Rich Jaroslovsky, Senior Advisor at SmartNews Inc.

Rich Jaroslovsky’s career goal was to be the D.C. correspondent for a major newspaper.

He achieved that - at 22 - for a little outlet called The Wall Street Journal.

He covered Gerald Ford’s doomed re-election campaign in 1976. Five years later, mere hours after President Reagan was shot by would-be assassin John Hinckley, Rich was at the White House, standing a few feet from Secretary of State Al Haig when Haig infamously said, ‘I am in control here.’ Unfortunately for Secretary Haig’s legacy, the Constitution says otherwise.

But covering all that history is just the first part of Rich’s story.

In 1994, he combined his two loves - technology and journalism - and started WSJ.com, the Journal’s website. Through that role, his founding of the Online News Association in 1999, his work at Bloomberg and Smart News, and his role as a lecturer at numerous journalism schools over the years, Rich Jaroslovsky is quite possibly the most important person in the history of digital journalism.

Rich recently joined us to discuss his multi-faceted career, digital journalism’s next chapter (hint: AI), and his connections to everyone from tech journalism legend Walt Mossberg to Canada’s finest singer/songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot, for this episode of Pressing Matters, from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. 

I’m Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing’s Media + Influencers Practice and your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship-building, we’ve identified B2B Tech’s Top 200 media and influencers, including Rich Jaroslovsky. 

Here’s my chat with Rich. Enjoy.

Transcript

Dave Reddy (00:00)
Rich Jaroslawski's career goal was to be the DC correspondent for a major newspaper. He achieved that at 22 for a little outlet called the Wall Street Journal. He covered Gerald Ford's doomed reelection campaign in 1976. Five years later, mere hours after President Reagan was shot by would -be assassin John Hinckley, Rich was at the White House, standing just a few feet from Secretary of State Al Haig when Haig infamously said,

I am in control here. Unfortunately for Secretary Haig's legacy, the Constitution says otherwise. But covering all that history is just the first part of Rich's story. In 1994, he combined his two loves, technology and journalism, and started wsj .com, the journal's website. We take it for granted now, but Rich was there on day one. Through that role,

his founding of the online news association in 1999, his work at Bloomberg and Smart News, and his role as lecturer at numerous journalism schools over the years, Rich Jaroslawski is quite possibly the most important person in the history of digital journalism. Rich recently joined us to discuss his multifaceted career, digital journalism's next chapter, hint, AI, and his connections to everyone from tech journalism legend, Walt Mossberg,

to Canada's finest singer -songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot, for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech. I'm Dave Ready, head of Big Valley Marketing's media and influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old -fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Rich Jaroslawski. Here's my chat with Rich. Enjoy.

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Rich, thanks so much for joining us on Pressing Matters today. It's a true treat with the exception of Don Clark, or I should say with the addition of Don Clark. You are easily the most accomplished reporter and influencer we've had on the show, and I really thank you for giving us the time. My pleasure. So, Rich, let's go back to the very beginning. I know you live in Emerald Hills now, which is, for those listening, a suburb of San Francisco.

You grew up in Northern California as well. Was it in Emerald Hills or another town? No, I actually grew up in Santa Rosa, which is about an hour north of San Francisco, up in what's now considered to be the wine country. Famous for Charles Schultz. Yes. Among other things. Yeah. So what was that like? What did mom and dad do? What was Santa Rosa is a relatively quiet town. I would imagine it was it was certainly quiet back then. It was. It was a great place to grow up.

My folks, my father was a small businessman. He had the meat department of a local grocery store was his main business. So when I became an editor, I would always tell my reporters not to worry. I came by my skills, honestly, because my dad was a butcher and my mom was a secretary in the local high school. You know how to trim the fat. I love it. Yes, sir. And.

