GoKawiilSometime in late February 2006, my phone rang; it was my boss, Steve Saunders. A serial entrepreneur, Saunders had birthed the telecoms website Light Reading in 2000.
"I bought the URL darkreading.com and am thinking about starting a security site," he said. "Interested?" Indeed, I was. I asked Saunders about the projected launch date. "Early May," he said.
I was silent but knew he could hear my eye roll.
By way of background, tech media looked very different 20 years ago. Most print publications had websites where they mostly recycled their print content and could run stories in their full, uncut length. In 2006, there still weren't that many sites being launched without a print analog counterpart. Saunders was known for putting the cart before the horse that way, trusting that great content would attract a very specific audience — and advertisers.
It's also fair to say that, in that era, the majority of news websites were pretty basic. Most of them had Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and message boards for stories (no moderators — too expensive). If they were fancy and had budget, B2B news sites sported a search bar. Columns and opinion pieces got repurposed under the clunky heading "blogs," which in 2006 sounded more like an upper GI event than anything you'd want to read.
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But back to getting a new security site off the ground: May was two months away and felt like tomorrow. Who exactly was going to crank out content for this Dark Reading? I took a mental inventory of the writers and editors I knew who could maintain the story-a-day pace. As luck would have it, Tim Wilson had just been laid off from Internet Week. Lots has been written about Tim, who passed away in 2021; he was the total package of writer, editor, and manager. And friend. I wasn't 30 seconds into my pitch when he asked, "When can I start?"
Our conversation quickly turned to who else we wanted to hire. Tim and I both had a long, admiration-filled history with Kelly Jackson Higgins (Tim, starting at their college newspaper at William & Mary; me, from across the hall in the Washington, DC, bureau of CMP — now Informa). Kelly had abandoned us 15-plus years previously for what become a wildly successful freelance business. I was dubious we could lure her back, but Tim was unfazed: "I don't care. I'm calling her." Several minutes later, he IM’d me that we had Dark Reading's first managing editor. I may have raised both fists in the air and yelled, "F%#! yeah!"
It didn't take long to find our momentum. Story coverage ranged from spam-based malware (some things never change) to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks (distributed DoS, or DDoS, would soon follow), and, of course, the TJX data breach that exposed 46 million customer records. The industry was wrestling over what would replace or complement the firewall, not to mention how to manage all those freaking alerts. SOCs were growing almost as fast as threat varieties and types of attackers.
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