Forget about awful writing and get-rich-quick schemes.
We are real journalists breaking real news. If you want a get-rich-quick scheme, the Internet is rife with them. If you want to learn how to run a successful news business and maybe make some money in the process, we’re here for you. You won’t have to start from scratch, because we’ve already made the mistakes, found the successes, learned what works and what doesn’t in the blogosphere. Come along with us, and we’ll be your guides in this strange new world.
About John Biggs
John Biggs began his career as a computer consultant. However, he moved from programming to journalism after realizing the real story wasn’t behind the scenes, but in the relationships people had with the technology. The late 1990s and early 2000s brought a new world where the business section of the newspaper turned from a one-page add-on at the back of the sports page into a fully-fledged section detailing the deals, secrets, and outrages of a strange new period of time called the “Dot-Com” era.
He moved on to earn a Master’s degree in Business and Economic Journalism from NYU, where he was one of the first in his class to cover the nascent Silicon Alley in downtown New York. A few years — and jobs — later he became editor of Gizmodo.com after meeting the former editor, Joel Johnson, for lunch and pleading his case. Now he and Charlie gather over 60 million pageviews a month on multiple sites.
About Charlie White
Charlie White started writing about technology on the Web in 1995, ancient days when Mosaic was the most popular browser, Clinton was president, and Windows 95 was considered high technology. One day at a trade show in 2000, Charlie and some of his cohorts decided to write short two-paragraph news stories about what they’d just seen and experienced on the show floor. The immediacy of these punchy paragraphs caught on quickly with readers, and suddenly Charlie realized that this new format could turn into an entirely new medium. Unfortunately, his short-sighted managers disagreed, so the concept lay dormant, and he continued working in the web journalism environment of the time, which revolved around webzines and portals–megasites that linked to numerous affiliated sites, all under the same umbrella.
A few years later, technology and gadget blog Gizmodo caught his attention, because it was starting to eclipse the numbers of the large portal for which he was working. What kind of site could garner such impressive numbers? Surely it must have involved a staff bigger than the Web portal he was building with a dozen writers or more? Hardly. All that content was cranked out daily by a quick-writing, wisecracking crew the size of a pickup basketball team, four hungry journalists with a nose for news, a love of gadgetry and high tech, and a rabid following. Eager to get himself mixed up with such excitement, he contacted the site’s editor, your other humble narrator, John Biggs, who invited him to join the blogging revolution. Two years later, he’d written 4,442 articles on the popular gadget site, helping to bring the site’s traffic from around 7 million page views per month to over 80 million. The next stop was NBC Universal, for Charlie was lured by the mainstream media giant where he wrote more than 2500 blog posts, reviews and features for the SyFy-powered blog DVICE. And now he’s senior editor of Mashable, writing for 15 million readers.
