Jeremey Owens, Editor-in-Chief, San Francisco Business Times

Jeremy Owens just landed a new gig as the latest editor in chief of the San Francisco Business Times. In this market, that's a minor miracle. Jeremy joined us to talk about that change, his early plans for the outlet's mission, and why he thinks San Francisco is the New Orleans of the West. 

That's a new one 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 Jeremy. Here's our chat with Jeremy. Enjoy. 

Transcript

Dave Reddy (00:27):

Jeremy Owens just pulled off a trick that, unfortunately, many reporters have been unable to do in recent years, a little more than two months after being laid off from MarketWatch. In January, Jeremy landed a new gig as the latest editor in chief of the San Francisco Business Times in this market. That's a minor miracle. Jeremy joined us to talk about that quick turn, his early plans for the outlet's mission, and why he thinks San Francisco is the New Orleans of the West. That's definitely a new one 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 Jeremy. Here's our chat with Jeremy. Enjoy. Jeremy, thanks so much for being on, I really appreciate it. You are just a couple of weeks into a new gig. How's that going?

Jeremy Owens (01:39):

It's going good. I have tried to take it slow. My staff has been really nice to allow me to take it slow and not have to jump in and start doing everything right away. I learned the CMS, the email newsletter system. My managing letter keeps looking at me like, "When are you going to jump into print?" So, that's probably next is learning the print system and process and procedure for dealing with print newspapers for the first time in more than a decade. So it's been really good so far, and they've been very nice to let me slow roll in. I'm waiting for that to end and for just things to start piling up on me.

Dave Reddy (02:14):

Normally, I do these in chronological format. This is your lifestyle, but given that you just started the job, you pulled off quite a trick here. You were laid off just a few weeks ago by MarketWatch, and now you are the new editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Business Times. How did you pull that off?

Jeremy Owens (02:33):

Well, as with everything, it's a mixture of work and luck. I've gotten ego. I will start with the work. I've been in this business for 24 years and have never been laid off, which is in itself a feat if you know what the journalism ministry has been for the last couple of decades. But when anybody got laid off, whenever there were layoffs in the Bay Area, whether it was my company or another one, I tried to be there. I tried to buy the drinks. I tried to open up my network for whoever got laid off and help them in whatever way I could. And so when I finally got laid off for the first time, that came back to me in spades, and that says as much about the Bay Area journalism community as it does about me. This is a wonderful, wonderful community of people who are working a very hard job and are constantly on the edge of getting laid off or seeing their entire news organization dissolve at any moment.

(03:26):

And so the care and the number of people who reached out, the number of people who took me out to coffees and lunches, and just got on calls with me and helped me talk through opportunities and where things were, that really was huge for me. Now the luck part is that the editor in chief of the San Francisco Business Times, before me, announced his retirement the exact same day I got laid off, January 29th, 2025. I was not expecting it. It happened by the end of that day. I had gotten a call saying, Hey, the EIC, the SFPT just announced his retirement. I had talked to A CBJ in the past, made that connection, kind of knowing that my history in both local journalism and business journalism fit this company very well. Even though I was not looking to leave MarketWatch when I spoke to them, I was willing to talk to them and help them get a lay of the land and maybe try to identify some candidates for editors beyond me. That certainly helped. In the end, I talked to them by the end of the week after I got laid off and kind of started this process, and credit to A CBJ for moving Fast. It's not a company known for that. They did move quickly on me, and I really do appreciate it, and hopefully it pays off for them. I certainly will do my best to make it. So

Dave Reddy (04:43):

I think you're going to do just fine. Now, again, you pulled off quite a trick. It's a tough market. It's a particularly tough market for journalism that has been for probably more than a decade now. Any advice for those out there still looking?

Jeremy Owens (04:58):

Tap those networks, go to those coffees, do those lunches. I mean, I feel like as an editor, I've been an editor since I was 25. Part of my job has always been to network and get to know all the journalists in the area in case I need to hire any of them. I know for reporters, they're more spending their time dealing with sources and trying to build sources instead of that network. But after a layoff is the time. If you haven't built that network to come to me, ask me who should I talk to? Can you put me in touch? Right? That's when you can build that network and try to use that network that you've already built. But yeah, just talking to people, that's where you hear about stuff. I heard about this job long before they posted it, right? Because I have spies everywhere. They reach out and they let me know. And yeah, I was talking to them before the ad actually went up. So that is where you can use that and how to use that network. I know heard from journalists, oh, we don't network like other industries like I do, and it does help. And after a layoff, especially, is the time to really make that.

