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By Charlotte Klein
The OpenAI saga was, in many ways, the best story for The News. Journalists at the influential tech site spent the week of Thanksgiving obsessively chronicling the chaos at the company behind ChatGPT, after its board of directors ousted its CEO, Sam Altman. Five days later, Altman, the generative AI model, was reinstated. At that time, The Information published 17 exclusive articles about the corporation that were picked up on numerous occasions through other media outlets. “His firing was announced, and then everyone on my team was sending me all those tweets, where other people were like, ‘Oh, if The Information gets the scoop, I’ll subscribe’ or ‘I really hope my subscription to Information will be over. It’s worth it,” recalls editor-in-chief Jessica Lessin. “And I really felt like the game had begun. ” Lessin, who has followed Altman since the beginning and wrote the first detailed profile about him in 2005, supported his team throughout the week, among other things, “checking in the bathroom while attending to my friends” and at the otolaryngologist with his 4 friends.
The small but mighty Silicon Valley publication, which turns 10 this week, has spent the past decade delivering advertising scoops and research to a target audience willing to shell out $399 a year for full access. In 2013, when Lessin left the Wall Street Journal to start his company, it was accepted that “mainstream media was the place where serious journalism was. And then there were some newcomers who tried to do new things, but tried to feed them with venture capital and advertising dollars,” he says. , adding, “These corporations have evaporated. ” But The Information, driven by subscriptions, survived and likely paved the way for a new cohort of media outlets offering policies for specialized industries at a premium price, from Puck to Punchbowl News. Nowadays, more and more media outlets, such as Axios and Politico, also offer B2B subscription products as well as their free content.
“There were a number of new media companies at the time, and they weren’t very traditional – they paid for subscriptions and weren’t very interested in social media,” says Ben Smith, a former media editor. head of BuzzFeed News, which recently published the year he founded Semafor, one of the start-ups in which he has invested Lessin. “It pains me a little to say it, but it’s clear that she was totally vindicated and most of her competitors are no longer here. ” That previous competition comes with BuzzFeed News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning online news site, which closed in April. There was also Recode, a logo that Vox withdrew in March; Quartz, which still exists but has replaced the hands several times over the years, at most recently at G/O Media; and Vice, which the Times, although reporting that the company had filed for bankruptcy in May, called a “ramshackle virtual colossus. ” Lessin was ahead of her time with the business style she followed and the story she sought to make her own. “She was from the Wall Street Journal, and there was a sense that The Information was applying the kind of rigor of East Coast monetary reporting to an ecosystem that West Coast publications didn’t seem to perceive well,” Forgeron says. Longtime subscriber Roelof Botha, director of Sequoia Capital and former CFO of PayPal, agrees, noting that when Lessin started The Information, “the conventional wisdom at the time was: Oh, you’re not going to build a successful business. ” simply through a subscription. ” this level of value. Who knows if the market is big enough to accommodate other people who are deeply passionate about the tech news they would cover? »And he adds: “She was on the right side of Hitale. »
“There’s rarely a CEO of a major company who hasn’t paid attention to OpenAI in the last week,” Lessin tells me. “I think a basic bet we made 10 years ago: You can’t get ahead of the curve or even keep up with the speed of business without digging into what’s going on in those corporations and those technologies. “
Today, per Lessin, The Information has 475,000 active readers (i.e., paid subscribers and unpaid newsletter subscribers). According to Lessin, they expect to be profitable this year. The company will grow its overall revenue by 30% year over year in 2023. They’ve been disciplined when it comes to growth, with only 65 full-time employees working across offices in San Francisco, New York, and Hong Kong, as well as remotely. Lessin is focused on growing The Information’s presence in Asia; they currently have three people assigned to the Hong Kong bureau and two hires in the works. Lessin, meanwhile, traveled with US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo to China in August—a trip she later recapped during a special event for subscribers.
He has also focused on The Information’s upcoming monetary policy, specifically after its policy on this year’s Silicon Valley Bank crisis. It was “a real eye-opener for me,” Lessin says, whether in terms of how they served their audiences—”a lot of subscribers said we stored a lot of money for them,” he notes—and maybe just competing in the marketplace. As a whole. ” Traditional media outlets like the Times, the Journal and Bloomberg, Lessin says, “are going to exist forever,” but “they’re not as relevant” in “my world, and I think in the business world. “”Because of the size of the audience they intend to serve. “This style limits how indispensable you can be, especially to a certain category of readers,” says Lessin.
I read him all the time and have been a subscriber for years,” the Amazon founder explained to me in an email. Jessica did a glorious job. Always perceptive about technology. Another long-time subscriber is Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. “Check it in every day,” he tells me, noting that he’s “thrilled from a business style standpoint that it’s been successful. “After all, he’s “a subscriber guy”; However, “as a reader, what matters to me is consideration. It selects ordinary journalists and the articles, from my point of view, are written in depth, unlike clickbaity. “That’s probably the key, because then they won’t get paid for clicks,” Hastings says. “People care enough about the stories to keep renewing themselves. “
Lessin retains full ownership of the company and claims that he has no goal of promoting it. ” I’ve been in this for a long time,” she says, a vision she says has been key to the site’s success. “You want the right business style and some alignment that we’re not going to chase the latest innovations in profits,” he says. “Over the past 10 years, I’ve noticed that each and every existing post creates a Snapchat team, then a TikTok team. , then a video system. We didn’t create any of those groups and instead hired sleuths or paid them what they were worth. It’s another formula and requires a lot of patience.
It’s worth noting that Lessin used his own money (“less than a million dollars,” he said in the past) to publish The Information. Her father was the spouse of equity giant TPG, and her husband, tech entrepreneur Sam Lessin, made a lot of money on the Facebook stock he made when his Harvard friend Mark Zuckerberg bought his startup in 2010. And there’s a sense that Lessin has worked to distance herself, that she’s too close to the other people she covers. His non-public dates with Zuckerberg, for example, have come under scrutiny. They tell you how to have dinner with other people one night and then edit a complicated but true article about them the next,” Lessin said when I asked him about the dynamic. “That’s what you do over and over again. “
“Finding the fact and telling other people why it’s important is a fabulous activity. Actually, it’s really hard. That’s why, he suggests, others haven’t been able to perceive it in the same way. “a Thanksgiving in the closet answering calls from his sources,” he tells me.
This piece has been updated.
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