In the very first episode of Pressing Matters, a series of conversations with the top media + influencers in B2B technology, brought to you by Big Valley Marketing, Dave Reddy interviews CNBC's Jon Fortt, one of the hardest working men in tech journalism.
Interested in more Big Valley? Check us out at www.BigValley.co
Have an idea for Pressing Matters? Email pressingmatters@bigvalley.co
Looking for Jon?
In the very first episode of Pressing Matters, a series of conversations with the top media + influencers in B2B technology, brought to you by Big Valley Marketing, Dave Reddy interviews CNBC's Jon Fortt, one of the hardest working men in tech journalism.
Interested in more Big Valley? Check us out at www.BigValley.co
Have an idea for Pressing Matters? Email pressingmatters@bigvalley.co
Looking for Jon?
Jon Fortt might be the most famous person in tech media, not to mention one of the most famous people in media, period. He's also incredibly busy. Jon cohosts several shows on CNBC, including TechCheck. He's got a wildly successful podcast, Fortt Knox on which he interviews tech's brightest stars, and he has written an online course on the Black experience in America. And yet Jon made time to be our first-ever guest here on Pressing Matters. And I could not think of a better person for the job since this is our first show. Let me tell you a bit about it. Pressing Matters, from Big Valley Marketing, is the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley's Media and Influencers Practice. We've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers today. I'm delighted to bring you a conversation with one of those 200. The aforementioned Mr. Fortt. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed talking with Jon. Thanks for joining us today on the inaugural edition of Pressing Matters. I can't thank you enough for being our first guest. As I said in my intro, you are the busiest man in tech media; you lead CNBC's tech coverage. You seem to be on-air all day. You host your own podcast, the eponymous Fortt Knox, which is a fabulous name, by the way. You're a singer-songwriter, which I found out a few weeks ago on Facebook,<laugh> and you're active in a bunch of other areas we'll get into. What don't you do, man? That might be an easier question to ask than what you do.
Jon:Well, technically, I don't podcast anymore. Check the Fortt Knox podcast feed. It says no longer putting out audio. It's a live-stream going out on Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. So I've gone to the visual medium. Still have love for the podcast, but I've just taken it in a slightly different direction. So, technically not doing that, but doing a lot of other things, including live events.
Dave:I remember many times you hosting the PRSA Media Matters and being part of it back in the day when you lived here, as opposed to New York, we'll get into that in a minute too. I'm curious how those two are different. You and I do have a few things in common. We both worked at the Mercury News. I missed you by about a year before I decided to go to the dark side here. You grew up in Washington, DC. I went to American, which of course for those who don't know is in Washington DC, although a very different part of Washington DC than other parts of the city. What was it like growing up in Washington? What neighborhood did you grow up in?
Jon:We lived in Shepherd Park. So, 16th Street right across the street from Rock Creek Park. So I could walk to Shepherd Elementary School. We moved there in 1985. I attended fourth grade there and went from fourth through high school in the area. And it was great. It was great. We had moved from Bedsty, from New York. Yeah, DC in the eighties was a lot different from DC now. But it was a great learning experience in a city and in an area that had a whole lot of different populations of people, uh, socioeconomically having a whole lot of different experiences.
Dave:I cut my teeth covering high school sports for The Post for about a year and a half. Each experience was different and, candidly, a little sad because you never knew what you were gonna get. And it just seemed like a certain lack of equity. How did that experience shape you, if at all, as you headed into journalism?
Jon:Well, I had gone to journalism
Dave:Maybe I'm skipping ahead into college.
