The View from the Office.

I met up with journalist George Anders at the Charlotte Cafe on the Upper West Side. 

It was a meeting long in the making. I first texted George Sept. 6, 2019 saying I admired his writing. At the time he was working for LinkedIn as a senior editor and posting profiles that I thought exemplified some of the best content coming out of Daniel Roth’s editorial team. 

George responded saying I should reach out if I ever got to San Francisco. He reminded me we briefly overlapped at Bloomberg when he did a stint working for David Shipley as a founding editor at Bloomberg View in 2011. 

It took almost seven years, but we finally met up while he was passing through New York. 

If you’re not familiar with his byline, George has spent the past four decades writing for The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Facebook, Bloomberg View, Forbes, LinkedIn and The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

He published articles and essays in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, The Guardian and the Harvard Business Review. He was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won the 1997 Pulitzer for National Reporting.

He also wrote five books, including the 1992 Merchants of Debt, which chronicled buyout firm KKR. I remember reading that back in the 1990s.

One of the things that’s fascinating about George’s career is how it mirrors the trajectory and transformation of the media from what is now called the legacy media (outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, NYT) to the New Media i.e. the user generated content posted on digital platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn and others. 

We talked about how it’s harder these days to agree on what is an official media company and how online writing and AI are changing the cadence and tone. Writing is moving to be less formal and more oral. 

We noted that for many of our former legacy media colleagues it’s been a challenge to adapt to write in new styles, but that there are huge opportunities for those than can.

And yet, it’s an exciting time because the digital landscape presents an opportunity for a golden era of storytelling. Unconstrained by the pages of a newspaper, social media provides many more people the opportunity to share their stories. 

George says more people will write memoirs. I believe people will become full stack publishers, tweeting short form thoughts, writing longer-form blogs or newsletters on Substack and compiling all those ideas into books. 

George said San Francisco is on fire, fueled by AI and the start-up scene and encouraged me to visit more often. I promised I would get there soon.

You can reach George via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.