Remembering the Day the Tall Towers Came Down and a Little Website Went Up. 9/11/01 a generation later.
By Ron Stokes
“Bin Laden is likely not yet done with us. Grand Central Station is just a block away and it may be a target as well. I really think that you should go home.” The request came from Craig Unger, our Editor and Chief & General Manager, who as journalists are, was well connected to the sources of many a big story, long before they were filed copy. Our small team was focused on service journalism and did not have its own traditional newsroom, rather relying on our principal print and television parent partners for that content. In the coming weeks, Craig would share more detail about “this story” as his journalistic sources around the world shared them with him. Photographs of animals that had been exposed to Anthrax and the blow by blow details of the doomed flights were shared with me within days of the attack. Weeks and months later, they would be reported in the news just as he had previewed with me.
That morning I had been staring blankly at my screen for about an hour. Trying to sort out my next steps. The city was at a halt. Everything closed up including mass transit. We had just launched newyorkmetro.com, the new web destination from partners New York magazine and Metro channels, a suite of local content cable channels. The partners combined forces to own New York City lifestyle space on the web. While in a soft launch for weeks, this was the formal debut with a marketing campaign defining us as the authoritative online resource for New Yorker's looking for the best restaurants, nightlife, shopping and services. But would the city would survive? What would the post-attack life be like? And what role could our new website play in this new unknown world? A series of suddenly inappropriately satirical print ads and TV spots with the tag line “It’s a big city. You could use a little help.” were about to go into the market. A simple solution would be to just put all of this on hold, but the media space had been reserved and obligations of the joint venture partners required the ad spending hit the books. With the now certainly challenged fourth quarter ahead of everyone, a solution had to be found.
Unlike other great world cities, the singular requirement for becoming a New Yorker, is simply to move here. There is an unspoken understanding of what a gift and privilege that it is to be a New Yorker. Most of all, it is being a part of the unwavering driving need to survive and thrive. Things happen in New York all of the time and often appear larger than life, because, well, they actually are. So, what a privilege and challenge it would be to tell this story in the early web space. But, now it meant maneuvering with so many unknowns. And the road to this tragic moment had been anything but smooth.
Moments before the March 2000 dot com bubble burst began, the NASDAQ soared to its all-time high. A record that would not be bettered for another five and half years. Simultaneously, PRIMEDIA and Cablevision hit their then all-time stock highs seemingly in response to the announcement of their “new media” joint venture. A group of seasoned media moguls heralded the new web destination powered by PRIMEDIA’s beloved New York magazine and Cablevision Rainbow Media’s brand new Metro Channels. Its mission was to become the home-site of choice for sophisticated New Yorker's by serving as the arbiter of taste for people looking for information about their everyday needs.
This new venture would presumably be a welcome alternative to the generic city sites that dominated the day with data but with no critical eye. The moguls’ vision of wall-to-wall video on demand and live streaming was years ahead of the capabilities of the day and user adoption. Explore a restaurant by viewing a video, check in on the live stream at happy hour of your favorite watering hole. With only seven million households on broadband in 2000 and the huge resources that would be needed for such an approach, it was not a viable plan.
On East 11th Street, between University Place and Broadway, Bill Clinton is walking down the street with Chelsea, his eyes red. “We love you, Bill!” one person calls out. “We need you now!” yells another. Patricia Grodd, an intern at a psychoanalytic institute, reaches out. Clinton pulls her out of the crowd by her hand. “Are we gonna get them?” she asks. “You have to understand,” he answers. “We don’t play by their rules.” He tells the crowd that any response demands patience, that finding the enemy takes time. His eyes are getting redder and wetter. Then he and Chelsea continue east. -newyorkmetro.com September 2001
That ill-fated September 2001 launch was not the original plan. First announced for the Fall of 2000 with a planned staff of nearly a hundred, the project was downsized to less than ten and a new date of March 2001. But by October 2000, it was clear that many of the original assumptions would need to be re-imagined. The advertising revenue plan was morphed into a user concierge service transaction model. PRIMEDIA then merges with about.com, the web’s fifth largest site (the AOL Time Warner merger had kicked off that year), promising the marriage of a hugely enthusiasts magazine portfolio with the user generated content category specialist web destination of the day. This would add about.com’s New York City channel into the mix. All but one of that original J.V. team were laid off. EdificeRex.com, a digital apartment building concierge, also years ahead of its time, was added to the partners portfolio, bringing the site an instant audience and ad play to an affluent demographic. I had recently joined EdificeRex, fresh from Metro Channels, where as Business Manager, I had last been tasked with sorting out working space for the one hundred J.V. staffers that were never to be.
