“No wireless! There’s only dial up! What do you mean?”

The above sentiments may seem irrational but to some folks, they’ve had this experience. They’ve heard the deafening words, “We’re sorry. There’s no internet access here.” Whether you’re a MySpace junkie or an RSS fiend, we come in all types. And I assure you, dial-up to check email is not enough. We need access, tons of it, and it better be at lightning speed. We need to be able to do tab browsing with Hypebeast, Boing-Boing, Straight Bangin’ and Engadget all at our finger tips. Access has turned us into media tyrants.

It’s a deep dark hole. First you start by checking a few sites a day, and before you know it, access begins to change your socialization. Lines seem too long. Traffic is unbearable. And, yep, screen eye is real. Things need to move at a click’s pace. It’s all take, take, take, but if we look at the other side of the demand, what is this world like for those supplying the media? How do the informants keep up?

Fortunately Dork was able to catch up with one of the best in the business, Peter Rojas, Editor-in-Chief of Engadget.com. If you haven’t heard of Engadget, you’re not a media tyrant. But beware, if you look at the site just once – you may become one.

Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics. The New York based site was launched in March of 2004 in partnership with Weblogs, Inc. In a very small space of time, Peter and his crew have amassed an army of more than 2 million readers a month who all obsess about the latest in tech news. Peter and I sat down one Saturday afternoon to discuss what it’s like to feed the beast in an age of now-news.

Dork: There are a lot of tech sites out there, but there’s something about Engadget that sets it apart. What’s the difference?

When we were at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) I saw the difference, that was the moment we really showed as a team. We had like four people – four writers – it wasn’t enough. But we had more stories than everyone else. We covered it in real time. We had the best coverage of anybody. We were more motivated. We worked harder than anybody. We live blogged Bill Gates’ keynote! We hit it hard. That was the moment that established us. I felt like people really respected us from that moment. They were like – yeah this is a gadget blog, but they can go toe to toe with any news organization.

I definitely sense a hunger among your writers to cover breaking news first. But Engadget also does a great job of making the information accessible without dumbing it down. What’s your approach?

It’s not whether you can talk about tech, but can you talk about it in a way that reaches people. I think tech is cool. We’re a bunch of kids that listen to music and are into fashion and watch movies. So, to disconnect that from the way we talk about tech doesn’t make sense. I care about the way a gadget looks and I also care about whether it has Bluetooth. It’s all equal, but at times it can be a tough balance.

If you notice, the way we post – I first hammer out all the tech stuff and then I look about how to write it in a way that is both informative and accessible. These days you can’t talk about a cell phone and not talk about how much ram it has. These things are important to the reader. It’s a balance. How does it look and what are the functions? Ideally, in every post we’ll nail the tech and talk about it in a way that you can get into it. You might not understand every acronym, but the difference between us and other news sources is that they assume the readers are stupid. We don’t underestimate the audience. We believe that you give a shit enough to figure it out.

In terms of all the products that you work with do you find it difficult not to build an allegiance to a brand?

When you write about stuff everyday, and you write about different stuff everyday, you start to see what people are into – like what people appreciate. You also start to try to find the good and bad in everything. We try to be really balanced. We’re not going to pull any punches. I’m not afraid to say… Well, for example, one of the reasons I was a few minutes late today was because my Treo kept crashing. One of the things we try to do is be really agnostic on the site. Yeah we have the stuff that we use, but we never let it color our perspective. For instance if you’re an Apple person, a PC person, a Sony person or whatever – it should never color the way you write about something.

We get accused of bias all the time. Which I think is silly because if you actually read the site close enough you notice that we just follow the news. If Apple is making a bunch of announcements we’ll cover it, but it still represents a small number of post on the overall scheme of things. 6 out 35 post on a particular day going to Apple does not demonstrate bias. Tomorrow some other company will announce a bunch of stuff and we’ll cover that. There’s no bias. The point is, when you write 35-40 posts a day you cover everything.

The bottom line is that we want to talk about this stuff as honestly as possible. Do I love my Treo? Yeah! But will I be turning it in for a new and improved version. Yep! You can’t get that obsessed with it. That’s why I always get a kick out of these people that start these holy wars between Apple and PCs. I love this stuff but don’t take it personally.

