DIARY

February 14, 2003

Selling the exclusive to the Wall Street Journal

Steven had managed to talk to the WSJ some more and it became clear that they were seriously interested. Steven and Pieter talked and emailed all day long and had to agree on the strategy. In order to get the WSJ to take it to the next level we had to give an interview over the phone. A second must was that we had to promise them the exclusive. They didn’t want to do the story (at this point) if we had already talked to other reporters. We agreed to this. The WSJ told us that they would need sufficient time. This meant that they could publish the story on Thursday February 20th. We also had to hold off on getting our first press release out on Monday February 17, 2002. The web site could not be opened up for the public until the WSJ did get a chance to publish.