So secretary at a local high school in a butcher that doesn't lead directly to journalism was, but although I know you study political science, what did the storytelling bug come along somewhere at some point, or was that not until you got to college? You know, when I was about 12 years old, I came to the sad conclusion that I would never be a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, which is still one of the tragedies of my life. And so I needed something else to.

to grow up to do. And I signed up to work on my junior high school newspaper at the Herbert Slater Senator in Santa Rosa. And I remember being struck at some point. I was an eighth grader going, yeah, this is what I'm going to do. And from that point on, I never wanted to be anything else but a journalist.

Well, given the way the Giants have started their season, you might want to, you know, pull out the mitt and the baseball again. What were some of the things you covered at the Herbert Slater Senator? Gosh, it's hard to remember now. It's been a while. I actually am still in touch with my teacher from eighth grade, Patricia Eric. I'll ask her if she remembers.

Shout out to Mrs. Eric. That's maybe high, maybe middle school football games, things along those lines. Possibly. The spring dance. I would presume that the middle school gossip pages were something. When I got to high school, I still remember at the Montgomery High School saga, one of the big issues was whether or not the cafeteria could serve coffee to students. Interesting.

If it didn't serve coffee to students right now, we'd have no students. So that's certainly one thing that has changed in the last couple of generations. Now, you went to Stanford, not a total surprise since you were living in Santa Rosa, but obviously a very difficult school to get into. And you studied political science. I know we had last month's guest was also a political science major. So do you, was that in an effort to get into political journalism or were you still not entirely sure you wanted to be a reporter?

No, I was quite sure I wanted to be a reporter. I started work on the Stanford Daily my very first day on campus and never stopped. But the advice that I got, which I thought was always really good advice, the advice I got at the time was don't study journalism. If you want to be a journalist, do journalism and study something else. It'll make you a better rounded journalist. And I've always loved politics. I've always had a fascination.

So it seemed the most logical thing to do. So I, my degree is in political science, but if you ask me what I majored in at Stanford, the answer would be the Stanford Daily. Talk to me about that. I know you're still involved with the Daily. Our CEO, Tim Marklein, was, is also still involved in the Daily. He also went to Stanford. How did that experience influence your career? It's a great, obviously a great daily newspaper in and of itself.

Well, it was really the seminal, the seminal experience in my early career. When I started at Stanford was the fall of 71 and the 60s sort of lasted longer at Stanford than they did at other places. So particularly my freshman year, there were still some major anti -war protests. There was a lot of news to cover.

In addition, it was kind of a weird time in Northern California. You had the Patricia Hearst kidnapping. You had the Zodiac killings. There were all sorts of strange things going on in the area in the time. And it meant that there was a lot of news and a lot of different kinds of news to cover. And so I really found it to be absolutely essential training ground for my professional career.

I think many others would say the same. I mean, it really is. If it's not the best, it's one of the best Dailies, college Dailies in the country. Now, perhaps not surprisingly, since you were at the Stanford Daily and did that, you got a job right out of High School, pardon me, out of college at the Wall Street Journal. Not bad. You and I were exchanging emails a couple of days ago and you lamented the fact that the first part of your career is kind of a postscript, but...

If that is the case, sir, it is one heck of a postscript. Can you talk to us about what you did first when you joined the journal? Sure. I had I still maintain that I have one of the more eccentric resumes in American media. But I started at the journal. I was actually a summer intern in New York between my junior and senior years of college. And when I graduated the following year,

I was trying to decide between graduate school and the journal actually offered me a job straight out of college. And I was going back and forth until one of my friends said to me quite wisely, Rich, the reason to go to journalism school is in order to get a job offer from a place like the Wall Street Journal. If you already have an offer from the Wall Street Journal, take it. And I did.

I for years kept the letter that I received from the journals managing editor at the time, wonderful guy named Fred Taylor, which read, Dear Rich, I'm offering you a job at the journal. I don't know where. I don't know when we want you to start. And because the union contract is being negotiated, I don't know how much we'll pay you. Please let me know if these conditions are acceptable. And I wrote back and said, Yes, sir.

