Success Quote by Jay Chiat

There’s a peculiar corporate poetry in Chiat’s hedged syntax: “One is that that’s the way we started…” It’s the language of a founder justifying a pivot without calling it a pivot, wrapping contingency in inevitability. The sentence keeps lowering the temperature: not truth, not public service, not even “journalism,” but “delivering news” and, more pointedly, “news that’s of value to Web sites.” The customer isn’t the reader. It’s the platform.

The stated intent is managerial clarity: fewer moving parts, fewer revenue streams, fewer explanations to employees and investors. But the subtext is a quiet admission that the early web’s promise of direct-to-audience media is already being re-routed through intermediaries. “Less confusion” is doing a lot of work here. Confusion for whom? For users trying to understand what’s editorial versus what’s product? Or for partners deciding what they can monetize? Chiat frames the business model as a kind of moral clean-up operation, when it’s really a narrowing of accountability: if you sell “value” to other websites, you’re insulated from the messier obligation to serve a public.

Context matters: this is late-90s/early-2000s digital logic, when content syndication, portals, and aggregation were becoming the pipes of the internet. Chiat’s phrasing anticipates today’s platform economy in miniature. The quote works because it’s so unromantic. It captures the moment news stops being a civic object and becomes a modular asset - a widget you ship to someone else’s interface, where “value” can be measured in clicks, not consequences.