John Lee is Crispus Attucks: A Hiphop Rebel Comes CleanQ&A with John Lee of UrbanExposé

"We launched and hit our target market so fuckin' fast it was ridiculous. Within days we had a fuckin' audience. Strictly word of mouth. It was hot enough to be one of those things that people talk about, and that spreads virally. People talk about 'doing a viral marketing campaign.' You don't do a viral marketing campaign, a viral marketing campaign happens by its fuckin' self."

This isn't one of those dotcom un-success stories. John Lee, under the pseudonym "Crispus Attucks," and his trusty sidekick "Harriet Tubman," are the staff of UrbanExposé, a site that boomed but did not bust. Sometime this month, to mark the end of the first cycle of online content plays and the beginning of the next, Lee will kill UE. Later this month he'll launch a new online property, MediaThreat. UE followed the parabolic path of one subcategory of e-zines?"urban," African-American-aimed and hiphop-based sites?so closely, effectively and mysteriously that even some who logged on and participated every day missed the larger point.

"All you can do is make a site viral-marketing friendly," Lee continues. He imitates a pencil-necked flack: "'We're gonna do a viral marketing campaign!'" Then, in his merciless Brooklynese, retorts, "What are you gonna do?e-mail all your fuckin' friends? Which is what some of these cats really did! Lots of sites did that."

Lee describes himself as "rough around the edges" and "as urban as you can get." He still listens to hiphop every day. You'd never know, sitting on the subway from Fort Greene next to him, as he wears his tan, suede Enyce best, that he's a tech consultant on his way to a meeting, with a head full of code. In fact, he's cagey enough to suggest a lifelong habit of concealing his intelligence, his rare combination of capabilities and, I'm pretty sure, his gentleness. Yet, when I ask, he tells me about being the only kid in Brownsville and Bed-Stuy who had a subscription to Spy. In school (brainy Stuyvesant, for a while) he ran track, and liked to hang back in second place, getting a bead on the leader, watching "to see if he tripped," before trying to pass. Born in 1972, he was a minor media celebrity before he could buy himself a drink, because of his hacking. That started on the Commodore 64 his single mother, who worked as a secretary, bought him.

All the media professionals who got called out on UE over the summer (the site launched in June) assumed that "Crispus" was one of their own. The guy writing the articles obviously knew their business and knew it well, and the posters on the accompanying message boards seemed like his army of moles. Some of the people behind UBO, AKA, 360hiphop, Source.com, Soulpurpose, etc., went half-mad accusing each other of being Crispus Attucks. Crispus was someone who knew their business, allright. What those people didn't quite realize?and if they had, there probably wouldn't have been a UE in the first place?was that their business was tech.

There were dozens of public wrong-guesses as to Crispus' true identity, and zero correct ones. Turns out he was the first black man on the cover of Wired. There's a book about his hacker crew, the Masters Of Deception. The self-taught, phone-phreaking expert from Bed-Stuy was a major character in the widely reported story of M.O.D.'s arrest and capture. Lee's indictment papers are still posted online (he ended up doing six months in a juvie boot camp). He consulted with 60 Minutes on computer security, and even appeared on the show. As urban computer outlaws go, he's not exactly low-profile.

Last spring, Lee says, "I was out of the country, and when I came back I found a whole bunch of urban sites just straight funded beyond belief. I thought it was great! I felt that the urban market had a lot of potential. I had my own ideas about the space. So I took a wait-and-see approach. Then, as they launched, one after the other, I must admit I was extremely disappointed."

He set up shop in a row house in the shadow of Brooklyn's Metro-Tech tower. According to Lee's landlord, the old building would have been torn down during downtown Brooklyn's recent renovation if not for its historic significance. It had been a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Crispus Attucks and Harriet Tubman exposed the inner workings of seven-figure IPO gambits not as professional journalists, according to Lee, so much as to supply what most people who surf the Web are looking for: "just entertainment and a little bit of information." The message-board posters, many of them employed by the companies featured, he says, "were disaffected because they had so many ideas and none of them were implemented. Some of them understood the Internet a lot better than, say, a businessman who spent more time at Wharton learning management, not so much the business they were entering." Lee shrugs. "It was part of the dotcom rush?a lot of things didn't get scrutinized. That's a blessing for some people and a disappointment for others," he says.

That a diverse crowd of freethinking, intelligent people logged onto UE every day is not something Lee has to prove with "hits" statistics, because the readership he drew contributed, candidly and often.