So the first job that I got full time was in the journal then had a bureau in Cleveland. And so for a kid from Northern California who had been born, raised, and educated within a 45 -mile radius of San Francisco Bay, Cleveland was kind of a shock to the system in the mid -1970s. But I was there for about 15 months. Probably the most notable story from that

time was that while I was in the Cleveland Bureau, a mining ship sank in the Great Lakes. And so I had to call the company, one of the companies that was involved in the accident, to find out whether they were insured and adequately insured for all the survivor lawsuits that were sure to follow.

And of course, the ship was the Edmund Fitzgerald. And a couple of years later, Gordon Lightfoot made it into an absolutely indelible and timeless folk song. So I actually can say that I covered the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The actual wreck, not the song. All right. I understand that he made a few things up. I presume you did not. I did not. And he had poetic license. What I've read is that he took...

facts very seriously and later amended the lyrics of the song when he found that there was one thing he had he had put in the song that turned out not to be correct. So the way he performed it in person over the years was actually a little bit different. And I always kind of admired that fidelity to the facts. That I got to tell you for an entertainer that is that I'd like to see journalists more journalists act like that these days. So God bless.

with a late Gordon Lightfoot. So you were in Cleveland for a while and eventually, I don't know how many stops, but you ended up in Washington and you were in fact at some point covering either the White House or the Reagan campaign or both. Yeah, I had when I was a young reporter, I had and even even that's in college, if you'd asked me what my life's ambition was, I had one burning ambition, which was that I wanted to be

a Washington correspondent by the time I was 30. And that I've never had another ambition like that. And I had been in Cleveland for about 15 months and no one at the Wall Street Journal knew or would have cared about my ambition, but I had that ambition. So after 15 months in Cleveland, though, I got out of the clear blue sky, a call from my boss.

that said, call the managing editor tomorrow. He's offering you a transfer to Washington. I was 22 years old at the time, and it was a total fluke. It had nothing to do with my ambition. But I can tell you that it was incredibly liberating to have achieved my life's ambition at 22, because I never had another ambition, and I never did anything subsequently in my career for purposes of climbing a ladder.

So I got to Washington when I was 22. They had needed somebody who would, you know, basically could get to DC. It was the middle of a presidential campaign, somebody who was willing to do anything. And so I became the general assignment reporter in the Journal's Washington Bureau. By the fall of 1976, I was covering the Gerald Ford campaign.

And after the election, I spent about three months in Plains, Georgia, which is where the newly elected president, Jimmy Carter, had based his transition effort. And I then covered several different beats in Washington for the journal, including health and education, energy during the 1979 Iranian oil embargo.

And then in 1981, became the Journal's White House correspondent. So I covered all of the first year, the first term of the Reagan administration, basically. And then became the national political editor at the Journal for the next nine years or so. Wrote a column that used to run on page one on Fridays called The Washington Wire.

and was deeply involved in the political coverage for several years. So you covered the record of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Were you already on the beat when Reagan was shot in March of 81? I was not, although it was a memorable day for me. The White House correspondent at the time was dispatched to the hotel, or pardon me, to the hospital where Reagan was being operated on. But I and my colleague, Steve Ormeal,

were dispatched to the White House itself to cover news that was coming out of the White House. So I spent that day, over that wild day, in the White House press room. I was standing about eight or 10 feet from Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, when he suddenly emerged and announced that he was in control in the White House, which...

was one of the more indelible moments of that day. So, but I got a, I had a front row seat at History for the next four years and really beyond that even when I was editing. So I had a great run in Washington. I was there for I think 18 years. For those listening who aren't old enough, I believe Alexander Haig lasted.

another few months because when he said, I'm in charge here, he was wrong. Constitutionally speaking, we won't get into that. And if I remember correctly, that cost him his job. Right. He was eventually. Yeah, he had it. It sort of symbolized everything that that went wrong with his with his tenure as secretary of state. It was not it was not a lengthy nor glorious one. So. You were doing political journalism. At what point did you?