Jon:I mean, there really is a journalistic route here because I went to Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is just over the border from Northwest DC. I went there because I had had enough of the DC public schools. My mom was an art teacher in Montgomery County schools in Maryland. So, I could go to the high school with half tuition, like I had to pay half of the cost to be there. But Blair was in this interesting position where it was what was called"down county," you know, south end of Montgomery County. So a lot of black and brown students native to that part of the county. And about a decade before I started attending, there had been, frankly, white flight into the county. So the school was in sort of a rough position, particularly test score wise and socioeconomically. And so they had this idea–and it wasn't a unique idea, totally sweeping education–let's have a magnet school. So they ended up putting two magnets at Blair, one math and science, and one communication arts. The idea being, we'll put these really special academic programs in this high school. So that kids who happen to mostly be white and Asian from up county will be voluntarily drawn down into this high school rather than forced busing. So Blair had these two programs, the community arts program. It worked to a degree, sure. To a degree, once you get beneath the raw overall test scores, and back at the time, we didn't have such good access to data as we do now. So there wasn't really this access. I mean, the overall test scores out of Blair looked strong because some very, very strong students were drawn into those programs. I think the question is how well was that down county, local population served by those resources and that's where it gets sticky. But to give too long an answer to your question, Blair was in position in the early-mid-nineties where it was the biggest student population in the smallest piece of land in Montgomery County. And it needed a bigger building to fit the students. And it was going to mean getting rid of athletic fields and it was going to mean, if they were going to renovate the school on this existing property, they were going to have to take out part of the student population in order to do it, because it was the biggest student body with more than 2,400 students at the time. And I happened to be elected student government president heading into my senior year at a time when the county council had just voted to renovate the school on its existing property, which was going mean taking out that student population. And it was gonna mean eliminating athletic fields. And we decided at the time that this was wrong because it was the most diverse school, largest school and the smallest piece of land. And there was a family that was willing to sell the county this really big piece of land, but only if they'd use it for a high school. The county didn't want to buy it. They wanted to renovate. And so I wrote for the paper opinion pieces and the student government officers who worked with me protested, led a walk out, participated in civic action and got the county council to reverse their vote and buy the piece of land and build a new school, which is where Blair is today. And so part of that was speaking and activism and a big part of that was writing pieces in the high school paper. So that was the start with journalism–not really newsy, more opinionated–but there it is.
Dave:That's fascinating though. I wasn't sure where that story was going. I didn't know if Blair was still gonna be there, but I'm glad to hear it is. So that sparked the journalism bug, if you will, for you. Did you study journalism at Depauw? I know a lot of journalists don't study journalism,
Jon:I did not study journalism, formally. We didn't have a journalism major, but there were news writing classes. I got a great journalism education as an English writing major. There's an independent student newspaper at Depauw. It was just a thrilling time to be there. We had Ken Bode, who just passed away, who was leading the media program there, while also hosting Washington Weekend review, apearing on NBC, bringing in great speakers, like Colin Powell to campus. And it was just a really active student media. Jason Anders, who's at the Wall Street Journal and Aaron Luchetti, who's at the Wall Street Journal were both editors the Fall before I was the editor. So, you know, the three of us are still in journalism. Just for example, out of that time.
Dave:We were a weekly, the American Eagle, but there are some famous people. David Aldridge comes to mind, who graduated from American and wrote for the paper. I was a sports guy. That's why I come up with David Aldridge.
Jon:Nice.
Dave:So I'm guessing here that tech wasn't the initial idea, because you start out in Lexington covering local and business for that paper. And then you end up at the Mercury News. So was tech because you came to the Mercury News or did you come to the Mercury News because of tech?
Jon:I think in a way tech was because I graduated from high school and started college in 1994, the year that the browser was born. And so, because this was an independent student newspaper, if the paper was gonna get online, the students were gonna have to put the paper online. And so we were teaching ourselves to do things that we thought needed to be done. And tech was becoming a more and more important part of that. We got, you know, the first Apple digital camera that the paper had had during that period. And we went from dark room to being able to use Photoshop, to get certain things in the paper more quickly. Of course, that thing only shot black and white photos. So it wasn't the greatest for everything, but hey, we only printed in black and white for most of the issues of the year. So that was fine. Uh<laugh> um, so, so it was clearly a part of the craft of journalism as it was emerging and because we were so hands-on as a publication doing it ourselves, that was part of the challenge of getting the paper out twice a week, was figuring out how to do it better, more quickly and prepare ourselves for the professional world. And tech was a part of that. Now, when I started in Lexington, I wasn't covering tech, but one of my first jobs at the paper was working for the.com side. That was a bit of a rocky period for me, career wise, but it was something that I knew was going to be an important part of my journey.
Dave:There and then off to the Mercury News. And, by the way, I'm from the last pre-digital generation. I graduated college in'92. We were still cutting photos with Exacto knives. So, you know...
