Monthly Archives: February 2008

Defenestrating Denton

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Like any­one in edu­ca­tion, I never pro­cras­tin­ate today over what I can vacil­late about tomor­row. And so it is with my estim­a­tion of Nick Denton, Gawker’s own Mar­quis de Sard.

I admire Denton’s blog empire, and his hard-headed approach to post­ing ($7.50 per 1,000 views), and yet it’s obvi­ous too that his own role in Gawker largely allows him to pur­sue the kind of aim­less, idio­syn­cratic non­sense best left to blogs — well — like this one.

Bob­bie John­son does an excel­lent post tot­ting up Denton’s num­bers and con­cludes:

19 of his posts — that’s nearly 21%, stat fans — didn’t even break the hal­lowed 1,000 pageview threshold… mean­ing they weren’t even worth a measly $7.50 in Gawker’s pay-per-view model.

Admit­tedly, he’s got his own nano-empire to run as well as the site, but Gawker does say “edited by Nick Denton” under the masthead. You’ve got to add some value, right? Looks like his obses­sions with Barry Diller and the Man­hat­tan media scene aren’t per­form­ing well enough.

Denton’s van­ity posts piss in the pond of the com­mer­cial imper­at­ive he preaches. Which really makes Gawker more of what, at busi­ness school, they del­ic­ately refer to as “a life­style option.”

But they also con­firm what every­one in journ­al­ism has always known. Mon­et­ising edit­or­ial con­tent across plat­forms is busi­ness, but sar­donic wise-assing to whoever’s listen­ing? Pure pleasure!

Destruction. Creative, or just destructive?

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Three things had me think­ing, as I re-read Old Media Seek To Know Google Not Just Fear It:

The genius of Google has been to couple search and advert­ising more effect­ively than any­one else. Its key word and con­tex­tual ad place­ments — mim­icked by other Inter­net com­pan­ies — have been nib­bling away at the rev­enue base of tra­di­tional print and broad­cast media as advert­isers shift more of their budgets online.

And then:

In seek­ing to bal­ance effi­ciency with tar­geted reach, advert­isers will turn to niche ad net­works … help­ing agen­cies reag­greg­ate frac­tured audi­ences while not sac­ri­fi­cing tar­geted environments.

“Advert­isers are going to look for fil­ters that say what’s good and what to trust and not to trust…”

And finally, I thought of some­thing I ori­gin­ally read in the old, bath­room friendly New Yorker (none of whose ads — alas — mean any­thing to me), by Michael Specter :

“We have to be care­ful not to rush from denial to des­pair,” John Elk­ing­ton told me … He believes there is a danger that people will feel engulfed by the chal­lenge, and ulti­mately help­less to address it.

“We are in an era of cre­at­ive destruc­tion,” he said… “What hap­pens when you go into one of these peri­ods is that before you get to the point of recon­struc­tion things have to fall apart. XXXXXX will fall apart. I think XXXX” — a com­pany that Elk­ing­ton has advised for years — “will fall apart. They have just made too many bets on the wrong things.

“A bunch of the insti­tu­tions that we rely on cur­rently will, to some degree, decom­pose. I believe that much of what we count as demo­cratic polit­ics today will fall apart, because we are simply not going to be able to deal with the scale of change that we are about to face. It will pro­foundly dis­able much of the cur­rent polit­ical class.”

The only thing is, of course, Elk­ing­ton isn’t talk­ing about the col­lapse of the media at all, but about the auto­mobile industry and cli­mate change.

Lawyers: the necessary brake on media innovation?

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Marc Andreessen remarked recently a pro­pos the inter­net and the media, that most car com­pan­ies didn’t emerge from horse car­riage making.

Admit­tedly that sum­mary mis­rep­res­ents the long period of devel­op­ment of a whole host of automobile-related tech­no­lo­gies: fuel pro­cessing, engine devel­op­ment, machine tools.

Reu­ters boss — and former law­yer — Tom Glo­cer has another take, that I would sub­scribe to:

When you think of innov­a­tions in the music industry like the ori­ginal Nap­ster or Kazaa or the phe­nom­enal rise of You­Tube, one under­stands why it is not Uni­ver­sal Music or NBC which blazes the trail.

