Lessin, formerly a technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal, is founder and editor-in-chief of The Information, a digital-first site covering the technology industry.

DL: What was the impetus for founding The Information?

Lessin: Over the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of activity and excitement about online advertising and the growing belief that the way to make a business work is get the most clicks. That disturbed me. I can’t believe that the best business model for journalism is one that drives reporters to write for the lowest common denominator. I saw through my experience as a tech reporter and editor for eight years at The Wall Street Journal that there was a thirst for deep information about the tech industry relevant to professionals. And I believed that the best business model for that content was a subscription business that aligned the mission to write unique content with the business.

To me, that’s the critical ingredient to surviving in today’s media. The brands that people follow are the ones that they have a real relationship with, the ones that have a differentiated value are the ones that stand out. That’s the subscription model.

The Information doesn’t want to be all things to all people. We have to deliver a product and an experience that readers can’t get elsewhere. You set it up that way. There’s a high degree of difficulty, but there’s also a high level of reward. If we’re day in, day out writing articles, that can totally be summarized [by other sites], and that’s a perfectly acceptable substitute as a product. That’s a problem. The blogs pick up on one quote, one thing that will generate traffic. What we find is that that kind of thing helps us in terms of exposure.

Our subscribers say they want more of a point of view, they want an informed take on it, the full package, the story behind the story, not the sound bite but what’s happening behind the scenes. And they want to get it first in their inbox.

What we’re really doing is building an experience. It’s not the words on a page, it’s how you get the word, and the commentary and community that are attached to that word. It’s more than information, though that’s the heart of it. But it’s the rest of it—beyond the information—that is the hardest part.

In the news business, people have lost sight of who their audiences are, who they are writing for. It’s not about pandering to them, it’s about answering the questions they want asked. And it takes time to do that, and effort to do that.

Eyeballs don’t equal success. On the news or business side, there are always trade-offs and compromises.

DL: What do journalists need to know and do? Do they have to have tech skills as well as writing skills?

Lessin: I don’t buy that—you don’t have to be a jack-of-all-trades. Organizations need tech skills as a competency, but what we’re really looking for are great journalists. We are recruiting, and we ask applicants to talk about their new take on events or ideas, how they pushed through a new idea or project.

I look at their Twitter followers, and yes, I’m interested in what they have to say. But I am the most actively engaged on Twitter when I am the least engaged in what I really have to do—so there’s a trade-off there. I do think journalism organizations have to think about how people are accessing their content, and we all have to have a certain awareness of how we’re spreading the word.

But if you are a great reporter, and you have a great environment, and you have a great audience? That’s so much more important. I worry because I see J-schools emphasizing that jack-of-all-trades model. But at the end of the day, the opportunities for original thinkers and writers have never been greater.

And J-schools have swung too far toward the tools, toward spending classroom time doing things like editing videos. You have to care about doing the legwork to make sure your stories are getting in front of the people who want to read them, but I think the organization has to do a lot of that work so the reporters can do what they do best.

We have implemented a commenting system, which we think is an interesting way to harness the expertise of our community. The vision is to make every subscriber’s opinion about our stories part of the value proposition.

Our core readers are business professionals and leaders in tech and finance, and they don’t have a lot of time. They’re also constrained by what they can say publicly. So we have to make sure we’re building a product that’s worth their time, worthy of their investment. Our subscribers may hit a lot of sites through the day. They’re getting articles in their inbox and choosing to read them.

For us, the question was whether it is possible to maintain very, very high quality in a publication without the structure of traditional [news] organizations and their brands. As reporters, it was our insights and relationships that made people want to talk to us. We knew that if you call anyone with a good enough story, they’re going to want to call you back, and that has totally been proved true. More people return my calls now than they did at the [Wall Street Journal]. There’s a curiosity about what we’re doing.

It’s been really exciting to see the caliber of the people interested in us. Journalists want to tell great stories, and they want those stories to be read and to influence how the world moves forward. They’re looking for the opportunity to do that.

DL: So how do you monetize that?

Lessin: People are always talking about different business models for different kinds of content. Pay walls for some kinds of content are sustainable, but not for all kinds of content. The [Wall Street] Journal had it right. It was not a niche publication; it appealed to a certain audience, but in the scheme of the panoply of media, the pendulum has swung too far. There’s so much more potential in the subscription model. [Consumers] are paying for Spotify. They’ll pay for value. I don’t think it’s a niche thing.

If you look at the potential audience for expertise in tech, the Journal was started for experts in finance, and then it used its expertise to grow as the demand for information about the financial world grew. I think we’re going to see a lot of major brands that are not niche that are going to be built through this model.

In technology, tech startups that start really narrow and are really focused tend to be the highest in value. Instagram took photos, that’s all it did. It became a formidable competitor to Facebook because it excelled at doing what it did.

Vox is like that; just let them get going. You have to start by being better at something. Disruption happens not because you’re worse at a bunch of things, but because you’re better at something very, very specific, and you make that work, and then you grow.