Ironically, given that your place of upbringing became sort of the center of tech at what point did you shift to technology? Well, it wasn't it wasn't quite as clear cut as that. I was always interested in technology and as personal computers came in, I and my my partner on the energy beat at the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg, who.

later became the most famous technology journalist in America. Walt and I would constantly be comparing notes on our latest, you know, gadgets that we bought, our latest computers. And around this time I got married. This was in the early middle 80s. And my wife quite sensibly said to me, if you're going to be spending all this money on these toys,

you're going to have to come up with some way to pay for them, which was not an unreasonable position to take. So in order to pay for my computer habit, I began freelancing technology articles in computer magazines, which were then a big thing. And so I was covering national politics and elections by day. And by night, I was writing about Windows 3 .1.

And this went on for a number of years until into the mid 90s or early 90s when I had been in Washington a long time and was beginning to think about maybe trying something else. And at about this time, I was approached by a couple of people internally within Dow Jones, the journal's parent company.

because there was a Skunk Works project that they were putting together that was described to me as, quote, figure out what an online Wall Street Journal would be and then build it. And this was at a time when the web was really not a thing. This was at a time, the sort of the heyday of AOL and dial -up services. But the opportunity to try to...

create something completely new doesn't come along very often in news. And it came along at exactly the right moment for me. So I, at that point, took this, joined this team, required moving my family up to the New York area. The first year I spent on the project, we thought we were building a dial -up service like AOL. And it wasn't until...

a year into the project where we had sort of concluded that in a reference that made more sense then than it makes today, we were off building a really cool Betamax when the rest of the world was getting ready to go VHS. In other words, we were on a dead end technology trying to build a dial -up service when the rest of the world was getting ready to pile onto the internet.

And so we moved the project onto the internet and were able to launch the prototype of what became wsj .com in the summer of 1995.

And it worked, obviously, despite the original boo boo. And the reason I bring that up is at the time I was a young out of college reporter slash agate clerk working in the sports department of the Mercury News, which you'd think, given where it was, would have absolutely hit the online journalism thing out of the park. But it did not. And it did not so infamously.

that not only was there a book written about that mistake, it unfortunately, I think, has led to the paper's essential demise. How did you guys get it right when other people, even those sitting right here in the valley, were getting it wrong? Well, the most important decision we made, which was seems fairly obvious in hindsight, but was not at all obvious then.

was that in this period, it was the era of information wants to be free, the buzzwords of the time, the sense that you could give content away and it would all be advertising supported. And so everyone else who was coming onto the web and publishing news on the web essentially gave it away for free.

We at the from the outset, we said that's the wrong way to go. We said we want to build something of value and we're going to charge for it. And the journal became, I believe, the first news news publication of any type to charge for content on the Web. And we did so from the from the get go from launch and.

we were widely ridiculed at the time for marginalizing the journal, you know, everybody, it's the free is the way to go. And it turns out that that was a pretty smart decision on our part. So it was it was really two things. It was one to build something good enough to be worth paying for. And the second.

piece of it was to actually charge people for it. It amazes me today since and we'll talk about the business model of journalism in general a bit later. It amazes me today that more than 30 years later or roughly 30 years later, we're still arguing about whether or not news outlets should charge for their service and that some people, I mean, I hear it even in PR circles. we can't do that. It's behind a paywall. Well,

These people need to make money. You know, it's it's we are a capitalist country, are we not? And you guys were catching crap for that back then and people are still. yeah. yeah. It was I've still got the if you'd like, I'll show you the scars. I've still got them. You know, we are dinosaurs. I still remember when Jim Kramer of CNBC launched his site, the street, he.

he issued some pronouncement that the dead tree boys are quaking in their boots. And I and my journal colleagues took that kind of personally because we felt we were on the right path. But we were pretty roundly ridiculed. No one will ever pay for content on the internet.

