'I'm A Big Geek,' Reviewed.com's Robin Liss Says

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Robin Liss frightens me a little.

I'm just not used to profiling an accomplished Internet-media entrepreneur who is so young that she was born on the same day that Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate.

Days shy of her 23rd birthday, Liss is the founder and chief executive of Reviewed.com, a network of consumer-electronics publications devoted to product critiques and reviews, consisting of CamcorderInfo.com, DigitalCameraInfo.com, WirelessInfo.com and PrinterInfo.com. Her publications draw about 750,000 to 800,000 unique visitors and 6 million page views a month.

The way Liss is going, she appears to be on her way to establishing the online answer to Consumer Reports. "In the categories we're in, I think we're better and more comprehensive than Consumer Reports," she told me.

Of the 20 full-time employees at Reviewed.com, Liss is the youngest. "CBS Sunday Morning" has profiled her and she appears often on other TV-news shows.

"She's had life experiences that I haven't had," marvels her father, Harvey Liss, an organizational consultant who has a doctorate in soil physics.

Should everyone on the wrong side of the generation gap, like me, resent someone so young and so accomplished? No. Liss is humble and charming. She speaks with great bursts of enthusiasm. I could've easily put an exclamation point after half of her quotes in this piece and covered the rest of them by using italics.

When I asked Liss to tell me the secret to her success, she didn't lapse into clichC)s about the verities of hard work and great parenting or having a competitive fire in her belly. Instead, she confessed, "."

"I take a big interest in the art, business and science of publishing," she said.

Teenage Upton Sinclair

Liss is a fairly hopeless geek, as a matter of fact. When she went off to Tufts University after being accepted in the early-admissions program -- well, natch -- she decided to major in political science. "I wanted to be cool," she said. "I didn't want to be a geek anymore."

Too late. She temporarily became a political geek instead. On Nov. 23, 2003, the New York Times mentioned Liss, then a deputy press secretary to Sen. John Kerry, prominently in a piece entitled "Spies Follow Hopefuls in Search-and-Destroy Mode."

The Times reported that Liss tracked former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, "monitoring his every word for potentially controversial statements or inconsistencies."

Liss has long been interested in helping people through her journalistic work -- well, as "long" as someone her age could be, anyway.

"She has a commitment to the truth," her father Harvey said. Robin was almost kicked out of high school because of a story she wrote for the student-run newspaper. It seemed that the school had plowed the snow around the area where bus drivers and teachers parked, but not where the students brought their cars.

"Some middle-level bureaucrat got upset," the elder Liss remembered approvingly, likening his daughter to a "teenage Upton Sinclair." She initially got suspended for three days but "the sentence was commuted," she remembers with a laugh.

"My teacher said, 'This is great!' You have to fight. They're attacking the media.' It was my first lesson in standing up to authority. Now we stand up to these manufacturers everyday."

Liss shrugs off compliments that someone her age already has achieved a great deal. "It's the Internet! People aren't surprised to see someone so young doing these things."

Oh?

"I found a niche and I filled in," she added. "I don't think I'm reinventing the wheel here."

Harvey Liss has a different explanation: "It's a combination of her ability, the circumstances and her courage to seize the moment. She has very little fear of failure."

Crowded field

It will be interesting to see how Robin Liss progresses. he insists that "being a tool of capitalism doesn't sit well with me."

"What is success?" she mused. "I know it's not the number of press clippings I get or the amount of money I can make. What drives me is creating something great and ethical. Wealth doesn't guarantee you happiness. We're putting the interests of our readers first, and everything else falls into place."

Liss understands that she is, for all practical purposes, just starting out in business. She said her company generates more than $1 million in annual advertising revenue. The upside looks big, as the enterprise continues to come up with new products and gain credibility. But the lucrative field is pretty crowded, with established names like CNET Networks Inc. vying for the same audience with sites such as TechCrunch and Gizmodo.

Still, she commented, her father Harvey has much less lofty goals for her than trying to save the world, one consumer at a time. "My dad told me, 'Maybe you could have someone come in and clean your apartment?'"

MEDIA WEB QUESTION OF THE DAY: Are media entrepreneurs and the Internet made for each other?

MONDAY REPORT CARD: Forget their political beliefs, policies and voting records. If the media will have their say -- and, of course, they will -- the battle for the 2008 Democratic nomination being waged between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be decided by how much money each can raise.

Money is taking on too much importance. It's gotten to a point where it doesn't matter if critics love or hate a movie, but how much it dough it accumulates in its opening weekend. It doesn't matter if a free agent in sports will be a good fit on a certain team -- only what his agent got for him on the open market.

Now it also doesn't matter what candidates stand for. It only matters how much money they've raised.

THE READERS RESPOND to my column about Norman Pearlstine and the CIA-leak saga: "Obviously, the media are so desperate to nail conservatives on anything that they completely ignore the facts." Ben Black

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By Jon Friedman