I've been posting more frequently to Tumblr recently (see here), and have neglected to update this site. (There was a Fortune column quite a while ago, as dated by its title--"Lipstick on a Pig"--that's a bit old news now.) And I filled the culture site editor position mentioned below--and launched the site already.
The site is Flavorpill.com's new omnibus culture blog, Flavorwire.com. The new site editor is Caroline Stanley, who was formerly the editorial director at GenArt. Week one posts: Flavorwire breaks news about a new Michel Gondry project, offers an extended ode to the Moleskine, an interview with composer Lukas Ligeti, Sheila Callaghan talks to Flavorwire about the underrepresentation of female playwrights on Broadway, Sloane Crosley offers essay recommendations, and we show you exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of TV on the Radio's latest video.
I'm helping out with recruiting and development for a company that's launching an omnibus culture blog and we're looking for a full-time editor. The ideal candidate is a cultural omnivore who has some experience with blogging, managing/editing people (freelance contributions and submissions by internal staffers), and generating ideas for original content. The candidate should also be familiar with site traffic analysis, if only to understand how the site's audience is responding to the editorial mix.
The client is a company with an established brand that already has quite a bit of proprietary cultural content that should/would be incorporated into the site, but is looking for an editor with a strong vision for the product that extends beyond aggregation of the existing offerings. The ideal candidate is capable of developing an editorial series that draws traffic, is unique to its genre, is well-produced and appeals to both insiders and outsiders.
And those, frankly, are minimum requirements for any good editor. The primary challenge for this particular job is that several genres fit under the "culture" rubric and the editor needs to be able to navigate all of them. So if you happen to have job experience in both music and visual arts (or publishing and video games--multiple genres--etc.), a good generalist is more appealing than a niche expert. Specialists are highly valued in this economy, but we need a jack of all trades. Send resumes and/or suggestions to espiers AT gmail .
I'm flooding the zone with this request (which means I put it here AND on Twitter):
I'm looking for housing (for about a month) in Phnom Penh and sadly, there is no http://cambodia.craigslist.org. (There is a http://vietnam.craigslist.org, but that's just not close enough.) So if anyone has any contacts in the region who could help, I'd much appreciate the assistance. I was in Phnom Penh in January and it was crawling with NGO Westerners, who presumably have similar real estate needs, but I don't actually know any of them. Any suggestions would be welcome. Email me at elizabeth.spiers AT earthlink DOTnet.
My gracious host is making some server changes, so this site will be offline for about a week starting sometime this week and Monday at the latest. Not that it matters too much, given how infrequently I update, but just warning you so no one thinks I've been hacked or forgot to renew my domain name (both of which are totally plausible scenarios that have happened before).
We'll return to our regularly scheduled one-post-a-month shortly thereafter.
As announced in the NY Post yesterday, I just signed on as a contributing writer at Fortune. Which, as Alex Pareene at Gawker notes, means I'm doing the same thing I was already doing, but with a different title. My contract calls for 10 columns and 2 features over the print mag over the next 12 months and Fortune is published twice a month, so on average I'll have something in every other issue.
However, the contract is exclusive for business writing, which means I can't write the back-page column for Fast Company anymore. This is unfortunate because I really enjoyed writing the column and my editors there, David Lidsky and Bob Safian, have been incredibly supportive. My last column will be in the June issue.
Lastly, I've never emailed my articles upon publication because it feels like spamming people, but a lot of people have requested that I do that, as they don't always check this site and want to know. So I'm going to do a monthly (or maybe quarterly) newsletter, for people who have indicated that they want that. But it's opt-in, so if you want to be on it, email me at spierslist AT gmail.
· Belatedly, my December Fast Company column: The Idiot Box, or "Why Broadcast Business News Is So Abysmal."
· Random: A couple of months ago I was in Port Antonio, Jamaica, where Errol Flynn, Ian Fleming, and Noel Coward (among others) lived, partially because of something to do with Flynn. But that and a recently acquired set of the entire James Bond series has resulted in more interest in Fleming as of late, and in the course of that, a 2002 article by John Lanchester from the London Review of Books, was passed on to me. Titled "Bond in Torment," it's mostly about Ian Fleming's masochistic tendencies but initially points to boredom as a root cause of Fleming's dyspepsia and has an ostensibly throwaway line about another English writer who had the same problem: "Waugh feared boredom so much he used to have nightmares about it..." While I generally think the sort of people who keep dream journals are invariably small, horrible individuals whose children hate them, I would love to read about Waugh's boredom nightmares.
I don't really blog anymore, so when I update here, I tend to cram a bunch of little things into one post so that my mom and the two other people who check this site regularly can get everything in one go. So here's the (monthly? quarterly?) update:
* Important things first: I was out of the country last week in a tropical mosquito-infested climate and took with me a Roald Dahl short story collection, Switch Bitch, which was passed on to me by John Hiler (erstwhile chronicler of All Things Blog, who seems to have disappeared but still has a site and presumably still maintains Xanga, which he founded) a long time ago and which has been sitting on my shelf untouched for a couple of years. Dahl's Uncle Oswald stories are fantastic. (In my experience, they're best read aloud outdoors at dusk after several medicinal doses of aged Jamaican rum, while being bombarded by preternaturally large moths.) They're dark--and darkly funnily--yarns about the protagonist's bumbling but largely successful exploits as a self-absorbed plutocratic Casanova who cannot bear any relationship "lasting more than 12 hours". They're great examples of good, old-fashioned storytelling, the rarity of which you only realize when you see it. Tonally, they remind me of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels, which I also like. Highly recommended, particularly when the air is sultry and the attention span short.
* I re-designed this site a couple of years ago, and you can tell that I did the work myself because the layout goes wonky in certain browsers. (I know next to nothing about CSS.) I'm looking for someone to redesign and clean it up for me (cheaply) as well as build another blog for actual albeit occasional blogging as opposed to just consolidating professional work, press, etc.
* My November Fast Company column is up now. I was going to write a piece about Why There Is No Hedge Fund Bubble, but I thought a piece about hedge funds would be a bit of a turn-off in a magazine for creatives. So I did a piece about teeny tiny bubbles in luxury markets that are heavily dependent on branding. You can read it here.
* About the Slate site: Just for the record, I thought it was a great idea, and I do think there's an audience. Contrary to Nick's assertion, Dealbreaker does exactly what it's supposed to do--capture a very small but very affluent audience. (Look at Dealbreaker's CPMs vs. Gawker's. I'm not saying it's a better model, but it certainly works. Advertisers will pay more for a better demographic, so you don't necessarily have to have large volume if you're well-targeted and your audience is attractive.) Dealbreaker is not a general interest biz publication like Portfolio. That said, the Slate site *would* be general interest. But I think there's a market for smart contrarian business commentary in that category.
Felix Salmon wisely points to Breaking Views as a comparable and suggests that if they made their commentary free, it would have interesting implications for that sort of content. But that said, Breaking Views has done incredibly well using a subscription model (as have many traditional publications, like Grant's Interest Rate Observer, which have a large following and could probably add to their top-line revenue with an online a la carte option, but don't.) Personally, I tend to eschew the subscription model because I have no experience with it and I don't know how to market subscription-only products, but if people are willing to pay for smart business commentary, they're certainly willing to get it for free. So I'm glad Slate is going into that space. My reservations about taking the job had nothing to do with what I think about the concept. I just don't want a 9-5 launching a website for a large media company. (Not right now, anyway.) If I'm going to launch a site, I'd rather do another startup. And I'm not saying I want to do another startup.
I'll be on Weekend America tomorrow with Simpsons writer Dana Gould and the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens, talking about Putin's new bomb, troop reductions, carbon emissions and naked carpentry.
Local listings here.
For people who listen to NPR outside of the New York market, I'll be on Weekend America tomorrow with New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff and "Ask a Mexican" columnist Gustavo Arellano, discussing Obama's plans for Pakistan, higher health insurance premiums for fat people and why people have sex. Station listings are here.
If you're reading this site, you probably already know this, but just in case, here's the text of an email I sent around early last week:
Dear friends and colleagues:This is just a note to let you know I’m leaving Dead Horse and to pass on my new
contact info. (My partners and I have an insurmountable difference of opinion regarding
long-term strategy for the company and we’ve come to point where I would like to
do some projects that are materially riskier and more experimental than Dead Horse’s
existing properties, and they would prefer to pull back and focus solely on the
sites we have. There are reasonable and good arguments to be made on both sides
of the issue, but ultimately we had to pick one or the other and pulling back was,
for me, a dealbreaker--pun only slightly intended.)Anyway, I’m in the process of deciding whether I want to pursue the aforementioned
experimental projects independently or just chill out for a while and do some writing.
In the meantime, if you need to reach me, this email address works...
I'm probably going to use the next 6 months or so to write, regardless of whether I decide to do a startup again. Along those lines, something else that was going around last week: my not-very-enthusiastic review of Conde Nast's new business magazine, Portfolio. They've got plenty of time to improve it, and I'm sure they will, but the first issue was horribly mediocre--especially for a Conde Nast publication.
from Jay McInerney: "Dana Vachon writes with rare insight about the American plutocracy at work and at play. He's been to all the right schools, met all the right people and betrayed all of their confidences. If there is any justice he will be blackballed from all the right clubs and have several drinks thrown in his face. Mergers & Acquisitions is a witty and entertaining immorality tale which should earn Vachon many fans, if not necessarily among his friends and family."
