"Are you out of your #%$@* mind?"
"Well, yeah," I'd reply to that relatively sound advice from a really good friend. "I think I am."
And that, my friends, might be the one thing that hasn't changed about this company over the near-decade that's elapsed since then. Because even now, with DK Pittsburgh Sports having started from scratch on July 23, 2014, to now soaring at all-time highs -- the past 12 months have brought across-the-board record results with 45,950,569 page views, 1,482,271 unique users of our app/site, 9,211,317 viewers of our videos, 6,385,471 listeners to our podcasts -- I'm more convinced than ever that our biggest and best are yet to come.
Our 10th anniversary's Tuesday. We're having some fun with it at the Downtown HQ/Shop, 12-6 p.m., and everyone's invited. We'll talk sports, we'll snack on some light refreshments, and we'll keep trying to sell off our Kenny Pickett XL overstock.
Given that, and given this annually being the lightest week on the sporting schedule, I had the idea to invest this Insider into a story I've never fully told despite it being the one that's most often requested: How did this happen? Why? What prompted a gainfully employed metro sports columnist to break off into a scenario smothered in unknowns?
Going to give that a shot today ...
____________________
I'd been at the Tribune-Review for almost four years, from 2011-14, after almost 20 years at the Post-Gazette. The Trib offered the columnist role I'd long been seeking, a higher salary, and that was that. Nothing but good times there, too. Nothing but good things to say.
With one exception.
I'll omit the name, since I'm looking to share a story that I see as nothing but positive, but there was one individual on the news side who seemed to have quite the stick-up-the-craw over my arrival at the Trib and never let it go no matter how many friendly approaches I'd made. He was in charge of photography when I got there, even though he wasn't a photographer, and he soon was put in charge of internet matters even though he had no experience there, either. Classic case of someone who shines only in meetings.
At the PG, I'd built up an online community of Penguins fans with a weekly feature entitled Penguins Q&A, beginning in the late 1990s. A few years later, upon moving to the baseball beat, I started a daily feature entitled the PBC Blog. The latter grew to the extent that the PG created an entire premium level for its content -- rare at the time, unprecedented in our city -- to augment the PBC Blog.
Once at the Trib, I'm proud and grateful to say, a huge percentage of that community followed. And what a pleasant, wonderful surprise that was, not only to me but also to the Trib's editors.
With one exception.
One summer day, not long after I'd returned from covering the Sochi Olympics in Russia, the name-omitted guy came up with the idea to change how the Trib's commenting system would work, with an aim of having all commenters get cycled first through Facebook. And this, as anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of social media would've known, would either reduce my community to the oldest possible age group and/or destroy it altogether.
I went directly to the editor of the paper, Frank Craig, pled my case and, in doing so, made clear that I couldn't continue under such a circumstance. That I wasn't about to let go of the readership that'd been responsible for my career to date. That nothing mattered more to me than dealing directly with my readers, even if that still seemed like a foreign concept in the newspaper world. And it seemed, as I left his office, that he both understood and related.
He apparently didn't. One day after I began a post-Olympic vacation, I checked my Trib blog and found the commenting platform had been replaced by Facebook. All of my regular readers, all the familiar names and faces and personalities ... had gone poof.
As soon as I saw that screen, then had it confirmed that the change was made with the editor's approval, I knew I was done.
Not at the Trib. But at newspapers.
____________________
Every day anyone walks into a door at almost any paper in America could be their last. The Washington Post announced recently annual losses of $70 million. The Post-Gazette's on record with annual losses of $30 million. The Trib, which long ago shuttered the Pittsburgh operation of which I'd been a part, hasn't announced losses, but it's known to be heavily sustained by the trust fund of the late publisher Dick Scaife, and it's nowhere near what it was.
I don't know how anyone still does it, but they do. And good for them.
I couldn't anymore. I felt like there were a ton of people at both papers doing good work and, despite that, the trajectory of the overall industry was down, down, down. No matter what anyone achieved, no matter the awards or accolades or even hearing directly from readers how much they valued the reporting and writing, everything was down, down, down. Circulation was down. Advertising was down.
Spirits, naturally, followed.
Not mine. I wanted to feel that what I was doing had worth, however little that might be in a broader scope. I wanted to feel that, if I put a lot into something, it wasn't for nothing.
And I share this interlude only to stress that, even if it hadn't been for the name-omitted guy, I'd have left newspapers. I couldn't have stayed a lot longer. Not with the doom, the gloom and, maybe above all, the palpable ignorance as to how desperately they needed to change their ways to stay ... well, alive.