You know, I don't get this question anymore, but as and I don't like to talk about PR too much on this, but one question I still get once in a while. Is will that be in print and I don't get it. I might get it once a year now from clients and the one of the things I say I is typically well, you know there are at this side. It's probably changed since since I started quoting this number. There are 12 times as many readers of the Journal online as there.

print. And I'm presuming that's probably two, two, three X that now, but it is interesting. You know, so on the flip side, there is still, I think it's waning now, but there is still a little bit of romance about the old days and being in the paper. Well, this is a bit of a digression, but if anybody had ever hired me to run, run their newspaper, what I would have done.

Because I still love print. I spent a long time in print. I feel that romance too. But what I would have done would have been to accept that print was no longer a mass medium. But to have recreated print product as a total prestige product. Raise the price, raise the quality, make it something special.

and and charge commensurately high fees both for reading it and for advertising in it. But I think for a long time newspapers clung to the belief that they were still a mass medium and didn't recognize that they were now a niche medium and needed to rethink how they were approaching that niche. I want to go back to digital since it's been such an important part of your career and it has

You have been such an important part of digital journalism. But I did want to talk about a decision that must have just been really hard to make, I presume. After 27 years, in 2002, you left the journal. What went into making that change? Well, there were a few things. One, I had been there 27 years. And which...

My old friend David Shribman used to look at me periodically and say, Rich, it's really time to quit your first job. So part of it was a desire for change. But really, the parent company of the journal Dow Jones had made some kind of disastrous business decisions over the previous few years. Those of us who had been around for a while could see

that the next few years were going to be not pleasant at a company and a place that we had loved. And we used to say even then that, you know, it'll, the next five years are going to be pretty ugly and then someone like Rupert Murdoch will buy it. And we kind of saw that. I remember having those conversations five years before the fact actually happened.

So I kind of didn't want to stick around for that. So in 2002, I had gotten an offer from a private investment firm, a hedge fund in New York, a private hedge fund. And that was sort of my ticket out of the journal. So I worked at the hedge fund for a couple of years.

And then I joined Bloomberg News as executive editor in charge of their global economic and political coverage and stayed at Bloomberg for nine years. Midway through, I transitioned from my executive editor role to writing a column about personal technology and had as much fun writing that column as just about anything. I was doing regular appearances on

NPR's morning edition as well. And I used to tell people I was the happiest person of Bloomberg News. And you became, accidentally, I guess, a competitor of your old friend Walt Mossberg, who was still doing that at that time. Yeah, well, we were we've never I've never felt competitive with Walt. Walt really invented the genre. And but we were both writing columns at the same time.

And occasionally it would amuse me when I would read my review of something and read Walt's review. And a lot of times the sensibilities were very similar, which was probably no accident because I'd spent years sitting next to Walt and sort of absorbing his sensibility. So I considered myself much more an acolyte of Walt's than a competitor.

The past 10 years you've been at Smart News, you've taken a step back now, which you well deserve, and you're an advisor. The model there is largely digital, is that correct? Yes, it's Smart News is a news aggregation app, iOS and Android. It's free. It company actually got started in Japan about 12 or 13 years ago now. And after succeeding in Japan,

the founders wanted to bring the model to the US. And so I was the first American hire to help build a smart news business in the US. And we've been at it now for 10 years here. I was vice president of content, which meant that I was responsible for the English language content in the app, as well as overseeing the team that did deals.

with a couple thousand news publishers and established our business relationships. So I did that starting in 2014. And then at the beginning of this year, I began to sort of transition out of that role. But the company is going, doing well, going strong.

We've made some great hires recently and so we're feeling really, really good about where we are and where we're headed. So the app is free, not a paywall like we talked about before. So what's the business model in this situation? Well, right now in the US, it's advertising. In Japan, it's advertising, but we recently introduced a subscription tier as well.

