article on the game. This is your sports columnist. And the readers understand that the columnist is an opinion guy, even though he’s not on the editorial page. Or your movie reviewer is an opinion person. You may have an article . . . a feature article, a news article about the making of some movie, and that’s expected to be objective. The guy that reviews the movie is expected to be subjective. So I was essentially proposing to become a movie reviewer of technology things, and the Journal had never had anything quite like this in its news pages. And there was some resistance starting the column. There was some resistance based on, “Why should we give all this attention to technology?” And there was some resistance based on the idea that this was gonna be a high profile, opinionated feature. But it became popular very quickly, and everybody was happy with it after a short while.

Question: What are the most interesting trends in technology today?

Transcript: Well I think there are always . . . I mean the lucky thing about having this is the thing you write about every week . . . several times a week is that it’s always changing. I think if I were to just pick two or three interesting trends right now, one I think is the cell phone, or the device formerly known as the cell phone, which really has less and less to do with making voice calls. The latest example is the iPhone from Apple, which is really a rather powerful little computer you can hold in your pocket. The Blackberry is also a computer. The Trio is also a computer. But the iPhone sort of takes it to a new level. The evolution of that is gonna be fascinating to watch. I believe the personal computer as we have known it has already peaked. I don’t mean that it’s going away. It’s still gonna be the dominant device; but I think it has peaked because I think there are gonna be a lot of other devices, and a lot of other methods for doing the digital things we have thought you needed a computer to do – a personal computer. So that whole cell phone thing is one.

Question: What trends are on the horizon?

Transcript: Closely related is the whole question of wireless networks. Basically they have been the province of huge, monopolistic, utility-minded companies who I like to compare to Soviet ministries who I think have tried to control far too much of the chain. The hardware, the software, everything you wanna do on a device on somebody’s cellular network has, at least in the United States, and at least up to this point, been heavily controllable by Verizon, and AT&T, and Sprint, and T-Mobile. And I think that’s about to blow up. I don’t mean that it’s gonna blow up . . . you’re gonna wake up one day and the whole system is gonna be blown up. I mean I think we are just on the verge of seeing power flow away from those companies and flow to either tech companies like Google, or Apple, or companies like that; or consumers, or some combination of both. I think Wi-Fi and WiMax and some of these other technologies have the possibility of blowing that open, and I think you’re gonna see more freedom in the creation of software and services on those devices. So that’s another big thing.

Question: Can old media survive the digital revolution?

Transcript: Well I actually think the digitalization of the world, or the digital tidal wave that’s sweeping through the world is touching every kind of industry and walk of life. I don’t care if you’re a pre-school teacher, a parish priest, the CEO of General Motors, or a newspaper publisher or editor. It’s touching your life. The media companies, whether they’re . . . it’s entertainment or information have been especially hard hit because . . . by the change because the Internet is a great platform for media. Really if you think about it, despite all the hype about video on the Internet and the fact that these videos will be on the Internet, it is still today as we speak in September of 2007 overwhelmingly a text medium – overwhelmingly a text medium. And so it’s a direct competitor for newspapers and magazines. And newspapers and magazines have not been the best managed companies, no matter how good their journalism is. And they have not necessarily been the most entrepreneurial and flexible companies, but they have been hard hit. I don’t believe journalism as we know it is going away at all. In fact I think all the evidence is it’s booming and expanding. But journalism as done only by a small group of professional journalists; and only on dead trees; or only on, you know, official television networks . . . that kind of journalism is being radically, radically transformed and challenged by journalism carried on the Internet. But it’s still journalism.

Recorded on: 9/13/07