Chris Preimesberger, Reporter/Editor at Large

Chris Preimesberger is one of the deans of tech journalism, known especially for his 15-year run at E-Week, including nearly 10 as the magazine's editor-in-chief. But tech reporting is, in many ways, the second half of his career.

He started in the 70s as a sports writer for the LA Daily News, where he covered a guy named John Elway as a high school baseball player, and later USC, UCLA, and the pre-Showtime Lakers. He did a stint as a sports information director at Stanford, he spent 10 years at the old Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto covering everything, it seems, but tech. And he even ran a desktop publishing business, which indirectly led him to starting his tech journalism career in 1999, since he genuinely understood software development.

Now a freelancer for several titles, Chris joined us to share tales about Cary Grant and Milton Berle, his father's connection to Marilyn Monroe, and what he considers the three watershed moments in technology for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech.

I'm Dave Reddy, Head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Chris. Here's our chat. Enjoy. 

Transcript

Dave Reddy 0:00

Chris Preimesberger is one of the deans of tech journalism, known especially for his 15-year run at e week, including nearly 10 as the magazine's editor-in-chief. But tech reporting is in many ways the the second half of his career. He started in the 70s as a sports writer for the LA Daily News, where he covered a guy named John Elway as a high school baseball player and later USC, UCLA, and the pre-showtime Lakers. He did a stint as a sports information director, that's our PR for sports at Stanford. He spent ten years at the Old Peninsula Times Tribune in Palo Alto covering everything, it seems, but tech. And he even ran a desktop publishing business, which indirectly led him to starting his tech journalism career in 1999 since he genuinely understood software development. Now a freelancer for several titles, Chris joined us to share tales about Kerry Grant and Milton Burrell, his father's connection to Marilyn Monroe, and what he considers the three watershed moments in technology 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 Chris. Here's our chat with Chris. Enjoy.

Speaker 1:45

Well, I know where I am on the on the totem pole now, Dave. So it's okay.

Dave Reddy 1:50

You're at the top, sir. You are at the top. So anyway, thanks for joining. I really, really appreciate it. So, you know, you've been in journalism for quite a while. I'll let you tell people how long if you want to.

Speaker 2:06

I'm not I'm Dave, I'm not ashamed of saying I've been a career journalist, and it's now 51 years since I graduated from Pepperdine. 51. Can you believe it?

Dave Reddy 2:20

That's awesome. Now, did you grow up down there in LA or did you grow up up here in the Bay?

Speaker 2:25

No, I I born and raised in LA, so native Californian. Went to two colleges in uh Southern California, LA Valley College, which is where I really learned journalism, and then transferred to Pepperdine, where I learned journalism theory and journalism law. And so you can talk to me about torts, but that'll probably be another another episode.

Dave Reddy 2:47

Yeah, I don't think that'll be a winning topic, but you know, good to oh, you know that. I may call you off the legal advice.

Speaker 2:53

I am not a lawyer, but I do know a little bit about libel and slander and that kind of thing. And truth, truth in broadcasting. So I'll try to stick to truth as much as I can today.

Dave Reddy 3:07

I appreciate that. What did you what did Mum and Dad do down in LA?

Speaker 3:11

Well, my dad worked for the city of Los Angeles in several different positions. He ran a senior citizen center, he ran a he worked with the LAPD during the time of um, well, I think it was during the yeah, it was during the time of OJ when he was out on the streets. And there's some stories there. My dad went to high school with uh Norma Jean Baker, later to be known as Marilyn Monroe, the advanced way. Yeah, and his best friend, Bill McCoy's last name now. Anyway, his best friend, his study buddy, he used to go over to his house to study for different classes, was the brother, Jim Doherty, of Marilyn's first husband. So I said, Well, Dad, do you remember her coming over to visit your friend's brother? And you know, kind of kind of thing. Did he did she ever come over and visit? He said, Oh, yes, I remember her. She wore a sweater very well. That was that was his interaction with uh the the the Marilyn Man Williams Russery Fame, pre-interview.

Speaker 1 4:20

Yeah, that is that's pretty cool.

Dave Reddy 4:22

Yeah, I've heard some cool things on this podcast, but that's one of the cool that you're so you're one generation removed from having a relationship with uh Marilyn Monroe. Yeah, all right, right. So, in terms of Pepperdine, I first of all I'm just wondering because you know, I I was down in LA for vacation recently and went to the beach across the street from Pepperdine. How the heck do you get any work done when you're across the street from the beach?

