Michael Nuñez, Editorial Director at VentureBeat

The path Michael Nuñez took to a seemingly straightforward gig – Editorial director at VentureBeat – was anything but direct. He covered the fun side of Hong Kong, the travel beat in Korea, and even wrote for an airline magazine in New York City after various tech writing gigs. He spent two years and change as head of marketing at a VC, but for coming on two years now, Michael has led VentureBeat, one of the most influential outlets in tech journalism. 

The son of an undocumented immigrant and an airline worker from the Chicago suburbs, Michael joined us to talk about the story that got him kicked off his high school newspaper, his controversial take on AI, and – here's a hint – the fact that he thinks long-form journalism is dead 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. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's, top 200 media and influencers, including Michael. Here's our chat with Michael. Enjoy. 

Transcript

Dave Reddy (00:00):

The path Michael Nuñez took to a seemingly straightforward gig – Editorial Director at VentureBeat – was anything but direct. He covered the fun side of Hong Kong, the travel beat in Korea, and even wrote for an airline magazine in New York City after various tech writing gigs. He spent two years and change as head of marketing at a VC, but for coming on two years now, Michael has led VentureBeat, one of the most influential outlets in tech journalism. The son of an undocumented immigrant and an airline worker from the Chicago suburbs, Michael joined us to talk about the story that got him kicked off his high school newspaper, his controversial take on AI, and – here's a hint – the fact that he thinks long-form journalism is dead. 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 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 Michael. Here's our chat with Michael. Enjoy. Hey, Michael, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. We're excited to have you looking forward to the conversation.

Michael Nuñez (01:10):

Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to dive in.

Dave Reddy (01:13):

So, let's just start from the top. You grew up in Chicago. Were you actually in Chicago proper or the environment?

Michael Nuñez (01:19):

No, no. That's something that a lot of true Chicagoans get really hung up on. So, I wasn't in the city. I was 30 minutes out in the northwest suburbs, and so people that grew up in the city I think get annoyed by people like me saying Chicago. But for all intents and purposes, I grew up in Chicago culture, and so that means a lot of sports and a lot of grilling out, a lot of cold weather. So yeah, I mean, it was a great childhood. This is a while back at this point. I've lived away from there for many years, but my family's still there. I go back maybe four to six times a year. I have one older sister, she's out there, my two parents, and then my extended family. So, I'm still very connected to the city and Chicago and everyone that I know. There is just a really big driving force I think in my life, even though I'm not able to spend as much time there as I'd probably like.

Dave Reddy (02:17):

I hear you on the whole living near Chicago thing. I mean, I grew up on Cape Cod, which is an hour and a half from Boston, but it's just easier for me to tell people I'm from Boston.

Michael Nuñez (02:25):

You get it. Exactly. No one knows where Barrington Illinois is or so. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Reddy (02:31):

Yeah. Well, in my case, if I tell 'em from Cape Cod, they think I'm rich like the Kennedys at any rate, which is not. So what did mom and dad do while you were growing up in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago?

Michael Nuñez (02:40):

Yeah, I mean, so I don't get asked this question very, I don't know if I've ever been asked this question on a podcast, so I'm excited to kind of dive into this. My father was an undocumented immigrant, so he moved to the States as a teenager, and he met my mom in Chicago. She was born in Texas and then moved to Chicago when she was pretty young. So those two met at a dance and I guess fell in love and got married, and I was their second child many years after they were married. But I give you that backstory just to say that they were kind of figuring it out, I think. And so my dad was, he worked as a mechanic in a factory for a company called ITW. They build automotive parts for a lot of the major American automotive companies. So basically, was in the US auto industry.

And then my mom, both of them worked for over 45 years for their company. So, my dad was at ITW, and then my mom worked for United Airlines. And so, she was there for I think 46 years in total. And she had done a few different jobs. She was, I think working for Global Services, helping some of the VIPs off the plane and helping them during their travel. She'd meet dignitaries and celebrities and all of the important customers I guess that United had at the time. And then later in her career, I think transitioned to more quality assurance. And so just helping United transition from its old Apollo system to kind of the new internet era stuff. So, anything that you're using on the app to check in, getting those notifications, et cetera. She was leading those programs.

Dave Reddy (04:26):

So, she obviously remembers paper tickets. I know a few of us do.

Michael Nuñez (04:29):

Yeah. Oh yeah, we still have some at the house. We have the old school carbon versions of from the early nineties and I guess late eighties. Yeah. But we're an airline family. My sister also works for United, so I grew up as kind of an airline brat, I guess is what they say.

Dave Reddy (04:49):

Well, given the size of O'Hare, I presume that's one of the biggest employers in the Chicago area. So, dad was an undocumented immigrant. Was that an issue once he married your mom or did you guys have to keep things quiet,

Michael Nuñez (05:01):

Just curious. Well, I think he was nationalized through marriage, so they got married in their early twenties, and then he's been a citizen now for over 40 years. But yeah, I mean, I think it's still the ripple effect of that type of decision carries through generation. So even though he's a citizen, has been here for most of his life and speaks English and had a good career and has lived a good life and basically has lived the American dream, yeah, that's still definitely a part of our family history and something that I'm super proud of and impacts even some of the decisions that I make and some of the opportunities that I'm afforded.