Mergers & Acquisitions [Amazon]
One of the cats, anyway. We're launching a fashion site. It'll be written by Faran Krentcil of Imaginary Socialite fame.
[Side note: That file photo of me looks pretty, uh, dour. Someone rightly suggested that it be captioned, "Where's your homework, asshole?"]
I was just reading Christopher Hitchens' essay on "Why Women Aren't Funny" (via Gawker). From the intro graf:
If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.Yeah, well, we may not be funny, but at least we don't recycle jokes we originally stole from Wodehouse in our Vanity Fair columns and use them again a few years later in the same Vanity Fair columns. From my pre-Gawker blog:
Irony ImpairmentI mean, it's a great line. But yeesh.
In the words of Bertie Wooster (via C. Hitchens), some people wouldn't recognize a joke if it were handed to them on a skewer with bearnaise sauce.
posted by Elizabeth Spiers @ Comments [0] @ Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Then there's Hitchens' bending over backwards to articulate a biology-based explanation for alleged inferior female funniness which then meanders into a bizarre sociocultural explanation:
And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because [women] are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks.This is a fine example of why, when you bend over backwards far enough, you eventually find your head up your ass. (This is formally known as the "why is it so dark in here?" epiphany.) Well, Chris, it's obvious that this whole piece is just therapy for a having been assailed at some earlier point by humorless crystal-bearing women with absurd romantic notions. During your Socialist phase, perhaps?
The third entry in the Dead Horse Media stable of sites launches tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Dead Horse Media moved into new office space last Friday after we totally overran the available space in my lead investor's offices. If we had added one more person, someone would have had to sit in Carney's lap. And it wasn't going to be me. So we packed up all of our worldly possessions (the Jim Cramer bobblehead, our one-step-up-from-a-crate-and-a-piece-of-plywood Ikea desks and the copies of Institutional Investor that, given the inexplicably large number of them, appear to have mated and reproduced during their stay), said goodbye to Steve Perry and moved to Mott between Prince and Houston. Here's the new space, yet unmolested...
1) This is so hilariously post-mo I can hardly stand it: the lovely and talented Jonathan Coulton will be performing in Second Life at 5PM SLT (which is, I think, around 2PM EST) today.
2) Check out Robert Lanham's (author of the fabled Hipster Handbook and former Bible Belt resident) Sinner's Guide to the Evangelical Right. It's funny because it's true.
Well, it looks like Gawker Media ended their deal with Yahoo(!). That doesn't really surprise me, but not because as Nick implies, Gawker's so edgy and Yahoo's so boring and mass market. It doesn't surprise me because you couldn't find the Gawker content on Yahoo if you wanted to. It's so heavily buried that you have to be in precisely the right place at the right time to stumble upon it, and if you're that far into the bowels of the site, chances are you're the type of person who's already reading Gawker. So it doesn't make sense to go the trouble of packaging existing content in a Yahoo!-friendly way (which is part of the deal) if no one's going to see it.
But I suppose "we're too edgy for The Man" has a nicer ring to it.
It's also noted that Gawker's plastering Gizmodo with more AdSense links and PSFK worries that we can "Expect this and every other blog network wannabe to follow suit, like, tomorrow." Maybe. But it only makes sense if the text ads aren't going to cannibalize your higher-CPM display ads. I took AdSense links completely off DealBreaker's home page because they made the site look cheap, which effectively lowers our CPMs. It may be less of a problem for Gawker Media because their CPMs are much lower than ours, but it makes more sense for us to lose the AdSense links and not risk potential cannibalization of our display ads and/or brand dilution.
The weekend before last, my friends Stacy and Simon (below) got married in a beautiful ceremony in Chelsea.
The lovely bride asked me to post the text of my toast from the dinner afterwards. So here it is:
I met Stacy several years ago at a Duke alumni function--probably the only one either of us has attended before or since. I'm been tempted on many occasions to send Duke a thank-you note because meeting Stacy has made the $130,000, incessant questions about the Duke lacrosse team and perpetual phone calls from alumni fundraisers with their frighteningly formidable ability to find me anywhere no matter how many times I move (if Osama bin Laden were a Duke grad, they'd have found him immediately) entirely worth it.
Now, this may come as a complete shock to many of you, but Stacy is famous on the Internet. I could just stop right there and leave the rest to your imaginations, but out of respect for bride and groom, I'll continue. Many of Stacy's close friends (including me) keep online journals called wherein we post our unsolicited opinions/general ramblings/descriptions of what we had for lunch for the entire world to read. In this strange world of blogging, Stacy is known as Stacy No-Blog. She is known as Stacy No-Blog because millions of Internet readers find it completely inconceivable that someone as smart and funny as Stacy is insists on continuing to deprive us all of her opinions, ramblings, and lunch. (Stacy, despite her wit and intelligence, doesn't have what it takes to be a blogger: extreme narcissism.)
If you Google "Stacy NoBlog", you'll find numerous party photos of Stacy in various states of happiness and inebriation. One such photo was taken in December of '04 at a party some of our friends threw. The party was a fake office party and part of a monthly DJ set our friends call "No Data." If the photo had been captioned, it would have said "Stacy NoBlog and unidentifiable English bloke." In it, Stacy and the unidentified English bloke, Simon, were perfectly silhouetted against a fake Powerpoint presentation titled "Favorite Types of Donuts". They had just met for the first time.
The photo was stunningly appropriate for two reasons. First, it was cheesily and unwittingly romantic. (Upon seeing the photo, I immediately sent Stacy an email suggesting that it bore a striking resemblance to the couples silhouetted in front of sunsets on the cover of every album in the "Greatest Love Songs of the 70s and 80s" series.)
Second, it was funny. When I think of time spent with Stacy and Simon, I think of it as being marked with joy and laughter. They're incredibly witty people and both take great pleasure in making their friends laugh. It's fitting, then, that their first moments together were captured in an atmosphere infused with humor and joy, two qualities they bring to all those who are lucky enough to know them. If you want to see the photo, you can probably find it by Googling "Stacy No-Blog." That's S-T-A-C-Y-N-O-B-L-O-G.
If Stacy had a blog, you could probably find it there. But she doesn't. As a result, I've been forced to imagine what Stacy's blog would be like if she had one. Herewith, the entry for December 23, 2004 - the day after she met Simon:
Stacy and Simon, we love you and we wish you all the best.
Silhouette photo above shamelessly stolen from Dennis's blog.
DealBreaker has a fairly affluent audience (mean income: $200,000; 12% make $2,000,000 +) but the numbers may be higher than we thought. Apparently, Warren Buffett reads DealBreaker. Or has one of his assistants read it to him. Or maybe was just Googling himself and stumbled upon it.
At any rate, we did a story last week titled "Is Warren Buffett Going to Hell?" (a direct SPY ripoff) where we had various theologians analyze Buffett's comments about giving money away, getting into heaven, and the relationship between the two. Late last week, Buffett responded.
I suppose this puts the new mean income of DB readers at ~ $4.6 million.
NOW WITH: Magazine Cover Graphics Nearly As Large As Actual Covers!™
Per this (second item), we're starting a legal blog that will be edited by "Underneath Their Robes" blogger and ex-Wonkette editor David Lat. But we don't yet have a name for it.
REJECTED NAMES SO FAR:
1. Barely Legal
2. Scofflaw
3. LawBreaker
4. Underneath Their Robes
5. Wonkette
6. Lawker
7. Legalist
8. Legalistist
9. Netscape
Suggestions? Send to Elizabeth AT Dealbreaker DOT com.
Just posted this on DealBreaker:
We realize that most of you have jobs at financial services companies (68% of you, to be exact) but for the rest of you**: we're looking for summer editorial interns to do some writing, reporting, research and a few administrative tasks, like parking the G-V and pouring our drinks (we like our scotch neat and old enough to drink itself.) Ideal candidates have an interest in the business side of blog publishing, are good, funny writers and have a natural penchant for mischief-making.
We're also looking for interns to work on some projects in development. Video editing and graphics skills are a plus.
Send résumés to elizabeth AT dealbreaker dot com.
** We're looking at you, Phillipe Jabre.
Belatedly:
From The New York Times, Business Section, "What's Online" (April 8, 2006):
DealBreaker operates on the idea that Wall Street types are at least as worthy of mockery as the media types Gawker makes fun of, or the politicians Wonkette takes on.The content bears this out. On his new CNBC talk show, Michael Eisner shows himself to be ''a charisma black hole,'' Ms. Spiers wrote. ''On a scale of one to charismatic, Eisner is a negative 10 Clintons. It's painful.''
Wall Street may be hungry for such material -- at least the busy comments sections seems to indicate that. Some of the most popular posts, in terms of reader comments, are written by ''Muffie Benson-Perella,'' an obnoxious, deliciously fictional columnist who wields her credentials and whose name and bio manage to make fun of about half a dozen people and institutions in fewer than 70 words.