Speaker 4:46

We didn't, and I'll tell you a story. This is great. I was there early when the campus had just opened in the mid-70s, and uh we didn't have any grass or trees then, so you can imagine just buildings on the side of a hill. I mean, is there wasn't there wasn't a lot of attractiveness to it, but it was still a beautiful location, and the head of the journalism department, Tom Nelson, who'd worked for the LA Times for many years, recruited me there, and I wanted to study with him. So uh I figured, well, okay, it's Malibu, it's the beach. You know, I'm a student, it's this sounds like a pretty good place to go. They gave me a full scholarship, too. So I was uh pleased with that. First, so um I moved I moved there in June before September. Okay, I'm moving to get a student job in June in the warehouse, where I'm a grip basically, picking up things and putting down things. And then I find out that Tom Nelson has has been let go by pepperdyne. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, that's the reason I came here. It was this guy. Anyway, I was not pleased, but I was already roped in, so I stayed. And the the person who replaced him was not nearly as qualified, but I stayed anyway and got my degree in two years. But funny story, I was while I was a grip that summer, I got this call with this other guy to go over to this house in Beverly Hills and pick up some furniture and some books that this family was donating to Peperdyne. So we hop in the truck and we drive up to Sunset Boulevard and Roxford on the corner, and we pull in, and it's the house of the former house of Clark Gable and his wife Kay. And Kay Gables, it turns out, was a big pepernine donor. She was very gracious. She let us in. We she gave us lemonade and cookies, and then we lifted some furniture and books into the truck and took them to the to the uh courtyard. Later, I I get a call from uh our oh well later in the year, I get a call from our our assignment for our editor at the Pepperdine Graphic, which is the name of the paper. And uh he goes, Look, we got this story. We found out that Kay Gable is a big donor of pepperdine. We should go do an interview with her. I understand that you met her. I said, Yeah. So uh we ended up going back doing an interview with her and a story on her in the newspaper. While I was there, I got to hold Clark Gable's Oscar, his Oscar for It Happened One Night in 1934. And then um while we were there, Mrs. Gable was very nice to us, and she said, Um, if you like to come back sometime, I'll show you the director's cut of Gone with the Wind. It's five hours long. And we never did go back. I should have. No, no, but uh the reporter and I should have, we should have I was actually the photographer on this one. Took her picture anyway. Anyway, it's a long story, but we didn't we didn't go back, and we should have.

Dave Reddy 7:51

But that's five hour directors. You could probably get that somewhere, but that is that's a lot had gone with the wind.

Speaker 7:57

That's a lot gone with the wind. Yeah. So anyway, so anyway, Pepperdine, we were there during the Watergate years, and of course, we were always investigating everything. All journalists were investigating everything back then, and uh we uh came across a slush fund that we found out that Pepperdine had for its high for its high-rolling developers, developing people. And we thought, oh, this, I don't know about this. We we thought maybe we should investigate this because we're all infused with the Watergate mentality. And we thought, well, wait a second, we're this is our this is our publisher, you know. They they they have the purse strings here, they have our scholarships. We can't just investigate them. Maybe we'll find out something not good. So we decided to get some advice on this story. We want to do the story and investigate something, but we didn't want to get in trouble. We had a very special guest speaker in our classes. She would come in about once every quarter. Well, we were in the trimester, so every try, she would come in and and do a speaking engagement, tell us about her career, and give us advice on things and answer questions. Her name is Adela Rogers St. John's. Okay. Now, I don't know if you know that name, but she was Wim Randolph Hearst's first female reporter. No way. She she was the first one to interview Wallace Simpson and the former King of England after they ab after he abdicated. Wow. She was also the she was a sports writer. It's an amazing career. I'll just go quickly. She was a sports writer, she did everything for William Randolph Hearst. She worked in Hollywood, she helped write screenplays occasionally. But the thing I remember most is it was her idea to have two big two major football programs meet that I've never met that had never met before in a special game every year, USC versus Notre Dame. It was her idea. She wrote this in a column. It happened in 1925, and it's been happening ever since. And anyway, it's a long story. She's really interesting. Anyway, she came and we went to actually went over to her place in Malibu, where she was living with her son. By this time she was 75 years old or 80 years old. And no, older than that, she was almost 90. Anyway, she said, we asked her for advice on the story that we thought we were going to write. She said, No, you don't ever write anything against your publisher, no matter how bad it might seem, no matter how unruly or how untouched it might be. You don't want to write that story. So we took that advice and we're glad we did. We kept our scholarships.

Dave Reddy 10:56

Don't bite the hand that feeds you, especially when you're in college. As a professional, you can get away with that, maybe. Speaking of sports writing, so your first gig, I think, out of Pepperdine, you got a job at the LA Daily News. A lot of past sports writers on this show, including, of course, me. Yeah. And you're covering sports in the late 70s. You know, you mentioned USC earlier. You're covering both college and pro. I remember growing up and watching those USC UCLA games, late 70s, early 80s. That was must-watch television. Yeah. Keith Jackson doing the play-by-play. That was back when those two programs were always good. Yep. That must have been a blast. Was sports your original plan? Is that or did you fall into that? No, sports.

