Drawing on Experience:
Web comics pioneer now manages Internet content at MSNBC.com

“It’s all happening online,” says MSNBC.com group manager Hans Bjordahl. (Photo/Michael Wamsley)

By Michelle Lang

The outlook seems dismal. Since 1990, U.S. daily newspaper circulation has decreased 14 percent, the Newspaper Association of America reports. Newsroom layoffs have followed suit. And in April, the CU Conference on World Affairs offered a formerly unimaginable panel – “Imagine a World Without Newspapers.”

And yet, one CU alum compares today’s news employment outlook to the start of the tech boom of the late 1990s.

“The last four weeks, the job market for interactive writing and design, it’s gone from hot to white-hot,” said Hans Bjordahl (’91).

Bjordahl’s optimism stems from his own experience at the start of the Internet wave of the 1990s to his position today as a group manager at MSNBC.com in Seattle.

“The action is online,” he said. “But having a sense of history of the industry is crucial to bring along for the trip.”

That appreciation of traditional journalism and knowledge of technology has kept Bjordahl’s own career trip afloat and thriving since college.

In fact, he said his pioneering spirit resulted in one of his college pursuits, a cartoon called “Where the Buffalo Roam” that was originally written for the Colorado Daily (www.shadowculture.com/wtbr/), becoming in 1991 the Internet’s first regularly updated comic strip. That was in the days of Usenet, a predecessor to the Internet.

That college hobby also landed him a job for nearly six years at XOR, Bjordahl said. The former Boulder-based Internet consultancy, which first took his comic strip online, hired him to work as creative director and director of interactive services. The company swelled from six employees to more than 500 before its demise, which he described as “spectacular.”

Bjordahl's cartoon, Bug Bash.

“It was such an explosion, I got thrown all the way to Seattle,” Bjordahl said of his move west. Despite a frustrating follow-up stint as the Outlook calendar program manager at Microsoft, he said he continued to take advantage of opportunities, including the chance to pen a new comic strip for the company newsletter.

When Bjordahl left Microsoft, he took his hallway-humor cartoon, Bug Bash (www.bugbash.net), with him.

“I’d describe myself as having a bad cartooning habit,” he said. “It’s tough to shake.”

But it’s also made a name for Bjordahl in the online community. BugBash.net gets 125,000 page views per month – although in March it spiked at 300,000 – and a Google search of his name turns up a vast array of results that include Wikipedia entries.

The cartooning hobby has been a constant thread connecting him to the Internet, though one that Bjordahl said he has less time for today now that MSNBC.com consumes much of his energy.

The Internet news organization is in a three-way dogfight, as Bjordahl described it, with MSNBC.com, Yahoo! News and CNN competing for the most eyes everyday. “I like a good horse race as much as anyone,” he said, comparing the workplace energy to his early tech boom days at XOR.

The shift from traditional print newspapers to online interactive media has kept journalists with hybrid skills, like Bjordahl, in high demand, he said.

“Having been schooled in the print world, most of the things to try have been tried,” he said. “On the Internet, maybe we’ve tried 5 percent of what’s possible. That’s the advantage and challenge.”

While some news organizations may still stumble in laying the groundwork for interactive media, Bjordahl said MSNBC.com got an eye-opener on election night after launching its political blog, “First Read.” Instead of the expected thousands of Web page views, the blog saw more than 1 million.

“We saw this big spike that people wanted to see what was happening right now instead of in the morning paper,” he said.

His conclusion: People use the Internet for breaking news updates, but print newspapers still garner attention for traditional analysis.

“TV never killed the radio, and I don’t think online will kill print,” he said.

The challenge lies in segueing from the old model to the new model of media without going too far – drawing the line between news written for the reader to consume vs. readers speaking to news providers and to each other, he said.

This shifting landscape continues to baffle, or even leave behind, some journalism traditionalists, but it has presented an optimistic opening for others.

“For what I’m interested in, I believe I have one of the 50 best jobs in America right now,” Bjordahl said. “Right now, there really is no place I would rather be.”