If I was going to sink, it wouldn't be because of the ship. Let's put it that way.
____________________
One small problem with all this awesome idealism: Between the writing and some online radio I'd been doing for the Trib, my annual pay topped $110,000, which, as anyone will attest, is highly uncommon in this business even today. I also received health benefits, a nice 401K match and more, and all of that was very much needed with two children in the house not far from their college years.
Not surprisingly, when I sought an audience with the Boss, this conversation about online communities and so forth ... didn't go well.
Like, at all.
This was very late on the night that I'd seen the community get swallowed. I laid it all out for Dali, all the passion I felt, all the emotion, all the examples I could cite as to why I'd feel so strongly and ... did I mention that this didn't go well?
We kept going. Back and forth. For hours. It was now the middle of the night and, ultimately, she burst into tears. Which I still can't believe took as long as it did, but oh, boy, did they come.
"You've already made up your mind," she'd say through those. "I can tell when you've already made up your mind, and you're already out."
I was. And now, so was she.
So the subject and tone shifted, just like that, toward how I'd make this work. Or, to be way more precise, how we'd make this work.
Between the two of us, she's always been the pragmatic one, which is a perfect and welcome contrast to all the idiocy I'll concoct on a regular basis. I'll come up with ideas without considering any real ramifications, and she'll ram home the ramifications. So, in this context, I knew I needed hard goals, a hard formula that'd make this seem even moderately plausible.
Next problem: No one else had done this. As in no one anywhere in North America. So I had nowhere to point, no data to cite.
Only this: When I was at the PG, I used to ask for our online numbers all the time. It was kind of a thing for me, rooted in a lesson I'd been taught back in 2004 at the Athens Olympics by Stephen A. Smith. (Yes, that one.) He'd told me of a time when he was a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer and was seeking a raise, and the editors wanted nothing to do with it. He responded, in what's now very easy to imagine being the Stephen A. style, that he had the numbers to demonstrate his worth to the paper and how much they'd lose if he were to leave. At which point he was paid every penny.
So I'd collect those numbers, too. Then I'd do the same at the Trib. And although I never did anything with them as far as approaching editors -- I'm not exactly Stephen A. -- I knew exactly how many people were reading my columns. And I knew how many were read related to Steelers, Penguins, Pirates or other subjects.
Which is what I'd tell Dali that night: I knew my Steelers columns, for example, average around 10,000 readers online at the Trib, and I knew that my most-read stuff in my final year at the PG, covering Sidney Crosby at the Vancouver Olympics, was also right around 10,000.
That was it. That was the magic number: 10,000.
Next came the money: How much do we need as a family? How much should we charge? And most important, how much would readers be willing to pay after years and years of reading me for free?
Not many media outlets were charging for anything, and the handful that did were probably over-charging. So I came up, wholly in the abstract, that I felt like my community, the one I'd been fighting to keep, might be willing to pay $2 a month. Or $24 a year. Didn't seem like too much, given the way so many in the community seemed connected to my kind of coverage.
That was it. That was the other magic number: $24.
And it was at that point, I could tell, that Dali's begun doing that small slice of math ... before finally letting out her first smile all night.
A key ally'd been found.
____________________
She knew better than to ask when I'd want to get started. It was now past 4 a.m. following a Friday midnight, meaning we'd have only the weekend to take care of everything before I'd resign my position at the Trib and announce the new site.
Which ... didn't exist.
I did about an hour's worth of Google digging to find that only WordPress was viable, another hour's worth to find that only PayPal was viable for collecting money, and then another hour's worth to try to uncover security issues that could kill the whole thing in a heartbeat if everything wasn't just right. Specifically that, if anyone really wanted to read my stuff without paying, we'd be super-easy to circumvent.
Awesome.
Whatever. Just keep going. We both put our heads down and just kept going.
She came up with a logo that I promised her yesterday I wouldn't publish again in this column:
DALI KOVACEVIC / DKPS
Oops.
Let's just say she's mastered the craft in the interim.
There'd be some sleep for the next few hours, then a sense of renewed disbelief and another hard reality that'd hit upon waking up: I needed to be credentialed to be able to continue doing this job at the same level. I mean, obviously. And here again, I was operating without precedent. I knew the credentialing process, I knew how teams and leagues treated anything/anyone independent at the time, and I knew, in turn, that I'd have to make a personal plea to people I'd learned to trust.