But in the US, at least in the US edition right now, it's an advertising -based model. And we've been able to make it work. One of the things that, because we have set out from the beginning to be good partners with publishers and to align our incentives and interests with our publisher partners, we've been able to do things that I think others who have...

come into and exited the space have not been able to. We have deals with a number of paywall publishers where some of their content is available within SmartNews for free to users. So we're a way for premium publishers to reach a bigger audience and allow that audience to sort of sample their wares. And that's been one of our features.

We've also been very vigilant about keeping fake news, keeping bad actors off the platform. We take very seriously our responsibility to vet sources, but we also take responsibility, seriously our responsibility to provide a broad range of viewpoints.

So one of the things that if you use Smart News, you may well see some content that you personally disagree with. And that's not a bug, that's a feature. Because it is entirely way too easy for a user to find themselves in a filter bubble of their own making, where they only hear...

and read things that are that agree with their own preconceived notions. And we've dedicated ourselves from the beginning to try to puncture filter bubbles and to expose people to a broader range of perspectives than they might otherwise see. That leads beautifully into this next question, which is you founded the Online News Association, which I'd like you to talk about for a moment when you answer this question. But. And that was.

I believe back in 1998 or so. Some of these questions are obvious, but I'd love to hear your answer to how has digital journalism changed over the years? And perhaps more importantly, how has digital changed journalism? Great questions, great questions. And I wish we had another hour to answer them all. The fundamental change that I have seen over the course of my career,

and a lot of that is attributable to the digital revolution, is that when I was a kid growing up in Northern California, there were a couple of local newspapers. There was the San Francisco Chronicle, my hometown, Santa Rosa, Press Democrat. There were three TV networks. And in terms of news, that was really about it.

And because each of these there were so few major news outlets those outlets were you know tended to to hug the middle politically and Because their audiences were so broad that they didn't want to offend this segment or that segment of the of their audience So you had broad -based mass media? what

The digital revolution has done has been to fragment the audience. And for many publishers, the key to success is no longer appealing to a broad audience, but identifying a niche and going deep with that niche. And so rather than have a broad -based media culture where everybody is basically seeing and hearing

the same things and you can discuss what they think of that, of those things, but everyone has a shared set of knowledge on which to base their opinions. You no longer have a shared set of knowledge. The knowledge that you glean tends to be from sources that you agree with already. And so it has totally changed the landscape from mass media to a media of niches.

Beyond that, the business itself has changed substantially. The web was revolutionary. And just when a lot of publishers were coming to terms with the desktop web, we had the arrival of mobile and the migration of content from the desktop web to mobile devices.

And so for legacy publishers, it was like being hit with two major transitions in a very short period of time. Then you had Google and Facebook and the platforms sort of invading and taking over the advertising market. And suddenly these publishers that thought that advertising was going to be their business model.

belatedly discovering that all the advertising dollars weren't coming to them, they were coming to these intermediaries. And so that has created incredible stresses on publishers. And that's why a lot of them have come back to the concept of charging for content and paywalls after moving in different directions for two decades.

And the problem there is that you know, it's really hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube I tend to subscribe to the view that my former Dow Jones colleague Dick Toffle who writes a very good Substack on the news media Dick referred to the decision to give content away in the 90s as the original sin for publishers

And a lot of publishers are still dealing with the fallout from that original sin in 2024. And now the next chapter and perhaps the most fascinating chapter of all, and even though all of those were pretty darn fascinating, AI. Is this good? Is this bad? Where are we going?

It is potentially incredibly powerful and also at the same time incredibly terrifying. The power is used properly. It can extend the possibilities of what we journalists can do. And it can take journalism in meaningful new directions. But it is...

also so incredibly powerful and the standards and regulation of it are so non -existent at this point that there exists the capacity to inflict immense damage on civil society if the technology is misused. So, you know, the one prediction I've been willing to make about AI is that

The speed with which it is evolving and penetrating our lives is far exceeding the speed with which we can come to terms with its implications. So continuing to look into that crystal ball, does that lead to an inevitable crash or are we going to figure it out?

