THANK YOU, JON IVERSON
John Atkinson
After 27 years, May 31, 2024, was the final day AVTech webmaster Jon Iverson was responsible for overseeing the company’s websites, including this one. Now in his mid-60s, Jon felt it was time for him to retire while he still had the energy to explore his other interests.
Jon was a successful audio retailer in California’s Central Coast region in the 1980s,1 though he took a year off to study gamelan music in Bali, Indonesia.2 After selling his business, he contacted Stereophile’s then-publisher, Larry Archibald, and myself in the spring of 1997 with a vision for the magazine’s website. Larry and I had been trying to come up with an appropriate web strategy for a long time, but without any success. But when Jon visited us in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and outlined his ideas, we were sold. Jon joined our staff as our self-styled “web monkey,” and the result went live on December 1, 1997. (See stereophile.com/asweseeit/1297awsi/index.html.)
Stereophile’s site grew rapidly both in page views and reader engagement. Jon subsequently developed websites for our other magazines and ventures, as well as contributing informed and informative essays, equipment and recording reviews, show reports, and the occasional interview. After Stereophile and its sister publications and sites were acquired by AVTech Media in early 2018, Jon applied his expertise to designing and developing websites for the company’s UK-based magazines.
Jon is one of the very few people I have known who think strategically. Most managers are tactical thinkers; they concentrate on best to do something. By contrast, a strategic thinker’s focus is on will be best to do. from 1997 through to my retirement as ’s Editor-in-Chief at the end of March 2019. For every one of those 22 years, I paid careful attention to Jon’s take on what the magazine was doing and how it could be done differently or better. Even when we disagreed about something, it was reassuring to know that Jon had thought about it as deeply as I had.