Dave Reddy (06:10):

We'll come back to the new gig and what you're doing exactly in a little bit, but now we're going to go backwards and get back to the beginning. So I think I know this based on what you're wearing, which is an Oakland Coliseum hat, but where, pray tell, did you grow up, sir? Well, it was not

Jeremy Owens (06:27):

Oakland actually. I was born in Georgia, lived in Alabama, and North Carolina before going back to the University of Georgia for college. And I moved to Oakland immediately after graduating from the University of Georgia. My sister had moved out here for grad school, and this was the late nineties. She called me somewhere around 99 when I was a junior and was like, "Yo, graduate and get out here. Ask Jeeves is hiring bums off the street. Everybody I know works there, get out here, I'll get you a job." And of course, I got out here in October of 2000, and the .com bust just calmed down. And so I use that journalism degree whenever I bring up Ask Gees. People just naturally laugh. Oh my God, that is such from

Dave Reddy (07:11):

Another era, the whole Ask Jeeves thing. It's like I'm not sure anyone under the age of 25 even knows what you're talking about. So what did mom and dad do? How many kids? What was growing up in the various southern states you were in?

Jeremy Owens (07:29):

Both my parents ended up being teachers. My mom was a teacher for damn near 40 years. My dad was an engineer when I was born. Didn't care for it too much, the structure of it, the hours. So he went back to school to become a teacher and yeah, that's when I was growing up in Georgia. He got his master's at North Georgia and then got recruited over to the University of Georgia to do his PhD in math education. And when he finished that up, he got a job at University of Alabama where he was from, where my grandmother at the time lived and was going through some health problems. So we moved to Alabama, Tuscaloosa to be exact, and then my grandmother died. We hit the Bush one recession going back even further than ask Gs now, back to the late eighties, early nineties. And the dean at the University of Alabama said, if you don't have tenure, you ain't getting tenure.

(08:20):

My dad was in the process of getting tenure, and that did not sit well with him. He put his resume out there. They eventually came back to him and told him, "Oh no, you were in the track, you're fine." He's like, "Nope, I'm leaving for East Carolina University." So I went to high school in Greenville, North Carolina, where East Carolina University is. By that time, after living in Athens, Tuscaloosa, and Greenville, I basically had a PhD in college towns and decided Athens was the best one available, and I'm right, and went back there for school.

Dave Reddy (08:51):

East Pirates, East Carolina University Pirates, right?

Jeremy Owens (08:52):

Purple pirates, purple pride. We actually lived about a mile from the football stadium and when they score a touchdown, they blow off a huge cannon and every time they blew off that cannon, my whole house shook. I didn't even have to watch the game on TV. I knew when they scored because the house would shake, but yeah. Yeah, and I have one older sister who, as I said, convinced me to move out to Oakland and she's lived out here. We actually live like a mile apart from each other now and live together for many years.

Dave Reddy (09:23):

So, before we get into your college years, what got you interested in storytelling? I'm going to guess maybe with two parents who are teachers, that might've had a part to do with it.

Jeremy Owens (09:33):

Yeah, definitely. And honestly, especially I feel it as an editor. I got right into editing straight out of college, and it's so much of a job of a teacher, but also a journalist is, I mean, you're taking really complex hard things to understand and trying to put it in a digestible format. That's exactly what a teacher does every day. That's exactly what a journalist does every day, especially when you're talking about daily news, the type of legacy newspaper news we're doing, you can't get too deep into it. You got 200 to 600 words usually. You've got to be able to take these really hard things to understand and get it down to some digestible nugget. And so yeah, that really did kind of help. I am definitely friendlier than my dad. My dad's a little bit of a sourpuss sometimes, but my mom is very much talkative. Her maiden name was Coleman. She always said I had the Coleman gift to Gab, and that really helped as well at some point, and I'm able to talk about these things. But yeah, I do think that the skillset of a teacher and a journalist are pretty similar. They use red pens. I used blue pencils, but it's kind of a similar approach.

Dave Reddy (10:46):

By that time, you'd gotten to Athens, Georgia, not Greece, the home of the B-50 twos and REM, among, I'm sure, other bands I'm not thinking of. You were majoring in journalism, you had an interesting minor in African-American studies and history. So, were you thinking journalism, or was there another? Maybe I'll take this minor in that, or was that just something listed?