Speaker 11:38

Well, I the first job I got was I was a copyboy at the Daily News. That's what that's everybody had to be a copy boy, right? You tore the wire pages off, you got coffee for the editors, you answered the phone, you did, you know, whatever. I anyway, um, true story. I am I had written a few feature stories for the news section on the side when I had time. And I'm I at this time I was at the right place at the right time, okay. I'm in the men's room, and yeah, I'm standing at one of the urinals, okay. I'm standing right next to the sports editor there, and we're doing our thing, and I said, because I hadn't met our the sports editor before. I knew who he was, but I hadn't met him. And I turned to him as we were washing our hands, and I said, You know, does your brother play at Notre Dame High School? Uh, because he Notre Dame High School is a huge, it's still a major school in the sports school in the San Fernando Valley, right? He goes, Yeah, he does. And I said, Yeah, I saw that he, yeah, he had like 130 yards the other day against so-and-so team. He was this guy was surprised that I had known this anyway. So I introduced myself to him that way. Two weeks later, I get a note, and he wants me to come up interview for a sports writing job in his department.

Speaker 1 13:04

So cool.

Speaker 13:05

So apparently, he had looked up my background. I had been a sports editor in college and I'd written quite a bit. Anyway, he hired me and I moved from Cobby Boy to sports department, and I had to cover the first year I had to cover high schools. Everybody covers high schools, and I covered John Lway in high school when he was a baseball player at Granat Hills High. He was the LA City player of the year, not once but twice. And he was a great quarterback too, but he was also a great baseball player. I didn't cover him as a high school football player. Baseball. Anyway, I got to know him then, and then later I got to know him at Stanford when we worked, we we worked together at Stanford. But that first year I did high school, and then second year I got the USC UCLA beat to cover all the uh football and basketball games, and then a year after that I added the Lakers beat. So I had like a lot of beats at once, and they overlapped a lot of times, so we had to schedule carefully. But I covered the Lakers when Kareem was the uh center and Jerry West was the coach, and I got to know Kareem a little bit. He was very retiring, he didn't do interviews or step forward very much, but it's fun to follow his substack column today. He's very smart and very, very good writer, he's very bright, yeah. And uh, so that was fun covering the Lakers. The this one season I covered them, it was a total, a total ridiculous year. That was the year that Kermit Washington punched Rudy Tomjanovich and broke his jaw in three places. On December 9th, 1977, I was right there on the sideline, and the before these the the press row was right on the court, so I was right there, and I saw it happen and I didn't hear it because it did you didn't hear anything, it just such a solid hit, it just wrecked his face. He was never the same after that. And I think I think uh Kermit got fined $60,000, which is little or nothing today, but in 77 it was anyway. I was at that, and then the very first game of the year, though, Kareem and Kent Benson, who was a rookie center for uh I think Milwaukee. Oh, wait, no, I for oh anyway, Kareem.

Speaker 1 15:43

I remember him from the Bulls.

Speaker 15:45

Okay, he was with the Bulls, all right. Kareem punched Kent Benson, broke his wrist, and was out for 21 games. That that was the first game of the year. I remember that. And then the Rudy Tomjanovich thing and Kermit Washington thing happened, and then a month later, Jamal Wilkes' daughter drowned in their family pool. Oh, I remember that. All these things happened within a space of like two months, right? And it just it just ruined their season, as you might imagine. Yeah, and it was not it was just horrible. Anyway, we struggled through that, and they made it to the first round of the playoffs and lost right away. They were just not into the season after that.

Dave Reddy 16:28

Yeah, that's a lot of tragedy and and tough stuff to go through. When it comes to basketball, yeah, right.

Speaker 16:48

He was a specimen. He was 6'10. He weighed about he weighed about 250. He was amazing.

Dave Reddy 16:56

And you didn't want to my my baseball/slash quarterback story is when I was covering preps in 1993, I covered a certain catcher at Sarah High School. Do you know who that was? Well, what in what year? 1993.

Speaker 17:14

Catcher? I don't know.

Dave Reddy 17:16

But again, he he he became an extraordinarily famous quarterback, maybe the most famous quarterback.

Speaker 17:22

Oh, Tom Brady?

Dave Reddy 17:24

Yeah. He was a he was a catcher? Yeah, a catcher or a first baseman. I think he was a catcher. He was a he also was a great baseball player. I mean, I think he was a catcher, if I remember correctly. He had a can of an arm, so that would have made sense to put him a catcher, right? Of course. Although, of course, he was probably breaking his fingers. But yeah, he he he chose football over baseball, and I'm really happy about that given that I'm a Patriots fan. Um, now you to your you mentioned earlier that you worked at Stanford, so you did a little bit of PR for a while, and I know you sometimes still do that. You you went to you moved up here.

Speaker 17:59

I moved up here because Stanford offered me the job to be in the athletic department.

