The Media Mogul

Jonathan Sacks: Newspaper reporter turned tech columnist and editor. As president of IDG Books Worldwide, shepherded launch of the ‘For Dummies’ series. Headed Web site the Hub, then became president of AOL Interactive Services. Now president of mobile content publisher Mforma. And no dummy.

I have a master's in journalism and was a reporter for 10 years. I spent most of my career at the Miami Herald. I covered everything from cops to local government and started writing about technology because I got tired of blood, guts and gore. I saw an ad in the New York Times for an editor of a computer magazine called Popular Computing, and I got it. They moved me out to Silicon Valley in 1984, and I got to meet the likes of Bill Gates before he was a billionaire.

The idea of “For Dummies” was not mine. It was a guy in a cubicle in our office — he came back from Thanksgiving and said, ‘My uncle said we should do computer books for dummies.’ Like all great things, we thought that was the most idiotic idea we'd ever heard and doubted anyone would ever call themselves ‘dummies.’ But we decided to give it a shot, and it worked.

At AOL I learned that people interact with different media in different ways. You have to look at every new media as an opportunity to really connect to customers in a way you haven't been able to before. Each new technology behaves the way an older technology did until people figure it out. We're in that place in wireless today: It's a nascent industry with one killer app, which is voice, and nobody has figured out what the other killer apps are going to be. That's what's so exciting.

I retired from AOL in 2001 to write a novel, spent three years working on it and was about three months from finishing it when my friend Barry Schuler, who had been the chairman of AOL, called up and told me about Mforma, where he had taken a board seat. He asked if I was interested in coming to run it, but I was not until I dug into it and learned about the market. Once I understood what cell phones were becoming, I thought, ‘This is the biggest opportunity ever.’

My view of technology is a little different in that I view it as enabling. It's the story of consumers, what interests them and what their information and entertainment needs are. The technology just enables you to get that to them. The most important lesson I've learned along the way is to pay attention to consumers. All the answers reside there.