Jeremy Owens (11:07):

No, I was definitely thinking journalism at the University of Georgia; you can't get into the journalism school until two years in, and they want you to do a very wide range of courses across all the different colleges there before you get in. Now I hated that. I hated the one-on-one level. Courses at the University of Georgia are like a couple of thousand people in a huge room, and it's not individual instruction. I would skip all those. They would sell the notes in a store downtown. I would just go buy the notes and buy the textbook and show up, go the first day, get the syllabus, figure out when the test wasn't show up for that. But with AP scores, I basically tested out of all the one-on-ones in English and history and it just so happened that when I was a junior in high school taking US History, AP US history, it was civil rights era.

(12:00):

I think it was 95, so it was 40 years after Brown V Board. So that was the big track for AP US history and as a kid growing up, white kid growing up in the south, I hadn't really been taught a lot of that history until then. And then I went into AP English the next year and we had a summer reading list and I read Native Son by Richard Wright, still my favorite book, favorite author. I read it that summer and wrote a lot about Richard Wright that year and got into it. So when I got to University of Georgia, because I had tested out of the one oh ones, I was able to take really interesting classes and especially in comparison to those 2000 level classes, I took a comparative African-American literature class figuring I could learn more about Richard Wright, read some more of that era and it was like 20, 25 people and there were fascinating conversations.

(12:44):

We were reading fascinating books, and I just got into it. It was like, well, this is what I can use this two plus years before I get into journalism for is to take more of these classes and balance all the stupid I had to take with actually interesting story. And I did have a professor who tried to talk me into switching over to a history major,r and I was like, my dad's a college professor. I ain't following that track, but I wrote some really good papers back then. It did stretch those muscles a little bit and teach me a little bit about research and developing those ideas and it was fascinating and this era when people are going after critical race, blah, blah, blah, it really did open my mind and I think it is critical to learn about cultures, the wide diversity of America.

(13:35):

And I do believe that some of the best literature I've ever read is African American literature from the 20th century, takes Baldwin and Richard Wright and that whole cohort, man, there's great stuff in there, obviously listen to the old Mississippi Delta Blues music. I got to listen to some of that, and some of it was just fascinating. I did Afro-Hispanic literature, basically Latin American diaspora type stuff, and read some really good books that I never would've read, and got to examine these issues, and that was a great thing. And yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Dave Reddy (14:12):

My classes were not, for the most part, as interesting as that, but the notion of going to journalism school and taking a lot of literature courses and a lot of history courses that open you up to hearing stories, to reading stories, and then writing your opinion or comment on those stories. Yeah, I mean, I'm amazed people can get out of journalism school without having done that and be good at what they do. That was the foundation for me.

Jeremy Owens (14:43):

Yeah, definitely. It's much better than Sociology 101; some of the sociology professors are out there, which is fine for those sociologists.

Dave Reddy (14:49):

Right. So you mentioned earlier your sister got you to come out here, perhaps at the wrong time, but you made the most of it. So you worked for 15 years at Local Bay Area papers, the Fremont Argus, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Mercury News. And you talked earlier about how being an editor is being a teacher, but you were editing and managing teams out of college. What was that like? I remember the newsroom experience. Journalists aren't always the kindest people to their editors. I know I wasn't.

Jeremy Owens (15:24):

No, it was interesting. I got my first gig on a copy desk out in Pleasanton. It was a joint copy desk of a lot of different newspapers. And so I was sitting there, and about two years in, what they did was they had one person who was kind of in charge of the Argus, and one person who was in charge of the Daily Review, and one person who was in charge of the Tri-Valley Herald, and they called them news editors. And so I worked with them. I saw, I was like, I could do that. And it was interesting; this doesn't exist anymore. So a little bit of journalism history for your listeners here, Dave, you get a job on a copy desk straight out of college, and usually a couple of years in, it's kind of like, okay, do you want to stay on this track or do you want to go be an entry-level?

(16:06):

And I kind of had that option. I'd been there two or three years, I think about two years, and I had made connections with all the editors of the different papers and all this other stuff. A couple of people left and went to become entry-level reporters, night cops, stuff like that. A couple of people moved up to news editor and so I kind of saw that happening. I decided to go the news editor route, and when I think back on my career, this is actually the decision point, and I didn't realize it at the time as a 24-year-old idiot, that was the decision point that was really going to determine where my career went from there. But I looked at it, it was like, okay, do I want to get paid the same? And at the time, no lie, I was getting paid less than $30,000 a year living in the Bay Area.