Dave Reddy 18:04

Gotcha. And you're an assistant SID, which for those who don't know the sports lingo, that basically is a sports information director, which is sports PR. Right. How did it come about? How did were you looking to get out of sports writing and into you know into PR? Were you looking to get up here? What what was I had come up?

Speaker 18:23

I had come up a year before to look at a job offer at the Times Tribune of all places, and it it didn't work out because we wanted to move back up here because my wife Becky is from Woodside, and her family is in this area, was in this area. So and we were really looking to get out of the LA area because for a lot of reasons. Back then, we didn't have the you know the smog devices on cars that we have now. The air in 19 from in the 70s, all through the 70s, was awful.

Speaker 1 19:00

Right.

Speaker 19:00

You couldn't go outside and not have to rub your eyes, it was terrible. We decided early on that we had had one child by then, we were not gonna raise our kids in Los Angeles. Now, if you go back to LA, it's improved a lot. It's much better, it's much better, and it's taken two generations to do it. But anyway, we decided to leave when that came up here to the Times Tribune job, didn't work out. The next year, I get a call from Bob Rose at Stanford. Bob is a sports information director there and a former college buddy of mine. We went to Peppernine together and we graduated the same year. He called me and he said, Hey, are you are you thinking about moving up here? And I said, Yeah, we'd like to. Anyway, I accepted it. We took a pay cut to work at Stanford. Can you believe that?

Dave Reddy 19:51

I mean, it's funny you say that because I when I got into PR, I actually ended up making one and a half times as much money in my first in my first job. And believe me, it wasn't a lot of money. But that's uh that's interesting. They I I have as a sports writer, I dealt with Stanford's sports information department a lot, and I don't think anybody does it better. No, really, really professional, as you might expect of a school like that.

Speaker 20:18

Yeah.

Dave Reddy 20:18

You you mentioned Times Tribune. Go ahead, I'm sorry.

Speaker 20:21

Yeah, no, no, I was gonna say it was a calculated risk. You know, we we knew we wanted to move up here. This was the job that I took. We I stayed for three years, and then when I got a job at the Times Tribune, right after that, I got this like 40% raise. So, you know, you never think you never think that from a newspaper job.

Dave Reddy 20:44

But right now, you worked at the Times Tribune for about 10 years. Yeah, we are we are still, by the way, 17 years away and two jobs away from your first tech role, which is amazing. I did not realize it. Um you worked at the Times Tribune from 82 to 92. You were you you did business, you did sports, you were the TV critic. You did everything but tech. So, first of all, TV critic, best show of the best TV show of the 80s or early 90s was Murphy Brown, hands down. Murphy Brown. Okay, solid. I I I would go with Magnum PI because I was a teenager that that that and I loved Magnum PI. I also loved the next generation, but that's because I'm a Star Trek door. So you worked at the Times Tribune until it shut its doors, which I remember that happening. I had just moved out here, and I think you worked until it shut its doors, right? A year to the day before. That makes sense because I moved out here in '93. And and back then a paper closing was a shock. I mean, now it's it happens every other day. And in fact, there's not a lot of papers left closed.

Speaker 21:48

I'm hired by the uh by the newspaper in in 82, and I'm the night city editor. It's my first job, so I have to work work late. We get this call that the uh wife and the daughter of the Owner of the earthquakes, the soccer team in San Jose, had been kidnapped, and was so we had to mobilize. I had to get everybody, the reporters, all together. Here I am. I'm a 29-year-old editor. I'm just starting out, and the youngest editor there in this newspaper. And so I'm getting all the veteran reporters together and the uh photographers around the city desk. We're going, okay, here's what we have to do. We got to go here, we got to go there, we have to talk to this person, this person, this person, do the background on the team, find out you know, who these people were, and let's follow the cops wherever they're going. And so it turns out the family lived in Atherton, which is real close to Palo Alto, and in the neighborhood, pretty much. So we stocked their home pretty much, and we went the cops, we went over. They ended up finding them alive and well. They were handcuffed to the steering wheel of their car, and they were put in the middle of a mud field in San Jose, in the middle of nowhere, but they were safe and they were alive. And we covered that whole thing. We stayed up all night to cover it, and turned out good. They caught the bad guys the next day. And my wife was with me at this time. She came and joined me at the at the office until you know the good news finally came out early in the morning. We ended up driving by their house in Atherton, which was not a good thing to do. We drove by just to see the scene of the of the crime where they had been abducted, and uh the cops looked us over pretty closely, but we uh we got through. That was on our way home. So anyway, that was the the big story that we covered when I was on the desk. After that, they shifted me over to redo the business section, redesign it, and kind of rethink it, reconfigure it, and just kind of change it up to update it. That was my next job. I didn't know the business world, I just knew the journalism world of telling the stories and laying out the news on the news pages. Did that for a year or two, and then I they switched me to the lifestyle section where I was the lifestyle editor in the late 80s, and I loved that job because I was able to assign myself to do whatever I wanted to do. If I wanted to go cover a concert or a movie, I could do it. If I wanted to go cover a stage show, I could do that. So, although back then, I'll tell you, it was really something. That one section had eight full-time writers, specialists. We had a food editor, we had a general assignment columnist, Loretta Green, who's wonderful, is still with us today. I had a classical music critic, a jazz music critic, a rock music critic, a movie reviewer full-time, John McClintock, who's retired now from Disneyland. He was with Disneyland PR for 40 years after after this, 30 years after this, and a couple of others. But that was a heck of a good section. Anyway, I didn't have any assignments left except TV. So I said, I can watch TV, I can I can write about it. So I assigned myself to be the TV critic. And I watched a couple of important shows you know a week and wrote about them. Back then we didn't have streaming, we didn't have all the cable networks. We had we had very few, we had you know four major networks. Fox had just joined in 1987, that was its first year. Later on came, you know, the the other smaller ones, the USAs and the others. But uh it wasn't nearly the crushing demand that covering television today would be. I wouldn't want to cover television today, it's too much going on.