Jon:We did that too.
Dave:We knew of this thing called the internet, but it was like that old Today Show clip. It's like the"interwebs," what is this thing? That was probably as far as we had gone. So then you end up at the Mercury News and you're there for several years. I would presume that's where your career takes off because you're covering tech a lot at the right time in the right place.
Jon:I mean, had my career taken off? I don't know. I mean,<laugh>, maybe that's where it happened. That's certainly where I got a viable, full-time tech beat for the first time. You know, the first companies I was assigned to cover were Apple and Adobe, and it was a really great time to be covering Apple and Adobe. So I got to know those companies, those leaders, those strategies pretty well.
Dave:It was a very different Apple.
Jon:It was a very different Adobe too.
Dave:That's more powerful<laugh> yes.
Jon:Lots of things were different. I got to cover Palm and the rise of the mobile revolution and really focus in on the effect of technology on culture and the consumer. So yeah, I was there at the Mercury News from the very end of 1999. I remember spending Y2K New Year's Eve at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, seeing if the world was going to break and it did not. And then I left the Mercury News in mid 2006.
Dave:<laugh> I was at HP on January 1st. We had this whole thing going, you know, from a PR perspective, you know, just in case. And, as we all know, nothing happened, but it was a fascinating year-and-a-half getting ready for nothing to happen. So from the Mercury News it's onto Business 2.0 and Fortune. Of course, both at the time owned by Time. That's when I met you. You probably don't remember when I met you, but I remember when I met you. So what was that experience like? This is in daily journalism. This is features and so forth.
Jon:Well, I had been sort of flailing at the Mercury News for a while.<laugh> I think it was 2004 or so. I decided that the personal tech writing was great, but they would have me doing that for the rest of my career. And I didn't want to do just that for the rest of my career. So I thought the way to go was to move into editing and they didn't have any editing jobs open. So they said you can cross-train, which meant edit, but not officially for a while in the the Peninsula Bureau, in Palo Alto. So I did that. And then when I was done with that, they still had no editing jobs, but you can be an education reporter for a year, or you can go back to doing what you were doing before. And I thought, well, I can't go back to what I was doing before. What was all this for? So, okay, I'll be an education reporter. So I did that. And after that, still no editing jobs. So you created this position called senior web editor where I was really producing podcasts and digital graphics Trump blazer. Well, you know, this was back when podcasts were things that you listened to on an iPod and you had to connect it to a computer in order to download the MP3 off the internet. It was very, yeah, it was different. But yeah, I was doing that then. And eventually, an editing job opened up on the business desk, editing real estate and personal finance, not tech. So I went back for that and then got a call from Business 2.0 saying that they were looking for a senior writer. Now, after all this time, I did not wanna go back to writing cuz I had just gone through all these hoops to get away from writing. But I'd learned by this time that when somebody wants to hire you for something in journalism, always have the conversation. Especially after going through both the.com bust and, you know, we were about to go through the financial crisis. So I talked to them, had a great interview, but said, yeah, I'm not really interested in going back to writing. And they said, oh, well we just had a senior editor quit last week. Are you interested in that? And I said, yes. And that's how I got into Time, Inc.
Dave:Okay, great.
Jon:And a year later they shut Business 2.0 down. Fortune magazine said, if you'd like to stay employed, you can be a senior writer. And I said, great.
Dave:Fortune. Yeah.
Jon:So, yep. I mean all that time, trying to get away from writing and here I was writing, but for Fortune. That's the only way at the time I ever would've been hired as a senior writer at Fortune.
Dave:Interesting. Yeah. Now, was TV always the goal or did someone come to you and say, Hey Jon, you'd be great on TV cuz you'd done events and you'd been doing things like that and you were naturally good on stage. So I'm curious.
