Dow Jones Marketwatch's Jon Friedman interviewed me for a piece on "What's Wrong With Media?" and it ended up being more of a profile. But my answer to the question was that media companies don't treat R&D like tech companies do and as a result aren't innovative enough. An expensive launch in an existing category is considered "experimental". My recent Portfolio-bashing prompted Friedman to ask if I was talking about any launches in particular. I wasn't talking about Portfolio specifically, but it fits the model.
He also asked me about my book, which comes out in Winter '08. He wanted to know if I'd care if people didn't like it. I said it would depend on who didn't like it.
Blogger Spiers knows where old media go wrong [Marketwatch]
As I mentioned before, I didn't particularly like party reporting when I was still doing it. But it had its moments. Two years ago, I went to a party at Lincoln Center celebrating Peter Jennings' 20th anniversary with ABC News. After the obligatory speeches were made and the slickly produced video homage screened, I walked over to ask the guest of honor a few questions. I was one or two questions into the interview when something strange happened: He started asking me questions. Where was I from? Where had I gone to school? Then he began telling me about some early experiences he had as a journalist, what drew him to the profession and so on, in a sort of benevolent "when I was a young journalist like you..." vein. I felt like I was in some 1950s film where the wisened old editor puts his arm around the wet-behind-the-ears junior reporter and says warmly but firmly in a bit of Runyon-esque dialog, "listen, kid, you got a lot to learn." Bill O'Reilly had yelled at me a few minutes earlier for bringing up a Slate piece in which Jack Shafer chronicled the last 20 or so times O'Reilly had told a guest on his show to shut up and while I obviously wasn't steeling myself for a similar reaction from Jennings as an interview subject, his good-natured dispensing of advice caught me off guard. It was humbling. Despite my paltry two-and-a-half years of experience in the media industry, my enormous and fragile ego prevents me from having the self-awareness to realize that I am wet-behind-the-years and could probably stand to have a few wisened editor types give me the "when I was young and stupid like you..." speech more often, even though I'm quickly approaching the "not-so-young and [still] stupid" portion of my career.
I remember telling a couple of friends later that I thought Jennings was a "really, really nice guy" and it sounds so trite, but normally when you're covering these things, you get a couple of minutes, max, to talk to people, and in this case, he kept talking well after the PR people were giving me dirty looks, my tape recorder had been turned off and he'd been reminded multiple times that "Mr. Cronkite" was waiting to speak to him. He genuinely wanted to help.
So, upon reading that Jennings died today at the age of 67, it saddens me that there's no possibility of running into him again. I would have liked to have talked to him more.
Salon asked me to write a little piece about the departure of Joyce Wadler from the Times Boldface Names column:
Loyal readers of the column may argue that it was never a gossip report as much as a party report, but let's get one thing out of the way: The classic gossip column -- a column that actually, as the phrase implies, reports gossip -- is as dead as Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper. It was tortured to death by lawyers, publicists and J-school moralists who painfully litigated, negotiated and preached it out of existence. Even Star magazine has fact-checkers nowadays. Things have changed..."This is The Times' excuse for a gossip column" the New York Post's Liz Smith complained recently to, well, the Times. "They don't let what's happening be the story." What she meant is that they don't let what's supposed to be happening be the story. If they did, Tom Cruise would charmingly glide in and out of a Joyce Wadler column unscathed by double-entendres and notes about his publicist. He doesn't, because that isn't what happens, and Wadler wasn't for a moment going to pretend that it was...
William Raspberry, in today's WaPo:
The explosion of the Internet leaves us, in effect, with no gatekeeper. Sometimes important information gains currency that way. The problem is that anyone with Web access can run any cockamamie story up the flagpole -- and if enough people salute, prompt the mainstream press to deploy its resources.
I think Raspberry just fundamentally misunderstands the way these things filter up to mainstream media. If "anyone with web access could run any cockamamie story up the flagpole," and expect to see it as a page A1 story, I'd be reading a lot more alien abduction stories in the New York Times. There are gatekeepers: "enough people" (and by that, I assume he means "enough people with the influence to affect the news agendas of major media orgs") are simply not likely to salute to anything that's obviously "bunk." It might happen occasionally, but I don't think there's any evidence that it happens more often when the story leads are picked from the web, or that the risk of it happening outweighs the benefits provided by important stories that have been broken *because* of the web.
I think Raspberry would appreciate web leads a little more if he were a political beat reporter instead of a columnist.
A Web of Bunk[WaPo]
Kaus: WaPo on Kerry's cabinet: What, no Steve Rattner?
I think it's the prospect of a 6,000 word Michael Wolff political column in VF that's providing the disincentive.
There's a big sign in front of St. Bart's church on 50th and Park Avenue at the moment that reads, "JUDITH MILLER ON FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. THURSDAY, OCT. 21, 7:30 PM." In what is perhaps the creepiest possible extension of Jack Shafer's Judy-Miller-as-martyr metaphor, Miller is now preaching actual sermons on journalistic integrity.
I understand and share other people's obsession with them, but I can't read any discussion of Presidential poll numbers now without thinking of something James Wolcott wrote in his most recent book and cracking up. From a chapter titled "Punditry for Dummies":
"Every pundit must be as conversant with polls and pollsters as a market analyst is with support levels and significant tops, able to divine the deeper booga-booga of conflicting numbers issuing from Zogby, Gallup, the newspapers, and TV networks. 'Well, as you know, Brit, Zogby polls taken on Friday nights skew Democratic because they're more likely to be home watching Washington Week in Review and counting food stamps.'"
