An Interview With Jared Kushner

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L.G.: Tell me about your growing internet operations, particularly the Politicker, and your plans for that. The last I saw, you were in about 20 different states.
 
J.K.: Not 20. I think we're at about 16 now, and we're growing.
 
L.G.: Okay. So, explain to me the whole idea behind this, how you're intending to monetize this huge investment you're making. Politicker was an existing brand at the Observer.
 
J.K.: Definitely. Politicker was kind of an interesting thing. I bought this website, PoliticsNJ.com, which is now called PolitickerNJ.com. We did that just from a branding point of view and it was one of the only URLs for which we could get a clean sweep of all 50 states. And we thought it was a great brand. I bought the New Jersey site and I figured, I didn't know who this guy Wally Edge [a nom de plume for a political insider] was, who ran it. He's an anonymous editor that's been around for a lot of years. Turned out he's absolutely phenomenal at what he does. We've hired some reporters, put some resources behind it, we've rebuilt the site in about 12 days. I redesigned it in about 12 days.

L.G.: You, Jared, hands-on redesigned it?
 
J.K.: With the designer. But in terms of web design, I'm very picky about how things look, the general aesthetic of it. I don't have any formal training in these things, so I look at it like a consumer, kind of like with the newspaper. I had a lot of experts who were great at redesign, and Peter Kaplan, who knows everything about newspapers. But I try to bring the consumer's point of view, and maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but I'm more willing to take risks with that. So we bought this site and we did it so quickly because we wanted to be out ahead of the competition in the state. We're over 40 employees in the company.
 
L.G.: And this is separate or under the same Observer umbrella?
 
J.K.: This is totally separate, and what I found with that site is, it was incredibly influential in the political realm, and literally everyone in politics in the state of New Jersey goes to that homepage and they check it three times a day. So I thought of it as a very effective P to P media—politics and politicians. My original goal with that is, "Let's just build the content and figure out how to monetize it later." I just recognized that it was a valuable asset. It became profitable within the first six months in the sense that we don't have an ad sales team, so people just started calling up saying, "I want to advertise on your site because I recognize that from a value and efficiency point of view, it's the best way to reach politicians, it's the best way to reach legislators."

L.G.: When you call something "profitable," what do you mean by that?
 
J.K.: It means that you make a dollar as opposed to lose a dollar.
 
L.G.: But what are you charging against it? The rent and what else?
 
J.K.: If you think about it, for that business, you don't need any rent. Now we do, because we're building out, but if it was a website, you know, with one guy running it—
 
L.G.: From his basement?
 
J.K.: Part of what's great about that business is, you have kind of a new-age way of reporting. If I hired you tomorrow and you were one of my reporters, and you were in Oregon, you'd get a laptop, a wireless card, a BlackBerry, a cell phone, one of these fancy recorders, a digital camera, a video camera, and you're off and running. Whereas most reporters can go back to their news bureau to file, our guys are sitting in their car, filing stuff. So we're quicker than everybody else. You know, you focus on hyper-local news.
 
L.G.: So the big scoop would be an early report on a House member retiring.
 
J.K.: We break that news all the time. Now we're all over—California, New Jersey, Washington, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, Kentucky, all over. 

L.G.: So as far as you can tell, you are on the right path to making money with this?
 
J.K.: The New Jersey site's making a profit. The other sites are still working to build the critical mass, but they're building the buzz, which was most important. New Jersey wasn't built overnight, but was built by consistent reporting, by putting out a consistently good product—all original reporting.
 
L.G.: As you know, the pattern of advertising revenue in web operations is that there is a spike in the beginning and then it sort of plateaus, and then people are wondering, how are we going to make it grow some more? You haven't reached that stage, I suppose.
 
J.K.: No. I think with the New Jersey site, there is a difference between trying to be a P to P site and being more general. I don't want to be everything to everyone, I really want to be a P to P site, politics for politicians. So I think the more that I go P to V, politics to voters, it dilutes my value proposition to the advertisers. So, for example, if you want to reach anyone and everyone who's in the state of New Jersey with a corporate social responsibility message—like [New Jersey Governor Jon] Corzine advertising his toll hike plan, while the opposition was advertising against it—but if you want to reach everyone in New Jersey, you could spend $5,000 on my site or you could spend $150,000 trying to get into all five newspapers all across New Jersey.

L.G.: But your family has been a force in New Jersey politics, and New Jersey people would know that this might be a go-to place, but in other states where the Kushner family isn't known, might it be more of a challenge?
 
J.K.: There's no correlation. People don't go to the site because of that. [Not having family political influence in a particular state] would actually make it more credible as opposed to less credible. The best thing about the site is that the Democrats accuse us of being the tool for Republicans, and the Republicans accuse us of being the tool for the Democrats, so we try to be bipartisan in that sense.

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