(16:48):

My days off were like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday was my Monday. It was not a great gig. And I saw the news editor route as a way to get paid more and have a better schedule. Now if I'd gone the other way, I probably would've ended up as a night cops reporter working the same schedule with the same crappy days off at the same crappy salary. And so it was a short-term decision. As I get to this age, I'm like, it would've been nice if I'd had a few years actually reporting as I'm managing tons of reporters, but the news under route and bumped up, and yeah, I was 25 when I got my first management gig. I was the youngest person on that copy desk, and I was managing five other people who were older than me. I remember the first one I hired. I was thinking, oh, she's younger than me. Yay. And then she got told me how old she was. I was like, you're older than me. Still dang. But it's a prove-it situation, and it really taught me as a manager, you have to prove yourself to your employees. It's not the other way around. You can't expect your employees to prove themselves to you. You have to prove yourself to them and then tell them what you expect of them and have them live up to that. And so I had to learn those lessons pretty quickly and pretty young.

Dave Reddy (18:04):

We talked about the Merc. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Merc. I worked there for five years on doing sports while also freelancing. Speaking of lousy salaries, I have always felt that it just missed this gigantic opportunity to be the paper of record for tech in the way that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times with entertainment. The other papers out there are the paper of record for the industry in their town. Do you agree or disagree?

Jeremy Owens (18:37):

I wouldn't put that on the Mercury News. I would put that on Alden Capital. The Merc actually did a lot of really good things back in the nineties and really set themselves up to be that, and it didn't carry through. There was no investment in it, especially once Auden Capital got its hands on it. And I will say when I worked there from 2010 to 2015, what I eventually ended up doing is taking over their afternoon business newsletter. Alright, and what you should take from this and the morning newsletter was the more popular one. Good morning Silicon Valley was around for years and years, but this was well before email newsletters became the way that people got their news, and the Merc was doing them for a decade before I got there. They were smart. They were out there, and they just couldn't invest in it.

(19:29):

They did not get the investment in it. Those newsletters don't really exist anymore. Now people use newsletters; they've kind of given up on Legacy. Some of their legacy business newsletters, they do have their other newsletters, they have developed new newsletters, but they were there. They were doing this stuff that they needed to do, and just the investment wasn't there. They did not continue with it. Yeah, I mean just look at the staff, Dave. When I started on the Biz desk, I was the online business editor for that staff. There were three editors and roughly a dozen reporters. Right now, at the Mercury News, there are two business reporters and no dedicated business editors. You're talking about less than 15 years to see the decimation of a department that has quite a legacy in Silicon Valley of covering the tech industry, and it's just been wiped out by the lack of investment by the owners of the Mercury News.

Dave Reddy (20:31):

Yeah, it's an absolute shame and I was there from 93 to 98 and sports was next to business and of course we never talked to each other because sports guys were really funny that way, but business was where it was happening. There had to be 30 people at that point and also David Arnold back then major credit to him, he started Mercury Center, which was an online and everybody thought he was nuts In 1993 he had an online version. Gee, how crazy is that,

Jeremy Owens (21:02):

Right? They fought and I got to tell you that staff I worked with so accomplished and they've gone on to great things. I mean Dana Hall over at Bloomberg, Troy Wilberton has bounced around a little bit and now is over at The Examiner. There's so many people at Reuters, at Bloomberg, at the Journal, Heather Somerville at the Journal, Julia Love at Bloomberg. After going to Reuters, there are just so many people who went through that shop and learned how to do what they do and then moved on and then they were not replaced.

Dave Reddy (21:30):

Yeah, yeah. I mean it goes on and on and on. Different question about the same idea from a local journalism perspective, you're a former and now current and current local journalist. Needless to say, one of the reasons we had the conversation about all the layoffs earlier on was that local newspapers are a mess if they exist. I'm wondering how many of those titles you worked at actually are still out there. I can

Jeremy Owens (21:54):

See only the Argus is dead. The Mercury News maintains the San Francisco examiner maintains the Argus still lives on as a weekly, but no, they've all been consolidated into the East Bay Times.

Dave Reddy (22:07):

I think that's dangerous for American society. What do you think?