From Institutional Investor, "A New Deal for Gawker's Spiers" (April 17, 2006):
Call it The Daily Show for the CNBC set. That's how Elizabeth Spiers, a former New York magazine reporter and founding editor of infamous celebrity-gossip blog Gawker, describes her new, satirical Wall Street blog, DealBreaker."The press does not talk about the things you talk about at cocktail parties," says the 29-year-old Duke graduate, who worked as an investment analyst for several hedge funds before launching Gawker in 2002. "Most mainstream financial coverage seems to imply you need to cover business in a deadly serious manner."
Downtown Express, "Wall Street Gets Snarky" (April 21, 2006):
Now Spiers, 29, has combined her business acumen, eye for gossip, and considerable writing ability to create Dealbreaker.com, an “online business tabloid and Wall Street gossip blog,” which she launched last month. It’s the first of what will be a commercial blog network published and operated by Spiers — much like Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, which includes sites like the Hollywood gossip blog Defamer and the gadget blog Gizmodo. Spiers admits it’s not exactly a new idea. “What we’re doing is a traditional media model,” she says. “We’re just creating content and selling ads against it.”
DealBreaker is a week old today and so far everything seems to be going well. Traffic is a bit higher than I expected and a frightening number of people I know have taken to responding to factual inaccuracies with "that's absurd," which has to count for something.
More DB press:
From today's Financial Times
...According to an introductory post, Dealbreaker aspires to provide "interviews with people about how much money they make and whether they sometimes buy things just so they can throw them away, sightings of Eliot Spitzer, pitchbook origami, fun with league tables, and so on."Dealbreaker founder Elizabeth Spiers, the first editor of celebrity and media gossip blog Gawker.com, said she hoped to start breaking original news about Wall Street personalities and scandals. "It could be anything you might talk about at a cocktail party," she said of the site's news ambitions...
Blogger Aims to Lift Lid on Financial Earnings [FT]
Also: I did a Q&A about DealBreaker with mediabistro, wherein they explore the potential for trouble:
mb: Has the SEC, FTC or other regulators been in touch?Spiers: Ha. No. The SEC gets in touch if there's a problem. They don't call just to say "hi."
mb: Will you be disclosing your investments anywhere? What are they? What's your policy for you and writers/staff? What about for your investors?
Spiers: I have no investments at the moment, so there's nothing to disclose, but the internal policy is that you can't write about something if there's a conflict of interest. My investors don't direct editorial, and I don't know what their financial holdings are, so it's a non-issue.
Elizabeth Spiers: Launches Aren't Much Fun
I viscerally hate having my photo taken and only stopped running away from Nikola at parties when I realized it made things worse. So after using a candid photo Uncle Grambo took at a party as a contributor's photo for the last three years or so, I sucked it up and went to get a headshot. I'm not very photogenic to begin with, but I have an almost Pavlovian response to cameras that involves scowling, looking for someone taller to hide behind (not difficult), then, if that doesn't work, trying to smile and managing something closer to a grimace while looking as if someone's slowly twisting my arm behind my back and I'm trying to hide the pain. It's not pretty--literally or figuratively.
But I've gotten a lot of compliments on Paul Sarkis' headshots that I've been using for DealBreaker press--probably because I don't look overtly hostile in them. Paul is awesome.
And now I won't have to do that for another 5 or 10 years at least. I figure passport photo expiration is a good standard for that sort of thing.
This weekend I officially became the last person in New York to acquire a digital camera. Maccers has been mocking me recently for having a Flickr account for over a year with no actual photos in it. And I'll admit that my lack of camera has dramatically reduced my relative ability to stalk Richard Dawkins at secular humanism conferences. In that respect, I defer entirely to Maccers.
But now that I have one, I plan to use it for the same purposes as the rest of this website: shameless self-promotion. Along those lines, i have a piece in the April issue of Jane about decoding celebrityspeak. I don't particularly like writing about celebrities (despite having done so for Gawker, New York Magazine, Page Six and various other publications) but in this case I did manage to get the phrase "blowup doll attached to a ventilator" published in a magazine owned by Si Newhouse. And I think that counts for something.
Lindsay also has a funny piece in this issue:
In other news: Silicon Alley is apparently back. (Actually, it was back a couple of years ago, but per Sunday Styles guidelines, no one was allowed to write about it until 24 months after the fact.)
In light of that, I've cleaned up my sidebar and added "Web 2.0" links to things like my nearly empty Flickr account. And when I get around to it, I'll add my Web 1.0 links: my SixDegrees page, my Kozmo.com account, my Contentville.com subscription...
Speaking of, I found this a couple of weeks ago when I unpacking some boxes in my new apartment:
I'm too lazy to enter the full list, but if you're feeling nostalgic, here are the Silicon Alley Top 15 in 2000:
1. Steve Case & Gerry Levin (AOL Time Warner)
2. Kevin O'Connor & Kevin Ryan (Doubleclick)
3. Bill Day & Scott Kurnit (About.com)
4. Jeff Dachis & Craig Kanarick (Razorfish)
5. Chan Suh & Kyle Shannon (Agency.com)
6. Jerry Colonna, Bob Greene & Fred Wilson (Flatiron Partners)
7. Gene DeRose & Tod Johnson (Jupiter Media Metrix)
8. Clifford Sobel (Net2Phone)
9. Alan Meckler (Internet.com)
10. Richard Johnson (HotJobs.com)
11. Fernando Espuelas (StarMedia Network)
12. Glenn Meyers (Rare Medium)
13. Richard Forman (Register.com)
14. Jason Devitt & David Joerg (Vindigo)
15. David Moore (24/7 Media)
And check out the hed on Jason's editor's letter.
Aleks. Dude. Shouldn't you be hacking Citibank or the Defense Department or something?
Hacking ElizabethSpiers.com = Lame.
RE: Melissa Moriarty's "Duke Girls Aren't What You Think" column... [via Deadspin]
Did the sorority make them wear matching white tank tops... or did they do it voluntarily?
And which is worse?
· Why Dealbreaker is not DealBook and vice versa. [FelixSalmon.com]
· Shots from the Dealbreaker video shoot, courtesy of Randy. (Starring: Krucoff, Harvey, Grellan, Doug, Dens, Brad, Me, Will and Becca. Shot and edited by Randy and Josh.)
(There's only one: When is it launching?)
And the answer is: sometime in late March--barring any development-related explosions, untimely illnesses, acts of God, etc.
The last week, most likely.
BUT look for a little teaser in a couple of weeks.
Update: Actually, a lot of people keep asking about hiring and blogger pay as well. I'm basically hiring one primary editor full-time (and at full-time rates) for every site we launch. It's a 9-5, more or less, and the site editors are essentially beat reporters. There will probably be additional contributors who post infrequently (people with some niche expertise or freelancers who want to cover a specific story), and they'll be paid per post, but I think it's important to have at least one person fully dedicated to each site.
And the corollary question: Are we hiring? Yes. Send resumés and cover letters to elizabeth AT dealbreaker DOT com. If you have a blog, include sample posts. If you don't, clips.
From today's edition of Page Six:
January 25, 2006 -- ORIGINAL Gawker editrix Elizabeth Spiers is hoping to give her old employer a much-needed run for its money. Spiers will launch dealbreaker.com, a Wall Street gossip blog, in March. If it's successful, look for Spiers to spin off sister sites just like Gawker Media boss Nick Denton did. The Alabama native, who quit her last job as editor-in-chief of mediabisto.com to finish her novel, "And They All Die in the End" (out next year from Simon & Schuster), has some unlikely inspiration in her new digs at lead investor Carter Burden's TriBeCa offices: an oil painting of former Journey frontman Steve Perry with the caption, "To Protect and to Rock."
UPDATE: Per Gawker's post here**,
I realize that actual reporting is Kryptonite to Gawker and that calling me for comment or asking me questions using my totally accessible email/IM/and-or-cell phone number would be historically unprecedented (having never done it before), cause space and time to collapse, pulverize us all in a single blast of plasma energy, etc., BUT...
Justin B. Smith is one of my investors (and one whose name Jesse should recognize.) We bought the domain off of someone else, thus the five year holding date.
If you'd have asked, I'd have told you.
I'm just saying.
** < Stewie > someone's feeling a leeeeeetttle threatened, hmmm? < / Stewie>
... to recommend a book with which we had absolutely nothing to do and don't know a soul who did (a change for us):
Edward St. Aubyn's MOTHER'S MILK. I mention it because I've recommended it to five people in the last three days and no one I've asked has heard of it, much less read it. So I figure the suggestion is more useful than, say, a recommendation that you read Joan Didion's new book, which is at the top of the Times best-seller list and stacked in piles the size of small skyscrapers just inside the front door at Barnes & Noble.
Not that the Didion book isn't fantastic. It is. But no surprise there.
As part of my current day job ("novel finisher"), I've been on a massive satire/comic novel reading binge for the last few weeks, re-reading books I've already read and plowing through ones I haven't. I picked up St. Aubyn's book because I scanned it in the book store and on first impression, it reminded me of Waugh. There are definite similarities: dark dry wit, stories about plutocrats in decline, etc. And there's the pleasurably dark resolution in keeping with my literary preferences, which may be summarized thusly: happy endings are BULLSHIT.
