Ten years ago today, Jason Chervokas pushed the send button and fired off the first issue of @NY to about 300 subscribers. As anniversaries go, this one isn't significant to many people besides Jason and me: we founded @NY that summer of 1995 to chronicle what we thought was a great story that needed to be told. The usually under-employed class of writers, designers, artists, photographers, editors - and their pals in sales - had created a tiny but fascinating new class of entrepreneur in New York City, leveraging the commercial dawn of the Internet browser to create a new medium. We came to the story during the preceeding year or so, attracted by art-based Websites, by email lists of interesting young people, and by the parties. The two of us were reporters covering the Bronx in those days (I was managing editor and he was political columnist for the Pulitzer-winning Riverdale Press) and we used our slight connections to hang out downtown amidst the tiny gaggle of pioneers who loved both the medium and the hip cooler-than-thou pose it allowed.
Within two years, our circulation of the weekly, plain text newsletter we'd invented - and its early blog-like Website - had grown to more than 100,000. Two years after that, we sold it: to empire-builder Alan Meckler, who has possessed one of the sharpest eyes in media technology for two decades. But in four years, Jason and I met some of the most fascinating people on the planet, and we built a network of personality that provides us with joy to this day. From the start, we believed strongly in the medium, but never in the bubble; we proudly boasted about "deflating the hype." Of course, we were poseurs too - I was profiled in Penthouse magazine, Jason was a CNBC regular for a while. We rode it. We hung at the parties. We did the junkets. And we learned a lot about finance, about management, about sales, about the increasingly interconnected nature of the planet. You can't buy that kind of education.
All along, the idea that user-created content - conversations - was the life's blood of the Internet guided our reportage. And that pose was clearly out best: tested by time, it has proven solid as a rock. @NY's legacy is a tiny one outside of a small circle of people. But it was entirely emblematic of its times, and, in retrospect, part of a the movement of citizens media we're all participating in now. Generally, anniversary articles aren't worth the writing, but this one's personal. Happy birthday @NY. I can't believe it's been a decade.