Dave Reddy (05:42):

Which country did he emigrate from?

Michael Nuñez (05:44):

Mexico. So he's from northern Mexico and from a small mining town, and he left his family when he was 15, moved to the US when he was 17, and he's about to turn 70. So, it's been a long time since then.

Dave Reddy (05:59):

Yeah, it's just those things, the stories about where your parents met. It's funny, my parents also met at a dance, and would I exist if my dad, in your case, hadn't had the guts come to America from Mexico at the age of 17? My god, that has to play in your head, right?

Michael Nuñez (06:18):

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, definitely it gives me a lot of focus, and I think it answers the question of purpose and drive, I think, especially when you don't want to be doing something. I'm sure we'll dive into this later, but I spent a lot of time traveling in my early twenties and had worked visas and worked in countries where English was not an official language, and those moments were hard, but it was kind of easy to reason through for me because I think my dad had already made the ultimate sacrifice. So, anything that I as a college graduate from an American university was faced with, it just seemed pretty minuscule in comparison.

Dave Reddy (07:01):

So, the son of a factory worker and an airline worker, there's rarely a direct line of journalism to me. How did the journalism bug bite? And it must've been early. You did go to Mizzou.

Michael Nuñez (07:15):

It was super early. It been something, it's probably the most consistent element of my life, I guess through teenage years to now. I'm in my mid-thirties, and it's just always kind of been there, I think despite all the other change, which is in some ways kind of relieving. But yeah, I was encouraged to join journalism from a really great teacher, Mr. Griffin. Excuse me, Mr. Griffith from Barrington High School in Illinois. Amazing guy. He just pulled me aside one day and he said, I remember him saying, and I actually remember the essay even. It was an essay about comparing the similarities between Dion, ISIS and Jesus. And I wrote it on the bus, and I turned it in, and I remember him grading it. He pulled me aside and he was like, Michael, I can tell that you wrote this on the bus. I kind of just stared at him blankly.

And then I remember him saying, I'm giving you an A because he did a really great job, but you should never turn in anything less than your absolute best because people are going to start thinking that this is all that you can do, and if you actually took the time, you'd be able to do an even better job than this. And I was like, okay. And then he mentioned that he wanted to nominate me, I guess, for AP English. So, I ended up joining that program, and then he also encouraged me to check out the journalism program. He was like, I think you'd be a great candidate for our journalism program. Would you be interested in joining? And at that point in my life, this is freshman year of high school, I didn't have close relationships with my teachers necessarily. I didn't have adversarial relationships, but I just wasn't easily shaped or mentored.

I just thought it was all –I don't know, I just wasn't thinking about my education in that way. And so it was really, really impactful to have this very respected teacher in our community pull me aside as this kid who was bused in from the poor neighborhood, like the neighboring town. I didn't grow up in Barrington. I grew up in Carpentersville, which is a neighboring town. And so, most of the Mexican Americans from Carpentersville were not that well integrated into the Barrington program. And there was kind of this, I hate to say segregated, but there were definitely two worlds within the same kind high school. And so typically those students didn't really get the attention that a lot of the other Barrington kids received. And so, for me, to get kind of pulled aside by this really respected teacher at that age was just really profound.

And I just said, yeah, sure. I wasn't really thinking much about it. Yeah, I'll do a journalism program. Why not? I get credits. This is just one of my classes. Okay, I'll take it. And so, I think I took it as an elective, and then it just stuck. I mean, it was so fun, and we were constantly thinking about holding truth to power and how to challenge the norms. And we wrote stories that got me and the teachers and the other people in the program in trouble, and it was just so much fun. And I had a column where I was writing about the Iraq war at the time. I remember, and teachers would pull me aside after class and talk to me about my column. And that was really exciting. And it just felt very empowering to have this platform where I could explore all of these socioeconomic dynamics in this really wealthy Chicago suburb as an outsider basically. And that sort of became a theme through a lot of my writing. I was often, I mean, I guess even today living in San Francisco, I feel sometimes kind of this outsider that is sort of looking through the window and trying to make sense of how a community organizes itself and who the power players are and what may or may not be unfair in those places and those sort of things.

But yeah, it all started, I guess in short, it started in freshman year of high school.

Dave Reddy (11:17):

Well, two things. Strike me about that story. One, you were obviously good at hitting deadlines since you wrote that on the bus, and it wasn't exactly an easy story to write, and you got an A and then two, I'm really curious, what were the kind of stories you wrote that caused a kerfuffle at your high school?