Well, not always. I just don't particularly care for them.
Now that they're officially out, here are the book details, from Publisher's Lunch:
Fiction Debut: Former Gawker and MediaBistro blogger Elizabeth Spiers' novel AND THEY ALL DIE IN THE END, a satire of Wall Street and the media, to Geoffrey Kloske at Simon & Schuster, by Kate Lee at ICM (world English).
Very exciting.
And randomly: Lindsay Robertson pointed me to an Australian Vogue article on bloggers in which we're both featured: page 1. page 2.
In the continuing vein of using this blog solely as a press release for myself, I feel compelled to link to the official statement that I'm leaving my job as editor-in-chief of mediabistro to finish a novel I just sold and do some writing that isn't about media. My contract was up November 1 anyway and I figured, easier now than a few months later.
But it's been a great year. We did a crash 90-day redesign on almost zero budget that left the site with 40% less orange and 600% more blog. And you can see the effects here:
I should add that I'm incredibly proud of the mb bloggers who are working hard to make sure that trend continues. Thanks to TVNewser's Brian Stelter, FishbowlNY's Rachel Sklar, FishbowlDC's Garrett Graff and Patrick Gavin, mbToolbox's Claire Zulkey, UnBeige's Eva Hagberg, FishbowlLA's Mike Sonnenschein and Claude Brodesseur, Galleycat's Ron Hogan and Sarah Weinman and our indefatigable media news editor/blogger, David Hirschman. Thanks also to writer/reporter Greg Lindsay, Associate Editor Aileen Gallagher, and our regular contributors (Rachel Bussel and Jesse Kornbluth, especially). Thanks also to the rest of the mb staff for aiding and abetting--and among the latter, in particular, mb CEO Laurel Touby and publisher Kyle Crafton for luring me away from NY mag in the first place. If you were in New York during the dot com boom, you can understand why mb's profitability and continued growth under Laurel's leadership is significant, and Kyle is, hands down, one of the best managers I've ever worked with.
Looking back, this is the bio that went up on the site the day after I arrived: "Elizabeth started at mediabistro.com on November 1, 2004, having celebrated Halloween the night before by dressing as New York Times reporter Judy Miller (short bob wig, handcuffs and a can of Raid labeled "precursor element")—a costume symptomatic of her frightening and near-pathological obsession with media. Armed with site redesign mockups, back issues of SPY, and an annotated copy of Graydon Carter's last book proposal, she came to mb from New York magazine, where she was a contributing writer and edited the magazine's Intelligencer column."
The Judy Miller handcuffs were, I suppose, unintentionally prescient.
1.) Men's Vogue - the premiere issue
Dana Vachon (a.k.a., D-Nasty, a.k.a., my consistently loyal and brave "plus one" during the loathesome party reporting days) has a feature in the premiere issue of Men's Vogue titled, "A Swiss Account: Where Dollars and People Go to Hide" that is, like almost everything Dana writes, hilarious. There's also a brilliant piece by A.A. Gill called "A Bloody Good Time" about shooting (for sport) in England. The American version of his travel book A.A. Gill is Away comes out this Fall. I read it a while ago, and though I'm not big on travel writing, loved it. Gill is perhaps best known in the UK, where he's sort of the Dale Peck of restaurant reviewers. (He once infamously began a restaurant review with "Why is there never a Palestinian suicide bomber when you need one?" and ended it with "My chickpea soup was like sucking wet sand, the Blonde's bourride was an accident involving a hair-dryer and an aquarium, the flat chicken supreme was a battered hen, the ham was sweaty and curling, the wine (I'm told) was having a sex change to vinegar, and the service was resting while its agent placed the treatment/novel/play." He also pleasurably eviscerated Jean George's 66 in Vanity Fair a couple of years ago.)
2.) John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise
John runs the Little Gray Book Lectures in Brooklyn, and you've ever been to one, The Areas of My Expertise is sort of like LGB in text form. But funnier. The catalog description:
John Hodgman brings his considerable expertise to bear in answering all of the questions book buyers have been asking:
-What are the mottoes of the 51 United States?
THE ANSWER IS PROVIDED
-Who were the U.S. presidents who had hooks for hands?
THE ANSWER IS PROVIDED
-What role does the Yale secret society "Skull and Bones" play in the secret world government?
THERE IS NO SECRET WORLD GOVERNMENT
-What was the menu at the first Thanksgiving, and did it include eels?
Technically, that is two questions, but do not apologize, for John Hodgman shall answer them both . . . LATER.
-Aside from a compendium of fake trivia, what is the best kind of book to write?
A SIMPLE TABLE OF THE 55 MOST DRAMATIC LITERARY SITUATIONS PROVIDES THE ANSWER, and John Hodgman is the author of that table.
Also, if the opportunity presents itself to hear Hodgman read, it's even better in person.
3.) Jersey boy Rob Sterling has started a local blog for Richmond called R804.com. Or R804ist, as I like to call it. On the upside, it's very pretty. On the downside, it's about Richmond. (Kidding, kidding.)
And randomly (not a reading recommendation):
I'll be speaking at the Impact Conference next Thursday. Here's the panel description:
2:00 PM: “Social Networks, Blogs and other New Channels of Influence”
Moderator: Brad King, Web Editor, Technology Review
Tom Foremski, Editor and Publisher, Silicon Valley Watcher
Elizabeth Spiers, Editor-in-Chief, mediabistro.com
Joe Trippi, Political Strategist
I'll be on NPR tomorrow at 2:10PM EST talking about Google and privacy. (To the Point, AM 820)
Jonathan Franzen says he hates Gawker because Gawker was mean to him.
You'll have to excuse me. I'm busy picking up the tiny fragments of my broken heart. All those months of benign pre-Gawker Franzen stalking, those precious minutes of absent-mindedly writing "Mrs. Jonathan Franzen" on errant scraps of paper--for naught!
Damn you, Choire. (I'm sure it was Choire.)
Last week, I write a column about why I hate party reporting, casually referencing an article I wrote for New York about Ed Klein's thin sourcing and exploitation of his relationship (or lack thereof) with Jackie Kennedy.
Today, Choire has a funny column in the Observer about why he also hates party reporting, referencing a party to which I dragged him over a year ago. Also in the Observer: an article about Ed Klein's thin sourcing and exploitation of his relationship (or lack thereof) with Jackie Kennedy.
I'll be doing two readings next week with other contributors to Kevin Smokler's tech/reading anthology, Bookmark Now. (Buy it with Freakonomics and Save™!)
I'll be reading my essay from the book, titled (seriously) "Andrew Krucoff and the Amazing Paper Weblog." The piece, not surprisingly, features Andrew Krucoff. And Lockhart Steele. (And Neal Pollack. And Meg Hourihan. And Jeff Jarvis.) The piece is mostly about Krucoff trying to turn The Other Page into a print publication. (I wrote it quite a while ago.) An excerpt:
When I arrive at Krucoff's two bedroom on Stanton Street, half the lights are out because one of the electrical outlets has been inexplicably shooting sparks across the kitchen and Krucoff and [Chris] Gage, tired of tiptoeing around it, lest they be electrocuted, have cut power to that part of the room. I'm deeply curious about what this seemingly oxymoronic "print blog" is, and would like to find out before they inadvertently burn the place down. Irony, or attempted irony, infuses most of Krucoff's extracurricular activities, and his latest project has all the signs of yet another effort to be the Johnny Knoxville of the Internet. He and Gage use the word retarded as a derogatory rather than medical adjective, and dude, while sparingly used, is frequently implied. They explain that they plan to recruit people to write blog entries, which they will then edit using Quark publishing software, print ("We'll put it on resumé paper!"), photocopy, then mail to subscribers via the U.S. Postal Service. The print blog is, unbelievably, exactly what it sounds like. "The best thing," says Gage, "is that I keep telling everybody I'm trying to get involved that we want to do stories about dune buggies and the low-flying helicopters that chase them! That's so retarded, it's awesome!"
June 6: McNally/Robinson Booksellers (NYC)
52 Prince St. in Soho. 6:30 PM.
(I'll be reading with Ben Nugent and KM Soehnlein.)
June 7: Galapagos Art Space (Brooklyn)
70 N. 6th st. 7-9:45 PM.
(I'll be reading with Tom Bissell, Ben Nugent, Robert Lanham, and Stephanie Griest.)
[Also - Steal a copy if you have to, Glen David Gold's (Carter Beats the Devil) essay on self-Googling, "Your Own Personal Satan," is hilarious.]
Randomly: A few days ago, I had lunch with Lockhart Steele (fetchingly pictured here in yesterday's Times with the rest of the Gawker media crew) and the inimitable D-Nasty. As Lock and I were making our way back across Spring Street, Lock nearly got plowed down--by A FRESH DIRECT DELIVERY TRUCK.*
*If you don't know why it's funny, don't worry; it's not that funny. But, still.