Jeremy Owens (22:10):

Oh yeah, man, local journalism and there's a little bit of a tail hags the dog here. I don't feel like people understand how important local journalism should be to them and they don't pay for it. When I talk to people about what news they pay for, they say the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or these big national papers and I ask them how much of what you read in there every day actually affects your everyday life. If you read the local newspaper, you would find something in there every week that's going to touch you in some way. Either it already is or it will in the future, but a lot of times it's boring. What I try to tell people is that news is boring and we're trying to guss it up and make it exciting, but go cover a city council meeting.

(22:52):

It's not that exciting. But that city council meeting is going to have a greater effect on your life than the great exciting things that are happening in Washington dc but also because people have not been paying for local news and because vulture capitalists like Auden Capital are coming in and sucking the marrow out of these civic institutions, it isn't as good. They aren't at every city council meeting and that's very sad. And so it's kind of one of those things of how do you have local journalism without the money? There's a lot of interesting ways to go, A lot of nonprofit kind of attempts and things like that. The rich people are instead trying to start up new things instead of going out and rescuing these local legacy civic institutions and doing stuff with them. And I do. It's sad and from my vantage point within the industry, I've watched it happen.

(23:44):

I talked about that Mercury News Business desk I started on that was 15 people and is now two. That first job I talked about at the Pleasanton Tri-Valley Herald where it was a large desk for several papers, there were probably 40 people to 50 people working in that office when I started. That is now five people sitting down in the desert in southern California doing it for more than a dozen papers. It was 40 to 50 doing it for three and a half and now it's five doing it for a dozen or more and that's what we're dealing with in terms of local journalism. It's just gotten absolutely slammed in my career of nearly 25 years. I've seen that kind of change and it's sad to see and it's sad to watch.

Dave Reddy (24:35):

In 2015 you left the Merck for MarketWatch, obviously a national paper. How much of what you're talking about led to that move or was it just an opportunity for you to do something different?

Jeremy Owens (24:46):

It was an opportunity to do something different and get paid what I deserved by that point. I feel like people should talk about their salaries more, so I'll talk about my salaries. That whole time I was in local journalism, I said I started at less than 30 k. Once I finally got up and to the examiner with a decent management title, I crested 40 K and for the next decade I was stuck between 40 and 60. I just could not, 60 was the ceiling in the Bay Area I could not get past in the Bay Area. Luckily Oakland was cheap back then. It got popular all of a sudden in the 2010s and got more expensive. But yeah, MarketWatch reached out and it was interesting. The Merck moved me over to business. I started on the copy desk there and I was kind of like, I'm tired of working nights.

(25:33):

I'd like to do something more. And so they moved me over to this online business editor position, gave me a newsletter. I really enjoyed that. I taught myself corporate finance. I kind of figured out that afternoon newsletter, if we had the morning newsletter and it was all the news in the morning, where can I find fresh new for this afternoon newsletter? Well, all these companies report earnings right after the bell at one o'clock. I send out the newsletter at 3 3 30, I can cover these earnings and that's fresh news for this newsletter and then I can link out and aggregate the rest of the news that has happened during that day. So I really had to teach myself. I've never covered business. I mean, let me be dead honest, Dave. The business section of the newspaper was the one I threw away unless it had the funnies in it.

(26:19):

I went front section to local, to sports, to arts, to funnies, and I was done and I never read business. I never cared about business, so I kind of learned how to read an SEC filing. I fell in love with Edgar, the SEC database. I learned how to read a corporate balance sheet and report on corporate earnings and MarketWatch saw that and saw that. I had had years of newsroom management. If you remember, MarketWatch was established in San Francisco and it sold to Dow Jones, I don't know, somewhere in the two thousands. And so they had kind of been in this long process of changing the headquarters, changing the base of it from San Francisco to New York where the Wall Street Journal is and all the other Dow Jones properties are kind of headquartered, but they never really established San Francisco as a bureau, and so they were really looking for somebody to come in and do that. They saw me as somebody who had managed a newsroom who understood corporate finance and tech and could come in and be tech editor and San Francisco bureau chief, and they offered me good money to the America's credit. They matched the first offer I got, MarketWatch went higher and they weren't going to match that, and it was like, thank you. You didn't pay me enough while I was there, but you helped me get even more on the way out the door. So I really appreciated, but it did. It

Dave Reddy (27:37):

Increased my salary ceiling going to market watch and you did quite a few things there. You were podcasting, et cetera. Now coming full circle in our conversation, you're at the business times. I know you've only been there three weeks. This is a bit of an unfair question, but do you have a mission in mind yet as editor in chief of what you want this to become?