September 12th was a day void of any familiar orientation. Craig, “newsroom or no newsroom”, unsatisfied with being a passive journalist in this moment of history, asked the small team to write down our own experiences of the prior day. It was to be the beginning of an online scrapbook that Managing Editor Kelly Maloni would produce including timelines, photo galleries, resource guides and ways to volunteer in the recovery. She added our new message boards to the growing feature. Within hours of being published, those boards became a real time community destination for New Yorker's seeking information including assistance with the whereabouts of family and friends not heard from since the attacks.
Around 11:30 a.m. September 13, 2001, rumors spread that there’s a bomb in the Condé Nast building in Times Square. People mill about outside, but no one seems particularly scared. Anna Wintour walks east on 43rd Street with André Leon Talley, chatting on her cell phone. “Nothing happened,” she says. “It was a bomb scare.” When a passerby asks if they’re leaving because of the threat, Wintour looks at her as if she’s crazy. “No, we’re going for lunch.” -newyorkmetro.com September 2001
A frantic pass at an interim ad touted the site as a destination for information and community during these challenging times. In the rush, the visual was a map of the city that inadvertently started at just below 14th street. DeVito Verdi, our advertising agency, was charged with quickly creating a new ad that would both hit the right note and appear as organically from our new website as possible. Assuming the city landed on its feet, we would have the opportunity to be of service to it. The stunning visual was a stark black and white image of a sliver of the Empire State Building and the top of the Chrysler Building seen through a window, perhaps broken. The brilliant copy read:
Volunteers needed.
To grab a bite.
To catch a show.
To shop.
To see a ball game.
To go to a museum.
To jog in the park.
To laugh.
To be New Yorkers again.
newyorkmetro.com
As weeks passed, our advertising partners gave us the go ahead to resume the launch. Continuum Health partners revised messaging to reflect the times with their sponsorship of New York’s first online access to the Best Doctors database powered by partner Castle Connolly. The annual print issue historically had the longest shelf life in readers’ homes. Jet Blue, the inaugural sponsor of the Travel channel, went live for a few hours until the Dominican Republic bound plane crash over Queens and then paused all marketing. These, and our other channels, represented the earliest days of the shift from print to digital for users’ everyday resources.
In Washington Square Park, at about 2 p.m., Keith Stressler, a trader, is sitting on the edge of the fountain, smoking. His office is in 3 World Financial Center; he started running after the first tower came down. “I couldn’t see anything; I didn’t know where the fuck I was going. I just wanted to get away from any capitalist shit anyone would want to bomb. I figured the Village was safe.” -newyorkmetro.com September 2001
As life resumed, advertising performance was strong and fast growing. We held a most unique place in the traditional media space, where editorial digital adoption was limited and the advertising revenue inconsequential. From inception, the business had a very diversified revenue model, with events built around both site and partner franchises, affiliate partnerships across Broadway, dining and travel transactions. The soaring ad business and the visionary product strategy supported and drove the brilliant journalism evolution that would follow it as users further shifted their reading habits to digital. The business would break away from the Joint Venture and come fully under the umbrella of New York Magazine and its new ownership and leadership at the end of 2004.
At the time of our launch, Google was not yet a verb as the search engine held just 12% per cent of market share, but it held 100% of the attention of Kelly Maloni and search rankings across our catalog of service journalism was a race that no one else would have a chance to win with her intense focus. It was essential in growing all of that early traffic that within a matter of years would surpass all of the competition. It would become exhibit one in every sales deck. As our traffic quickly surpassed all other city sites and verticals that we competed with, there was one potential threat that preoccupied me. While NYToday, the New York Times city digital destination, was not a major corporate focus for them, I wondered what our winning strategy against those massive resources and market positioning should they decide to lean all in. Before too many sleepless nights passed, word got to me that the Times was at the highest levels, shifting all in on a national strategy and dropping on all efforts around the nytoday,com brand.
