Roger L. Simon: The Accidental CEO's Tale

This is going to be an inchoate post from one exhausted blogger who found himself an accidental CEO of a media company that launched today. If you had told me two years ago I would be hosting such an incredible line-up of people at the Rainbow Room today, I would have thought you were the reincarnation of Timothy Leary.

But to begin with, let me say that Jeff Goldstein's keynote address was brillant. We decided to use Jeff as a last minute replacement for Judith Miller when so may advocates of "free speech" attacked us for offering her a platform. (BTW, OSM will be offering plenty of people platforms with all sorts of views. Get used to it.)

Seriously, I thought Judith did a terrific job and her speech will be posted over at OSM as soon as we can get it transcribed (but not by me, because martini-fueled transcriptions tend to be...er... erratic). The general subject matter of a possible Federal Shield Law and what that will mean to bloggers and journalists (and those who go both ways) will be the subject of an on-going series of Blogjams on OSM. Many people have expressed interest in participating, among them Jay Rosen and attorney Andrew Deutsch (a specialist in this area). I even asked the Daily Kos to participate (everybody who blogs should be concerned with this issue) but received no reply. So it goes.

I also thought Sen. Cornyn, who joined our lunch via satellite from Washington, was surprisingly blog-friendly in his remarks.

And speaking of OSM... which I will often, I'm afraid... it's now my day job... special heartfelt thanks to news editor Hillary Johnson and el nino de Barcelona Jos´e Guardia from all of us here in NY for doing triple-duty keeping the site up and running while we're... er... drinking martinis at the W bar with the 5'1" Tim Blair (he's actually 5'3").

UPDATE: A special apology to the those of you who have been emailing me. So far I am unable to send email out of the hotel in NY. Working on it. Of course, there are also, inevitably, many small errors and omissions (names missing, etc.) on the OSM site, which we are working on. We will be updating for the next week at least, I imagine. [But is Tim Blair really 5'3"?-ed. Actually, he's 6'2".]

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I truly had no idea on the situation. I was cluess, which wasn't the first, nor the last time. As some of my postings here have indicated over the years.............

I imagine you're feeling a version of "What a long, strange trip it's been," about now. I have a feeling the trip is just beginning!

Congratulations, Roger! I hope that this will be the start of something very big.

One suggestion, though: The main page is *way* too cluttered. I think one of the problems with the MSM approach to the web has been excessive page clutter, and I'd hate to see OSM go the same way.

Check out the photograph, I hope you like it! Ed wrote me a nice email about it.

I hope your day job doesn't mean you won't have any time for writing novels. I've been hoping that Moses Wine would find a reason to stick his nose around Iraq.

Via the link, I listened to Judith Miller's talk, which, btw, left me with a much more favorable opinion of her, and then heard Roger (right?) say there were about ten minutes for questions before Senator Cornyn was due via satellite and then...dead air. I moved on to something else after a couple of minutes. Did I miss anything?

Also, Senator Cornyn, IIRC, talked about the blogosphere in generally positive terms during the Roberts hearings. I remember correctly.

After being introduced to blogs in late 2002, and the stepping out (if you will) that Bernie Goldberg did - I wondered whether we'd finally hit upon a new source of truth in media. Especially over the last 18 months reading your blog and others; I find this all very exciting, and the answer to my hope.

It's finally here! Absolutely stupendous work! And how exciting to be making the future instead of just watching it unfold!

I hope you, Glenn, Charles, and everyone else get stinkin' rich doing this, Roger. OSM is just another nail in the MSM coffin, and I couldn't be happier to see it.

I don't know if that is exactly what is jarring about the new site, but I do think it is not well formatted. It falls into the category of " I don't know much about art but I know what I like". What exactly is the home page supposed to do when the unsuspecting viewer happens upon it?

Just for me ,it needs to jump out and grab the viewer and it does not. It just lays there and extends a rather indifferent invitation to the casual interloper to maybe drop in, for some unexplained reason. The whole culture has ADD, websites should take that into account.

For me there is not enough visual impact for a major new entry to the information stream.

I REALLY want this to work so that a viable 'alternative' to our current media might soon arise, but I really don't see what this current formulation really offers. It's probably just me, but I don't get it .

It's been a long time coming, and it's well ddeserved. You've got our eyeballs. But we know you've got so much to attend to...
so we'll let you go.

In line with dougf's comment, I have some specific suggestions. Number one, it is the content that is supposed to be innovative, NOT the appearance. The site is wasting valuable real estate with the vertical naviagation bar on the left hand side. That space could be used for advertising, or something more content oriented. I suggest you redesign that section, and put the links in a horizontal navigation bar, like most professional websites do. You guys need to get a book on best GUI practices. I know Microsoft puts one out. Or just emulate a tried and proven site. A very good model to emulate, imo, is Debka. Debka's newpaper format is appealing visually, and it is what former newspaper readers are used to. The beauty, however, is that for the rest of the story, one doesn't have to physically flip to some back page, but just click to see the rest of the story. I want you guys to suceed. The visual right now is a bomb. Get charles hot and get that appearance fixed.

Just to make my suggestion clearer regarding redesigning the vertical navigation bar to appear horizontally instead. You simply have the same main menu items, with the sub-items in a pull down menu that appears as you roll over the main item. For example, in your horizontal navigation bar, you would have an item called News, and when the user rolled over it with the mouse, the sub-items for that menu would appear (United States, World, Politics,etc). This is the norm, and what users expect. You can rip off the code from Front Page, or just gin this kind of navigation bar up with javascript. Charles is a wiz with web programming, he should be able to do this easy.

Funny. When I looked at the site for the first time yesterday my first thought was Thats a great site" so just now I looked at it again and felt the same way. Then went to Debka and found it to be too busy - I find all that movement to be distracting. But then, who am I. . .

November 16, 2005: The Accidental CEO's Tale

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