"You know, technology CEOs like to think of themselves as rock 'n roll stars." -- James Daly
James Daly is a San Francisco Bay Area journalist and owner of 2030 Media, a content-creation firm in Northern California. Previously, he was Editorial Director of GreatSchools, a website designed to better public schools through increased parental involvement that is used by nearly 3 million persons per month. Prior to that, he launched and was Editor in Chief/Editorial Director of Edutopia, a magazine and website from The George Lucas Educational Foundation that follows innovation in K-12 public education. He also served as Editor in Chief of Red Herring, leading the web site's relaunch in 2004.
In late 1997, Daly led the launch of Business 2.0, an international biweekly businessmagazine. Arriving in July 1998, Business 2.0 ultimately had a paid circulation of 350,000, six international editions and won more than a dozen editorial awards, including the Folio: Editorial Excellence Award for Best Business/Finance Publication three years in a row. Business 2.0 was also a National Magazine Awards finalist in the category of General Excellence. Business 2.0 was also featured in Magazine Design That Works (Rockport Publishing). He served as Editor in Chief and Editorial Director at Business 2.0 until the publication was sold to AOL Time Warner in July 2001.
Daly has served as a Features Editor at Wired magazine, where he was the lead editor on cover stories that helped gain the magazine the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 1996. He was also Senior Editor at Forbes ASAP magazine, was a new media columnist for Rolling Stone and San Francisco Chronicle and has written for a number of publications including the Los Angeles Times, ID and Writers Digest.
Daly received his Bachelor of Science, cum laude, in Journalism and Economics from Boston University. He also has a degree from the New England School of Photography, and has done postgraduate work in economics and international relations at Harvard University.
"And I love writing. I've always loved writing.""Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year.""Business people have been made into these rock stars because they've made a lot of money.""Certainly there are bubble-like valuations of certain companies, but I don't think anyone out there believes that we're going to go back to doing business the way we used to do business.""I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.""I still believe that the mission of Business 2.0 is very strong, very fundamental, and we're really at the beginning of where they're going to take us.""I think Fast Company has a tremendously smart focus and execution.""I think up until that time a lot of focus on Internet coverage was either sort of the bits and bytes aspect of it, sort of the high-tech aspect of it, and the sociological aspect of it, which is how it was transforming culture.""I think what we should have done is integrate the web site with the magazine much earlier in the process.""I'm a history buff, and right now we're sitting on one of the most dramatic historical shifts that this planet has ever seen and we have a front row seat for it.""It's very rare that publications double their frequency.""People say we were an overnight success. It took us a year to be an overnight success.""People who say that the Internet is the bubble are incredibly misguided.""Rock stars are incredibly energizing to me.""See, what we were going to do was say, the Internet is this great business strategy tool.""The best rock musicians are the most exciting people in the world.""The collective energy of everyone is what really made Business 2.0 exciting.""The hardest part of it was really being away from my family - I have two small children. Last year I took over 20 business trips, so being away from them was hard.""The magazine was being started by a company that had no experience in business magazine publishing. It was a little difficult to get people to sort of buy into it and to join the staff, but we did.""The stock market can be down, but the stock market is not an indication of where people's spirits and enthusiam are, and where their intellectual energy is.""The story of the Internet is this incredibly strong, exciting change.""There certainly was a lot of potential in the air for doing a magazine which focused on the way business, in particular, was being transformed by the Internet.""There was never any danger of Business 2.0 ever going under.""You can't be distracted by the noise of misinformation.""You can't suppress creativity, you can't suppress innovation.""You have to remember a lot of business is very cyclical.""You have to remember when we were going once a month, we were putting out issues that were 480 pages, and people were complaining that these were too big, I can't get through a 480 page magazine every month.""You lie awake at 3 in the morning thinking of story ideas. You're online at 8 a.m. on a Sunday or midnight on a Wednesday. It's a job that you never push aside.""You've just got to focus on excellence and try not to be distracted by the news and the rumors and the absurdities of the stories that were coming out."