While our brand was New York, our audience was national. Hungry for the largest share of national advertising as it migrated online, we began plotting our next move. It was fashion. National magazines were not taking the web seriously as a consumer advertising business. At the time, premiere publishing houses gave away digital advertising space with print purchase. And given their limited digital effort and audience, it might have made sense in the moment. We always valued our digital offerings with equal regard to our print and TV as they delivered. Fashion designers that dabbled on the web in those early days worked in flash, giving them more creative opportunity, but no ability to build audience through search engines. For many years we were the number one ranking for almost every fashion designer worldwide. Our TV partner, Metro TV, was in the tents for the NY shows with their Full Frontal Fashion franchise giving us access to all the key players. Those early fashion efforts had a democracy and sense of humor that all of the fashion books stayed clear of. Our wall to wall coverage of Project Runway and their emerging designers was unique among fashion sites. Known as a destination for that content, our traffic would spike each week both the east and west broadcasts, alarming our C.T.O. that we might have been hacked. Atlanta traffic spikes from coverage of Richard Tyler’s new uniforms for Delta Airlines staff set off similar alarms. On the advertising front, there may have not been anything more impactful than collecting that fashion audience in those early years. They were the earliest adopters to e-commerce transactions. This success was core in our partnerships with early like-minded agency pioneers who were charged with building the initial digital customer bases for their clients. The level of collaboration and exploration with the also progressive and forward-thinking agencies including Morpheus Media, Modem Media, Digitas, Avenue A Razor Fish, Range was responsible for levels of performance that far surpassed our weight class. That outlier status allowed us to secure very early large unique partnerships with likes of Microsoft, Google, Samsung, MasterCard, American Express, Delta Airlines, The New York Times and Neiman Marcus, to name just a few.
Traffic and editorial frequency were a constant business collaboration. Site visits were first driven by the service journalism with the Restaurant Section continuously being the number one channel. Fashion would then surpass that with a mix of data bases and new content coming from the fashion week shows around the world. Two of the largest traffic spikes were easy to predict as they hit that intimate crossroads of web and sex. The first was a celebrity gossip edit post about the Paris Hilton sex tape. Owing to our search ranking strength, we popped with users who were searching for the tape. The next event of that proportion actually took our site down as this time we did have the skin to deliver. The web publication of the Lindsay Lohan recreation of the famous Bert Stern Marilyn Monroe final sitting photo shoot in the buff broke the internet.
As non-service reader behavior shifted to the web and sales success required more and more page views and audience, the need to shift to daily content was core. As the sales continued to soar, daily morphed into the overnight and weekend coverage. Beyond the fashion, the first blog was Gawker co-founder Elizabeth Spiers’ The Kicker in 2003 under the direction of then New York Magazine Editor and Chief Caroline Miller. The big wave of daily content and the vertical strategy that would bring Grubstreet, Daily Intelligencer, The Cut, Select All and Vulture rolled out under the most consequential direction of legendary Adam Moss, Editor and Chief and the web pioneer Digital Editor Ben Williams beginning in early 2005. Beyond The Cut, which was the natural evolution of something initially driven by the business side and then re-imagined by editorial under the brilliant Stella Bugbee to something larger and more important, arguably the other most important expansion for the business side was Vulture.com. Coming out of the great twenty-first century recession there were major shifts in key ad sectors. Financial clients made less effort with new client acquisition and focused more on targeting additional products with existing vetted customers. Retail and fashion clients were coming to terms with changes in new generational priorities and the platforms and sources of influence that would impact them. At the same moment, new entertainment platforms and creators were entering the market in a relatively small and less highly regarded editorial landscape. While anything New York did got put in the highbrow bucket, the tag line for Vulture was a marketer’s dream come true… “The mind of a critic, the heart of a fan.” This was the second phase of building consumer bases for new clients, albeit this time with an eye to driving many people to do smaller things like tune-in versus the emerging retail and fashion period where we were charged with securing fewer users but each making large transactions.
Through the ensuing years, the business that was built by a small group of colleagues that wrote the playbook, continued to reinvent and pioneer. Menupages.com, rookiemag.com, the Vulture network were, at various moments, successfully added to the sales portfolio. A highly respected magazine with a primarily New York audience of four hundred thousand readers would become a digital powerhouse reaching over forty million users. As it continues to do today within the mighty Vox portfolio, constantly embracing new story-telling opportunities and platforms.
The months following the attacks of 9/11, anthrax threats and frequent office evacuations became our new normal. Paused advertising was turned over to the Red Cross. Daily newsletters, a key early traffic driver, community builder, sole source of user shared data and first consequential revenue source were all paused until the moment felt right to resume. The largest email list was focused on driving users to log off their computers and attend live events. A 9/11 event at the Cathedral of St. John Divine struck the proper chord to re-engage with readers. I pushed the email out and within moments my email box was flooded with undeliverable notices from Cantor Fitzgerald email recipients. It was a reminder that there was just no way of ever ignoring the the tragic impact of that day. Hours later responses came in from users thanking us for getting back to life and most of all by doing it with an acknowledgement of the healing and recovery that we were all moving through.
