January 6th, 2011
Six month anniversary.
Since everyone in the world is either publishing or intentionally leaking their end of the year internal memos, I figured I’d do the same. To my own blog.
In fact, it’s not just the end of one year and beginning of another. Today is also the six month anniversary of the launch of our first blog at Yahoo! News, The Upshot.
Below is a note I sent my team to commemorate the occasion. Chris in the memo is Chris Lehmann. Jennifer and David are Jennifer Karmon and David Caplan. Holly, Michael, Brett, Zack, Liz, John, Rachel, and Joe are Holly Bailey, Michael Calderone, Brett Michael Dykes, Zachary Roth, Liz Goodwin, John Cook, Rachel Hartman, and Joe Pompeo.
—— Forwarded Message
From: Andrew Golis
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2011 11:54:18 -0800
Subject: Happy six months
Team,
Six months ago this week, we launched The Upshot. A month and a half ago, we expanded the network and launched The Ticket, The Lookout, and The Cutline.
In the coming days and weeks Chris and I will be laying out goals for 2011. But, in celebration of our first half-birthday, I wanted to step back from the relentless chirping of instant messenger to look back at what we’ve accomplished so far.
You already know the numbers have been huge. About 2,700 blog posts, generating over 450 million pageviews, seen by 30 million readers each month, adding up to 1.3 billion minutes of time spent and all of the the advertising revenue that comes along with that. While Yahoo! is not without its challenges, the media business is good and the blogs perform better than any comparable content across every metric.
At some level, though, that’s the easy part.
While it can’t be captured easily with a graph or spreadsheet, I think our biggest accomplishment has been the creation, out of thin air, of an editorial culture that is fast, fair, and smart.
Chris’s leadership here, as you all know, has been essential. Under his guidance, we’re building blogs that, as Chris wrote in November, are reminiscent of “open-invitation town meetings” and “convey the excitement of that big, moving-target undertaking.” Your work is welcoming, blunt, and informed; and there’s a lot of it. And we produce it while avoiding the maladies that plague so much modern journalism: “on the one hand on the other” laziness, snarky nihilism, opaque insiderdom.
To pull that off, we’ve built internal systems — meetings, memos, IM chats — that allow you all to thrive while keeping our work reliable and our voice consistent. Frankly, the work Chris, Jennifer, and David did in December to grow into a process that moves over 30 blog posts through edits and copy edits each day (and the work they do to push that system forward day in and day out) is simply awesome.
And we’ve broken news. A lot of it.
Holly was the first to layout the interrelated nature of the GOP’s shadow campaign infrastructure (http://yhoo.it/a5J3oH). Michael’s coverage of the term “Ground Zero Mosque” being used by mainstream media changed editorial policies at the AP (http://yhoo.it/cLusyi) and the WSJ (http://yhoo.it/9PXPfg). Brett exposed the Obama Administration’s efforts to stage a presidential visit to an oil spill site at Grand Isle (http://yhoo.it/bHNAYO). Zack disturbed us all with his report on the nation’s nuclear weapons program undergoing an existential crisis (http://yhoo.it/9CkGF8). Liz saw the national trend in anti-mosque protests before the New York Times or AP (http://yhoo.it/d3HbSI). John got the Pentagon to reopen an investigation into employees with Top Secret clearance viewing child pornography (http://yhoo.it/9otzOd). Rachel was the first to have Tom Tancredo on the phone making the threats that led to his run for CO governor (http://yhoo.it/cJWdrA). Joe may as well have camped out on Tina Brown’s lawn he’s so exhaustively led us through the Newsweek/Daily Beast convergence (http://yhoo.it/cPYKuN).
And that’s just a sample.
At the same time, we’ve explained complicated issues to millions: the deficit (http://yhoo.it/bNg86w), net neutrality (http://yhoo.it/dJA4rN), the conflict in Korea (http://yhoo.it/elLZzH), the legal battle over health care reform (http://yhoo.it/f2MyqV), and much more.
The result of all of this work is a growing reputation for excellence. I’m hearing more every day of journalists in newsrooms across the country at organizations we all respect who are watching our work closely and, as a result, citing it in their own work. You name it, and they’ve linked to us: NYT, WSJ, The Guardian, Reuters, WaPo, HuffPo, The Daily Beast, Politico, Slate, Drudge, Gawker, Fox, and on and on.
And six months ago, we didn’t exist.
In other words, we’ve lived up to the awesome responsibility that comes along with having the audience and resources Yahoo! has given us. And we should be proud of that.
That was the first six months. Now for the next.
Thanks for all your work,
Andrew
—— End of Forwarded Message