Michael Nuñez (11:34):

Yeah, so two immediately come to mind. The first was, it was a column that I wrote in opposition to the Iraq War. So, this was following, it was my freshman year of high school following, or may have even been sophomore year, but it was following nine 11, obviously a sensitive time for the country. Everyone's making sense of just existing, I guess after that it was kind of life before and after nine 11 for most millennials. And so, at the time, rage Against the Machine, it was my favorite band. I was very politically engaged, I think, and just kind of exploring just different political philosophies and just trying to think through critically what I was being told and who was telling me that not necessarily sticking it to the man, but definitely as a teenager and questioning, I think basically just was kind of fascinated by this idea that, well, maybe the adults aren't always right, and maybe sometimes they're wrong, and maybe some of these things are unfair.

So anyways, I remember writing this column in opposition to the Iraq war because basically they hadn't attacked us and there was no evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks of nine 11, even when they were launching the war out there or the second war. And so I write this column and several teachers pulled me aside. I remember to talk to me about that column. They felt it was their duty to basically kind of scold me for writing it to call me unpatriotic or whatever, and to really just what I felt was kind of intimidate and sort of just ostracized me a little bit. But I was young and pretty hardheaded at the time, and frankly, it was probably good that that happened early in my life. It happened so many more times in my professional career where I was challenged on Twitter by thousands of people. So, I remember that one causing a kerfuffle. And then the other big story that was kind of a defining moment for me in high school was publishing this feature on drug use in the school. So, at the time, a lot of the kids that went to Barrington had disposable, not even disposable incomes, they just had their parents would give them money to spend on whatever they wanted, essentially. That's splash.

Dave Reddy (13:51):

Yeah,

Michael Nuñez (13:52):

That's right. And so, a lot of times that went to not hard drugs, but there was a lot of weed use and decent amount of alcohol use. And so, I remember we did a survey, we passed out surveys during people's gym classes, and we tried to be as scientific and thoughtful about it as possible, and we wrote this whole issue in the newspaper on drug use at the high school, and that caused a huge controversy, I guess, in the community. The journalism teacher was replaced the next year, and I think he eventually shortly after, went into retirement. And then also, I couldn't be an editor my senior year because of that issue. They didn't trust me to, I guess, manage the priorities of the newspaper and do it fairly. That might not be the sole reason, but definitely one of the reasons that I wasn't able to be an editor. So, I was like you said that high school kids were doing drugs. How was that a shock? I know. Well, I think the parent, it's the type of community where it was like a don't ask, don't tell policy. I think that that the percentages that we reported were pretty high, and it was so to speak, I think looking back a little bit unscientific, and I mean it was dicey, and I am actually surprised our journalism teacher let us pursue it.

Dave Reddy (15:20):

So off Mizzou you go, they must have loved the stories you just mentioned when you applied and the school papers, the Ator, is that sort of a sly reference to the fact that Missouri is the Tigers, but also that a newspaper is out there to pursue justice? I'm trying to figure that

Michael Nuñez (15:36):

Way. That is exactly right. So, there's two big newspapers at the University of Missouri. This was another thing that I remember learning before I joined. So, they have the campus newspaper or the school newspaper, which is funded by the university, and everyone has to be a writer or an editor at the Columbia Missourian, which is a newspaper that the university produces and competes with the local newspaper. I mean, there was really, really high-quality political journalism in the Columbia Missourian. And when I was there, wrote about the super delegates during the Obama versus Clinton Democratic National Convention. So, I happened to be in Missouri, which was a swing state. And so, the votes at in Missouri really mattered, I guess, during that race. And so, I spoke to Richard Gerhart, senator, who was the former speaker of the house, Senator Claire McCaskill, and just a bunch of other establishment politicians that yeah, I just wouldn't have been able to do that, I think at most other universities I was looking at.

Dave Reddy (16:43):

And then you went off to Hong Kong, at least that was to study as well. You were still technically a Missouri student. Was that an exchange situation?

Michael Nuñez (16:51):

So, I was an exchange student, and then rather than taking classes at the university, I mean I did take one feature writing class for magazine journalism, but most of my time, pretty much every day I was going to the timeout Hong Kong offices. So, I was basically given this opportunity to be a writer at timeout, and I worked for someone named Hamish McKenzie, who is now the co-founder of a site called Substack. So, he also lives in the San Francisco Bay area, which is crazy. I thought I'd never see him again. And here we are both in the Bay.

Dave Reddy (17:25):

Right after that, your journalism career was anything but a straight line, which is probably serving you now. You worked in South Korea, you wrote for a travel outlet, you wrote for a music outlet. How much of that was, okay, this is the gig that's available, and how much of that was, I really want to try new things?

Michael Nuñez (17:39):

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the early stuff was the goal was really just to get paid to write. So, timeout kind of started that. I think that was the first early success that I have, and maybe the man eater, I guess would be a little bit before that. I remember getting 10 bucks for a music review reviewing an album, and I was just like, oh, I can do this for the rest of my life. I listen to music and write about it and get paid. This is amazing. Bad beer. Exactly. Yeah. So, I remember being so thrilled to have that opportunity. And then, yeah, I basically moved abroad. Hong Kong and Seoul were part of this journey because I was having a really hard time getting my foot in the door at some of these larger publications. So really the dream, or basically what I thought was most likely was, oh, I'll just work at the Chicago Tribune or the Sun Times.