Jeremy Owens (27:58):

I'd like to modernize it a little bit. This is still kind of a print focus newsroom a little bit. They've definitely changed over previous years and it is going to be tough. I've got to get used to this market watch did get me out on TV and on radio and eventually had me develop a podcast and host it while I was there, and that was good. With a CBJ and the San Francisco Business Times specifically, events are the big thing. That's really where they found a way to generate revenue beyond news is through events, and so I'm going to have to be out and about and meeting the public a lot more. That is not what I've done in my career, right? For the first 10, 15 years, I was the guy in the newsroom. The reporters went out, interfaced with the public and they were calling back into me.

(28:49):

They were sending me the copy. I was the one there to help them take care of that. With MarketWatch doing more TV and radio and podcasting still wasn't going out in public and having to talk to 50 people and make those connections and stuff like that. That's more of what is here. So that's really on my mind is this is a different gig than I've had in the past and I've got to get used to that side of it. But yeah, San Francisco Business Times has been a tradition in San Francisco for so long. I want to live up to that. That's really what I'm coming in here thinking is they've spent decades ingratiating themselves with the business culture here and explaining what's happening inside San Francisco, and I know that history and I want to live up to that history more than anything. It's not coming in here and turning this into my own. I'm not coming in here guns blazing. You must do by way. Right? No, I feel like they have done a really good job. They have a very good profile here. They have a good reputation here and there are legacy businesses here that trust the business times to tell them what's going on and I want to make sure I can live up to that.

Dave Reddy (30:00):

A couple of general tech questions. I know the San Francisco Business Times is not all about tech, but you have a tech background and B, let's face it, I'm going to guess a pretty good percentage of what you guys are going to cover or what you guys cover is tech. So past a hundred days, almost everyone in tech media and media in general is covering Musk, a little less musk lately, Trump, DC executive orders, CISA or not, it's indisputable. How long do you expect this to last? Is this a few more weeks or is this the whole administration where four

Jeremy Owens (30:39):

Years. I mean I covered tech during the first Trump administration. It never stopped and the thing is people forget about stuff that happened that the thing that we covered really extensively in the first Trump administration was the attempt by Broadcom to buy Qualcomm and I dunno if you remember this Dave, but it was quite a drama. It ended up getting squashed by the Trump administration eventually for national security concerns involving China, which was just made no sense. Broadcom was at the time domiciled in Indonesia, maybe it was somewhere in Asia, but it was not China and they were basically just doing that to avoid taxes. They were a US company and they were in the process of red domicile to the United States as this was happening, and so it just made no sense. It was hilarious to cover and try to explain this to people and nobody remembers it.

(31:39):

I'm the only one I think who remembers this entire drama, but stuff like that happened throughout the four years. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be chaotic. There's going to be efforts that go nowhere. There's going to be efforts that do go somewhere. I mean, remember the TikTok ban started under the first Trump administration. We're still dealing with it five, six years later, so I don't expect this to end. This is not the first a hundred days is chaotic and then it's going to calm down. No, this is how they operate is just by launching darts at things and then letting it all fall apart and trying to put it back together. This is what it's going to be like until 2028 and people need to get ready for it Again, I covered tech from 2016 to 2020. I remember what that was like, and so

Dave Reddy (32:34):

We're just

Jeremy Owens (32:35):

Doing it. Again,

Dave Reddy (32:35):

I'm one of the few people who did live the Qualcomm Broadcom thing and I to be careful because at the time represented Qualcomm as a member of the Webers Shamwick family and while we were not Weber Shamwick was not directly involved in the public affairs part of the business. I do remember getting a call. It was Oscar Knight getting a call. Yeah, Trump shut it down and now of course we represent Broadcom, so I have to be very, very careful about what I say about this.