Summer's almost here, which means that lease on my apartment is nearly up. (At some point, I'll plan far enough ahead to sign for a place that I actually like and want to live in for more than twelve months.) At any rate, I'm looking for a new apartment and need to find something by the beginning of June. I'm currently in an East Village studio with a slightly uneven floor. (Drop change in the middle of the room and it rolls to the south wall.) Something similar would be great--but, you know, without the uneven floor.
I'll be reading at the WYSIWYG Talent Show on Tuesday, April 19 with Dan Radosh, Jon Friedman, Michelle Collins, Brian Grosz, Frank Beekman and Andy Horowitz at 7:30 PM.
Rather than train new bloggers on the mediabistro live site, I've been letting them play with elizabethspiers.com, which has resulted in posts like this one. Expect a few more in the next couple of days.
I'll be in DC tomorrow night launching (or launch partying, rather) FishbowlDC and TVNewser. I haven't actually been to DC in a couple of years, unless you count the various airports, and the last time I was there I was conducting due diligence on a technology startup that was selling a sort of ISP-in-a-box product to various underdeveloped countries. The company was losing money, losing employees, etc., but they had big shiny offices with a popcorn machine in the lobby and a seemingly endless supply of nerf toys. And this was post-crash. (It was the year of immaturity masquerading as childlike whimsy. To this day, foosball tables in corporate environments fill me with an unmistakeable sense of impending doom.)
So it was all I could do to keep from banging my head against the wall when the CEO excitedly told me that the company was going to rescue itself by selling the product to a handful of companies in Nigeria. The same Nigeria where the electrical blackout rate is somewhere in the mid-double digits? Where the literacy rates eliminate approximately 30% of the population from using the Internet in the first place? Where the monthly per-monthly usage fees for your product equal 82% of the country's annual average per capita income? Where getting cash in and out of the country is almost impossible? Yes! That Nigeria!
Every time I get email from the only living son of the late Charles Taylor confidentially offering me 26,000,000 USD if I would be so good as to provide him with my bank account number and routing directions, I can't help but wonder if somewhere one of those dead dictator's sons is snickering over the huge wodges of cash he just got wired from an ex-technology entrepreneur in D.C. But then again, someone's obviously been building Internet infrastructure there or I wouldn't be getting so many of those confidential offers.
· My most recent mb column: Estrich vs. Kinsley, Part 783.
· I'll be reading at the WSYIWYG show with Radosh and some other people on April 19th. The usual place, the usual time.
· On April 20th, I'll be moderating a mediabistro panel on reporting via blogs. Come for the panel; stay for the Lockhart Steele. (Other panelists TBA.)
· I have an non-fiction piece called "Andrew Krucoff and the Amazing Paper Weblog" in this book. Five better reasons to buy it: pieces by Tracy Chevalier, Nell Freudenberger, Meghan Daum, Neal Pollack, and Six Apart's Anil Dash.
· PR Week did a profile of me that got a few minor things wrong, but I kind of liked.
· The obligatory Gannon/Jordan column—but with 87% less Gannon and Jordan!
· The link to the Times article that I should have put in the last post—wherein the Times archiving works to my advantage and the most flattering part of the piece is in the abstract. This is because I secretly control the New York Times—a matter about which many of you have openly speculated. (Bill: I don't like the color scheme on that page. Could there be a little more blue? Too much red for my tastes.)
· AND THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS: It was brought to my attention on Tuesday night that the Christopher Hitchens Drinking Club has not been convened since sometime in 2003 (by someone who has not updated his blog since April of 2004, no less.) I just had my quarterly liver replacement, so I'm probably up for it. Email me if you're interested and we'll come up with a venue.
So last week, I thought the whole "Fishbowl vs. Gawker" rivalry was funny, if grossly inflated. I think the extent to which we're competing with Gawker is pretty negligible, but as a journalist, I completely understand that "blog rivalry" is a much sexier angle than "blog launch." Predictable, at any rate. (Also predictable: the catfight juxtaposition of me and Jess, despite the fact that my [male] co-blogger Christian is responsible for most of FishbowlNY and Matt Haber is responsible for a number of, if not most of, the media-related posts on Gawker. The reporter seemed to have no interest in talking to either of them, because, you know...women fighting is hot!)
But now I'm getting emails from people wanting to know where the celebrity gossip is on Fishbowl and that's a little disconcerting. The "media" part of "media gossip blog" seems to have gone unnoticed. The NY Post this morning suggested that the fishbowl blogs needed more sophomoric Gawker-type jokes because there's a bigger market for that stuff. And there is a bigger market for that stuff. But it's not our market. We're targeting media people, not a general audience. In the best of all worlds we'd be inside.com but without spending the $28 million. If the fishbowls end up being Gawker 2.0, we're doing something wrong.
Another frequently overlooked point with regard to the business model: we're selling ads on the blogs but we don't need to, which completely changes the economics of the situation.
For example: Jason Calacanis, on Gothamist: "Who is going to advertise on Gawker or FishbowlNY? I always do a test when I launch a brand... I look for the analog... and with Fishbowl and Gawker the analogs are Folio Magazine and Spy Magazine. I love(d) both but they both struggled and they both sucked as businesses--and they were national!!!"
Right now, estimated ad sales for the mb blogs next year comprise less than 1% of total revenue for mb. We've been getting ad sales inquiries, and we're happy about that, but ad revenue is found money for us. All mb needs to get out of the blogs is a very small increase in companies posting to the job boards for the blogs to pay for themselves. The blogs are not meant to be stand-alone businesses (but that said, if we ran separate P&Ls, I think they easily could be and in all likelihood will be.)
Folio is probably a good analogue in terms of target market, but there's a reason why it's struggling. Printing and distribution for a publication with a circulation of less than 10,000 is incredibly expensive. Frankly, I don't understand why they don't just do the whole thing online and scrap the print edition.
My beloved SPY magazine is probably not a good comparable, as the target market is really the same market New York magazine and the New York Observer theoretically serve. (That's Gawker's market, incidentally, but not Fishbowl's.) That said, I think SPY online, done now, would be profitable, and I think Slate is the proper comparable for that.
So, in summary:
1) Tara Reid's breasts will never appear on FishbowlNY. Sorry, NY Post.
2) The blogs are not going to make mb filthy rich, but they help the bottom line and are the most economically efficient marketing tool we have at our disposal.
Logo designer: check.
Interns: check.
Sanity: still intact, surprisingly.
But!
I need a blogger (part-time, paid) who's interested in DC media. Not DC politics, mind you. DC media. (And yes, I realize that there's some overlap.)
Applicants don't have to be based in DC, but need to be able to demonstrate prior interest in media if they're not. That said, being based in DC is clearly a major advantage.
Send cover letter, blog URL, etc. to elizabeth AT mediabistro DOT com.
I'm looking for interns to help with mediabistro relaunch projects. The downside: no pay. The upside: lots of creative input and the chance to do actual writing and reporting without being forced to get me lunch and fax things for a year and half prior. You'll be doing research, copyediting and some reporting.
You'll also get exposure to both the editorial and business side of running a profitable web publication and participate in the development of launching new web properties from scratch.
Send resume and cover letter (no attachments, please) to elizabeth AT mediabistro DOT com, indicating you availability and areas of interest. Include your blog URL if you have one.
I need a logo designer to work on some blogs we're launching (and relaunching) at mediabistro.com. Predictably, I need someone cheap but good.
Suggestions? Send to elizabeth AT mediabistro DOT com.
If you happened to send me email between last Wednesday and yesterday, I probably did not get it, thanks to my own moronic failure to check the defaults on my remote email. Re-send to elizabeth AT mediabistro DOT com.
We're running the mediabistro blogs on Blogger software until we switch hosting in a few weeks, and Blogger's been having problems all morning. In 2002, when I was blogging a blogspot blog called "Capital Influx," I wrote this:
"Evil Blogger software
'Leading tool,' you boast
Yet when I clicked on 'Publish'
You ate my fucking post."
Some things never change.
Ode to Blogger [Corante, Sept. 30, 2002]
I'd slam Jack Shafer for knowingly and willingly voting for people he plainly characterizes as numbskulls, but I'm a Kerry supporter, so that would be hypocritical. (John Kerry: the lesser of the two numbskulls.)
I just got the November/December issue of Foreign Policy (or The Poor Man's Foreign Affairs, as I like to call it) and there are two headlines above the cover story:
"The Tragedy of Colin Powell" by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, and...
"HOW BLOGS ARE CHANGING THE WORLD" by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell (CAPS EMPHASIS my own).
Re: the first -- I used to have a minor obsession with Christopher Hitchens, and to some extent, I still do. But in the couple of years, he's only made sense to me when explaining why he's an atheist. His justifications for the war in Iraq, in particular, have been comically disingenuous. (And yes, it hurts me to say that. Sort of.) In this issue of FP, he attempts a takedown of Colin Powell that really just boils down to the fact that he may have not spent enough time traveling and that his prescriptions for multilateralism were not always successful. If the Hitch managed to knock Powell off his supposed pedestal with that one, I think it's safe to say that Powell landed in a bed of marshmallows.