Those were the two big papers in Chicago. There was a timeout magazine there as well. It was a little bit newer, but I figured I'd land in one of those places. I'm like the hometown kid. I did all the right things. I went to the university, I had the right internships, and it seemed really obvious that to me, that I'd be like a shoe in there. And then as I started getting later into my college career, I just realized that it was really hard to network outside of the Midwest for sure. And then even within the Midwest, a lot of the newspapers, like the Tribune and the Sun Times were dying, and they were basically just cutting jobs rather than adding any. So yeah, early in my career, I realized that I was more valued and there was way more opportunity being an expat living in Hong Kong or living in Seoul, Korea than there was, it was much easier to get the clips that I wanted and get paid.

Dave Reddy (19:25):

And then I believe this was your first tech job. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you joined Pop Psci in 2014, also sort of the fun side of tech, at least for a guy like me. What attracted you to Tech? You were already in New York at that point, and then you went on to work at Gawker and Mashable, somewhat similar titles, but there's obviously some variety there. What was it about tech that stuck after you'd been in music and travel for so long?

Michael Nuñez (19:52):

I remember at the time realizing if you're going to be serious about journalism, all roads lead to New York City. There's no way to avoid it if you want to be a magazine journalist at least. And that was really what I wanted to do. I wanted to write features, and basically, I wanted to work for Esquire Magazine that was the cool kid on campus at the time, and they were doing great feature reporting. And so, I leave Seoul. I remember moving to New York and I took the first job that I could get, which was at an in-Flight magazine for AirTran Airways. And so, I'm still doing the travel stuff and I'm excited. I'm writing for a magazine; we're closing the issue. I'm pitching ideas and helping decide different cover lines and that sort of thing, and commissioning artists and just all of that was so new and exciting to me.

And then I want to say three months into that job, Southwest bought AirTran, and Southwest is based in Dallas. And so, they were kind of absorbing this regional carrier AirTran, but as part of that, they were open right away that they wanted to use the publishing house that they were already using in Dallas rather than Ink Publishing, which is where I was working based out of New York. And so, they kind of told us at that magazine, look, you don't have to leave now, but you need to start looking for new work. Basically, AirTran will no longer be using this publisher. And so, I was terrified. I was 23, I was so broke, I was getting paid like nothing. I was getting paid 24,000 a year as a contractor to live in the most expensive city in America. A thousand bucks would go to rent and then a thousand bucks would go to living.

And it was awful, frankly. And so I remember just being really terrified. I was barely stable three months into it. And then of course, I had to start looking for new work. And so, I'm just frantically scouring the internet, applying to anything, asking people for just to meet for coffee. And I found this opportunity at Newsweek Media Group who was going through a transition from the Tina Brown era, and Newsweek had seen better days and was being passed off between several different owners. Anyways, they were looking for a tech reporter, and I just kind of applied by chance. And then before I knew it, I was kind of in the system working on just writing about Silicon Alley, which was what they were calling the tech scene in New York at the time.

Dave Reddy (22:29):

After a couple more jobs, Gawker and Mashable stop at Forbes. You made the move out here and you changed careers, sort of how did you end up heading up marketing for Playground Global, which for those who don't know as a VC with roots in the gaming industry, investments in quantum genomics, what have you?

Michael Nuñez (22:48):

Yeah, geez. So that story's kind of crazy. I think there's this breakout moment. I finally make it to New York. I stabilize, I get that tech reporting job, and then my career starts taking flight. So, I've become the tech editor of Popular Science. That's a breakout moment for me. I'm doing television editing for the magazine, I'm writing for the web, and I'm invited to then join Gawker Media. And so, in 2016, I wrote a series of investigative reports on Facebook and its relationship to the news and news curation. So, anything that you've heard or read about content curation from social media really started with or kind of hearkens back to some of the reporting that I did in 2016 exposing Facebook's news operation and how it was essentially run by 15 recent graduates from NYU in Columbia. And they were deciding what over 350 million English speaking users were able to see and not able to see.

And so that was a front-page news story. It made international headlines. It has been entered into the congressional record several times. It was part of the Zuckerberg hearings, and that was really a breakout moment for me. And life was going well. Yeah, I jumped to Mashable and Forbes and really just trying different voices and trying different reporting styles and also trying to make a few extra bucks because living in New York, it still isn't very easy. And so, it was easier to get paid more by jumping between companies. And so, I was doing that for a little bit. Life was great. And then 2020 hits, and that was when everything changed. Yeah, so I remember the first week of March just feeling the social fabric kind of fading away in New York. New York has a reputation that everyone's really rude, but in fact, I always found that everyone was super nice and you kind of treat everyone like your neighbor out there.

