"To continue this conversation,
go to our Web site"

How often do you hear, “To continue this conversation, go to our Web site”? The conversation is the point, Jesse Kornbluth ’64 would say.

A lifetime writer whose first work was published in Look magazine when he was a teenager, Jesse says he was “teed up to write for print.” He spent years writing in every genre, publishing books and contributing to the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and New York Magazine, culminating in five professionally exciting years (1987–1992) with Tina Brown at Vanity Fair. (“Like playing on the 1927 Yankees,” Jesse describes that time. “You had to pinch yourself—the masthead had everyone you admired.”)

Now Jesse has almost completely migrated to the Web, which he saw in the mid-’90s —and now sees even more fervently—as a dynamic agent helping a planet’s worth of people find information and connection. Engagement, community and interaction are, Jesse feels, hallmarks of a new kind of journalism happening first on the Internet.

Perhaps that is why, despite nearly four decades as a writer for some of the nation’s slickest magazines, Jesse predicts “the Internet Tail Will Come to Wag the Magazine Dog, [www.mediabistro.com/ articles/cache/a4349.asp]” in his essay at mediabistro.com, a Web site for media professionals.

His view that in magazines, “the articles exist to keep the ads from fighting,” is not only what made Jesse lose interest in glossy monthlies. It’s a question of values: His strike him as being labeled “nostalgic” by traditional media. For Jesse, writing is a calling rather than a career (“because as a career, it’s a terrible one,” he says). “Journalism for me has been like writing a series of term papers for A. O. Smith for which you get paid,” according to Jesse. “I had (and have) a deep sense of mission that comes right out of the ’60s, a clichéd ’60s mission that is about pushing for equal rights, telling the truth about the war, creating a better society, and actually daring to be true. When writing is your life, the things you do are you. You’re totally accountable: You can’t say ‘someone else wrote this.’ What I find heartbreaking is that there’s more and more differentiation between the kinds of media that are accountable and those that aren’t, and people who have integrity and those who don’t—and the irony is: I find more integrity on the Web than I do in traditional media.”

Jesse’s “reinvention” began with some AOL funding in 1996, when he cofounded bookreporter.com; it became the biggest non-commercial book site on the Web. Old friend Bob Pittman, then president of AOL, requested help “changing a tech company into a media company,” and Jesse came on as editorial director. The heady time of creative work was short-lived, as AOL “couldn’t find the business model” that supported Jesse’s core idea: community-driven content—that is, citizen journalism. “It wasn’t easy for ‘The Suits’ to see the potential of this kind of collaborative creativity in 1998,” Jesse says. “Now it is the single most powerful concept in online programming.”

One piece of AOL programming that he created during this period proves the point. Jesse’s memorial to Princess Diana invited emotion-charged participation by AOL members and drew 4.5 million of the 10 million AOL subscribers within four to five days. “Identifying an issue that has potential to inspire sharing, and then to provoke people to respond, is not that difficult. People tend to talk about the Inter-net in ‘masculine’ terms, as a provider of data. But I see artistry in the feminized part, making connections, feeling deeply, sharing. And I think the importance of the Internet as an encyclopedia and data mine is a distant second to that.”

When his AOL stint ended in 2002, Jesse looked for more intimate ways to use the Internet to form global communities of caring people. He launched a cultural concierge site called HeadButler.com. Its mission: to promote the great, not just the new. HeadButler.com, he says, tells you about “books, music and movies you might never hear about from anyone else…stuff that came out last year or the year before or even decades ago…stuff you might cherish for the rest of your life.” On any given day, he might urge you to read Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale (1930), watch William Wyler’s Dodsworth, or listen to Green Day’s “American Idiot” (2004).

Just as he was putting on his butler’s suit, Beliefnet.com, the largest spiritual site on the Web, asked him to be its liberal blogger, so he signed on for a year’s tour of duty as Swami Uptown [http://www.beliefnet.com/story/145/ story_14546_1.html]. The experience was not a happy one: “Five days a week I put my head into the Iraq war and the damage it does to our spiritual and emotional lives. I believe in posting my email address; I got a lot of anguished mail. I answered it all. And it burned me out. Now I do one Swami a week, and I feel I’m more effective.”

Jesse still writes columns for magazines and is working on a book, but the Internet is where he finds his greatest satisfaction. “The Internet is the Maginot Line—the one completely free, global source of information and opinion,” Jesse argues. “It’s all that stands between us and the complete dominance of corporate news sources, which are understandably slow to annoy their well-connected owners. But on the Web, anyone can be Tom Paine: You don’t have to be hired or hyped, you just have to be forceful, factual and lively. I can have 100 times the impact online than I can in print. I can be emotional and I can be honest. I can do advocacy without violating any code. I can absolutely be who I am and I can also find out who I am—because, as every teacher who welcomes honest exchange knows, no one gets more value out of a class than the instructor.

“The huge advantage of the Internet is the death of the old top-down communication, the ‘celebrity voice.’ My readers, not individually, but collectively, are smarter than I am. People like me take great pains to be accurate, to link to good sources. But there’s equal value in hearing from readers who have fresh information and new points of view. That’s the single biggest reason why so many traditional journalists and media potentates hate (and fear) the Internet. Internet technology makes journalists accountable, and the community’s judgment can be swift and harsh.

“It’s a big issue for media that the young live online, and that there’s widespread disrespect for traditional media among smart young people. Well, the kids are on to something: They can find better stuff on the Web. The classic example is the Downing Street memo, buried in the Washington Post, two weeks late and on page A18; the coverage wasn’t much better in the New York Times. It was the Web that drove that memo into the news in America.

“Our destiny as a species is to seek light and radiance, to love the truth. Talking about that in terms of journalism is odd, but the media is an agent of all of it. On the Internet—not so much in print, never on TV, and rarely in the movies—you can feel a desire for unity, peace, compassion and understanding. That’s why I love this medium like I’ve never loved anything else.”

Cathleen Everett


Editor’s note: Over the 18 months leading up to May 2005, Jesse wrote for Tina Brown’s Topic [A] “views magazine.” The show was doomed, Jesse feels, in part because it was hosted by the wrong network, the business- oriented CNBC. “I love working with Tina,” he says. “I’m not going to work with or for anyone smarter, any time soon.” In an article for mediabistro.com, Jesse explained that he is now turning his energy back to his novel, finding a credible resolution for his characters’ “achingly plausible” situation. “The paradox of fiction is that, at least for the author, it is reality.”
[www.mediabistro.com/ articles/cache/a4528.asp]

 

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