The fourth entry in the Dead Horse Media network is live:
From this morning's Page Six:
DEALBREAKER blogger Elizabeth Spiers is expanding her empire. In addition to a site for lawyers, today Spiers' Dead Horse Media is launching a fashion gossip blog called Fashionista.com that will be written by Faran Krentcil, who started Imaginary Socialite. Spiers says, "It'll be part industry gossip, part consumer-oriented product recommendations and recurring features like 'Deal or No Deal,' where people duke it out over whether an item is worth the price."
This will be our first consumer site and Faran's been plugging away on it for over a month now while we found a suitable domain name. We were going to call it Size Zero, but with the money the owners wanted for SizeZero.com, I could have started my own hedge fund. (They insist that GoogleAdSense is making them SO MUCH MONEY off of search that they'd be stupid to sell it for anything less than the GDP of a small Eastern European country. Riiiiight.)
Blog Expansion [Page Six]
Introducing... AboveTheLaw.com, Dead Horse Media's new online legal tabloid. Above The Law is written by David Lat,** formerly of Wonkette and Underneath Their Robes. (For background on David's blogging and lawyering history, check out this profile in the New Yorker.)
** Lat, like DealBreaker editor John Carney, was formerly a practicing attorney, which brings our staff to 28% lawyers. Send them a cease & desist at your own risk!
DealBreaker re-launched this morning with a sleeker layout, a smaller logo and, among other things, a user forum. We're still fixing bugs, so if you're a reader and you spot anything that seems to be broken, please let us know.
And coming soon...
We're moving to a two-column layout shortly (based partially on the layout of this site, which I redesigned a few months ago) so I really can't mock, but is that seriously a 32 pt hed? **
Maybe Gawker's audience is older that I thought.
** Not really. But it looks that way on an 800 px screen.
From today's Metro:
Text below:
INSIDER DEALING is about to take on a whole new meaning on Wall Street. The founding editor of New York’s most popular media gossip blog is turning her attention to the money men. Elizabeth Spiers, who began her blogging career at Gawker, will launch a new site called Dealbreaker (www.dealbreaker.com) next week. The blog, which will focus on Wall Street personalities and culture, is sure to include the same blend of humor and behind-the-scenes gossip that made Gawker an obligatory bookmark of New York’s media elite. “We’re not looking at analysis and journalists’ assessments of how companies are doing,” says Spiers. “We’ll leave that to TheStreet.com. This is more like how it would be if ‘The Daily Show’ did CNBC.” Spiers, 29, is no stranger to Wall Street. She worked as an equity analyst for hedge funds before joining Gawker in December 2002. In fact, she says that she intended to launch Dealbreaker soon afterward but Gawker swallowed up too much of her time. She says about one-third of Gawker’s initial audience was people who worked in financial services. And she believes there is a hunger in the financial world for more behind-the-scenes information. More transparency “There is a lot less transparency in the financial world than there should be,” says Spiers. “Most financial journalists only cover public companies. They are not covering hedge funds or small financial institutions in the way they probably should be. Besides, Wall Street people are just as colorful and interesting, so I think there is plenty of material out there.” Spiers left Gawker for New York magazine in fall 2003. She later joined New York’s Mediabistro.com as editor-in-chief, where she helped launch Gawker rival fishbowlNY. Her first novel, a satire of Wall Street and the media called “And They All Die in the End” will be published in the fall. Dealbreaker is the start of a new blog network that Spiers is launching with the backing of two investors, Carter Burden, the CEO of Web hosting company Logicworks, and Justin Smith, president of news magazine The Week. Each site will have one, full-time editor plus additional contributors. Spiers said two more sites will launch in the fall but she would not reveal their focus. She has writers lined up for Dealbreaker but she is looking for writers for future sites. In the meantime, tips are also always welcome. You can send them
to tips@dealbreaker.com
PAUL BERGER
blogarithms@metro.us
Paul Berger writes a blog called Englishman in New York
at www.pdberger.com.
