How the Sayfie Review Was Born

By Justin Sayfie

August 16, 2016

Fourteen years ago today, I launched the Sayfie Review for fun. Here’s the story that I have never publicly told.

When I was 11 years old, at McNicol Middle School in Hollywood, I learned the Basic programming language, and wrote very simple computer programs. When I was 14, in 1982, my parents bought me an Apple II+ home computer that a buddy and I converted to a BBS (“Bulletin Board System”) thanks to my parents who funded the extra phone line. It was a primitive system that ran on a single modem and a single phone line, that first operated at 300 baud, and then upgraded to "lightning fast" 2400 baud.  Visitors to the board would call in, one at a time, check messages, post new board messages and then hang up. That lasted a couple of years before our teenage interests moved in other directions.  :-)

When I saw the World Wide Web for the first time in 1994, I was amazed that multiple people could be logged on to a single site at the same time, and could visit multiple sites from a single connection. Compared to the BBS I had used to operate, I understood the awesome connective power that the internet represented.

When Jeb Bush was elected Governor in 1998, I moved to Tallahassee and worked first as his chief speechwriter, and later, in November 1999, as his Communications Director. In that role, one of my responsibilities was communicating the successes of Gov. Bush’s “A+ Plan for Education” which included school grades and school vouchers to students in chronically failing schools. One way I did this was by creating a single webpage on the Governor’s website that had all the aggregated links to news clips that showed the positive impact of the A+ Plan.

Little did I know then that this news link aggregation project of mine would help inspire another news aggregation idea – the Sayfie Review - because another service that the Communications Office provided to administration officials was generating and distributing the ‘morning clips.’ An employee who would wake up early and buy the hard copies of the newspapers and cut out any relevant articles with scissors and make a packet of copies of the day’s articles, so they could be distributed.  During my time there, a new electronic clips service started, and we would receive an email with links to all the Florida news articles. It was organized in alphabetical order by the name of the newspaper, and each newspaper’s articles were grouped together. The email of links was inefficient to read because the stories weren’t grouped together by subject, and sometimes the same story would be linked multiple times in different papers. #NotUserFriendly

In the summer of 2001, I left the Governor’s office and came back home to South Florida and started working as a lobbyist. In Tallahassee, I had become a state political news junkie, and the only way to get my news fix back home was to visit every state newspaper online and hunt for the state political news stories on each website, a laborious process that frustrated me. 

That’s when it occurred to me. Why shouldn’t there be a website with all of the state’s political news from Florida’s newspapers, grouped together by story, on one easy to read page. I decided to see if I could create it? So, in early August 2002, I went to a computer store and bought a software program called Microsoft FrontPage, which was a webpage editor. I laid out the page in a crude Drudge style format. I created a bookmarks folder with all of the Florida newspapers’ political news pages. To see if I could actually do it, I would wake up around 5:45 am and went through the webpages, and manually copied the links into the FrontPage software layout, and would generally finish by 7 am. I did this every day for a week before I felt comfortable that I was ready to launch, and that I could publish the page without interfering with my real job as a lobbyist.

The day before launch day, I called a few friends of mine who were working in Governor Bush’s office and asked them to gather in one of their offices, to show them the Sayfie Review page. I was on the phone with them as they looked at it, and they were very impressed. I’ll never forget one of my friends saying, “Pulling these clips every day is a lot of work. Who’s going to do it?” My response was, “I will.” Doubtfully he said, “We’ll see how long that lasts.”

The next day, I launched SayfieReview.com. That was 14 years ago today. Since then, the Sayfie Review homepage has been viewed over 40 million times by hundreds of thousands of people, and we’ve sent over 20 million morning headlines emails. Year after year, surveys repeatedly rank Sayfie Review as the top news source for Florida’s legislators. We’ve organized three Summits of Florida’s leaders, and are preparing for our fourth on November 17-18. The #sayfie hashtag has become synomous with Florida politics on Twitter. And, in the coming weeks, we’ll be announcing the Sayfie Society. Stay tuned for more news on that…

So, on the Review's fourteenth birthday, I can’t express enough gratitude for every single one of Sayfie Review’s readers, our email subscribers, our Facebook fans, our Twitter followers, our Sayfie Summit sponsors, and our incredible Sayfie Review advertisers. Thank you for making Sayfie Review the online home for Florida’s politicos. As long as Florida’s politicians are making news, we will keep you in the know.

Be awesome today!

Justin