This was the audience that the funded, censored sites wanted to say was theirs. "I think people thought the audience was maybe all about hiphop, that maybe they needed their content dumbed down for them," says Lee. "Actually, the Internet is a research tool?that's the last place you want to dumb down content! You're looking for facts, for information that can help you. The site provided that for people who were already in business, people who were thinking about joining existing media properties and also those who were trying to start their own, fledgling ones. And, of course, we spun it in an entertaining way, and that's where we hit critical mass."

Crispus Attucks' Two Guiding Principles for Content Sites are as follows: (1) Make the technology work for you, and (2) Offer content that keeps them coming back. The first rule means that users better be able to understand a site's layout, to find the content they want and get involved immediately. Otherwise the tech's an enemy.

UE flaunted that steep learning curve. Lee designed the site's "engine" over a weekend. "That's where the hacking skills come in," he says. "I just knew the Web since it started. I had friends who were at CERN, where the Web first started at. I know kids who were working with Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who had the first prototype of the Web. So coming up with an interface that works, that's just a function of knowing the Web."

The IPO-hungry sites, says Lee, "couldn't make any money because they didn't invest in technology. What they did a lot of times is they let design shops tell them their business... That's like the publisher of the Source going to the printing press and saying, 'Yo, whaddaya think I should do with the magazine?' [They'd be like,] 'You need a lotta pages, lotta ink! Let's try the six-color process! There's six primaries?you didn't know?' Cats were asking these e-incubators and website design shops, but none of those ever built a successful media property online." A lot of content got buried, or was unreadable from many computers. Lee sounds sincere when he says, "That was a damn shame."

"UE," Lee brags, "launched with the ability to deliver content to multiple platforms, not just the Web but e-mail, wireless, Palm Pilot?automatically. There are sites that took six months to a year just to develop a wireless strategy... Once the site was programmed, we didn't need a production staff."

Lee claims UE took in less money from ads than from selling the code behind that engine and consulting on how to tweak it for other sites. Besides tech work, he's earned checks working on music-video shoots (he went to film school?Brooklyn College). But he refuses to discuss where, exactly, his money comes from. Maybe that's his ghetto roots showing, he acknowledges, or maybe it's just him.

Those disinclined to see the elegance of UE's marriage of form and function, the clear advantages of an e-zine whose editor-in-chief is also the head programmer, credit the site's success to people's perverse delight in witnessing backstabbings, blown covers, gossip and betrayal.

"I'm not gonna lie and say we haven't exploited controversy," Lee responds. "But I mean, when you feel passionately about something?particularly with the way UE worked, I mean it damn near became a focal point for a lot of the companies we were writing about. It became the beating pulse of a lot of people who are on the Net daily. Whether it was their job or at home?this is something they wanted to see."

Though all kinds of sites allow vicious, personal postings from users, Crispus found himself the target of a criticism unique to the African-American media universe. UE worked in violent contradiction to the united front that many (usually very well-placed) black professionals insist must be presented. In hiphop, to cross this line is to be tagged a "hater."

"That's a term that was made up to deflect criticism and the ability to speak your mind," says Lee. "Criticism, at the heart of it, is the ability for an individual to speak his mind. In urban media, where we had this absurd twist where people used the term 'hater' to deflect criticism, we were in trouble for a little while in 1999. The excesses that came from a lack of listening to criticism or other viewpoints?you see the end result of that."

Another critique of UE that showed up repeatedly on its boards was that the site was blowing a lot of urban entrepreneurs' only chance at big-dollar funding. Why would venture capitalists put up millions for another hiphop content play, now that they've witnessed the subculture's crabs-in-a-barrel problem?

"The money will be back," Lee assures, adding a quote from Robocop: "'Good business is where you find it.' The main thing is that content sites learn a lesson. We tailored the message toward the urban sites, but there were a lot of lessons, businesswise and in terms of execution, for everybody... The next round of people who get funded will be those who learned a lot."

Don't be surprised if MediaThreat takes an early lead?or a suspicious, lagging second?in that next round. "I'm going to be involved in the editorial process," says Lee (who proved to be a subprofessional line editor with UE) of his new site. "I'm inviting some very smart cats, one by one. It's going to have a more powerful engine than UE. It won't take much maintenance at all."

The gold rush and the IPO bubble were fun, he says, but now, "It's back to serious business. Time for people who got results already to step up."