A sample:
From William Jennings Bryan to Cyrus Vance, history used to suggest a remedy for secretaries of state who became demoralized or disillusioned with the policies pursued by their presidents: resignation. More than just quitting, resignation also at least implies an acceptance of responsibility (as it did, for example, when Lord Carrington resigned as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's foreign secretary over the Falklands imbroglio). But with Powell, one has never been entirely sure whether he considers collective responsibility to be a part of his cabinet rank. Instead, he offers a grudging willingness to stay on, for a little bit at least, in invited--no, make that pressed--to do so. This attitude is normally associated either with insufferable guests, or with people who appear to believe thta they are performing the thankless task of holding up the sky....
Resignation does not always imply an acceptance of responsibility, and in this case, it would be more likely to imply an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to deal with the consequences of one's irresponsibilty. To the extent that Hitchens is right, it can in some cases, be the ultimate form of dissent, but it's a trump card that can only be played once. How often is "I don't like what you're doing, so I'm quitting" more valuable than "I don't like what you're doing, so I'm going to stick around and try to change it"?
Further on:
He may well indeed favor the venerable traditions of negotiation and multilateralism. Yet what reward has this touching faith brought him? The chief evidence against him would be his attempt to prolong the political life of Yasser Arafat, his reluctance to believe that Hussein was incorrigible short of war, his belief in the good faith of the Saudis, nad his willingness, right up until September of 2004, to extend deadlines in Sudan.
So much intellectual dishonesty here, I don't even know where to start (the failures of intellect or the plain dishonesty?) Re: Arafat--oversimplification to the point of distortion, and re: good faith of the Saudis--stand alone distortion without even the courtesy of oversimplification. So I'll just deal with the two most grating charges (to me, at least): (1) that Hussein was incorrigible short of war. If this were a point of fact, John Kerry's support base would be much smaller right now. Most of the conservatives I know aren't fully convinced that Hussein was incorrigible short of war, and the Realists so frequently identified with hawkish administrations (Mearsheimer, Waltz, and if Morganthau weren't dead, I'd wager...) vehemently opposed it, precisely because they thought Hussein was corrigible--or at least, deterrable. That Hitchens treats this as a given is outrageous. (2) extending deadlines in Sudan. I'll give Hitchens that Powell could have done more and sooner, but at least he called it genocide, which is more than could be said of the rest of the administration at the time. If that's the indictment, and it actually sticks, Powell's will be the first of many resignations, and certainly not the most senior.
I could review every paragraph in the article like this, but it all points back to the same fundamental flaw in logic: if Hitchens is going to make the argument that Powell's policy of "quiet diplomacy" is morally flawed on the basis that it's ineffective and/or insufficient, then he has to compare it to the shortcomings of the alternative (loud non-diplomatic actions, I suppose) and acknowledge that the relative distinctions imply an imperative to correct them in order of priority. And if inefficiency and ineffectiveness are the wages of that particular sin, then who's going to hell first? Powell or other members of the administration?
Now, onto the blogging article:
First of all, FP just discovered blogs? "Blogs," writes Drezner/Farrell, "(short for 'weblogs') are periodically updated journals, providing online commentary presented as a set of 'posts,' individual entries of news or commentary, in reverse chronological order." [Ed.--Three issues ago, they explained email as "a message, written traditional letter format, but electronically transmitted via the World Wide Web, an interconnected and decentralized public network." ... Oh, alright. Not really. I made that up.] I cannot imagine that anyone who would ostensibly be reading Foreign Policy would not know what a blog is, given the extensive coverage in all other tangential media of blogs at the Democratic and Republican conventions, presidential candidate blogs, TV anchor blogs, etc. You'd pretty much have to be reading FP and nothing else politically-related to avoid any collision whatsoever with blogs.
But on to rest of the piece:
Compared to other actors in world affairs--governments, international organizations, multinational organizations, multinational corporations, and even non-governmental organizations (NGOs)--blogs do not appear to be very powerful or visible. Even the most popular blog garners only a fraction of the traffic that major media outlets attract.
Not that visible, I'll give them. Not that powerful, I won't. Basing power assessments on size of readership and traffic is like arguing that the President of the United States isn't very powerful because there's only one of him. How many people are reading blogs isn't as important as which people are reading blogs. If the Bush and Kerry campaigns are reading ABC's The Note religiously, Mark Halperin is getting an audience for which high profile interest groups would and have paid millions. There are plenty of well-funded NGOs that are much less capable of affecting foreign policy agendas.
Another observation:
The blogosphere has no central organization, and its participants have little ideological consensus. [Ed.--Is that critical or merely irrelevant?] How then can a collection of decentralized, contrarian, and nonprofit Web sites possibly influence world politics?" [Ed.--This is apparently a big puzzle, yet the question of how decentralized, contrarian and nonprofit NGOs, also known as one of the examples invoked earlier for contrast, can possibly influence world politics is, it seems, self-evident.]
The article is ultimately very "rah-rah-blogging!" on the basis that it allows for the dissimination of niche expertise (i.e.,--UMichigan professor Juan Cole translating Arabic language newspapers) and the bypassing of foreign censorship laws (Bloggers in Iran! Bloggers in China!), but pretty shallow analysis overall-- though I do like the fact that it refers to Jeff Jarvis's Buzzmachine as "the single best source for information on the global expansion of the blogosphere." (Jarvis is the single best source for info on the global expansion of the blogosphere because he has probably engineered most of it himself. A hundred years from now, historians studying the mysterious proliferation of indie web media in the early '00s will be shocked to learn that it was masterminded by a guy in suburban New Jersey.)
And one final note, on FP:
If AIG ever stops advertising, they're going to have to remove the back page entirely, because it has become a fixture and the absence will be noticeable. It'll be like Paper magazine without Chloe Sevigny or the New York Times without the institutional self-loathing.
1. Your blog looks different. What did you do to it?
Yes. It now has little blocks of text that appear in reverse chronological order. To be fair, it always had them, but they previously appeared once every two months or so. From now until November 1, they're going to appear a little more frequently because I'll be blogging by necessity at mediabistro until the site relaunch (circa January 31, 2005) and I need some practice. I'm a little rusty. Feedback is appreciated, but keep in mind that "don't quit your day job" is actually a compliment in my case.
2. Didn't you say just two weeks ago that you were kidding about the 100% more blogging?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Consistency, hobgoblin, etc., etc. I also told an editor of mine that I thought media reporting was the most soul-destroying job in journalism. (Then I realized that soul destruction necessitated an actual soul, and that I had nothing to worry about.)
3. If a Zogby poll falls in the forest and no one's around to overanalyze it...
I'd look at the numbers, but I'm too enthralled with Spiderman Reviews Crayons [via D.R.] at the moment. I'm just being reintroduced to the Internet and haven't quite worked my way up to solid foods yet.
If you're reading this site, you probably already know that I'm leaving New York magazine in a week to assume the role of editor-in-chief at mediabistro.com. I'm managing a redesign of the homepage, which I anticipate will include the addition of niche-specific blogs, the process of which started with the acquisition of Cable TVNewser and the launch of Galleycat.com.
The design, integration and beta runs for the various blogs will probably occur simultaneously, and I'd like the new bloggers to have a reasonably good understanding of the basics of libel law and fair use. But at the moment, I don't have a quick and efficient way of training them. I'm not even sure that my understanding of either of those issues is really sufficient, given that I had to educate myself with regard to the Gawker and New York blogs. (Nick now has a disclaimer that sort of works around it, but I assume it won't be tested until Gawker gets a serious lawsuit.)
My first impulse was to call the EFF and see if they have a primer for these things--a Marighella's Minimanual of sorts for indie media--and offering to develop something with them if they didn't, but then I realized (after a bit of futile sub-domain Googling) that it would probably be faster and more efficient to just put the question out there and take suggestions from people who know a lot more about this than I do.
If such a thing does not exist, wouldn't it make sense to put together some sort of collaborative blog or wiki that would cover the basics? There are certainly other people besides myself who are hiring bloggers or working with bloggers and have an interest in being able to brief them on these issues. (Nick... Jason... Jeff...)
If there's an easy way to do this and I'm missing it, do let me know. Send me an email (elizabeth AT mediabistro DOT com) or leave a comment.
mediabistro.com Hires Elizabeth Spiers As New Editor-In-Chief [mb]
See also: Ones to Watch [WWD]
· This seems kind of counterintuitive, given that (A) the traffic stats are still trending upward and (B) the site's disappearance for a few hours is deemed newsworthy enough to warrant a story. (Or two.)
· I'm secretly hoping that if I concentrate all my psychic energy on this, new posts will appear. I don't know that it will actually happen, but I hope that it does. [Ed.--Actually, scratch that. My psychic energy tends to make things turn black, shrivel and die. Maybe I should just stay as far away from it as possible.]
[Alternate Title: Blogging Is Good for Exorcising Debate-Induced Depression]
[Alternate Alternate Title: ES.com--Now With 100% More Blogging!]
[Alternate Alternate Alternate Title: I'm Kidding About the 100% More Blogging. Two ≠ Trend.]
· Vociferously. He knows what it means, but can he spell it?
· Why do both candidates pronounce "Saddam Hussein" as "Sodom Hussein"? Is that intentional? And why we're at it, Kim Jung Il? Kim Chung Il? Kim Jing Il?