[A few minor things here, but chiefly: My book isn't actually out until sometime in 2007.]
Slate's Daniel Gross declares blog-based businesses over before they started in this article:
As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked.
It goes without saying that if I thought Gross was right, I wouldn't be starting Dealbreaker, but I don't think he makes much of a case here. (And I normally like his writing.)
First, he's woefully short on evidence/actual data. If there were thousands of commercial blog networks in existence, he'd be in a position to reasonably handicap, but at the moment there are only a handful of major players (Gawker, Weblogs Inc, etc) and single digit sample sizes don't have much credibility. If there is a "blog business" sector large enough to qualify it as an industry, or a sub-industry, or a micro-industry, it's miniscule. (Raise your hand if you make a living blogging. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) There are not actually very many people doing this *as a business.*
Secondly: Interpreting Bob Pittman's desire to get out of Daily Candy as "smart money leaving the blog business" presumes that (A) Bob Pittman is smart money (I know people who would disagree with that) (B) Daily Candy is a blog (it isn't) and (C) Pittman wants out because he thinks the business is unattractive; not because Daily Candy has been around for years and is, as these things go, a fairly mature business, and ready for an exit.
So what else has he got? Media overexposure. If you've read about it thirty times in the New York Times Styles Sections, it's obviously over. If he wants to argue that blogs are culturally over, then that might be an indicator. But I don't see online ad rates going down because of it or any bottom line indications that it's a shitty or dying business model. Sure, hype precedes bubble, but I don't think you're going to see Gawker Media imploding anytime soon, anymore than dot com hype wiped out the Internet when the bubble burst.
What I think *will* happen, and it's already happening, is that VCs, many of whom have been sitting on massive overhangs, cleaning up portfolios and still recovering from the last tech boom's hangovers are going to throw money at blog-related technologies. And most of it will be dumb money and most of those companies won't be necessary. And there will be an inevitable reckoning of sorts.
But blog companies like Gawker and Weblogs Inc are fundamentally *media* companies. They're editorially driven, not technology driven. And if voice-y online editorial content supported by advertising doesn't work as a business, Gross might want to quit his job at Slate right now.
(I think I understand how Nick determines his press policies, but I've never actually been able to find the incriminating Magic 8 Ball.)
Clive Thompson takes a look at commercial blogging for New York mag today, and there's a bit about Dealbreaker:
Will professionalization turn blogging into media-as-usual? Or will the idiosyncratic voice of the lone blogger prevail? Elizabeth Spiers thinks that both statements are true. After she left Gawker, she learned about the power of the first-mover advantage the hard way, by trying to repeat her success. Last year, she spent three months launching eight media-gossip sites for Mediabistro, a career-development site for journalists. They amassed an impressive 1 million page views a month, a healthy amount, but hardly Gawker-class. Then in January, Spiers jumped back into the blog pool with a splash, announcing that she was launching her own blog empire.When I call her, she is at her desk in her new company’s offices in Tribeca. She’s being backed by two angel investors—Carter Burden, head of the Webhosting company Logicworks, and Justin Smith, president of The Week, a news magazine. Their first blog, launching in March, will be called Dealbreaker, and devoted to Wall Street gossip. Her advertisers would be? “For Wall Street? Pretty much everybody,” she says. “It’s a high-income demographic, pretty attractive.” The start-up money lets her pay for a full-time blogging staff, which she’ll need since she wants her writers to actually do reporting and break news. And this, she argues, is the future of the professional blogosphere.
“It’ll be more like the mainstream media, really,” she adds. “Blogging is increasingly becoming a survival of the fittest—and that all boils down to who has the best content. The blogs that are going to stand out are the ones who break news and have credibility.” Plus, it can’t hurt that Wall Street scuttlebutt is one of the last truly huge unfilled niches in the Manhattan blogosphere. “This is a business, and we’ll build business infrastructure from the get-go.” The age of the blog moguls is here.