Dave Reddy 26:06

Yeah, but there's a new streaming show every day.

Speaker 26:10

But through through that, through that contact, uh, through that network, I was able to interview a lot of famous performers, being the editor of the section music and television. So I could name just a few. I sat down with Andrew Lloyd Weber for an hour, and I didn't say a word because he never she never shut up. We just talked. He was fun though. He was telling me in 1989, he was telling me about where Phantom of the Opera was going to be in 1993 and 94, five years ahead. Uh that kind of thing.

unknown 26:46

Wow.

Speaker 26:47

Yeah, so anyway, that I got to interview my favorite interview of all was Cary Grant. I met him backstage at the De Anza College uh Auditorium where he was giving a speech about his life. He was wonderful. I got to meet him backstage and spend some time with him. He was one of my favorites. Cover a John Denver concert at Shoreline Amphitheater because I really like his music and I play his music. And I interviewed him for an hour and a half when he was in Australia before he came to Mountain View on this tour. And we really got it together, it seems like on that 90-minute thing. We really kind of had a lot of the same ideas on saving the environment, uh, spiritualism, etc. Anyway, at the end of the conversation, he goes, you know, why don't you come backstage after the show? I'd like to meet you and say hi. I said, sure. So uh we heard his concert. My wife and I were with my wife was with me, Becky was with me, and we went backstage. By the way, the backstage at Ampath at Shoreline Amphitheater is like nothing you've ever imagined. There's a basketball court back there, there's a pool, there's a workout area. It's amazing. Anyway, he comes up, he meets us afterwards, and he was so gracious. And we talked for a little while, and he said, You know, Becky, I see that you're expecting, and she was expecting her third child at the time. And he said, Do you mind if I say a blessing on your child? And we said, Of course not. And he he did it, it was just amazing. That and that is cool.

Dave Reddy 28:21

Which we is this the child that ended up becoming becoming an actor, or just out of curiosity?

Speaker 28:27

Yeah, our daughter Megan is now well that was 86, so she's now she's gonna be 40 this year in November, and she's always felt like she's been a blessed child, and she has that is pretty cool. I I can go deeper into that, but I just I'll just say that she's feels very special as a result. We told her about that when she was older, a little older, and true story, but anyway, there's others. That's one of those are some of my favorites.

Dave Reddy 28:54

So, yeah, you Clark Gable, you didn't meet, but Carrie Grant, that's that's pretty cool. Two of you know the original Hollywood superstar.

Speaker 29:01

I I spent an evening with Milton Burrell. You want to hear that one?

Dave Reddy 29:04

I'm not sure that'd be clean for this thing, but go ahead.

Speaker 29:08

I'll keep it, I'll keep it quick. I get this call from um a Hollywood PR guy when I was the editor at the Times, and he said, Chris, I know you're really into television. You write about old school television, don't you? I said, Yeah, I do. He goes, We have a special event coming up at the city. There's a new cross graph, well, it there's a new club opening up in North Beach, and the co-owner of it is coming up to be there for the opening night. I think you would like to meet him. His name is Milton Burl. And I said, Oh, wonderful, of course. So we go up, and he said, Look, just I'm just gonna invit introduce you to him as a friend of mine, you're a guest of mine, okay, and you can just observe. I said, Fine, I don't care. That's great. So we go up there, we get a table, I shake hands with him. He's just this little gray man with a cigar, and uh we watch the show, and it's it's uh you know, a pretty pretty clean show. It really was.

Speaker 1 30:09

Sure.

Speaker 30:09

But uh, you know, there the guys are cross, you know, cross-dressers, and they're dancing and they're having a great time. Of course, Milti was well known for his impersonations of women, okay.

Speaker 1 30:20

Right.