These are names I very much do want to recognize in this piece, those of the four people I'd call that day and receive their immediate approval. Because without the Steelers' Burt Lauten, the Penguins' Tom McMillan, the Pirates' Brian Warecki, Pitt's E.J. Borghetti -- all of them, enthusiastically -- agreeing to continue credentialing me, out of respect for the professional relationships we'd forged -- none of this gets off the ground. Not only did they credential but, in years to come, they'd get asked by other teams in the NFL, NHL, Major League Baseball and NCAA how they handled the precedent that'd been set in Pittsburgh. One year, in particular, at MLB's Winter Meetings, the media relations directors asked the Pirates' contingent to address the rest of the group on how they handled us.
If the above paragraph's all that's remembered out all these words, that'd be appropriate.
People ask why I'd never leave Pittsburgh. That's why, right up there.
____________________
So we had a site, a logo and credentialing. All that was missing, it seemed, was one final rush of courage.
By Sunday, I'd been playing around with articles, announcements and the like on the site, all unpublished.
McMillan was huge in this regard. He'd handled the media all through the Penguins' bankruptcy and Mario Lemieux's many storylines, so this was the smallest of small potatoes. But he helped as a friend. He told me who I needed to contact, what order all of that had to take place, how to exit the Trib on professional terms and, of course, how to make it all sing on social media. As I've told Tom countless times since then, he's the best.
I also reached out on that Sunday to a couple of fellow reporters, one of whom responded with the blistering -- if understandable -- expletive that opened this column. I got it. I knew that'd be most of the reaction.
My last call that day went to my late dad. Because that's where yours would've gone, too. I didn't bore him with the business details, all the community stuff and whatever. Which he didn't need to hear, anyway.
He asked me, simply: Will this make you happy?
I told him it would.
He replied: Then that's what you'll do.
At 9:30 a.m. Monday, we did it.
____________________
Per McMillan's recommendation, because all of the Trib brass would be at work, I sent the resignation email. Then, precisely two minutes later, I posted on social media about resigning. That way, in the unlikely event that anyone at the paper would've gotten mad enough to claim that they fired me, everything would've had proof with timestamps.
Told you he's the best. I never would've thought of that.
The reaction from the public, chiefly on Twitter but also on old-school TV and radio, was a billion times bigger than anything we could've anticipated. Multiple interviews followed that day and the next morning, highlighted by being on the WDVE 'Morning Show,' with longtime host Randy Baumann asking me, 'Dude, have you thought at all about what you just did?'
Neither the PG nor the Trib reported on it, but they weren't needed. (And, if I'm being all-the-way blunt here, it's been almost 10 years, and neither's still reported on anything about this successful Pittsburgh business, not even when we opened a physical Downtown location. Not. One. Syllable. Only the Pittsburgh Business Times, with no ax to grind, has reported on us.)
I took a break that afternoon from all the fuss to take my laptop and other equipment back to the Trib offices on the North Shore. The lady in human resources who accepted the equipment would later ask Dali if I needed some sort of help medically. Meaning, once more, whether or not I'd lost my mind.
I'm sure she meant well, and I mean that.
I then drove around to the front side of the Trib's building, just in case Craig, the editor, was there, as he often was on his cigar breaks. Conveniently enough, he was. I parked, approached and thanked him for everything. He was terrific, wishing me well.
As I began walking back to the car, he'd add that, if this didn't work out, I was always welcome back at the Trib.
I'm sure he meant well, too, and I mean that.
I knew I wouldn't be back. And soon, we'd see why.
____________________
I covered a Pirates game at PNC Park that night. Wrote a baseball column, which felt easy compared to all else the previous few days. A deep sigh of relief.
Got home afterward, and the Boss was sitting in the same spot as the other night. Smiling again.
The PayPal showed $18,000 in subscription revenue. First day.
It showed another $10,000 the next day.
Our plans to apply for a $100,000 loan from PNC Bank were shelved, and we'd be built, as we still are today, on the backs of our subscribers. Even with multiple other streams of revenue, the subscribers still account for more than a third of everything that comes this way.
Oh, and an epilogue without parallel ...
We knew we were on the way to becoming a wholly legit operation when an online group of Flyers fans mocked our inaugural logo by emailing us this:
FLYERS FANS
Those rocket scientists aside, I hope it'll be clearer now why we're always saying we couldn't have done this without the community. It's the truest thing we say. It was the driving force.
Thanks, in all seriousness, to everyone who read all of this and especially to those who've played a part in it, large or small, early or late. Dali and I are forever grateful.