And that started kind of disintegrating, I think in the early weeks of March. And I ended up leaving the city the first week of March of 2020 thinking that I'd be gone for two weeks. So I remember booking a flight and packing seven pairs of clothes. And I had read this joint study that was produced by Harvard University and University of Oxford, and they basically estimated that two to 3 million people were going to die. There'd be 18 to 24 months of significant covid activity, the most densely populated cities in the world would be hit the hardest. And there were all of these really grim facts that I was kind of wrestling with. I remember weeping reading this thing like, holy cow, I'm in the worst place that I could possibly podcast. I'm a big, okay, I forgot to ask that before, but holy cow, I'm in the worst possible place that I could be for this pandemic or for this event.

And then I immediately thought of my parents like, oh my gosh, I need to get back home. So I booked the first flight to Chicago. I remember calling my mom saying, mom, I'm headed back to Chicago. Don't go into the office. Don't let dad go in. We'll talk about it when I get home. To that point, my whole life had been kind of defined by journalism and my identity was really wrapped up in my career and living in New York and being successful in Brooklyn, and so much of who I am, frankly, still is that person still out there somewhere. But I kind of just made peace with that really early and tried to just let go of it. And so, I remember thinking, okay, the world is changing. I need to rethink what I'm doing. And there was a lot at the time, the media ecosystem was more fragmented and polarized than probably ever before.

And so, I was a little bit disillusioned as well and disenchanted with the industry and was very frustrated by the fact that people could be presented with the facts and would just reject them outright. You could give someone all of this scientific data and peer reviewed studies and you could have leading experts in the world all agreeing on one thing, and people would still choose to disagree and choose not to accept that information. So, I remember thinking, okay, maybe it's time to start looking outside of journalism for something that I can do. And I was fortunate enough to come across this tweet that said that Playground Global was looking for a senior marketing manager and just like someone to help with their marketing efforts. And I kind of just applied on a whim. At that time, I didn't really know what I was going to do.

I think I was trying to think outside the box. I was applying to places I normally wouldn't have, but I was also still talking to other, let's say tier one and tier two news publishers. So, I remember I had this executive editor offer eventually, but playground, I think it started very innocently where I was, I just said, yeah, let me just apply to this. It looks pretty easy. And then as I learned more about the firm and as I learned more about the portfolio companies and was thinking through the opportunity there to tell stories, I remember asking some of the partners, why haven't I read about Agility Robotics or Relativity Space? Why aren't they more prominent? I've constantly seen these Boston Dynamics highlight videos or these promo videos of the robot doing flips and parkour and all that, or dancing and thinking, these humanoid robots look just as capable if not more, and you could easily go viral just showing people what this thing can do.

And so anyways, we had a lot of conversations like that where I was really stumped by why I didn't know more about some of these portfolio companies. And I think we both got really excited as the conversations continued and it was, I want to say a four-to-six-month process. I mean, it was really long. I just remember it being egregiously long or feeling that way because in journalism, everything's so fast. I had been hired in days at other moments in my career, and there was basically just these handshake deals like, yep, you've done really cool things. We want you on the team done. I'd be working there in two weeks. And I guess on the VC side, there was so much due diligence and this really long kind of drawn-out process. And then, yeah, eventually they made an offer, and it just felt like the most exciting thing I could do.

At the time, I had this firm belief that people were hungry for optimism at the time. It was a really dark period for me, and I think for a lot of the country, we were locked in our homes and afraid of this disease. And my point to the general partners, one of the pitches across six different interviews or whatever was that I felt there was a really strong appetite for optimism and enthusiasm in science and technology. And I thought that people really wanted to know what the brightest minds in the country were thinking about and what technologists and scientists were excited about. And there was going to, my firm belief was that there would be this reaction against the dark ages and people would come out of the pandemic, or at least persist through the pandemic by clinging onto hope and wanting to believe in personalized medicine or discoveries in aerospace engineering and robotics. And just thinking about a future, like an idealistic future, kind of that retro futurism that was popular in the fifties that sort of led to the space race I thought might reoccur during the pandemic. And so that was kind of the pitch. And yeah, I did that for two years and it was incredible. And then I tried something called Chat, GPT, and that started kind of a new chapter for me.

Dave Reddy (30:41):

Is there a connection between chat GPT and how you ended up at VentureBeat?

Michael Nuñez (30:44):

Absolutely. Yeah. So, I'm working at playground November of 2022. I try something called Chat GPT, and I'm convinced that this is going to be the next big thing. I mean, it just seemed really obvious to me day one that the next, it was going to drive the next technological wave in Silicon Valley. And when I graduated in 2009, social media was already out in the world, and there was an opportunity to embrace it early, but not really. I think I was in school where they were basically telling us that social media didn't matter and that the fundamentals of journalism were all that mattered, and you didn't want to insert yourself into the story, and you weren't supposed to express your views on the things that you were reporting on.

So, there was kind of this cognitive dissonance that I was having between what I was being told and then what I was viewing out in the world during the golden era of blogging. Anyways, fast forward to 2022, it just seemed really obvious. I'm like, oh, this is new and exciting. And it felt like using Google for the first time, I was just so mesmerized by what I was seeing, and I felt really strongly that it was going to impact my life. Whether I was at a VC firm or at a newspaper or at a traditional journalism outlet, artificial intelligence was going to have an impact on storytelling. And so with that in mind, I started thinking, how can I get more deeply involved in this industry and do it really quickly? And I had been talking to Matt Marshall, our founder, just because I was trying to meet other journalists in San Francisco Bay.