Definitely. You begin to realize that you can’t please everyone once you have a site that allows readers to post comments. How do you balance that?

You don’t want to pander to the audience. That’s where I think some of our competitors started to lose their way. It started to feel like they were pandering to the lowest common denominator. If we stopped writing about Apple because a few people complained, we’d lose all the people that were coming to the site because of Apple. You have to balance this stuff. When you get several million readers a month. Even if we got 100 complaints a month that still would be such a small fraction of our reading population. And we don’t – we usually get like 3 or 4 complaints a week. And half of those are usually a valid complaint about something, and we’ll take that into consideration.

I had a complaint – I didn’t like the PSP losing to the Nintendo DS in that video you had. I was vexed about that. Hahaha!

You know what’s funny about that though. You know why they had the DS win? I actually asked Catz about this… They said it was more fun to smash up the PSP.

Boooo! Hahaha.

It looks nice and the screen is huge! It was more fun to destroy. And the really funny thing is that the people who complain most about us being biased are the Nintendo people. They say we hate Nintendo and we never write about the DS – we only write about the PSP. One guy wrote in about how I didn’t include some post about the DS in our weekly round-up. He was like, “This is clear evidence of your bias against the DS.” What are you talking about dude?

We’re going to cover what the news is. When we did the hacking contest, no one submitted a single hack for the DS. But there were a ton of submissions for the PSP. We’ve gotta cover what is out there. You can’t win with some people.

We have to make decisions everyday about what we’re going to cover and what we’re not going to cover. We use our editorial judgment to decide what is important and what we think people will be into. That said, there’s stuff I’m going to write about no matter what. For instance, when Siemens, the phone division, was up for sale I don’t think anyone cared about that - except for me. I didn’t care. To me I thought it was a really interesting story and there was a bigger trend on China being on the rise and buying up Western brands. So I was like who cares, I’m going for it. Sometimes something will be super newsworthy, and we’ll be like, we’re not really interested in this but it is a big story. For the most part it’s me or Ryan or whoever else is watching the news deciding what will make it that day – going through the RSS feeds and news hits deciding do I want to read about this. If we don’t, we’re not going to write about it.

In that sphere, how do you step away from the echo chamber? Is there a priority for original content on the site?

Again, you have to strike a balance. The one thing that we can’t ever let slack is covering the day-to-day, minute-by-minute news. We do like 35 stories a day. We’ve done as many as 65 in a day. The point is that we’re doing that much stuff. I’ve done as many as 30 posts in one day. When I started Engadget it was just me. In May 2004, I had done 500 posts. I’ve done almost 5000 – 5500 posts in total. Volume helps! We want to be like CNN. When news breaks we’re there. That’s why we’re moving to 24 hour coverage of the site. Soon someone will be watching the site all day and night – constantly grinding for news.

As far as features, reviews, etc. they take a lot of time. I rather not do reviews, then do bad ones. Also they don’t always drive as much traffic – especially when people have already done it and done it well. For instance when the Nano was released we wouldn’t do a Nano review because iLounge already had and it’s great. The main reason people come to Engadget, and I’m always aware of this, is to go some place else and find something else. So I rather say, hey come to Engadget, read about the iLounge review and check them out. They’re great.

When we do something original we do Columns, How to’s, Interviews and we try to do stuff that will get people really excited. Like, did you see Engadget 1985?

Yeah I loved it. I thought the idea was ingenious.

That was four weeks of work. We did a little bit at a time over a month period. I went to Iceland over July and was determined to do this. The funny thing about that feature was young kids thought it was real. We wrote it in the exact same voice we always do. I think that was the best post we’ve done. It’s neat because we’ve built up a relationship with the audience and they get it. If we’d tried to do something like this before it wouldn’t have worked.

We're all about gadgets, so the reputation and relationship made it work. But, man... just researching to ensure that all those gadgets came out in 1985 was hard. It’s not like now where you could research 1999 just fine because the web was around. Anything pre-web is like ether, you can’t find anything.

What I found so interesting about that piece was it reminded me of how much technology has grown. I saw that you mentioned baud rates and I was thinking back to how I went to college with a 2800 modem and thought I was the man. Ha!

