CNBC’s Fortt: How I nearly blew my career

Jon Fortt, the on-air technology editor at CNBC, writes about how he nearly blew his business journalism career while working for the San Jose Mercury News.

Fortt writes, “So in late 2005 I made an ill-fated recommendation to the newspaper’s corporate parent, which owned newspapers across the country. We needed to create a series of national online magazines about high-interest subjects like tech, sports, business and real estate, staffed by newspaper reporters. By going national we’d be able to attract a bigger user base, and by focusing on niche categories we’d command a better premium from advertisers. But to pull it off, we’d have to build the national magazines on blogging software that was simple enough for a distributed staff to update.

“I pitched the idea to corporate and got some nibbles of interest. But when a top manager at my newspaper heard about it, I got chewed out worse than I had in any job. Ever.

“‘I’m trying to fix the WEBSITE,’ the editor yelled, ‘and you keep talking to me about BLOGS!’

“In other words, keep working the current broken system, and quit with the big ideas. I got the clear impression that my job was in danger if I kept it up.

“I went for a long walk in the parking lot alone, shaken. I had hit a new low. After two years trying to get my career out of a rut, I’d gotten exactly nowhere.

“Fortunately, an editing job opened soon after — covering real estate and finance though, not tech. I moved into that and gave up the blog effort. Soon after, I got an offer to leave the newspaper and edit tech coverage for an entrepreneurial Time Inc. magazine … which led to a job at Fortune magazine covering technology again … which led to an offer to cover technology for CNBC, which is hands-down the best job I’ve ever had.”