Speaker 30:21

So anyway, we do the show. At the end of the show, the host goes up and says, You know, I want to thank you all for coming to our opening night here. But before we go, I want to just say thank you to one of our greatest patrons. There's in the audience with us tonight, and you might know him as Milton Burrow, Uncle Milty. And so the spotlight comes to our table and it's on him, and he gets up and he he bows to the audience, and then he goes up on stage and he does 45 minutes of killer stand-up. It was absolutely amazing, you know, and during during the show, he I noticed him taking notes. You know, he'd he'd hear a joke, and then he'd he'd turn to us and he'd kind of say, you know, they shouldn't be doing jokes about the Israelis right now. That's not good, you know, that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 31:11

Right.

Speaker 31:11

But he went up and he just killed, you know, and he was closing in on 90 years old at this time, and I'll never forget that night. But he the the thing that I noticed more than anything is that he just transformed from this little gray man sitting with us. He gets up on stage and the color comes to his face and his hands, and his expressions just are huge. He just he lived to be on stage, and so many performers I find are that way.

Dave Reddy 31:43

You met all these famous Hollywood people. You left to do desktop publishing for a for a few years, which we won't get into, and then you get into tech. So in 1999, you get your first job as managing editor of a software magazine, correct? Were you always into tech? Or or was this just the job you got because you lived in Silicon Valley?

Speaker 32:05

I was always no, I always was into tech. To prove it, when I was with the Times, I was the first editor that did digital layout on a screen. What they what they wanted that we we always did cut and paste for years, and we had paper layout sheets, but they looked around and they said, Well, let's get somebody who's not too smart, maybe, to take a look at this digital thing that we've got going on, who who might be adaptable to learning it. So they taught me how to use Quark Express and PageMaker, and I used Photoshop for the first time. This is 1990, so this is really early.

Dave Reddy 32:41

And I was really internet, I mean pre-public internet at least.

Speaker 32:44

Yeah. So I I had moved to a job after the after the arts editing, fine arts editing job, lifestyle editing job, the special sections editor. So I would do these special sections on digital screens. Was the only one doing that that I knew of. I don't even think they were doing it at other papers yet, or very few other papers, but I had some special training for that. So I was into tech early on. And um, after I left the Times, I had my own business doing desktop publishing because I knew how to do it. I learned it at the newspaper. I also was the COO of the Los Autos Town Crier for two years in there. I considered them a client, but I set them up on digital also. So yeah, I was I was into tech pretty early. Then later, one of the clients that I landed was a company called Sun Microsystem, which is gone which is gone today. And uh I got a recommendation from somebody big in Palo Alto, who was the mayor of Palo Alto, which helped because I knew him through the newspaper. And I ended up joining Sun as a contractor, and I edited and laid out and wrote most of this publication called Sun's Hottest. And Sun's Hottest was in published in 17 languages, and it talked about new products at Sun, and I included things like their chips and their operating system. And oh, by the way, this new thing called Java. We have to explain what Java is to our it to our ecosystem. And that included internal and also customers, contractors, potential customers, etc. So I had to explain what Java was. To this day, we still have Java in basically every single one of our devices today. Anyway, uh mental development language. That's right. And I went right to the horse's mouth to figure out what this meant so I could explain it in business language. I went right to James Gosling himself, who was the head of the Java group at Sun, and he explained it to me really quickly. He just said, Look, here's all you have to know. He says, picture a handheld device. Back then it was a Palm Pilot. I said, Okay, I got it. He goes, now picture a desktop computer, any desktop computer. I said, Okay. Then he says, Behind those two, or just think of what's back there as a big hunk server. He uses that word, big hunk server. He said, Yeah. He goes, line them all up, they look the same in Java. That's the language. And I said, Oh, when the bells start ringing, I go, Oh, I can explain this now. So that was my first really good coup in tech was explaining Java. And that's how I explained it. And from there, I got the job later uh at the new at the magazine, software development magazine. I I don't know if I was totally qualified, but I did know about Java, and that helped a lot because that was the hottest thing going right then in 1999.

Dave Reddy 35:48

Well, you must have been qualified to do something because you you did several jobs in in you know before that, but between that and 2005, and then you got the job that you know, I'll let you decide if you agree with this, that in in many ways defined your career where you have spent 15 years as an editor and then editor-in-chief for about 10 years of eWeek during what was the heyday of that magazine, or at least part of the heyday of that magazine.