Jon:TV was not the goal. I was a really, I was a print snob. I thought those TV folks
Dave:Good for you. Me too.<laugh>
Jon:They just, they just read what we wrote already. Like that's shallow, you know, watered down, whatever. That was my attitude at first, but I would appear on CNBC now and then, you know, mostly when Apple would have an event or there'd be some news. They'd ask me if I would come on and I would. And so they enjoyed that. I enjoyed that. And then once again they asked me–hey, we're thinking about opening up another reporter position in Silicon Valley. Would you be interested? And by then, having been through the financial crisis, once again, if somebody wants to talk to you about a job, have the conversation. So I had the conversation and wasn't convinced that they were serious. Didn't hear from them for a while, but became convinced that video was an important next stage in my career, partly because I realized that people who could do video–there were lots of people who could write about technology and fewer people who could talk about it on camera, and the people who talked about things on camera–there were fewer of them–and they tended to get paid a little better. And so I thought maybe I should try to do that. Especially given what was happening in journalism and communication. You could no longer get siloed into one thing. Just because you're doing video doesn't mean you can't write doesn't mean you can't do audio–you can do both and you can do more things. So let's try that.
Dave:Especially these days, where the biggest influencers really do a variety of things, including social of course.
Jon:Yeah. It's true now, but back, you know, 12 years ago when I made the switch, wasn't quite true yet.
Dave:Sure. Got it. Yeah. I'm thinking of you, Maribel Lopez, folks like that do a variety of things. But to your point, that is, that has, is a growing– where you've got, you know, uh, polymaths for lack of a better word in the media world. One thing that I've always appreciated, Jon, is that it would be really easy for you to spend your day covering Apple and Twitter and Facebook. And, I know you do and you have a responsibility to do that, but you give time to the less sexy B2B tech side. Why?
Jon:Well, partly, I'm just curious. And then, partly, it goes to that issue of insight and scarcity and where those two things meet. Everybody thinks they can talk about Apple. Everybody thinks they can talk about Microsoft and Google. If you've ever used Microsoft Word or done a Google search, you think you can talk about those things, right? If you've ever touched an iPhone, but I mean–B2B software scares people.
Dave:It scares me!
Jon:<laugh> Because there, we don't have a bunch of people coming on thinking that they can opine about CRM or AI and machine learning or, you know, so let's learn about that stuff. Where there are–both multi-billion-dollar public companies and tons of smaller startups with innovative ideas across verticals that want some attention and are gonna be worth a lot of money someday. But no mainstream news organization is gonna pay attention to them until it's like too late. Right. Why don't I get to know them now and get smarter about what the future holds?
Dave:So I wanna move a little back to journalism. You've been a reporter, God bless you, for a quarter century now almost. Not to age you!
Jon:No, it's not you aging me–the time is doing that.
Dave:Right, right. Yeah. I hear you. But how's it changed and, to feed the question a little bit–to lead the question a little bit, I should say–I'm kind of worried about it. I still love journalism. I had a journalism degree, even though I've been out of it for 22 years, 23 years. Are you worried about it, or are you optimistic?
Jon:Can it be both? Can I be worried about it and optimistic?
Dave:Yeah, I think I'm worried and pessimistic, but yeah, it certainly can be both.
Jon:Well, yes, I'm worried about it because the phenomenon that we first saw–that I first saw–with Apple 20 years ago, is playing out for so much news, broadly. And by that I mean–people realize that if they put Apple or Steve Jobs in a headline, people would click on it. And, as the internet rose–first as a gauge of the audience's interest and then as a driver of revenue–things that got clicked on, the industry produced more of. If people weren't clicking on them, then even if there's no news, just figure out some way to connect this other news to this thing. So, we can put Apple or Steve Jobs in the headline, and then people will click on it. There are some in the industry who just have grown up with this as a reality–where it's like, oh, well, you know, I'm hired to produce a certain number of page views. So I'm gonna write about the stuff that produces a certain number of page views. It's not like they're being asked to do something that feels like this ethical departure from the way things used to be. This is the way things used to be for a very large portion, you know, of the working journalism core at this point. It used to be that there were just a few companies, people, subjects that had this kind of click bait effect. And now I think we're seeing the impact of a click bait mindset, not just in business journalism, but across information and misinformation, globally. It doesn't matter so much if it's true or if it's considered or if it's reasonable or if it's soundly argued–if it's seen–it doesn't even necessarily have to be clicked on. Now we have TikTok, where you don't necessarily make choices. Things just appear, right. If it's seen, then it's remembered. And if it's remembered, then at some point, it becomes kind of true–at least to the person. And so that I am worried about because the old way with gatekeepers and whatnot was certainly imperfect and there were very bad deliberate decisions that were made by gatekeepers about what was news and what wasn't news. Right now, I think we've gone algorithmic to a fault, and it's gonna take a new set of truth tellers and principled communicators to turn that around. We're just figuring out the model, but the reason why I'm optimistic is because there are more and better tools than ever to tell true, meaningful, impactful stories. And there's not enough focus put on the tools. The better we get at using these tools, the more productive we get, and, I think, the better hope we have of finding a model that works to distribute good and useful information.