I don't I'm enough of an optimist to feel that it's not inevitable. That we can figure this out. And there are interesting things going on right now that will shape the future. For example, the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, which on one level is a commercial dispute.

between the Times and OpenAI. But really what it is, if you look at that lawsuit, look at the Times as representing all publishers and look at OpenAI as representing all platforms. And in a lot of ways, I think the Times maybe is sort of taking one for the team here by stepping up and initiating this lawsuit. And...

the way that it gets resolved, and it will eventually get resolved one way or the other, will start establishing some rules of the road for what is fair use for content in AI and what are some of the right and wrong applications of AI. So I do think that out of things like the Times OpenAI lawsuit, some of the legislative

and regulatory things that are being discussed in Washington and to a certain extent also in Sacramento. We will start to see some rules of the road emerge about the relationship between journalism, content, news and technology platforms. I know the publishers are determined not to

Repeat the mistakes that they made in the 90s when they basically allowed and the information wants to be free era Allowed their content to be used to buy others to build businesses that eventually took away their own business models So the publishers, you know understand what? What the stakes are here but

the publishers have much less leverage now than they might have had in 1995 or two or even 2000 or 2005 and so this will not be a negotiation or a struggle of equals at this point. The power is all on the side of the platforms. So given that, given your pioneering role in digital journalism and given the fact that you teach

A lot, even at Cal, which I found sporting when I saw that on your CV as a Stanford guy. I teach a lot of journalism students. Are you optimistic about journalism? Is it? I have my days, so I'm curious about you. Well, let me put it this way. The need for quality journalism has never been greater. And where there is a need.

there is an opportunity to meet that need. By the same token, journalism and news are far, far more complicated. The environment is far more complicated than it was when I was starting out. When I started out, essentially, besides the ability to report accurately and to...

Write semi -coherently. I really only needed one additional skill and that was the ability to type and to this day I'm still a very good typist The the the number of skills that you need to master now To be a journalist and the the complexities of the environment that you operate in to be a publisher

are far, far more complex than they were back then. And, you know, the one thing that I've always told, you know, young journalists is if you ever talk to somebody of my vintage who starts going on about how tough things were back in the olden days, you have my permission to tell them that's BS. It is much more complicated, a much more complicated landscape today. There are fewer journalists.

By far, there are more people like me publicizing. There are more things for journalists to do. We've got to do TV or a blog or a podcast. And, you know, so I can't even imagine. I got out of journalism in 98. I can't even imagine how difficult it is. But the need has never been greater. Right. So let's hope that necessity is the mother of invention, as somebody smarter than me once said.

and that we end up in a good place. My final question, as I often ask people, is a simple one. So you've lived in three places, three very interesting places, the Bay Area, Washington, D .C., and New York City. Well, and Cleveland. So I'll throw that into. Who wins? Well, it should tell you something that I'm back in the Bay Area for as long as I lived on the East Coast.

I never gave up thinking of myself as a Californian. And the fact that I was able to cut the deal at Bloomberg to move back to the Bay Area from New York, you know, was really a special thing. And and I can say that Thomas Wolf was wrong. You can go home again. Fantastic way to finish, Rich. This was one of if not maybe my.

favorite interviews on this podcast. You were fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoyed it. I'd like to thank you all for listening today. And once again, a big thank you to our guest, Rich Jaroslawski, the Dean of Digital Journalism. Join us next month when we interview another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley marketing and how we've identified the B2B Tech Top 200.

Be sure to drop me an email at dready at bigvalley .co. That's D -R -E double D -Y at bigvalley, all one word, dot C -O, no You can also email the whole team at pressingmatters at bigvalley .co. Thanks again. And as always, think big.