Veteran entrepreneur Jonathan Sposato, the new publisher of Seattle magazine and Seattle Business, is always thinking about what's new—really new. “Not only do I think about what would be fun for me to do, but also what is the sort of negative space,” he said in a fireside chat at a From Day One conference in Seattle. “There’s the positive space of all the things that exist currently. But there’s the negative space of what doesn’t yet exist. I felt Seattle was missing a certain type of journalism,” he told Steve Koepp, From Day One’s co-founder and chief content officer.

Sposato is the chairman and co-founder of Geekwire, a technology news website, an investor in numerous technology companies, and he also founded, grew, and sold two companies to Google. His vision in purchasing two of Seattle’s premier publications is to strengthen Seattle’s voice as a world-class city on the forefront of technology, biotech, quality of life, and so much more. He’s looking to do more long-form journalism and delve into topics such as social inequality in housing and the tech industry, as well as in other booming industries in the region.

One of Sposato’s goals is to deepen the editorial content at both publications. That means being unafraid to take on local business giants when there’s a story worth telling. “In some ways Geek Wire has normalized me to being thicker-skinned with someone thinking our coverage is not fair,” he said. “If a CEO doesn’t like a certain piece, they don’t call the editors, they call me. Maybe they think I’m the nice guy they can squeeze or something, and I understand the impulse. This may sound a little cliché but we do need as much independent journalism as possible. I’m very proud of the fact that Geek Wire is wholly independent. There’s no other stakeholders that we are beholden to, other than ourselves or the public and doing a great job.”

Deepening content also means coverage that creates a more connected and inclusive environment. Sposato, 55, grew up in Seattle and was often the only Asian American kid in the room. Sposato said he would never have imagined being in the position he is now, to facilitate a platform for quality journalism that promotes inclusion and equality, back when he was getting beat up on a schoolyard for being different.

Seattle is more diverse now, and the city’s news coverage needs to reflect diverse backgrounds and experiences. In Sposato’s case, he was raised by a single mom who couldn’t afford to care for him so she sent him to live with his grandparents in Hong Kong. All this has shaped his worldview and commitment to widening the editorial lens of the journalism he publishes.

One issue he’s particularly passionate about is affordable housing. “We have to move with conviction, we have to move with intelligence, and we also have to be patient,” he said. “And I believe that if you can kind of cut through all the noise, regardless of what you think about the issue or what you think about the city council or the mayor, whatever, that at the end of the day, we have a supply-and-demand problem with regard to affordable housing.”

“And how much do we want to address fundamentally at its core, the high-order bit, as we engineers like to say in technology? The high-order bit is: How much do we want to allocate the city’s resources to creating that affordable housing stock so that people who are teachers, nurses, and firefighters and who are not making $175,000 a year at Amazon can afford to live close to the city?” Another major consideration, he said: “Investing in the right infrastructure–light rail, all of that public transportation.”

Sposato also pointed out that we can deconstruct the homelessness crisis as being two-thirds about affordable housing and one-third other things. “But we shouldn’t over-focus on the other things at the expense of folks who are marginalized despite the fact that they have jobs, despite the fact that they’re not drug addicts and thieves.”

Jennifer Haupt is a Seattle-based author and journalist.