I thought the piece was pretty balanced. It was half expecting a rah-rah-everyone's-getting-rich-off-of-blogs article and it didn't go there. And I think it correctly pointed out that making a living from a blog is usually more complicated and difficult than launching a blog and sticking Google AdSense on the page.
That said, I'm surprised there aren't more people in this space, given the economics. Starting a commercial blog is certainly more cost-effective than starting a print magazine or doing a TV pilot, and if the concept fails, your losses are--at the very worst--about what most media companies pay marketing firms for a round of focus grouping.
Along those lines, I think Time Warner's new site, OfficePirates.com, is a good idea and pretty much the only way a new launch is going to compete economically in the already-crowded US laddie mag market. Given that it's Time Warner, the editors probably have to get board-level approval for font changes, but if they aren't completely mummified in bureaucratic duct tape, I think it could be good.
The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom [New York Mag]
If you're free on the 26th of July and have $12 burning a hole in your pocket, you can hear Lock and I talk about online media with WSJ Online editor Bill Grueskin and CJR's Brian Keefer at Makor. Details here.
And...
If you're in the mood for something entrepreneurial/business-related: on July 20th, my boss, Laurel Touby, explains how she turned mediabistro from a cocktail party company into a news/content/education/career training (and, uh, cocktail party) company.
And while I'm clicking around the 92nd St. Y site, later on this summer, you can hear my pal Seth Mnookin talk about new threats to journalism. [Ed.—Hey, why does Seth cost $15 and Lock and I only cost $12? (Or $3 each, really.) I feel so cheap.]
Today's mb column: why bloggers don't need standards.
[These are otherwise meaningless links I need for a conference presentation tomorrow.]
MSM:
Koyen 1
Koyen 2
Gannon 1
White House
Wolff 1
Wolff 2
Graydon 1
Graydon 2
Zeta Jones 1
Zeta Jones 2
PR:
Perkins, pt. 1.
Perkins, pt. 2
blog pitch
EW Oscar Party
Vincent Gallo
Nick's launching Sploid.com (an anarcho-capitalist Drudge, according to Nick's description) today. It's being written by Choire Sicha and...drumroll...
KEN LAYNE. (Or "Ken Lane" as Joe Hagan calls him.) This means Sploid already has a huge advantage over Drudge: it will be funny. Drudge is not funny. Not wittingly funny, anyway.
Layne's a huge part of the reason I started blogging in 2001. I blame him for all of this. (Blame where blame is due: Tim Blair as well.)
Or, as Jim Treacher put it quite a while ago: "Hey, did you guys know that Layne was the first blog I ever read? He was like my gateway blog, so it's all his fault. Damn you, Layne. These could have been the best years of my life."
[If stumbling across this wasn't surreal enough...]
John Hiler of Microcontent News is blogging again after a 2(+) year hiatus. (It's about time!)
I kept meaning to do something on this earlier, but kept forgetting. Leave it to Howard Kurtz to remind me. From Kurtz's column:
The Fishbowl DC guy, emulating Jeff Gannon, finally got a day pass into the White House and filed his first reports. Sounds like he could barely stay awake.
"We'd been warned by a regular White House correspondent over the weekend that the 'zoo' of the briefing would likely leave us knowing less and being more confused than when went in. Having sat through it now, we have to agree."
But InstaPundit strikes a skeptical note:
"Garrett Graff is vice president of communications at EchoDitto, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based technology consulting firm. A Vermont native, he served formerly as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean's presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean's first webmaster.
"A partisan PR guy disguised as a 'real journalist!' He's even a 'dittohead!' Somebody tell Kos. I'm sure he'll be right on it. . . . "
Garrett (a) does not work for Howard Dean or any partisan affliated company now; (b) has been totally up front about the fact that he's Dean's former assistant press secretary, even to the point of mentioning it as one reason why it's bizarre that he couldn't get White House security clearance immediately having gotten it before.
