Life in Translation
How Cable Hall of Famer Leslie Ellis got from there to here
During the summer when she was eight years old, the girl who would become Leslie Ellis rode across the country in an RV crammed full of La-Z-Boy recliners.
They had started in Pennsylvania: the girl, her grandparents and her dad, a La-Z-Boy Inc. marketing executive. On the long drive to Billings, Mont., the girl, reclining in an easy chair, was marveling at the view framed by the RV’s back window, perfect clouds floating against a bright blue sky.
“Dad!” the girl yelled from the back of the van. “Where are we right now?”
“Colorado, honey,” came the reply from the front seat.
The girl considered this news, then made an announcement: “I’m going to live here someday,” she said.
She does.
Ellis, now 53, is one of seven honorees selected by The Cable Center in 2019 to receive the organization’s highest honor: entry to the Cable Hall of Fame. It’s a place where moguls like Ted Turner and technology pioneers like Sid Topol are recognized along with larger-than-life names from cable’s programming world, like the CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour and, this year, inductees who conceived the iconic network MTV.
It is not a destination Ellis could possibly have imagined during her mid-20s, when she made good on her youthful promise by landing a job in Denver with the technology trade magazine CED.
That happened in 1990. After graduating college with a degree in business, Ellis worked for a Pennsylvania company that manufactured commercial-insertion systems for cable operators. During a trip to Denver she met Roger Brown, the magazine’s late editor, along with then-publisher Rob Stuehrk. The three hit it off during a dinner where Ellis mentioned two things: that she’d long wanted to live in Colorado, and, fatefully as it turned out, that she wrote technical manuals for her employer.
Except for those sideline duties, Ellis had almost no publishing experience. Still, Brown needed a managing editor, and was intrigued enough to follow up with a few long-distance telephone interviews — but no job offer. A month or so later, when Ellis returned to Denver for a follow-up client visit, she was feeling pressed. On a Friday afternoon, she visited Brown at his office. “Listen,” she said. “I’m just going to say it. I want this job and I would really like it if you could hire me today, because I only have this weekend to find an apartment.”
He did.
Technology trenches
Thus began a decades-long career marrying journalism, research, an abiding curiosity about technology and an instinctive ability to establish trust with people who work in the field. For more than 25 years, Ellis has applied her experience in the technology trenches of the cable industry to become one of the most respected writers in the trade, probing for explanations of how things work and sharing them with readers of periodicals, websites, books, white papers and magazines like this one.
Her knack for defanging complex technologies — Ellis once described a popular software development process as “part cultural spasm, part management renaissance” — has made her a frequent host of live panels and on-stage interviews that burrow deep into subjects like edge-QAM modulators and upstream signal quality.
In a trade publishing world where writers sometimes would regard tech subjects with a weary disinterest, Ellis stood out. She spent hours on the phone with engineers who were unaccustomed to being sought after by journalists. Ellis cultivated relationships with some of cable’s best-known technologists, fashioning an enviable Rolodex. Sources for stories who were unreachable to some peers, or at least carefully guarded by corporate PR staffs, returned calls from Ellis on the spot. Writing for CED and later for the weekly Multichannel News, Ellis became known as a journalist who had a deep and authentic interest in technology.
“What makes Leslie so particularly special is her deep knowledge of the issue she is covering,” wrote Tony Werner, Comcast’s President of Technology and Product, in an email message. Werner, who has known Ellis since the 1990s, said he prizes Ellis’s ability to triangulate information. “Instead of just regurgitating the facts, she connects the dots and delivers the real story,” he wrote.
The respect came to be mutual, as Ellis held technologists in high regard. “Why do I get along with engineers so well? First of all, they’re funny as hell,” Ellis says. “Second of all, they are seekers of truth. They just want to know what’s the answer.”