· Poland? Did we mention Poland?
· Is "speaking clearly" really a good catchprase for Bush?
· Is it possible that Kerry angry really does sound exactly like Kerry reading federal tax code?
· Why are Kerry's roots darker? Doesn't Christophe know where to put the highlights?
· Wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place. But can he say it five times fast?
· Is Bush's ability to stay on message largely the result of Bush's inability to remember more than two or three catchphrases at once?
· Are these two really the only options?
Alternative Title: Blogging Is Good For Lazy People Who Don't Have the Stamina to Answer Any More Emails About Matt Klam's Sunday Times Piece.
General thoughts, incoherently ordered and incoherently articulated, for people who have asked (I assume you're the only people who actually read this site):
1) Ana Cox is hot. Jack Germond, not so much.
2) All press is good press, and this piece is probably good for everyone involved. More exposure = more traffic, etc.
3) That said, I thought the piece was condescending and it actually made me feel compelled to defend blogging, which is almost as creepy and alien to me as feeling compelled to defend traditional media.
4) Given the title and the setup, you might be under the impression that the article was about the effects of blogging on politics, but - HA! - you would be wrong! The piece was really about the effects of blogging on big media (and vice versa). I seem to remember Klam appearing in TMFTML’s comment section months ago, indicating that he was working on a blogging story for the NYT mag [Ed.--Yep, and he was a bit unfairly mocked by the bloggers, which may explain the attitude in the piece. Google also indicates that the the LA wing of the blogosphere was approached in May], so I guess the election was a news peg for an article was already in progress or languishing in CopyDesk. [Ed. - Also, I realize you may have seen this before, but in case there's any confusion: what you're presently reading is a "fake" editor of my own creation, who breaks in, midsentence, with parenthetical questions and accusations.]
5) The question that is posed in the article - "Is blogging ruining political journalism?" - implies a hard dichotomy between the two, then disingenuously goes on to profile people, most of whom are not only bloggers, but journalists in a very real, professional, get-paid-and-bylined sense, and certainly understand the rules and ethics of journalism. Klam acknowledges those print affiliations** but doesn’t seem to have internalized that particular cognitive Venn diagram or it would have presumably affected his analysis. There is a tendency on the part of some traditional media people to separate the two and to assume that bloggers, given traditional journalism assignments, can't or won't follow standard practices, and that their editors have to accommodate that. But it's not like Josh Marshall gets a "get out of fact-checking free" card when Remnick assigns him a New Yorker piece because he's incapable of understanding this "fact-verification process of which you speak." And I don't think he expects one. Nor do I think he's as desperate for old media validation as the article seems to imply. The article seems to dismiss Josh's Atlantic and New Yorker assignments as if he just found them at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, and there are no actual editors who read and respect his writing. From reading the piece, you’d think that Josh was staring wistfully out the window, hands clasped furtively over his (quickly wrinkling) shirt, long eyelashes batting innocently in the moonlight, telling himself, "One day - one day! - I’ll have a real press pass. I just know it!" [Ed.--That said, the description was oddly endearing. It made it seem like all Josh really needed was a big hug. A big hug from a stodgy print publication, but a big hug, nonetheless.]
6) I think for the most part, big media is embracing blogs. When I was covering the RNC, nearly every major news outlet had an RNC blog--and Newsweek was blogging the Olympics in case anyone caught up in the RNC orgy free cocktails and hot air forgot they were happening. Not all of the blogs used standard blogging conventions (cross-linking, permalinks, etc.) and some of them--ie._the Hardball blog - read awkwardly, but they were certainly warming up to the concept. And no matter how many times Pinch Sulzberger wants to use the phrase "opinion-ridde n free-for-all" in reference to anything other than the NYT'’s own editorial page, the NYT increasingly has blog-like elements, some of which may, godforbid, technically constitute "blogs" - whether they choose to admit it or not.
Gratuitous digression: I didn't really understand the backlash in Jeff Jarvis's comment section with regard to James Wolcott's new blog. There are only three reasons I read Vanity Fair anymore: Wolcott, Hitchens and the occasional Neal Pollack piece. If A.A. Gill were a regular, there would be four, but I guess there are only so many column inches left for interesting stuff after you take out the Asprey ads and the nostalgia articles on 1930s Hollywood. [Ed. - If Hitchens ever starts a blog, I might have to start blogging again, just on principle.] At any rate, more Wolcott is a good thing, and unedited Wolcott is highly entertaining. More Wolcott, I say! For all the complaining in the blogosphere about big media snobbery (How dare the puny little bloggers presume themselves journalists!), it's surprising to see a sort reverse snobbery on the part of small media (How dare the big institutionalized media people presume themselves bloggers!) and it's equally annoying and equally asinine. [Ed.--If this keeps up and big media political correspondents keep starting blogs, I suppose we'll see another NYT mag story that poses the question, "Is political journalism ruining blogging?"] I'd frankly like to see more big name big media people keeping blogs even if it means Bill O'Reilly writing "Shut up, Begala!" posts and banning IPs.
7) I'm not saying there's no legitimate opposition to blogging by traditional media people, but the occasional snippy comment from Tina Brown (who, a year or two ago was much more pro-blog and seems to have soured on them as of late) or desperate "pajama people" denunciations from an embattled Dan Rather are no more representative of the average journalist's attitude toward blogging than Tina Brown and Dan Rather are representative of the average journalist.
** To wit,
Cox = ex-Chronicle of Higher Ed, ex-Mother Jones, ex-American Spectator, plus any number of pubs she for which she writes currently
Marshall = The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Post, The New York Times, Salon, Slate,
Etc., etc.
As previously stated, the world is officially slated to come to a fiery, crashing end tomorrow night at Lolita, where Eurotrash, Maccers and I will be reading. [Ed.--You always knew Armegeddon would start on the Lower East Side, didn't you?]
Maccers will be making her literary debut, with the lovely Maud Newton emcee-ing and Eurotrash will once again whine that she's not funny anymore, then nonchalantly proceed to blow the rest of us out of the water.
More details here.
Cupcake Reading Series
September 14, 7:30PM, at Lolita, 266 Broome Street (at Allen).
Eurotrash moved to the dark side a few months ago and now D-Nasty is freelancing for the Times (bribing his way into summer concerts on their behalf). Two down, Maccers to go...
From the article:
I came upon the Garden like the ancient serpent, intent upon exploiting the inherent corruptibility of man. My heart brimmed with vice, my pockets with $50 bills. I scanned the ticket takers for the classic signs of human weakness - onanism, narcissism, botulism - and soon found a man who seemed to embody them all.
"Tickets?" he asked.
How quaint.
Allow Me to Introduce My Friend, Andrew Jackson [NY Times]
More GOP TV -
Lloyd Grove and I will be on MSNBC's "Convention After Hours" program at 12:30AM tonight/tomorrow morning with Joe Scarborough and Ron Reagan, talking about convention parties (the good, the bad and the ugly) live from Herald Square.
I'll also be covering John McCain's party at Cipriani tonight (co-hosted by Lorne Michaels) for The Convention Kicker. Check back.
The Kicker is back, but in a much more powerful incarnation--we're using it to group blog the Republican National Convention. We'll be covering everything RNC and posting constantly. [Ed.--I'd call it "flooding the zone," but, well...]
Check it out: The CONVENTION Kicker.
No individual logins at the moment, so here's my stuff:
RNC Media Party II
(And the media circus it rode in on...)
The Convention is here and I will be contributing to the inevitable press onslaught starting Saturday, when I become the Temporary Talking Head Expert On the Bush Twins. Previous Temporary Areas of Expertise, In Case You're Wondering: The Many Wardrobe Malfunctions of Janet Jackson (Intentional and Un), Sex and the City (Strong, Independent Women or Dirty Little Sluts?), Celebrities Who Run for Political Office (Schwarzenegger, natch), and Many Other Topics of Serious Import. Here's the schedule, subject to change:
I will be on CNN Saturday at 6PM, talking about the Bush twins.
On MSNBC Sunday around 11:45AM, talking about the Bush twins.
On Fox News Sunday around 1:45PM, talking about John Kerry's proposed increase in corporate average fuel economy standards and its implications for the long-term development of non-hydrocarbon fuel sources...Just kidding! I'll be talking about the Bush twins. [UPDATE: Actually, I won't. I'll be talking about convention week parties.]
And next week, I'll be covering the convention along with every other journalist in New York. And more importantly, the convention parties, starting with Mayor Bloomberg's "welcome party" at the Time Warner center on Saturday and ending with John McCain's Wednesday soiree at Cipriani. Check back for updates.
The lovely ladies at the Cupcake Reading Series have invited Maccers, Eurotrash and I to participate in their September reading. One of us would be frightening enough, but all three? Very, very brave of them.
September 14, 7:30PM, at Lolita, 266 Broome Street (at Allen), Lower East Side, NYC.
I'll be in Toronto this Saturday, presenting at a journalism conference. If anyone else is going, drop me a line. (Given the lamentable absence of the usual suspects, I expect to be in catastrophic brunch withdrawal and will need moral support.)