In the con­tent world, it must be admit­ted that a fair num­ber of start-ups adopt a legal pos­i­tion that could be best described as “we will worry about copy­right infringe­ment when we are suc­cess­ful.” Indeed, that is pre­cisely what is going on now as Google is reg­u­lar­iz­ing YouTube’s con­tent relationships.

Since I prac­tised law for many years I offer this defence of my former col­leagues: don’t blame the law­yers for once. If a product man­ager at NBC called upon the for­mid­able GE legal depart­ment and presen­ted a busi­ness plan that was based on ripping-off copy­right until the ser­vice was so pop­u­lar, fear­ful con­tent own­ers would no longer com­plain, he would be laughed out of Fairfield.

Big com­pan­ies with strin­gent com­pli­ance policies and now Sar­banes Oxley con­trols to attest to are just not going to take these risks. Nor should the junior product man­ager just not con­sult the law­yers for fear that he will get the “wrong answer.”

We must recog­nize that there are often legit­im­ate struc­tural reas­ons why most chal­lenges to the estab­lished order come from out­side the firm. This is also not a bad thing as it quite nat­ur­ally serves as a check on the dom­in­ance of large organ­iz­a­tions — per­haps far more effect­ively than anti­trust policy.

No Country for Old Newspapers

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The Albuquerque Tribune shut down today. As its own report of its demise mourn­fully notes:

The Trib’s daily cir­cu­la­tion in Janu­ary was about 9,600…In 1988, the news­pa­per sold about 42,000 cop­ies a day.

It was foun­ded by a muck­raker who came up with the motto for the Scripps news­pa­per chain: “Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.” They cer­tainly found their way to illu­min­a­tion some­where other than news­pa­per stands.

The Tribune had 38 edit­or­ial employ­ees. On aver­age that means they were each pro­du­cing con­tent for about 250 people.

Has Albuquerque been shrink­ing? Nope. In 1990 the pop­u­la­tion was around 385,000. Today it stands at 455,000. So the Tribune has lost cir­cu­la­tion in a town where there were more poten­tial readers.

To gen­er­ate some more heat a few years ago it hired a con­ser­vat­ive colum­nist. This was prob­ably con­sidered an innov­a­tion. It didn’t work.

News­pa­per decline is not — as I’ve argued before — a con­tent thing. Journ­al­ist­ic­ally, the Tribune is prob­ably as good as it ever was, since it star­ted back in 1922.

The con­ser­vat­ive colum­nist reviews the Coen broth­ers’ latest offer­ing in his part­ing shot.

[O]né of the key story lines wind­ing through­out the movie is the rap­idly chan­ging nature of crime racing past Sher­iff Bell, a man from a long line of men who pledged to com­bat it. Bell was sadly and bril­liantly played by Tommy Lee Jones.

Set in 1980, Bell is hon­est, decent and polite. He fights fairly. He is, in essence, a dino­saur, as dated as a rotary phone, as out of fash­ion as a powder-blue leis­ure suit.

At one point in the movie, Bell is seated in a cof­fee shop read­ing a news­pa­per. No cell phone, no flat screen TVs, no laptops. Noth­ing but a cup of cof­fee and the pre­vi­ous day’s events afforded in cold black-and-white.

Just 28 years ago. The Stone Age.

Of course, the film is set in Texas, but most of it was shot in New Mex­ico. Budget­ary reasons.

Online read­ers offered their own valedictories:

  • I don’t care for the envir­on­mental waste that comes from hav­ing a daily paper delivered, assum­ing I was there to pick it up every day, which I typ­ic­ally am not because I put in 70 to 80 hour work weeks.
  • I … don’t care to pay to sift through gigantic wad of paper every day to find the two to three pages that aren’t spin or advert­ising. Most of what a news­pa­per is, is not actu­ally use­ful to me.
  • It’s mostly advert­ise­ments, pun­ditry, spin, and gigantic amounts of inform­a­tion that really do belong online: page after page of clas­si­fied ads and stock prices that will be wildly out of date by the time any­one looks at them.
  • No way am I will­ing to pay for a full Journal sub­scrip­tion to avoid those idi­otic on-line ads about some guy “sit­ting down to break­fast with the paper” as if any­one actu­ally does that any more. I can get news from nearly every other major city world­wide without hav­ing to do that.
  • Say­on­ara, news in Albuquerque.