Ellis, who playfully jumbled the letters from “Leslie” into an invented surname as a 27-year old, has written for a succession of industry journals and periodicals after gravitating from the original gig at CED. A signature work, the Definitive Broadbandseries of illustrated dictionaries (produced by Broadband Librarypublisher Lundwall Communications) can still be found lining bookshelves across the industry, providing crisp explanations of technology terms and concepts from A (abstraction layer) to Z (Zipf’s Law).
Career change
In the late 1990s, after working as the technology editor for Multichannel News, Ellis made a career pivot to the world of financial journalism and market research. She began working from Denver as a senior analyst for Paul Kagan Associates, a job that plucked Ellis from a familiar world of telecommunications technology and delivered her to a new realm of economics and financial analysis. Ellis, intrigued by the chance to try something new, was both curious and terrified. “I haven’t balanced a checkbook since 1986,” she recalls thinking. But the timing was good: Ellis applied her knowledge of telecommunications technology to the world of high finance at a time when the cable industry was investing billions of dollars for infrastructure upgrades tied to services like broadband Internet delivery. A succession of conferences staged at New York’s Park Lane hotel brought Ellis into the orbit of top industry executives like the late Glenn Britt, formerly the CEO of Time Warner Cable, and digital video entrepreneur Jonathan Taplin, now a director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab.
But the allure of technology beckoned. So did Ellis’ burgeoning list of contacts, which by now had swelled to fill three Rolodexes (she still uses them today). In 1999, as the U.S. was spiraling toward recession, Ellis decided to hang her own shingle. She saw promise in a niche she would come to think of as “translation” — helping to explain technology stories through specialized reports, industry conferences, ghostwritten articles and bylined contributions. One early move was to resurrect the technology column “Translation Please” for Multichannel News, which spawned a namesake website Ellis still maintains. Around the same time Raymond Katz, then the lead media analyst for the investment banking firm Bear Stearns, hired Ellis to help make sense of a fast-moving cable technology picture.
Writing gigs for others quickly followed as word spread. Ellis’s rule for taking on clients was a simple one: “Do interesting work, and don’t work with a…holes.” A longstanding alliance with CTAM, the cable industry marketing organization, exemplified how Ellis parlayed a talent for demystifying technology. Besides writing papers and articles, Ellis annually led a parade of cable industry executives through the exhibit floor of the CES show on behalf of CTAM, guiding guests through a jungle of technology displays.
A mix of these high-profile engagements with writing assignments for cable companies, technology developers and trade associations made Ellis a familiar industry presence. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the industry who Leslie doesn’t know or who doesn’t know Leslie,” says Angie Britt, a CTAM Senior Vice President who collaborated with Ellis on the CES tours and other projects. “How she remembers everyone’s names, much less something special about each one of them is beyond me.”
Today, working from an 11th-floor condominium in Denver’s Cheeseman Park neighborhood, Ellis continues to do what she set out to do when she launched her independent business, Ellis Edits, in 1999. On a Sunday in March, as she prepped for a move to a nearby building, Ellis was busy stuffing stacks of newspapers and magazines into cartons, exhuming odds and ends from a nearly 30-year career. A yellowing copy of Multichannel News, with an Ellis page one byline, was splayed out on the floor. On the shelf behind it was a book about journalism ethics, given to Ellis by a mentor, the late business writer John Higgins. Another book, this one a handbook about digital technologies co-authored by Ellis, tilted on a shelf nearby. All of these bore a common hallmark: “What I do is I make technology approachable for people who have less of a natural interest than engineers,” Ellis says.
The Hall of Fame nod came as a flabbergasting surprise to Ellis, who learned of her selection while driving home to Colorado from Arizona. On the phone was Michael Wilner, the longtime industry executive and Chairman of the Cable Center’s board of directors. Ellis, characteristically, thought Wilner was joking. “I’m driving through the desert. Cactus all around. It was surreal,” she says. And yet: It seemed somehow fitting that the call came while Ellis was on the road. Going places.