Comparing Garrett to Jeff Gannon is intellectually dishonest. (I actually assumed Glenn was being ironic when he wrote that, but maybe I read it incorrectly.) Gannon went in as part of a partisan organization. Mediabistro is not partisan, and Garrett is not acting as a partisan reporter as part of mb. Nor is Echoditto a partisan organization. (It's a for-profit online community consulting company.) The most Kurtz (or anyone) can complain about is that Garrett has a documented political opinion. And any journalist who voted in the last election (Mr. Kurtz?) can't have a problem with that.
The difference between Kurtz and Garrett is that Garrett doesn't have the luxury of denying that he has an opinion and implying that he or she has a superior claim on "objectivity" as a result.
On Monday morning my DC media gossip blogger for mediabistro, Garrett Graff began his quest for a White House press pass for the daily gaggle, which Scott McClellan, following the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert scandal, had said any qualified reporter could easily get by going through the normal procedures. After four days of calling and faxing, the White House press office issued Garrett a pass, making him the first blogger to get credentialled by the White House for the daily press briefing. It wasn't easily gotten, but it was gotten nonetheless. (Garrett's coverage here: day one, day two, day three, day four, and day five.)
Garrett's impressions:
All-in-all it was a very surreal day--anti-climatic almost even. Something similar happened to bloggers attending the conventions last year: There was a big to-do beforehand and then their writing all seemed sort of pedestrian after all the hype. They were the biggest news they came across.
Indeed we spent almost as much time being interviewed by the regular White House press corps yesterday as we spent interviewing them. In fact, at times we felt it was so meta that Marc Ambinder and the Note had to be guiding our day: We were being interviewed by reporters about what it was like to interview them about them interviewing the White House.
Garrett also had a conversation with Scott McClellan afterwards, the most interesting takeaway of which was this: He doesn't read blogs.
More coverage here, and a gratuitous screengrab of Garrett on MSNBC (via Trey Jackson).
· White House approves pass for blogger [NY Times]
· Blogger in the White House [WaPo]
· Bloggers blag way into White House [Times of London]
· Gannon comments on first blogger at WH briefing [E&P]
· A blogging first at the White House [MSNBC]
· OnPoint: West Wing for a day [NPR]
· White House admits 1st blogger to briefing [AP]
· White House admits blogger to press room [UPI]
· Blogger wins White House pass—for a day [AFP]
And my personal favorite, from ABC's The Note (where Garrett interned):
"Garrett Graff a. k. a. "Stretch Junior" joins the White House press corps for a day. We knew him when& like when we assigned him to quickly digest a steamy Lynne Cheney novel moments before Mrs. Cheney's husband was announced as the vice presidential pick of Gov. Bush. Mr. Graff didn't complain"
Congratulations, Garrett!
I hate hosting parties. I'm generally bad at it and it stresses me out. As a result, I don't really have any involvement with mediabistro's usual party hosting and planning. But I agreed to do the launch parties for the new blogs, so last Monday we officially "launched" FishbowlNY.com, even though the site has been live since January. (This is, of course, in keeping with historical precedent. We launched Gawker in December of '02 and threw the launch party in February of '03.) The weather was nasty—blizzard-y, in fact—but the turnout was great.
For added self-referential meta-ness, Gawker covered the party. Their excellent photographer, Nikola, shot these photos.
Flashback:
Hylton Jolliffe, Corante, Tuesday, July 2, 2002, 12:56 AM:
Elizabeth Spiers comments on her blog-fatigue: "I'm wondering if there's some point in the near future where everyone goes through some sort of collective blogger burnout. I'm waiting for the blog bubble to burst."
Then:
Hylton Jollife, Corante, Tuesday, July 2, 2002, 11:56 AM
Nick Denton agrees with Elizabeth Spiers' "blog bubble" comments: "Weblogs have been massively hyped by the media. And they aren't going to change the face of journalism any time soon."