Dave:Yeah, it seems like if it outrages it sells. To that end, you gave the commencement speech at Depauw. Congratulations on that.
Jon:Thank you.
Dave:Um, although they didn't give you a doctorate, I, I, you need to go back and get one that's the, you know,
Jon:Well, they're wise. I didn't earn a doctorate.<laugh>
Dave:I read your speech and one of the things that you just touched on, that really hit home, was this notion of respecting both sides of an argument, when you do your"On the Other Hand segments" on CNBC. Tell me about that. And why don't we, as a society, seem to respect both sides of an argument. Has it always been that way or has it just started?
Jon:I don't know if it's always been that way, but I do think it's become easier for us to sort of marinate ourselves in, uh, different flavors of our existing opinion, right? It used to be, I think, hard to find just an ocean full of people and opinions that essentially agreed with your existing biases, right? If you were gonna talk to somebody about something, chances are after you talk to the second or third person, somebody would have a different opinion. But now, because of what digital information has brought us, we can go 10-to-12 opinions deep that are just variations on the same misguided point of view we had already, you know? There isn't really evidence. It's just more detail, right? People can go deep down a ridiculous and completely-fact free rabbit hole. I think that part of what's new is we're not forced to consider other points of view because we're not forced to actually talk to real people. We can engage with digital echo chambers of our own opinions and maybe that changes over time. I'm hopeful that it does, because I think that good art–the best art–tends to challenge us and sometimes offend us. And usually part of the reason we're offended by things is that we disagree with them at some level. So I'm not a big fan of the term cancel culture because people who talk about and complain about cancel culture–I actually hear them complain about it–which to me is evidence that they haven't been canceled.
Dave:It's a very good point. If you've been canceled, no one's sent to you by definition.
Jon:Nobody can hear you scream if you've actually been canceled, right? I'm hearing people complain about it. I'm like, yeah, must not have worked.
Dave:Right. Let's talk a little bit about a very important and complicated subject: diversity in America–diversity and technology. You wrote online that you've been doing much more coverage with regards to race and opportunity in America at CNBC. And a couple years ago, after the murder of George Floyd, you wrote a course for your kids–for all of us, as you said, about the black experience in America. I will not speak for every middle aged white guy in America, but I remember when Barack Obama was elected in November of 2008, and I felt both astonished–because I didn't think I'd live long enough to see anything but a white male president–and relief because I thought, oh, we finally did it. We've crossed the bar. Now, I don't say that from a political point-of-view, because I'm not gonna say who I voted for, but I liked McCain too. I thought he was a good man, but I still thought this was a huge marker. It's not that simple. Apparently.
Jon:Not that simple. Yeah. I addressed this in the curriculum and I<laugh>, I did write it for my kids because I didn't know if it was gonna really work. Right. So it's like we'll test it on the kids. And then, when it worked, I thought, oh, well maybe more people might enjoy this. So I'll make it more broadly available. Yeah. I mean, that was a big moment–President Obama being elected. I fit it into the context of what I, in the structure of the course, call false restarts. And what I've seen in our history as a country is this pattern where, when it comes to race and social issues, we have these moments where there are three steps forward. There's great hope that there's been this dramatic and enduring change, but then we take two steps back. Post-Civil War emancipation being one, but then a botched reconstruction takes us back two steps. You know, you can go to the Civil Rights Movement being one, and the laws that passed there and then, the backlash against busing, and some implementations of that, you know, you have communities separating and you end up needing to do magnet programs, as we talked about earlier. And then this was another one, you know, you can count the election of Barack Obama and some of the hopes that some had about what that signaled about how we as a country felt about our fabric and our direction. And then the backlash against that, which I would say was the feeling among some, okay, we've arrived. So stop complaining about race. It's fine. We got a black president. What more could you ask for? Let's move past this race thing. And then I think this is even more epitomized in the murder of George Floyd–the reaction to that, which I think was misguided along a lot of different vectors. I think there was angry civic unrest during the pandemic, which from a civil society perspective was not good, but there was pressure to say, well, really this is not okay, because look at how understandably upset people are. And so I think that was sort of glossed over. And then, when it got back to a certain point, the people who had glossed over it were like, okay, well enough. This was never okay to begin with. And so now, let's swing hard the other direction. Right? And so there was, again, these two steps back, even from that.