I was still getting settled into this area. And so, we were just talking, and I'd give him advice on the site just as a friend, like, oh, what were you thinking with this headline? Or why did you choose to write this story rather than this one? Or, how come you missed this big story? And Matt said to me, we might be looking for an executive editor soon. Would you be interested in that type of role? And at the time, I was like, yeah, I think so. I'd be willing to have that conversation. And then basically after chasing down these two offers, one at another deep tech VC firm that would've paid a lot more and would've moved me back to the East coast and in many ways, checked all of the boxes that I wanted. It was good pay. It was a good life. I'd get back to Brooklyn, I'd still be focused on the bleeding edge of technology and storytelling around that.

And then the alternative was VentureBeat paid a lot less, I guess, but was more squarely focused on ai. And that just seemed like, I felt like if there was ever time to take the chance, this was it, because I felt so strongly that AI was going to be a really big deal. And frankly, I still feel this way. I think that it still is going to be a big effing deal. And so, I just felt like, you know what? I need to run towards this thing, not run away from it, and the rest will kind of sort itself out. So, I ended up joining VentureBeat just a few months after chat t launched, I want to say February of the next year. And then, yeah, it's been crazy. I mean, geez, I think I've been there almost two years now, and the pace of development has just been insane. And I'm so glad that I made this decision because it has definitely put me at the forefront of AI and media.

Dave Reddy (34:17):

Yeah, indeed. Few outlets cover AI as much as VentureBeat, and you in fact have also joined the San Francisco Press Club as a board member. And it would seem, based on your remarks and what you just told me, that they're looking for your thoughts on how AI is going to affect journalism. Is that correct?

Michael Nuñez (34:35):

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think I was invited the first month that I was working at VentureBeat, I was invited to this panel at the Microsoft Silicon Valley offices, and it was a discussion on AI in the media. And so, I dunno, I got invited and I remember it was a lot of tier one outlets like Bloomberg and Reuters and a FP and a wired magazine. And then there was me. I felt kind of like an outsider as the VentureBeat digital media guy. I was one of the few pure digital media plays on stage. It might've been the only one. And anyways, during that conversation, I became the villain of this panel. I remember being so excited to get back on stage to do public speaking, to talk to fellow journalists. I'm thinking, I'm in San Francisco now. There will be fewer cynics, there will be fewer skeptics.

These people will be embracing the technology. We'll be talking about the framework through which we're viewing this stuff and the prompt engineering, how we're activating this within the newsroom. And then, anyways, I get there, and I remember hearing in the green room just a ton of negativity. Everyone's talking about hallucinations and why they're scared of AI and why they shouldn't use it and why it's just a crock of shit, I guess is what I want to say. It took you through time. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I really was doing my best to not, but it's just a little easier for me to talk that way sometimes. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people were just really skeptical of this tech and frankly, distrusting and there I was as sort of the token evangelist, this is going to change our lives. And I remember speaking in platitude, I recognized that in the green room, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to lean really fricking hard into this and I'll be the pro AI guy, the digital media person.

I have a little more freedom than most of these other outlets anyways. And so, I'm saying things like by the end of the year, AI is going to touch every piece of content that we produce at VentureBeat, and it'll be part of every single part of the process. And I am speaking in very hyperbolic terms and thinking the goal at the time is like, okay, maybe I'll get a tweet out of this. Someone will quote me, and a tweet will go viral or something and that'll be the best case scenario. And what ended up happening was I got the tweet, but I also got a Bloomberg takedown where I was painted as this villainous guy that was embracing AI at a time when journalism was being undercut by a lot of different forces. And I was almost painted as sort of an anti-labor technologist or something.

And it was really frustrating. But anyways, I embraced that role. I had been through the ringer because of stuff that I did at Gawker Media and Gizmodo around the 2016 election with Trump and Hillary. So, I had been called a Russian spy, and Ted Cruz had referenced my work, which is someone that I absolutely despise. And there were so many other things that had happened, I guess prior to just embracing AI that kind of prepared me for the backlash. And so, to just be fully transparent, it just didn't phase me all that much. And I felt very strong in my conviction that this was a positive technology. It could be a pro-labor technology, and it would be helpful frankly, for people like myself, Mexican-Americans and others that are just looking for an opportunity and trying to find a way into this industry. This is a great equalizer.