Jeremy Owens (33:07):

Well then I definitely brought up something that you'll be one of the few people who I think they're both fantastic companies, said on

Dave Reddy (33:18):

Say that with your whole chest, Dave, let's talk about AI in journalism and in life. Is it good, is it bad? Is it both? And how are you planning to use it or do you use it at the business Times? The business Times

Jeremy Owens (33:34):

Is integrated, an AI headline generator, basically when I opened up the CMS, there are a dozen fields. We've got a news headline, an email headline, a search headline, a meta description, a tease, a social tease, like all these things that three bullets underneath the headline and you can hit a button. This says generate AI suggestions. You do not have to hit it. You can hit it. It puts suggestions underneath those fields that you can either accept or dismiss. I tend to dismiss most of them. It's not incredibly smart right now, but these are the kinds of things I've actually advocated for and I advocated for my time at Dow Jones as well. Tools to assist journalists, not AI tools to do journalism. I don't believe AI is anywhere close to doing journalism. Actual journalism, and I'll give an example of something we did at Dow Jones, if you know what A 13 F is, Dave.

(34:30):

This is the quarterly filings from big investors that detail what they're invested in right now. It was something that we love to report on at MarketWatch, but it was really hard. These filings are just a list of numbers and to figure out what's important about them, you have to compare them to the previous quarter and then you can figure out, oh, Warren Buffett sold a bunch of Apple stock last quarter. Investors will care about that. But it took a long time. We developed an AI solution that as soon as A 13 F hit, it would compare to the previous 13 F and give you a readout of what changed from the previous 13 F. That's extremely useful and cut the amount of time we used to look at those 13 Fs tremendously. These are the type of tools I want to see for journalists to get rid of some of the grunt work that is not actual journalism.

(35:27):

And another example, I did a lot of earnings coverage at MarketWatch. I was going to fax that to find estimates from analysts I going to press releases and SEC filings to get the numbers from the company. You could totally have an AI solution that rips all that out and puts it in a file and the journalists can use that so that they can do the more high value work it is. I did not go to journalism school to figure out how to copy and paste numbers from one data source into a CMS. I'm fine if they could develop AI solutions to do that, but I don't want the AI goal, the goal of that AI solution to be we're going to grab all this and then publish the story. No, no. Give me the three or four graphs there that quicker than I can do it.

(36:17):

Let me double check it versus those sources. That's something I do that is journalism and then I can focus on the high value stuff beyond just copy and pasting numbers. That's what I want to see now, is that actually I was going to, no, and Dow Jones MarketWatch puts out a bunch of AI developed stock movers every day. If you look at the bell, it's just like Apple Stock moved X today, and the copy is just how it moved the links to any news we've done on Apple, the 52 week high, all that kind of stuff. I was not that unhappy about that because the one place it really goes is into Apple stocks and Apple News, which is kind of AI generated for the readers. So we're feeding the bots with bots like, here you go. Right? But yeah, I definitely want to see AI use to free up journalists to do the high value work of journalism, but I don't want to see AI used to do journalism.

(37:17):

I don't think it can right now, and I don't think it really will. What I do see eventually is it taking on some of that just breaking news. Breaking news is basically this got announced, here's the background on this. AI is not good at it yet. It will be eventually, but I still would like to not have that go directly to a reader. It still needs to go through a set of eyes like mine that has spent decades learning what this is supposed to be, knows how to double check those facts and make sure it's not hallucinating some background. But yeah, that's where I see it going. And then there's the higher level than daily breaking news that I don't think it'll ever be able to do. I mean, AI is not going to take a commercial real estate person out for coffee and find out some stuff that has not been announced and then rush back to the office and find a second source and get that news solidified and then write it and get it out. That's not going to happen. So that's kind of where I see it headed.

Dave Reddy (38:19):

It's funny, I've been reticent to use AI at work. I mean, we use it for research. I'm concerned about the use of AI in journalism, but I got to tell you, the 20-year-old Dave Reddy who was the editor of the sports editor of the American University Eagle and sucked at writing headlines, could totally have used your AI headline generator. Yeah,

Jeremy Owens (38:44):

Like I said, I tend to dismiss a lot of those. Sometimes it'll come up with something like, that's a decent approach, but I'm going to take the idea and twist it like this. That's more, it's just an idea factory, but I'm still writing the headline. That's where AI is right now and where I'd like it to kind of be is assistive not replacement. That's something everybody who works with AI talks about a lot, or at least they used to. Now the tech is out there, oh no, we're going to replace everybody. It's like, yeah, you're just trying to sell something. I think this is going to be an assistive technology for a while before it is able to replace anybody.

Dave Reddy (39:23):

All right. Well, we've had a lot of serious talk, but as always, I like to end with a fun question. You got to choose here, my friend, bay Area or the South.