Yeah I was one of those kids who had Prodigy back in like 89 or something. I just remember how horribly long it took to download. It’s funny how far we’ve come but it also shows how obselete things become. So for those who are so obsessed with Ipods or whatever, this is all stuff that we’ll look back on, and it’ll eventually be junk. That’s why you’ve got to stay light hearted about it. Not that we don’t take things seriously, but you gotta have fun with it.

So considering the echo chamber, the hunt for original content and the volume of post you produce, do you have spies?

Hmmmm... Do we have spies? We don’t have ThinkSecret level spies, but we know a lot of people in the industry. The best scoops are the anonymous folks. For instance our biggest scoop ever was when we had the first live shot of the Xbox 360.

At the time, everyone had these renderings and photoshop images of the Xbox 360. Then a source who is a developer, who loves Engadget, gave us some inside information. That’s why we were one of the first to report that the system was called the Xbox 360. I was like, “Come on dude!” You know... People try to mess with you. So he gave me his real name and I did a little background checking. Is he who he says he is? Is he a developer? – and it’s tough because you can’t follow every single lead that comes down the pike. We have stuff that we haven’t posted because we don’t know if it’s legit or not. Like the Nano stuff. We had that, but we weren’t sure if it was real. I wish we had published that, but we weren’t sure. Sometimes you don’t want to take that risk.

Anyway, Microsoft had a launch party. No cameras, no nothing, but somehow someone at the party took the picture, created a myspace account, uploaded the picture to the account and gave us a link to the account. No one had those pics. That was on CNN two days later. My parents were like, I’m watching CNN and it says, “…photos courtesy of engadget.com,” in the corner.

That must have been a great moment!

Yeah that was pretty cool. And that’s when you realize when you’ve broke through to this other level. One of the best moments for me was when the NY Times did a story on Pitchfork Media and they compared their audience’s obsession with cool news with us – and mentioned Engadget in the article. To be referred to in that way - it meant a lot to me because it meant that people were starting to see us as this gold standard for something. It also means you gotta take that responsibility seriously. You can’t mess with it. You can’t abuse it, you can’t take it for granted. You can’t mess with people’s expectations. They expect for there to be news 24 hours a day now. After we did Engadget 1985 people wanted that every month. Ha! If we’re lucky we’ll do this every year.

Over time I’ve seen growth in the site's form. I’ve always admired the function, but things seem to be developing at a rapid pace.

We are working on refreshing the design of the site. We’re going to make the navigation a bit more easy. One of the things we noticed was that we do so many post and in one sense it’s great because it’s one of the reasons people visit the site so much, on the other hand when news breaks it gets pushed off the page so quickly that people may miss it. So if we get news ahead of the curve, people will miss it because it’s been pushed off the page by other news. So one thing we’re going to do is add a column to the site for breaking news (i.e., latest Apple) etc. I don’t want people to think that we’re missing news. We’re not missing news. It’s very rare that we miss a big story. I’m not going to say it hasn’t or could never happen, but we work extremely hard to ensure that it doesn’t.

I mean, I never sleep anymore! Blogging completely changes your mindset because now I worry about news breaking and us missing it.

With all of the challenges and intensity to stay on top, where do you get your motivation?

To be honest, there was a point earlier this summer where I was really burnt out. There were mornings where I really didn’t want to do this anymore. Because it is a lot of work and it starts to get repetitive. The audience can be picky, other bloggers begin to attack one another. The pressure is so intense.

It is intense. For example if you decrease the amount of posts a day you lose readers. It’s that delicate.

Yeah. Professional Blogging is one of those unique jobs where you get a report card at the end of the day. It’s traffic. Luckily Engadget continues to increase for the most part, maintaining and increasing traffic is critical. And, you find out how you did at the end of every day.

So how do you do that – maintain and increase?

I want to keep our base happy and figure out ways to bring new people to Engadget. My biggest fear is to have someone write me a letter that says, “I’ve been a reader of Engadget for years and you guys have really lost your edge.” I haven’t received that letter and don’t want to. --El Fin [Visit Engadget.com]