Speaker 36:16

Yeah, we had 45 full-time people doing the magazine and the website. I mean, that was that's non-trivial. That's a good, that's a good size staff. Now, I wasn't the editor at that time, I was the storage guy. So when Larry Dign hired me, Larry was our editor at the time, I had been just a contractor rewriting press releases and adding, you know, adding value to them through interviews and analysts, that kind of thing. So I did those pretty quickly. I would do, I could do two a day because two or three a day, because that was really fast from the newspaper business. So they loved me because I was able to do all this these things quickly. Anyway, one day Larry calls me and he goes, Grish, you're starting full time. I was that was part-time at that time. He said, You're starting full-time Monday. I go, Oh, okay, great. What changed? He goes, Well, the storage guy just quit. So he goes, he goes, What do you know about hardware? I said, Nothing, zero. I just know software. He goes, Great. That you're perfect. I said, What do you mean? He goes, You'll ask the dumb questions. I said, Oh, okay. Anyway, I did storage for about six years. In fact, I guess I did it pretty well because Forrester called me and wanted me to be their storage analyst.

Dave Reddy 37:37

Oh, no kidding. Did you consider it?

Speaker 37:40

I did. I actually went in for a half a day's worth of interviews here in Foster City, as a matter of fact, and one every half hour for the entire morning. And then after at lunchtime, I said, No, I don't think so. This is not a good fit. It just wasn't gonna work for me. I didn't want to spend two or three weeks with one company going way, way deep into the dirt, into the you know, into the the weeds on that. I think I just preferred writing a story a day and doing regular journalism rather than the analytic thing. And so I turned that down. And then a year or two later, a couple years later, eWeek changed over to a new publisher, and they I was the one person from the entire staff they asked to come back and start restart the staff. So that's what I did in 2000, 2010, I think it was. Scott Ferguson and I worked, and then I hired a few other folks from the old staff, and we continued for six years after that.

Dave Reddy 38:49

That must have been quite the challenge. That's when magazines were starting to die out. You you kept it going a long time, my friend.

Speaker 38:56

Yeah, we lost the mag the magazine in 2011. In fact, the second it was the second public publication date after Steve Jobs died in October of 2011. We we dropped the magazine, stayed online only. The reason I know that is because I wrote that cover story for Steve Jobs, and I remember that very well.

Dave Reddy 39:18

Yeah, that's like a uh for techies, that's like a moment you don't forget. I remember I was at a dinner in New York City when we got the news that Jobs had passed away.

Speaker 39:26

Yeah. Yeah. We all knew it was coming. He looked pretty weak in his last year or so. But he still made public appearances, you know, he was not afraid of that.

Speaker 1 39:37

No.

Dave Reddy 39:37

Good for him. You you saw so many things in those years between between 99 and today. What are the two to three stories? I mean, you've already told a bunch of wonderful stories about other things, but in tech, what are the two to three things that really stand out to you as the watershed moments? We've all got our ideas of those. I want to know what your ideas are. What are the things that change the world?

Speaker 40:02

2006, the cloud, uh AWS really introduced S3, the simple service cloud, or the simple cloud service. And that changed, that changed everything. There's no question about it. Before that, the application service providers, the ESPs, were not working very well. They broke down, they overloaded, they were not secure, it could go on and on, they were terrible. The precursors of the cloud. But AWS really straightened out the cloud, and we haven't been the same ever since. So that's one tent pole. I guess there are three tent poles in my career in journalism. The first one would be the beginning of the internet and in the mid-90s, the second one would be 2006, the cloud, and the most recent, of course, AI going public in 2022 with Chat GPT. Yep. And I was uh pretty fortunate to be in the right place at the right time for New Stack. I just joined the New Stack as a contributor in uh 2021, or actually 22, and ChatGPT was made public in November, right after Thanksgiving in 2022. I had been talking to people before this time about how they were using it, what they thought of it, did they trust it? Was it did they think it was secure, etc.? I talked to about 20 or 25 people who had been using the beta version, and I had the that all ready to go, pretty much. And then when they open AI let it go public, I had that story ready to go. It's still getting hits today on the new stack. And it why? Because it was one of the seminal stories about what GB chat GPT does and what how it what its potential was, and it was from real people using it. So that was my first story for a new stack. That was that was pretty good, it turned out.

Dave Reddy 41:55

Quite a start. And uh I want to come back to AI, but first, yeah, why'd you leave eWeek and become a freelance reporter?

Speaker 42:02

Why'd I leave eWeek? Okay, that's a good one. We had two publishers with uh in eWeek, Ziff Davis, of course, for many years, and then it was sold to Quinn Street here in the Bay Area in 2010. And 2020 they sold it after 10 years, they sold it to a publisher in Nashville, Tennessee. Now, what do people do in Nashville? Okay, we do a lot of different things, but basically it's music, right? Okay, they had uh there's a man who owned a biz a business, a real estate business, and he won he wanted to be a tech publisher, so he was a wannabe. He bought e week for I don't know how much, but I'll tell you something. This man knew nothing zero about publishing, and he knew nothing, even more nothing, about tech. So he actually, I could go into some nasty details, but I'm not going to. I stayed with him for a year and then I left voluntarily in 2021. And the next Monday, after that, last Friday, my phone was ringing with freelance offerings, including ZD Net, which is not Ziff Davis, but just has the name ZD Net. And Larry Dignan, who was my former editor and who hired me at eWeek. He hired me at ZD Net. Oh, so here's a Larry. You say good Gino, you know Larry, right?