The people that embrace this technology now are going to be the ones that are more well equipped for future jobs and will have an edge, frankly, on I think a lot of their counterparts. So that was along the lines of what I said at the time. I still firmly believe that. I think I might be even more hardened in that view. And then the San Francisco Press Club asked me to join because I think they were really surprised by how willing I was to kind of put myself out there and take those shots. And weirdly, it was like this contrarian view, which still seems so strange to me. But I think journalists are naturally very skeptical and naturally were sort of trained to be just skeptics and think critically through about any new technologies or any new things that might impact our industry or the ones that we focus on. So, I don't blame people for being skeptical, but it also just seems so fricking obvious that this is a really powerful technology that's going to help people get their drafts done sooner and faster and more accurately. And so I have been really surprised by how slow the uptake has been in the journalism community, and I think the San Francisco Press Club saw some value in that, maybe even just to help balance the board if for no other reason

Dave Reddy (39:31):

To be candid, I think you are a different voice than many of the folks I've had on the show, including me. I mean, many of us are totally cool with AI doing research. We're totally cool with AI doing transcriptions. But if it gets into, and if I'm putting words in your mouth, Michael, tell me when it gets into AI helping with the actual writing, we're a little bit more conservative. You're not as worried about that.

Michael Nuñez (39:55):

Not at all. I think that it's a fool's errand to be honest. I think that the people that think that they're going to get by without using AI in the near future to get their newsletter done, to get their stories done, to get their original reporting done, especially at the agencies, I mean, this is what pissed me off so much about that panel. It's like the people that are working at Bloomberg and Reuters and these wire services, essentially, those are the most formulaic stories out there. If anyone should be raging against ai, it should be the digital media reporter because my voice is so strong that the reader can't possibly know the news without having my voice inserted in there. I think when you're writing for something as formulaic as the Associated Press or Bloomberg where it's who, why in the lead and some of those classic news telling tropes, I think it's foolish to think that you might be able to do that job more quickly or more accurately than a super intelligent computer.

And so, in my view, if you're not already using this stuff on a daily basis to get your work done, you're falling behind because a lot of people are already doing that. I think they might be doing it behind the scenes or without revealing that, but I think pretty soon it's going to be common practice. This will be baked into the content management systems of a lot of newsrooms. And really I think there's, there's opportunity for people, for example, to you can feed an interview into your AI model and have it spit out a story, or if you're doing financial analysis, the best financial analysts are already tinkering with this stuff. And there have been billion-dollar investments from some of the largest hedge funds and financial institutions into large language models and using them for financial analysis. So, I think if you're like a business reporter to say that you might come up with a better idea than again, the computer processor that can handle this, that can handle the same computational load as a human times like infinity.

I just feel like that is silly to me, it just seems so wrong. I mean, it's like the people that felt like a computer can never beat the greatest chess player in the world or can never beat the greatest go player in the world. I think that there are so many examples where when there, especially in structured formats, computers are extremely good at executing on those problems. And so we've seen it in games, Atari games in Old World games like chess and Go and Checkers, and we will, I think soon, if not have already seen it take place in journalism.

Dave Reddy (42:48):

So, it's funny, you're optimistic about the future of journalism, but not in the way some of my other guests have been in the past where they talk about writing will never get taken over and so forth. So, what do you see? Do you see a future in which an entire masted is AI or is it going to be a mix?

Michael Nuñez (43:06):

Well, I think what a lot of people get wrong about AI is that it's going to automate the news. I mean, this is something that we got hung up on that panel. People talk about AI in journalism as though it's going to do the entire job for the journalist. I think what ends up happening is that AI will take over some of the writing and structuring and organizing elements of the job, but I think that will place a greater emphasis on the reporting, on being able to talk to people on being able to ask the right questions on being able to find those sources. And so the human element will actually be more in focus during the AI era because those without social skills like those during the Twitter era that were writing about tweets, they would structure an entire news story based on a tweet that will be less and less of a practice as time goes on.

Because I think what people are going to be looking for is originality and an original content, original reporting basically. And so, getting those quotes will be more valued than it is now. And then I think the speed will be less valued. I think speed was during the golden era of blogging because we were out running The New York Times would take a full day to write a story, whereas a Drudge report or whatever would write that story in an hour. And so you saw blogs undercutting traditional media because they were just moving much faster. And weekly magazine news magazines like Time and Newsweek couldn't keep up. And even the daily newspapers struggled to keep up. I think now speed is going to be speed already is pretty much equalized by ai. And so the pendulum will swing back in the direction of original reporting, getting those original quotes, sourcing up and just having some social skill.

There's this weird era that we entered in media in my opinion, where suddenly when I talk to the folks at the San Francisco Press Club who are from the older generation, they went out, they were drinking whiskey, they're smoking cigarettes, they're out on the street talking to people on a nightly basis and work on the phones. And there was so much socializing as part of their job. And I think my era, like the millennial Gen Z era, it swung in the other direction. Suddenly you were chained to your desk, you never left the office. And frankly, few people even picked up the phone. A lot of these star reporters are using direct messages to do their interviews. And so that was something that I was told was forbidden in journalism school. And I think that became common practice during the golden era of blogging. People were just using social media to shortcut, take all these shortcuts in their reporting process.

And I think in the AI era that will, I'm not saying that goes away entirely. I'm sure people will still run q and as via email and they'll source up via direct messages and there's going to be a mix. But I do think at the end of the day, it's going to be like, who do you know? Can you get a good quote? That original sourcing I think will be a really big edge for people that have those social skills rather than the ones that hide behind their computer and are just trying to get traffic basically using trending topics. I think that practice is pretty rapidly dying, and I hear about it a lot from my friends in New York, and then I just see it a VentureBeat. It's like I think that stuff's being prioritized less and less by the algorithms, and I think people want that stuff less and less, and people are really looking for additive.

