How Jessica Lessin of The Information turned her journalism beat into a business
How Jessica Lessin of The Information turned her journalism beat into a business
Jessica Lessin reveals what she learned covering tech startups and how it informed the launch of her own tech news startup.
Jessica Lessin just celebrated the 7th anniversary of The Information, the influential subscription-only tech publication she’s the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief and sole owner of. I first got to know Jessica in the mid-aughts, soon after I first launched Venture Voice and as I was starting Muck Rack and The Shorty Awards. She was working as a tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York, and I was subletting office space from her husband in the DUMBO area of Brooklyn, which wasn’t exactly the tech startup center that it is today. In this episode, Jessica shares her trajectory as a technology journalist and an entrepreneur, including what she learned as an editor at The Harvard Crimson during the early days of a fledgling tech startup called Facebook and how her reporting on the industry affected her decision to launch her own company in 2013.
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“Covering tech is covering the future of business.”
Jessica Lessin is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Information, an outlet that was launched on a simple idea: write deeply reported articles about the technology industry that people won't find elsewhere. Like many who work in the news business, she got the journalism bug early on, working on school papers and enjoying the permission it gives you to “be a little bit nosy.” While at Harvard, she covered the faculty beat for The Harvard Crimson, something she likens to covering Congress. Oh, and there was also “the other thing that was going on” — the launch of Facebook. As she shares in this episode, that “very, very interesting experience” of witnessing the earliest stages and trajectory of a technology company and its impact would go on to shape her future reporting and her career.
“So many media outlets underestimate how quickly and important young companies can get very quickly.”
As someone who was there at the beginning, not just for the launch of Facebook but also as a Wall Street Journal reporter covering emerging technology and media companies like Google and Yahoo in the early 2000s, Jessica says she was able to see the power that really young founders get early on — and understand the issues at play there, too. It also gave her a more rounded view of these businesses and their impact. “People sometimes think, oh we were there in the beginning and we’ve become cheerleaders for these companies. But I think it’s quite the opposite.”
In fact, while many members of the press were enthralled by the personalities, the money being raised and the unbelievable growth trajectories and valuations, Jessica focused her reporting on trying to understand just what was happening at these companies. I remember that time vividly, because it’s one of the reasons I started this podcast. Back then, there wasn’t much in the way of in-depth reporting on how these businesses were being built. The press coverage was essentially “a bunch of founders on magazine covers,” as Jessica puts it.
“Tech isn’t a tech story; tech is a business story.”
After interning on the economics beat at The Wall Street Journal, Jessica jumped at the chance to cover a new emerging tech beat for the Journal’s New York office, writing about startups and “what the kids were doing online.” She covered Blackberry during the iPhone launch and saw what happens when a company that seems at the top of its game is completely blindsided — and how quickly fortunes can change in technology. But she had trouble convincing editors that a company like Facebook was worth writing about. She says they simply didn’t understand the business models that would ultimately propel these companies.
A few years later, Jessica moved to San Francisco to cover internet companies, where she realized tech isn’t just a niche beat; it’s part of every business story. That seed of an idea would ultimately grow into the thesis for her own startup.
“I became very excited about the idea that, just as Netflix and Spotify and everyone else was scaling subscription media, that was going to happen in news and I wanted to build it.”
Like many entrepreneurs, Jessica saw an opportunity within a disruptive moment. Her experience covering technology had already convinced her that there was a broad audience for a business publication that focused on deep reporting around technology. As publishers tried to chase a business model based on “eyeballs and clicks,” she decided to develop her own model that would build and monetize audiences based on quality information.
That didn’t make it an easy decision, though. For starters, she’d never hired staff or directly managed people before. But as she explains, she forged ahead, and “frankly, I’ve never looked back, and I think that’s probably something all entrepreneurs relate to.”
“My business plan, if you will, was: Write great stories, people will pay for them. It’s still, by the way, my business plan.”
While most news sites are funded by venture capital or corporate owners, Jessica owns The Information and bootstrapped it for the first two and a half years until it broke even. Our conversation about The Information’s subscription business model will be particularly interesting to anyone who has a subscription-based business or is thinking of launching one. There’s no magic number, she says. Instead, growth rate is the guide: “The other thing about steady growth is, it’s steady growth. And over time, the numbers do get quite big.” The Information’s subscriber base now numbers in the tens of thousands, and half a million regular readers turn to it for deep reporting on business, technology and disruption.
The media industry is integral to my own businesses, Muck Rack and The Shorty Awards. So I was interested to hear Jessica’s take on the trend of journalists quitting their jobs and starting up newsletters. She also shares her thoughts on why founders and CEOs still need PR and media, even in an era where leaders can talk directly to their millions of followers on social media.
From a journalism perspective, Jessica says she’s just getting started. She’s adding to her staff of 40, which is primarily based in the San Francisco Bay Area but also includes a four-person bureau in Hong Kong as well as reporters in London, DC, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.
It’s clear that her business model and her thesis — that you can’t remove business from the context of technology and disruption — are more relevant than ever. And as the founder of The Information points out, “The demand for information and quality information is greater than ever.” As a subscriber and fan, I can’t wait to see what’s in store next.
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