3:15 pm to 4:45 pm / 352
History and Magazine Divisions
Teaching Panel Session: From the Many to the Many: The Evolution of Web Logs
and Their Journalistic Promise
Moderating/Presiding: David Abrahamson, Northwestern
Panelists: Blogs That Work: A National Audience for a Personal Perspective
Elizabeth Spiers, New York Magazine, the kicker.nymetro.com
Unexplored Territories, Unexpected Results: Variations on the Blog Theme
Jay Rosen, New York
The Self-Referential Journalist: Past Traditions, Future Prospects
David Abrahamson, Northwestern
The Blogs of Politics, the Politics of Blogs
Mickey Kaus, kausfiles.com
I'll be reading at Lindsay Robertson's Ritalin Reading next Tuesday, the 28th at Piano's (8 PM.) It will be a unique opportunity to watch me laugh at my own jokes and spew beer into the audience. You don't want to miss it. Really.
Belatedly:
· Steven Levy did a nice profile of Gawker Media in the last issue of Wired wherein Jason Calacanis called my decision to go to New York Magazine "the worst decision made by a media blogger to date." Based on the number of people who have mentioned that quote to me since the article came out, I'd estimate the current circulation of Wired magazine to be somewhere around 5.2 billion readers. To answer the Most Frequently Asked Question: no, I'm not pissed at Jason. He's entitled to his opinion, however much it dumbfounds me.
In an interview last year, Dave Hirschman from Mediabistro asked me what I wanted to get out of Gawker and I said that the ideal scenario would be a magazine job.
Because I'm a lifelong pessimist with exceedingly low expectations, I said it in the same vein that most people answer the question, "If you had three wishes, what would they be?"
"Well, as long as we're imagining fantastical scenarios, I'd like a gajillion dollars, a time travel machine and three more wishes--ha ha ha."
So basically, I'm sitting here a year later with a gajillion dollars, a time travel machine and three more wishes--still a bit stupified about the whole thing--and Jason can't believe I'm happy with that.
Dude! It's a gajillion dollars! (And a time machine! And three more wishes! Exactly what I wanted; holy shit!)
I mean, I didn't even say I wanted a good magazine job.
· Dan Radosh did a lovely piece for the New Yorker on my agent, Kate Lee, a few weeks ago. If it were possible to use the word "dude" again and retain a shred of dignity, I'd make some quasi-hip-hop gesture with my arms and say something vaguely frat-boy-ish, like, "Dude! Kate fucking rocks!"
Okay, you're right; I would never do that.
But Kate does, in the classical sense of the word, rock.
If you've emailed me at espiers@endgameresearch.com anytime in the last few months, I haven't gotten your email. (That address expired and I forgot to change it.)
I can be reached at Elizabeth_Spiers AT newyorkmag DOT COM.
I'm looking for a new apartment with a June 1 move-in date, preferrably in Manhattan, preferrably downtown-ish. If you hear of anything, email me at elizabeth_spiers AT newyorkmag.com or AIM spiersNYM.
I realize that this is going to seem dreadfully uncool of me since I work for New York, but there's a story in the magazine this week that's creepily fascinating and I keep demanding that all my friends read it. It's about Eddie Seda (the copycat Zodiac killer) and his Attica romance with his girlfriend, pre-op transsexual Synthia-China Blast. The story's interesting by itself, but the kicker is the running commentary by convicted clubkid Michael Alig--i.e.:
“Eddie paints her these really weird paint-by-number sets, like a soaring eagle or a horse,” says Michael Alig. “I don’t think Synthia appreciates the fabulosity of it. Other than the fact that he’s this crazy psychopath, it’s kind of cute.”
Kiss of the Scorpion Woman [NY Mag]
The charming and wonderful John Hodgman has asked me to read some fiction at his next Little Gray Book Lecture, the topic of which will be "spying".
Details below:
For review by MEMBERS OF THE WORLD PRESS, and other ACQUAINTANCES, only
****THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION HAS BEEN REPORTED WITH A CONFIDENCE LEVEL OF 9.3 (VERY HIGH)****
Little Gray Book Lecture No. 26: OHUUQ GQYRP YJVZA BUVUS FGOI
shall occur at 8PM on Wed, April 7, 2004 in the front room of Galapagos, a known meeting place in Williamsburg that is located at 70 North 6th Street between Kent and Wythe and shall welcome briefings on spies and spycraft from,
MR. DAVID GUION, writer/actor/INTERNATIONAL VOICE of Oral B "Professional Care" power toothbrushes, illuminating that overlooked genre of popular music known as SPY ROCK;
MR. PATRICK KEEFE, a FELLOW of the mysterious agency known as D.A.L.B.C.C.F.S.A.W. (the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers), reading from LISTENING IN, his forthcoming book on the art of SURVEILLANCE;
MR. PETER KUPER, the renowned ILLUSTRATOR and co-founder of WORLD WAR III magazine who, since 1997, has been the sole member of Mad Magazine's "Joke and Dagger" department as artist and (wordless) writer of SPY VS. SPY;
and
MS. ELIZABETH SPIERS, the former GAWKER and current KICKER, whose last name is actually pronounced SPY-ERS, discussing the unique pains of WANTING TO BE A SPY.
plus:
ONE SPY RELATED SONG FROM MS. ROBIN GOLDWASSER
****THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION HAS BEEN REPORTED WITH A CONFIDENCE LEVEL OF 2.3 (UNCONFIDENT)****
Night vision goggles will be distributed to all members of the audience; the Lecture will be held entirely in the dark.
******THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION HAS BEEN REPORTED WITH A CONFIDENCE LEVEL OF 7.9 (USEFUL ONLY TO THE VERY CURIOUS)****
The brave Bristish cryptographists of Bletchley Park could not have broken the German Enigma code without the letters "GRY" and, of course, Shockwave:
****THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION HAS BEEN REPORTED WITH A CONFIDENCE LEVEL OF 9.8 (EXTREME CONFIDENCE)****
Salient details are as follows:
Little Gray BOok Lecture No. 26: OHUUQ GQYRP YJVZA BUVUS FGOI
Wednesday, April 7, 2004, at 8PM
Galapagos Art Space (Front Room)
70 North Sixth Street, bet Kent and Wythe
L Train to Bedford Avenue
718-782-5188
www.galapagosartspace.com
www.littlegraybooks.com
A FIVE DOLLAR DONATION IS REQUESTED AT THE DOOR BY "HILL"
This ends the transmission to the world press.
THAT IS ALL
· Drunk Drawing (Post-Oscars)
· Rick Bruner's Daily News article on female bloggers. (Blaise has the photographic evidence.)
· I swear to god I still have a job. If you want to hear me say it, I'll say it.
· From transcript: Live! With Regis And Kelly Syndicated TV Syndicated TV National 03/01/2004 9:00 - 10:00 am [Derived from Captioning] 04.40 We all had assigned seating. The guy who was just here, peter and lorraine i can't think of the guy who is raymond's father. Pointer boyle. A what peter boyle. What's the matter with you? Can't you remember anything? Kelly: it was such a strange thing, peter and elaine, you know, ray's dad. What? Regis: peter boyle, great guy. Then next to me was an editor for "New York Magazine" of the intelligence column. Kelly: i would have been very intimidated and not spoken all night. Regis: what the pressure. I have just been through a tough week with mill mill and all of that. With "millionaire" and all of that. Yet i had the intelligence watching every move. She was very sweet. 05.34
The Young Manhattanite Interview: Elizabeth Spiers, New York Magazine.
Disclaimer: Recent attempts to be funny at my own expense have resulted in emails from concerned parties offering to "help me with my heroin problem," help me "find my way back to Christ," or "advise me on extradition issues regarding illegal arms dealing in Montenegro." Given that, maybe you should just assume that at least half of what is said in the interview was said in jest. Or all of it, really.
Incidentally, the bit about Panama City was originally a poem entitled "Ode du Panama City." It went like this:
Panama City!
Where the overfried sea bass is all you can eat
And every strip bar sits next to a Christian retreat
If you'll excuse me, I must now go swim the Hellespont.
Related: Interviewer Andrew Krucoff's "Other Page."
Photo Credit: Uncle Grambo
[Christmas morning breakfast, Spiers residence. Maccers* vs. Dad.]
Dad: Those are grits. I hope you've had them before. We spent all morning hunting them and they're especially hard to clean.
Maccers: Really?
Dad: 1
Maccers: 0
[Two days later. Post-dinner.]
Dad: So, the catfish you ate for dinner--those are what we call "bottom-feeders." They eat things at the bottom of the lake--sewage, more sewage, whatever.
Maccers: I know; that's why they're so juicy.
Dad: 1
Maccers: 1
Ongoing...
* Maccers was lured south for Christmas with false promises of fried turkey (or was it Wild Turkey?), holiday cheer, and 78 degree weather. Also, I told her we were going to St. Bart's.
Someone walked off with my phone at a charity dinner on Saturday, so I had the account closed and I got a new one. Disorganized non-detail-oriented (anti-detail-oriented, one might say) idiot that I am, I don't have backup copies of people's phone numbers. So if I'm supposed to have your number, or you're supposed to have mine (I assume the only people who read this site anymore are my friends), then please email me.