They're looking for news that furthers the conversation and that hopefully teaches them something new and relevant. And there will always be room for aggregation and summarizing really complex topics, and we don't have time to consume all of this information all day. So it's nice to just get the gist on the RFK scandal. That's something I didn't follow that closely this weekend, but yeah, I read about it in a newsletter this morning and I basically get what happened there, and I don't need to do the deep dive and get original quotes and all that, but I think that left me time to go find other stories that did have original quotes from Johnny. I’m working with OpenAI on a new hardware project, and that was original reporting. So anyways, that stuff is standing out a lot more, and I think the aggregated stuff's going to be more commodified. Do

Dave Reddy (47:47):

You think that extends to long form journalism, not just original reporting, but the 10,000-word stuff, the stuff you were talking about that was your dream to do at Esquire?

Michael Nuñez (47:55):

I know, yeah. It's so crazy to think about. I don't know what happens to long form journalism. I think it feels dead to me already, to be honest. I don't think people want to read, even me as someone who loves the art form of long form journalism and could talk about some of my favorite pieces, Sinatra has a cold, or can you say Best Friend by Tom Juno on Mr. Rogers' masterpiece? In my opinion, falling Man is another great piece. Geez, there's just so many, but I don't think people consume information that way. In fact, it's moving more and more towards bite-sized pieces of information and just quick hits. I think TikTok and Twitter and the way that social media is formatted and the type of content that it promotes is just really short format. So, I think long form kind of already feels dead to me.

Obviously, there will always be a place for books. There will always be a place for deep investigative reporting. The New Yorker isn't going anywhere from what I can tell. And the Atlantic seems pretty well funded and is apparently doing very well under Nick Thompson and those guys. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's something I used to think about a lot because I was kind of clinging onto long form as an art form, and I basically just view it now as kind of a dying art form and sort of this dying craft. People are still doing it, and you can go seek it out if you want, but I think fewer and fewer, definitely fewer and fewer young people are doing that. And I think millennials were already pretty, just easily distracted and just not that invested in long form stuff. So yeah, with the newsstand, I think long form has kind of died, and it's hard to consume long form media on the internet as well.

No one wants to scroll through a 3,000-word story. It's hard to keep track and you can't really bookmark it, and you can't come back to it later. And so until someone figures that out for an easy way to start and stop on those things, I don't know. It just feels like digital media in particular, the shelf life is so short on this stuff. The expiration date is 10 seconds from now. So yeah, so long form. I think there's always room for the definitive piece on X scandal or X topic. I might read a definitive piece on those pagers that were blowing up in Lebanon. I'd love to learn more on that, and that's a cool story that I would for sure read the definitive piece in the New Yorker. But that's one example out of a thousand news stories that I could rattle off right now. And all of those other thousand news stories are going to be consumed in tweets and TikToks and newsletters and short bits of content,

Dave Reddy (50:44):

A fresh point of view. I really appreciate it. And after that very serious conversation, we'll finish with a very unserious question. So, Chicago, Hong Kong, Seoul, Brooklyn, or San Francisco.

Michael Nuñez (50:59):

Oh my gosh. Wait, in what? This, I want to make sure if you had to choose, if you had to choose If I had to choose. Oh my goodness. Wow, that is tough. That is tough. I mean, if I'm being completely honest, I think if I'm being honest with myself and with the listeners, my heart is very much in Brooklyn still. I loved my time there. It is so diverse in thought and in background, and I've just never felt more comfortable in a single location. I think that Brooklyn is just so beautiful. I think everything that it stands for is just awesome. So, for me, Brooklyn will always have a sweet spot in my heart, but I will say these are just different chapters of my life, and I think there's something to be said for each of them. So, San Francisco is similarly very beautiful, and I'm healthier now and maybe a little bit less career, not career oriented, but I'm just not grinding as much as I was in Brooklyn. So, there's probably something positive to be said about that as well. And yeah, I could say good things about all those places.

Dave Reddy (52:10):

You don't have to worry about snow. Michael, thanks so, so much for your time. A very compelling interview. Probably a controversial interview. I wonder sort of emails I'm going to be getting, but I really

Michael Nuñez (52:20):

Appreciate, oh gosh. Well, thanks for having me on. Hopefully I didn't drag you into any trouble, or if so, I hope I did, but well, yeah, thanks again, Dave. This has been awesome and yeah, thank you. This is great.

Dave Reddy (52:34):

Really appreciate your time.

Michael Nuñez (52:36):

Take care.

Dave Reddy (52:36):

I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to our guest, Michael Nuñez of VentureBeat. Join us next month when we interview yet 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 identified the B2B Tech top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready@bigvalley.co. That's DRE double di at Big Valley, all one word.co. No M. You can also email the whole team at pressing matters@bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening and as always, think big.