Inside the Death Star

 

We called CMP’s headquarters the Death Star. The three-story, green-tinted glass building (above) at 600 Community Dr. in Manhasset, Long Island, looked like a slice of Darth Vader’s cold metal planet. And for its far-flung crew of independent and skeptical journalists scattered around the world, it felt regimented.

I planted myself in a windowless inside corner office on the third floor as the company was rising into its zenith. At the other end of the building, CMP’s top pub, Computer Reseller News aka CRN, was making good money and getting noticed. It routinely got interviews with top tech executives. The EE Times crew considered those folks the stuffed shirts at companies where savvy but unsung engineers designed and built market-making products.

CMP was on the brink of launching its first big consumer title, Windows Magazine, filled with tips for using PCs. By contrast, OEM Magazine would be small potatoes despite Girish’s high hopes. I was happy to toil away outside the CMP spotlight and closer to the Bunn coffee maker.

A CMP house ad from the mid 1990s shows its titles for "builders, sellers and users."

Nose to the grindstone, I focused on the stories and the pages. But as Steve Weitzner, the associate publisher and alpha dog of EE Times, said, “It’s all about the people.”

I first met the other EE Times editors at a summer retreat a few months before I officially started on OEM. I recall more than a dozen of us around a long boardroom table at an upscale Long Island hotel.

The meeting ended with a tradition we called “What’s Hot.” Each editor took a turn describing what would likely be the big stories on their beat in the coming year. It felt like a grad school of tech journalism. I recall little of what was said, but I do remember the amazing cast of characters. Two of the senior reporters stand out in my memory.

We called Ron Wilson “the commodore” for his love of sailing on the San Francisco Bay and his calm, confident and occasionally cocky way of commanding thought leadership in the group, at least on all things related to semiconductors and Silicon Valley.

Ron’s articles were often more opinion pieces than news stories. They built up a thesis from an agreeable starting point, step-by-step, with every sentence and paragraph like interlocking bricks leading to a seemingly irresistible conclusion.

While many of us would brag about interviewing more than a dozen folks for one story, Ron might talk to three well-chosen sources, just enough points to connect with an artful line of logic from his fountain pen.

Copy editors were by turns relieved and intimidated when assigned to edit one of his treatises. They might move a comma or adjust a word here or there, but it was impossible to make significant changes without ruining the carefully constructed flow and bringing the entire castle crashing down.

Ron wielded his intellectual prowess with gentle humor, deference and kindness, a benign and bearded Buddha -- unless you disagreed with him. Then he’d deploy a razor-like wit to deftly remove the legs from any competing argument.

We were grateful to have Ron on our side. He was among the few EET editors who was an engineer by training and had worked in semiconductors, albeit more on the marketing side.

Loring Wirbel packed a similar brilliance in a wiry, restless body framed with a reddish yellow halo of frizzy hair that seemed on fire with one passionate thought after another. Ron patiently waited for his turn to make a dramatic pronouncement, like a well-manicured and quiet poker player holding aces; Loring was an unfiltered and animated activist always ready to grab a bull horn and deliver an impromptu speech.

I swore Loring knew every company, every PR person and all the head-spinning acronyms on his arcane beat of communications chips. His broad and deep understanding spilled out in dense stream-of-consciousness stories. Loring knew what he meant, and the people he wrote about routinely praised the ways he portrayed them, but we couldn’t make heads or tails of some of his stories ourselves.

As if becoming an expert in the field of communications chips was not enough, Loring also had a passion for music. He organized concerts and was often drawn to the most unusual acts and unclassifiable genres. He published an annual list of the 100 or so best and worst songs of the year with extensive commentary. It was a good read that was by turns an eye opener and a head scratcher.

With his extra time, Loring edited a satirical newsletter called “One Great Big Conspiracy.” Imagine The Onion on LSD. It was a hub for anything bizarre or half-fictional in politics. A cartoon version, one of its stranger incarnations, still lives online.

Somewhere amid all this writing, I think Loring slept, but I never saw him do it. Certainly not while covering any of a long list of communications tech conferences he attended. His event schedules were 20-minute whirlwind meetings from breakfast to dinner, then a full round of parties prioritized by what live music they would have. (I attended one with him headlined by Blood, Sweat and Tears.) Back in the hotel room in the wee hours, he wrote his stories.

Ron and Loring were among more than a dozen editors in a crazy-smart crew I joined as an enthusiastic junior member. Two managers acted both as the adult supervision keeping folks in line and the field generals inspiring us to charge the steepest hills.

Our editor-in-chief, Richard Wallace, served as our surrogate chaplain, the keeper of the faith and a paragon of a hard-working, hard-bitten tech journalist. He carried a weathered leather satchel overstuffed with legal pads, the latest issue of EE Times and whatever else he was reading. His special passions included history and the semiconductor operations of IBM, ensconced in the upstate New York woods near his Westchester home.

