Meredith Klein of Meredith and the Media interviewed The Information founder and editor in chief Jessica Lessin about her tech news site.
Here is an excerpt:
You founded The Information in 2013 to build the next leading business news publication. Today, it’s one of the world’s fastest-growing news businesses, delivering in-depth, hype-free technology reporting to hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide. What’s driving your team’s coverage?
What our team of 40-plus journalists is doing is trying to do the stories no one else is doing. You can open up X. You can turn on Spotify and hear a lot of hot takes on this moment. Is AI going to kill us? Are we overspent on capex (capital expenditures)? What’s happening with China? What we’re doing every day is introducing really important new facts, both on what’s happening now, and what’s going to be happening six months from now.When I look back on the past few years, The Information was a year or so ahead on covering the AI infrastructure boom, the deal-making around it, what it meant for energy companies, real estate companies, how the hyperscalers were thinking about it. We wrote about what’s now a major OpenAI infrastructure initiative called Stargate when it was a tiny project inside of Microsoft and OpenAI. What we publish is a function of asking the world’s best journalists those questions: What’s happening now behind the scenes that no one’s writing about? What’s going to be in The Wall Street Journal six months from now? It’s actually an interesting moment because AI has turbocharged the speed of the business cycle. So I say six months; it might be more like six weeks—just the pace at which everything’s going now.
I find that if you ask the right questions, you’re ahead of storylines that really matter to readers. I often think of The Information reader as a decision-maker in business. About one-third of our subscribers work in finance, just under one-half work in technology, and the rest are across the business world and across industries. When they go to work in the morning, what are they talking about in their meetings? Because they’re not planning for today, or they’re not planning for next week. They’re planning for six months from now or 12 months from now. What do they need to know? What are they obsessing with? That’s where The Information meets our audience, where other business publications don’t.
Read more here.
