Highlights From DN Journal's First Decade: Domain Pioneers Up Close and Personal - How Our Cover Stories Evolved Over the Years

Last week I started running a series of highlights from DN Journal's first 10 years - an anniversary we will officially reach on January 1, 2013. One of the things the publication has become best known for is its monthly Cover Stories profiling some of the industry's most successful domain investors and companies. 

In our first year (2003), when DN Journal will still very much a part-time project for me, the initial cover stories were more like brief sketches. There had been no major domain conferences at that point in time, so I had no face to face personal relationships and no photo library to draw on for anything more ambitious than that.

Still, I started expanding the concept with an April 2004 profile of Sedo.com, the pioneering domain company born in Germany that had just opened its first U.S. office in Boston. I requested some photos from the firm to help flesh out the article and the outcome was an early road map for what the Cover Story concept would eventually evolve into - highly detailed biographical profiles with increasingly heavier use of photography that allowed readers to match the names they kept hearing about with faces that brought those names to life. 

The landscape really changed after the first T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference in October 2004. That allowed me to start getting to know people really well as individuals and also to get leads on an wide variety of story ideas. 

Photos from our 2004 profile of Sedo.com: CEO Matt Bentley (at top) at the company's newly opened U.S. office in Boston, head of U.S./UK Operations Daniel Law (bottom left) and Co-Founder Ulrich Essman (bottom right) who was also head of the Technical Staff in the U.S. office. 

One thing I noticed at that first conference was how few women were in the domain space (something that thankfully has dramatically changed since then). That led to an early 2005 Cover Story called  .Women Wanted: Our Role Models Rock But the Business Needs More Recruits. Though female domainers were few and far between in 2005, I had three very talented professionals to profile in that piece, Donna Mahony, Marcia Lynn Walker and Michelle Miller. 

Long time friends and pioneering domain investors Donna Mahony (left) and Marcia Lynn Walker (in a photo from the 2007 Domainfest Global conference in Los Angeles) were profiled, along with Michelle Miller of BuyDomains.com, in our February 2005 Cover Story.

DN Journal reached pass another key road marker in March 2006 when I had an opportunity to tell the story (and many travails) of original Sex.com owner Gary Kremens in a piece titled Be Careful what You Wish For: The Continuing Saga of Gary Kremen and Sex.com. The domain was stolen from Kremens and he went through years of personal and financial agony trying (and eventually succeeding) to get it back. The thief was finally caught and Sex.com was eventually sold for $13 million in what remains the highest publicly reported cash sale on record. 

Original Sex.com owner Gary Kremens (seen here at the 2008 Domain Roundtable 
conference in San Francisco) was profiled in our March 2006 Cover Story.

Three months after the Kremens story, we published what I would consider to be the Cover Story that became the one all of our personal profiles since then have been modeled on - a moving June 2006 piece on domain attorney Ari Goldberger that included his family's terrifying experience during the Holocaust. This was the first piece that really had the full complement of human interest, rich detail and supporting photos that was needed to elevate the Cover Story concept to the level I hoped to reach. In a brief passage from that article I wrote, "I was more impressed by stories I started hearing privately about Goldberger – about people in trouble that he had helped regardless of whether or not they could pay. Goldberger has always felt compelled to stand up for those no one else would stand up for. He can instantly identify with people in dire straits, those for whom help is nowhere in sight, because of the horror his own parents experienced."

Ari Goldberger in the 2006 photo  that led our Cover Story  profile of the noted  domain attorney from ESQwire.com.

"Adam and Ruth Goldberger are both survivors of the Holocaust. Only 5% of the 50,000 Jews who lived in Cracow, Poland before the war managed to survive extermination by the Nazis. Ari exists today only because his parents were among that tiny fraction that made it through the nightmare." 2006 ended with a December Cover Story that has become one of the most popular in DN Journal's history - a profile of the Castello Brothers, Michael and David, the personable geodomain giants who own and have developed such gems as Nashville.com, PalmSprings.com, Acapulco.com and a variety of category defining generic .com domains.  Michael Castello & David Castello on the night I first met them in October 2006 at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East conference in Hollywood, Florida. Two months later I told their remarkable story in one of  DN Journal's most popular Cover Stories to date. More 10th anniversary highlights to come, as well as our own story in the December 2012 Cover Story. In the mean time, on this Christmas Eve - a Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

(Posted December 24, 2012)