On my first trip to Manhasset, Richard took an entire Saturday off to escort me on a sort of historical orientation to his neighborhood. On a crisp March day, he drove me to the southern Long Island beaches where he told stories about Robert Moses, then over the Throgs Neck Bridge and up the Hudson as far as West Point where he recounted tales about the Revolutionary War. By the time we stopped for dinner at his modest home outside White Plains, my brain was fried, but I felt I had been baptized into a sort of humanist cult at the intersection of history and journalism.

EE Times was his life blood in those days. Wallace, as we referred to him when he was not in the room, knew every reporter on his team, their beats, their peccadillos and the stories behind their best scoops. He celebrated and worried about us as if we were his children. He gladly fielded every call from angry PR execs complaining about our stories, polite but secretly delighted we had upset the powers that be. He was as big a champion of the underdog reporter as you could find.

Often Richard would launch into an impassioned speech about some event. I recall once listening and nodding politely, until our unflappable boss, Steve Weitzner, interjected, “Rich, why does everything have to be a 20-megaton bomb with you?”  

It was typical of Weitzner’s tart humor, often spotlighting someone’s shadow side. Weitzner sported a broad smile behind an impish goatee surrounded by a sort of Jewish afro of tightly curled salt-and-pepper hair. As he padded down the hallway toward me, I imagined a Sheepdog and Airedale mix with x-ray vision that saw the person beneath the skin and was amused by the ironies.  

Once, while haggling with Wallace over a reorg of the 40-plus-person editorial team, Weitzner pointed to their draft org chart and said, “there’s the structure and then there’s the deep structure,” of who people feel they are and how they fit into the group. He wanted the reorg to balance both.

In 2013, I asked Steve, who had moved on to another company, to write an editorial for the 40th anniversary issue of EE Times. I had no idea what he would write, but I was sure it would be on target and folks would love it. He came back fast with a tight piece.  “It was all about the people,” he wrote, describing each major character on the editorial team as well as the newspaper and its readers with insight, humor and aplomb.

Steve spoke frankly about folks in the company and the industry with infectious humor and without hesitation—especially when they weren’t in the room. That made me nervous. What does he say about me when I’m not around, I wondered. I instinctively trusted his intuition, but I also wanted some kind of lead shield to hide my foibles from his penetrating gaze.

When the time came to kick off OEM Magazine, Weitzner rallied the editorial crew for a meeting where he laid out our mission. You could feel he owned the room. Everyone around the table, even doggedly independent thinkers like Ron Wilson and Loring Wirbel, were drinking in everything he was putting out.

Then he left the room, turning things over to me as the publication’s editor, and my heart sank. I deeply appreciated him rounding up the crew then graciously handing me the reins, but I felt a void in the absence of his intelligence, wit and animal magnetism. In that moment, I realized what I couldn’t articulate: I didn’t want to lead people, I wanted to be led by people like Weitzner.

I turned the meeting to the practical task of coming up with story ideas we needed for the first issue. Luckily, inspired by Weitzner, nearly everyone chimed in with real gems, and we were off to a good start despite my momentary flash of self-doubt.

Playing in the Big Leagues

I spent much of the next 15 years taking my game of tech reporting to the next level as a team sport. The tech industry we covered was taking off like a rocket, too.

Folks worked hard at EE Times. The copy desk, the artists and the reporters had pages to fill and a sophisticated, fast-moving industry to follow.

Pages went out every day. On Mondays, we closed in-depth special supplements deep inside the paper. Tuesdays and Wednesdays had deadlines for Business, Technology, Design and Profession sections.  Thursday was a race to try to deliver for the front page a handful of compelling stories that, if pressed, we could finish up early Friday morning.

On any given day reporters were developing separate stories for a supplement, a section and front-page news while answering questions from copy editors and graphics artists about articles filed yesterday or last week.

The headiest moments involved breaking news.

If Dave Lammers, for example, got a big scoop about a company in Tokyo, Wallace might ask someone in Silicon Valley or New York to flesh it out with comments from the company’s partners or rivals in the U.S. or Europe. The business or Washington editors might get roped in to add some analysis about the impact on markets or regulations.

An Oct 2000 issue hit 178 pages, typical for that time.

A content editor stitched the contributed threads into one cogent article Thursday night or Friday morning, making sure to add a nut graph defining any arcane technology in simple terms and explaining at a high level what it all meant. Then the crack copy desk would pump up the prose so it was a crisp read while the production crew laid in charts we ginned up at the last minute.

Week in, week out, the work was a source of pride, like scoring the winning goal at the buzzer. EE Times fleshed out in days the week’s top news with authoritative, well-rounded stories. Our monthly magazine rivals had few fresh angles left to work. We played to win, 52 weeks a year until the Internet arrived with its instant analysis and 24-hour news cycle.

The head-spinning process left me a dual challenge with OEM Magazine. I had to solicit high quality contributions from a staff already running up and down the court at high speed. And I had to find compelling, big-picture themes the newspaper had not thoroughly investigated.

Luckily, the tech industry itself was taking its game up a big step. As in my Hong Kong days, there was plenty to write about.

Next: A Time of Convergence