Dave:Yeah, we have a hard time having difficult conversations in this country, and there may not be a more difficult conversation than race. How do we change that? How do we create optimism regarding race and opportunity, whether it's in technology or in America?
Jon:Here's an area where I just have some observations, which is that we have big swaths of the country where people live in relative isolation, right? We have urban areas where people don't really experience what it's like to live in, certainly rural areas and barely what a suburban culture or lifestyle is like. And then we have vast rural areas where people are in a largely monolithic culture and are, you know, presented with ideas about dangers and dangerous ideas that people who look a certain way and live in cities have, and they really have no lived experience to counter that. So it's difficult to break past the information that people have been fed when they're not having a lived experience that contrasts with it. I think a big part of the answer here is going to be figuring out how to meaningfully connect people to each other. And maybe that means the involvement of technology, but I still find that the most meaningful, highest fidelity experiences are non-digital.
Dave:I'm gonna put you on the spot just once and lighten up the conversation. San Francisco or New York?
Jon:San Francisco or New York... New York. Why? I worry about San Francisco right now. When I go back over the past, I don't know what to call it, five-ish years. It's so different from the San Francisco I encountered 20-ish years ago, where–yes, there was income inequality as you have in a place where there are innovative ideas and some of those innovators and the people who have helped them with that journey are getting rich very quickly–but I think San Francisco and the Bay Area need leaders to make more practical and three-dimensional decisions. Walking down Market Street over the past several years has just not been a comfortable or really tenable plan. It's like the Tenderloin experience is scaling out into the city, which is first and foremost, a call for a city to help in meaningful ways, because absolutely there's human pain and real civic challenges there. But my sense is just that the way to solve and address those is, well, San Francisco hasn't figured it out. That's not to say New York is some utopia. There are real challenges in New York–troubling, continued anti-Asian violence and friction between communities and the need to really solve those kinds of issues. There's also infrastructure in New York, both literal and metaphorical infrastructure like public transportation, which really affects affordability. People can live farther out and commute in and get work done. And hopefully that helps economic mobility and also cultural infrastructure. I think that allows the region to be a bit more resilient. And I would love to see that for the Bay Area, because it's got such rich culture and such rich communities, and there's too much forcing out and pricing out happening. And the streets, particularly of San Francisco, just aren't what they used to be.
Dave:Interesting. We started with, arguably, the most complicated city of the'80s, Washington, DC, and we finished with what is undoubtedly the most complicated American city of the present day, San Francisco. So the more things change, right? Jon, I cannot thank you enough for being our first guest. That was a fantastic conversation. Your course is available at Fortt with two Ts media.com. Correct?
Jon:That is correct.
Dave:And, of course, you are constantly on CNBC as well as Fortt Knox, which is Forttknox.com F O R T T K N O X.
Jon:That's right. You can find it there. It's probably the best way to keep on top of everything. I don't think anybody wants to watch everything that I produce. If I weren't producing it, I wouldn't have time to watch it all. Right?
Dave:I hear you.
Jon:Follow me on LinkedIn and you'll get the highlights there.
Dave:Fantastic, Jon. Thanks once again. This was a lot of fun. I really, really appreciate your time,.
Jon:Dave, thank you. It was a pleasure.
Dave:I'd like to thank you all for listening today. And, once again, a big thank you to Jon Fortt of CNBC for helping us kick off the Pressing Matters podcast. Join us next month when we chat with yet another member of the Top 200 media and influencers in B2B tech. Now, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley Marketing and how we identified the B2B tech top 200, be sure to drop me an email at D Reddy at Big Valley dot c o. That's D R E D D Y at Big Valley, all one word, dot c o- no m. Thanks again. As always think big.