Jeremy Owens (39:33):

I've made that choice Bay area all day every day I do. Going back down to the south. I miss the food. I miss Waffle House more than I should probably say. But yeah, if we could just get Waffle House in the bay, I'd be happy with it. The Bay Area is a fantastic place. I'd lived out here probably about nine, 10 years, and when I left the examiner, I kind of moved away for a little bit. I lived in Vegas for a minute. I was in San Diego and SoCal a little bit. I was in New York a little bit, kind of seeing where do I want to be? My sister had a little bit of trouble and I came back to the Bay to help her out and took one walk around Lake Merritt and was like, this is where I want to be. This is where I want to be for life.

(40:18):

This is where I want to build my life and stabilize here and moved right back. It is. They're great, great, great things about the Bay Area. And I got to tell you the funny thing here, Dave, working in San Francisco, I always used to be the East Bay champion. I was always talking trash about San Francisco saying that Oakland was better and all this kind of stuff. And then all of a sudden, San Francisco started getting this negative reputation, and it was a Fox News talking point. The funny thing was they were talking about San Francisco the same way I had talked about San Francisco for years, and I was like, wait, no. And it was more like they were acting like this just happened. No, San Francisco's always had issues and problems with homelessness and drug use, and this has been a problem for the entire time I've lived out here, and people suddenly in 2020 and 2021 talking about, oh, this is hard. How did this happen? So this is what it's always been. So I've really turned into a defender of San Francisco in a way that I never was previously, but I do love San Francisco. It is like I can talk trash about my sibling, but you can't. That reminds me, I was like, yeah, you don't get to talk about my city like that. You can't,

(41:42):

Right? I can say that, but what are you do in New York, Fox news person? No, no. Right? So yeah, no, the Bay is fantastic. I would say that New Orleans is probably my only city that I would consider on a par, just from uniqueness standpoint. And what comes out of there with New Orleans is music with here it's tech and thought. But yeah, no, I absolutely love the Bay and we'll take it all day every day.

Dave Reddy (42:15):

That's a new one. San Francisco, the New Orleans of the West. So with that, Jeremy, thanks. It doesn't

Jeremy Owens (42:22):

Feel that much like an American city, right? New Orleans feels so different than any other city in the us. San Francisco feels so different than any other city in the us. There are a few like that. Vegas is definitely different than just about anywhere now, that kind of thing. But yeah, no, come to the bay. Anybody listening to this has never been to the Bay Area, get out here, experience it. It is a wonderful place, and it isn't just San Francisco. Oakland is a fantastic city. It's one of the true American cities, and everybody should experience that as well. I live in Alameda, beautiful, beautiful place. Come over and see it. I really, for anybody outside the Bay Area listening to this, don't listen to the talking points about how dirty and nasty San Francisco is. It's a beautiful, wonderful city, one of the jewels of the United States, and come visit us.

Dave Reddy (43:11):

Well, with that PSA for the San Francisco Tourism Board, as well as the Chamber of Commerce and whoever's selling houses these days, we will wrap. Loves me now. Yeah, that's fine. Look, I got to sell my house eventually, so you just keep talking about how awesome, so I can make more money. Jeremy, thanks so much. This was a lot of fun, very informative and a great interview. You're just as good on the other side of the mic as you are on my side of the mic, so thanks for your time. Really appreciate it.

Jeremy Owens (43:43):

Thanks for having me, Dave. And to anybody out there listening, subscribe to the San Francisco Business Times or your local American City Business Journal. We're in 40 markets nationwide, and we will tell you what's going into that empty storefront down the street, and anything else you're wondering about a local business. Get to know your local journalists. We did talk about local journalism. What I didn't really say there, Dave, is it takes the community to make a local newspaper spark. You've got to talk with your local journalists. We are people, right? And you can reach out to us. We listen to the members of the community. You've got to reach out to them. You can make your local news better by being a part of it. Please do. If you're in San Francisco, you're in the business community, reach out to me. Let me know what's happening in your industry. Let me know what we need to be focusing on. That is the way that local journalism has always worked, and I feel like people don't think of it like that. I hope they'll,

Dave Reddy (44:38):

You got to love the passion. Jeremy, thanks so much for being on. Appreciate you Dave. I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to our guest, Jeremy Owens of the San Francisco Business Times. Join us again 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 BigValley Marketing and how we identify the B2B tech top 200, be sure to drop me an email at d ready@bigvalley.co. That's DRE double DY at BigValley, 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.