Dave Reddy 43:32

Of course, yeah.

Speaker 43:33

Of course you do. Yeah, he's a great guy. He's with Constellation Analytics now. And just saw him the other day. He was here in the town. But anyway, Larry hired me, and then he left ZD Net for another job two weeks after he hired me. Now, the funny thing was, I didn't say this before. When he hired me in e-week, he left eWeek two weeks after he hired me and went somewhere else.

Dave Reddy 43:55

It's all about it's you know, he just obviously doesn't really like working with you, he likes hiring you.

Speaker 44:01

True stories. I reminded him of that the other day and he laughed. He said, You're right. Yeah, I don't know what that was about.

Dave Reddy 44:08

But anyway. Unfortunately, those stories like the one you just told about e week are all too familiar. What is your sense of going back to AI? What's your sense of AI as a force in the tech world?

Speaker 44:21

My sense of AI is that I trust nothing anymore. I don't trust videos that I see. I don't trust voices that I hear on the web. I don't trust messages sometimes, all only from people I know. I am skittish about everything now. I mean everything. Because, first of all, you know, we have this meet is this app that can do anything. It can remember anything, but it only wants to please you. It doesn't necessarily want to tell the truth. And it just goes hand in hand with the way I see our government today. We're not going to get political here, but I don't trust our government either. Like many people. I don't trust our government right now because they keep changing their mind, they keep lying about things. And I just don't know about AI. Now, maybe I'm painting with too broad a brush, but I I'm very I'm very skeptical of AI right now, as far as bringing me information that's true.

Dave Reddy 45:21

Well, I know I know what you're talking about. I mean, you know, you you see something on LinkedIn, you see something on Facebook or Instagram or something, and you say to yourself, Oh, wow, what a story. I need to share that. And then you go, hold on a moment. Yeah. And I gotta, I'm sure you've had this experience. I don't I wouldn't say it's 50% of the time because the news could be pretty crazy these days, but probably 10% or 25% of the time, it's total BS.

Speaker 45:46

I know. I've been burned, I've been burned several, I've been burned several times, and I'm not gonna do it again. Sorry. Yeah, or at least I'm gonna try not to. But you know, AI is not used just for bringing us information, it's it's good, it's good for helping developers write their code, it's helping many people in tech design their systems and look ahead to the future based on all the great database information that we have stored in the world. There's many good things about it. I just for personal use, I'm I'm not crazy about it. For business use, I think it's gonna be very beneficial. It could be very beneficial for healthcare too.

Dave Reddy 46:28

So, how do you use it in journalism?

Speaker 46:30

The only thing that I have been doing is, excuse me, if uh I need to look up a definition of something, I can look it up on Google too. But sometimes I'll I'll ask AI to give me the definition and the history of a particular event or person or technology or trend that I'm looking for, and they'll give me a bunch of good info. Whether I use it or not is debatable. That sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

Dave Reddy 46:58

You know, we we we could do a whole season of stories by Chris Primesberger. That was a whole lot of fun, my friend. And I I like to finish with uh the the same question for everybody, and in your your case, it's it's pretty classic. SoCal or NorCal? NorCal. Really? I'm surprised to hear you say that. Why?

Speaker 47:18

The environment in general. I LA is a desert. I've never been a desert person, but you know, I do miss family members, I do miss the beaches. There are places in LA that I miss, but I'm I'm a NorCal guy now from now on. I do miss the Dodgers. I used to be a I'm still a Dodger fan. I hate to admit it. But when the Dodge when the Dodgers play the Giants, I figure I can't lose either one.

Dave Reddy 47:41

Now that is rare because usually at this point, some you've picked. I forgot to ask you what what what what what happens, and I don't know this doesn't happen a lot, but what happens when Pepperdine and Stanford meet in any particular sport?

Speaker 47:52

Oh, that's a good question. And they have met, but not often. They've met in volleyball. I'm gonna have to go with the alma mater. Okay, because if if they do win, it's a huge win. It's pretty it's it's an upset usually.

Dave Reddy 48:08

So right. Whereas for Stanford, it's it's it's typically just another day in the park. Well, Chris, that was a whole lot of fun. I really appreciated the stories. I'm not entirely sure I've I've ever heard about somebody's thoughts on AI, Milton Burl, and uh USC football all in one podcast, but that's what made this one very special. Thanks again for being on. Hey, anytime. I'd like to thank you all for listening today. And once again, a big thank you to freelance tech reporter Chris Primesberger. Don't forget to join us next month when we chat with 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 at bigvalley.co. That's D-R-E Double D Y at Big Valley, all one word, dot C O. No M. You can also email the whole team that pressing matters at BigVally.co. Once again, thanks for listening, and as always, think big.