Dear people who know me personally, have my cell phone number and my email address (some of whom have even referred to themselves as my friends) yet apparently still can't be bothered to contact me for verification because it would ruin the scoop on your blogs**:
New York Metro experienced technical difficulties this weekend and the primary URL for The Kicker is not resolving properly (nor are several of the other pages.)
The Kicker has not been shut down.
That's not to say that The Kicker won't be shut down. It may; it may not. Today was Adam Moss's first day and we haven't talked about it yet.
** I'll let Felix and Gothamist off the hook a bit here, because they were re-reporting, but Choire and Nick have no excuse...
New York Magazine's new blog will be live tomorrow at NewYorkMetro.com.
This is sad. Edward Said yesterday and now Plimpton. I met him at a party for Tina Brown's talk show a couple of weeks ago. I asked him what he thought "Topic A" (the title of the show) was for most people right now. He said "Iraq and the economy." I asked him what was being over-covered--"Topic Z," so to speak. "Both of those," he laughed. Then he talked a bit about the upcoming fireworks in Central Park and how gunpowder was used in China for festival celebrations long before it was appropriated to weaponry. I got an on-the-spot history lesson. (By contrast, Alec Baldwin, at the same party: "what do you call men who are gay, but want to sleep with women?")
In last month's issue of Black Book Magazine, the editor sent requests to 50 or so celebrities and influential figures, asking them to contribute "letters of protest" for their protest-themed issue. Plimpton wrote a hysterical letter protesting his lack of subscribers. He mentioned that The Paris Review got (if I remember correctly) nearly 25,000 submissions a year, and he guessed that none of those people were subscribers, so he sent subscription forms out with the rejection letters. He also had a subscription form printed on the back of his business card.
Plimpton had just started penning his memoirs.
The Page Six account:
GEORGE PLIMPTON that pioneer of participatory journalism who has talked his way into pitching at Yankee Stadium, quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions, playing goalie for the Boston Bruins and shooting hoops with the Celtics - is finally penning his memoirs. The Upper East Side-based editor and co-founder of the Paris Review, the literary journal he launched 50 years ago, also wrestled the gun out of assassin Sirhan Sirhan's hands while covering Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign, played the triangle for the New York Philharmonic in 1968, and has had cameos in more than 50 films, ranging from "Reds" to "Lawrence of Arabia" to "Pumping Iron II: The Women." Plimpton tells Variety's Jonathan Bing that publishers have been begging him for years to write up his amazing experiences. "I finally succumbed," he said.
My hometown newspaper discovers blogs. And Gawker.
I need a name for New York mag's new blog and I'm taking suggestions. Anyone? Anyone?... Bueller?
The day after I wrote my Bill O'Reilly/Jack Shafer post, I met Bill O'Reilly at a party. Peter Jennings' 20th anniversary party, to be specific. Jennings was charming, aside from calling my alma mater "that WASPy school in the South" and O'Reilly was... O'Reilly. Here's what happened (second item).
Jack Shafer from Slate has explicitly detailed the various ways in which Bill O'Reilly has told people to "shut up" (his favorite two words.) [Ed.—Dammit. Why didn't I think of that last week?]
Between this and his recent Judy Miller bashing, I like Jack Shafer's stuff more and more.
with some friends and spotted an acquaintance with whom I was supposed to have lunch next week at one of the outdoor tables. I stopped to say hi and he smirked and nodded toward the door. There sat Graydon Carter. I suppose that wouldn't be too unusual, except for the fact that I'd never actually seen him in the flesh before.
I'm going to continue to blissfully assume that he has no idea who I am, or I think he would have thrown food at me. A spray balsamic bottle or something. A t-shirt, perhaps.
If I see James Truman on the subway, my life is complete.
I'm looking at the September issue of Vanity Fair (the enormous 20th Anniversary issue with Prince William on the front) and I just came to the old SPY ripoff Venn-diagram page titled "Common Grounds"—two overlapping circles, one titled "Threats" and the other titled "Belgians" with the overlapping area labelled "Jean Claude Van Damme." (Threats/Belgians is, incidentally, the only one on the page that's actually funny.)
One of the diagrams has two circles labelled "out-of-work journalists" and another labelled "computer owners." The overlapping area? Guess. Just guess.
It might have been funny if VF hadn't done an in-and-out list a couple of issues ago where "out" was "out-of-work journalist" and "in" was "blogger." The joke only works once. And big media making fun of bloggers is, like, sooo January 2002.
The irony, of course, is that I don't know a single out-of-work journalist who's a blogger.
I'll probably write about this on Gawker tomorrow, but it'll be short and snarky. Jack Shafer swiftly indicted Judith Miller's questionable reporting from Iraq in Slate on Friday, and as usual, no one blinked. This story really should have gotten a lot more attention than it has. Miller's a Pulitzer Prize winner putting out front page articles on Iraqi WMDs (or lack thereof) for the New York Times. Getting duped by sources occasionally is an occupational hazard if you're a reporter (see the recent "Bambi hunting" hoax) but Miller doesn't seem to have made an effort to verify much of anything (and this isn't a fucking paintball game.) That's lazy and negligent reporting, but worse, she seems to be defending Chalabi after it's been established that he's a semi-reliable source, at best. I don't think anyone's capable of being completely objective, journalistic or otherwise, but she's blatantly taking sides.
I don't think that the NYT is institutionally reinforcing the pro-Bush WMD line, although I know that one's popular with the conspiracy theorists and good fodder for cocktail party arguments. I think it's a combination of Times scandal exhaustion post-Jayson Blair (more bad reporting at the Times--*yawn*) and the fact that most media people aren't inclined to care about anything that happens outside of Manhattan. They don't feel "connected" to it; the details are convoluted; she issued the necessary disclaimers; blah, blah, blah.
This should be the biggest media scandal of the year.