DealBreaker made an appearance today in what might be considered its native venue: the almighty Bloomberg terminal. From the article:
Leveraged Sell-Out, DealBreaker and a half-dozen more online diaries are gaining popularity among young bankers. The sites blend blogging, a regular habit for Wall Street's college- age summer interns and entry-level employees, with an older tradition of insider memoirs such as "Liar's Poker,'' Michael Lewis's tale of Salomon Brothers bond traders in the 1980s.Randomly and coincidentally, I was at 21 yesterday and snapped this photo of a Bloomberg in its natural habitat:
I've never "jockeyed for credit [with Nick Denton] for pioneering... a willingness to run suspect info". Credit goes entirely to Nick for that. It was more the strenuous avoidance of anything remotely resembling useful service journalism in favor of utterly useless gossip that was my contribution. I wrote a listicle once and it was painful for everyone.
When I went to New York mag Nick swore they were going to force me to write hamburger recommendations, but fortunately for New York and the hamburger-eating residents of the five boroughs, that never happened. I was, however, asked to write a tongue-in-cheek essay explaining the utility of the magazine's service-based "Best of New York" issue and it eventually morphed into second-person fiction that ran (literally and in its entirety) on the cover. That's as close as New York (wisely) let me get to the service part of the mag. I just have no desire to be...what's the word?...useful.
And randomly and unrelatedly: I'm on the old-and-decrepit end of InstitutionalInvestor.com's "30 Under 30." Though as far as I know, Morgan Stanley isn't blocking us.
But Merrill is. Pussies!
I spoke to Patrick Phillips' NYU J-School class last week and the resulting Q&A is published here.
I'll be on WNYC/NPR's Leonard Lopate Show on Wednesday, June 8, from 1:20 to 2PM with writer Tom Bissell and Kevin Smokler, who edited Bookmark Now.
MEDIABISTRO'S SPIERS PUTS OWN SPIN ON THE BLOG WORLD
By Erica Iacono
February 28,2005
Though she hadn't originally considered a writing career, Elizabeth Spiers, editor-in-chief of mediabistro.com, lures readers and wins critical acclaim by staying true to her voice and interests.
Upon first meeting Elizabeth Spiers, it's difficult to believe that she was once the editor behind the biting wit of Gawker, which arguably set the standard for media and celebrity-gossip blogs. She appears shy and soft-spoken, so much so that it is often hard to hear her.
But only a few minutes into a conversation, the 28-year-old Alabama native comes out with a quip or two, and then it all makes sense.
'It's not like we sat down and decided that Gawker was going to be snarky.
I didn't know anything about media, and I wasn't interested in half the stuff we were supposed to cover, so I just brought my own attitude toward (people like) Paris Hilton,' she says with a smirk and just a trace of a Southern accent. 'How would you ever write it straight? I don't know.
It was just my natural voice.'
Spiers says that while she has always enjoyed writing, she had never really considered it as a career option. 'I never thought I could make money doing it,' she says. But then again, she's never tried to plan her life or career.
'I've always been an opportunist. When interesting things come up, I generally will think about them,' she says with a sense of nonchalance about her. 'Things never work out the way you think they will.'
Indeed, Spiers was as far away from the world of media as one could be when Nick Denton approached her to start Gawker. At the time, she was working as an independent equity analyst, but had started a blog called Capital Influx.
The media firestorm that ensued after Gawker's launch did not affect Spiers in the way that it could have. She worked 40 hours a week maintaining the gossip blog that dissected every facet of New York media life, and then worked an additional 30 hours a week freelancing just to pay the bills. 'I was on deadline all the time,' she says.
At one point, The New York Times ran an article about Gawker, but Spiers did not see it until 24 hours after it was published, much to the chagrin of her publisher, Denton. 'It didn't faze me at the time,' she says. It was only after she took a job at New York magazine co-writing the Intelligencer section that she actually had the time to sit back and reflect on the situation.
A little more than two years after leaving the finance world to take a leap into the realm of blogging and freelancing, Spiers has taken on the role of editor-in-chief at mediabistro.com, one of the media industry's most popular online communities. Having total creative control over the site, she says, is one of the things that attracted her to the job.
'It was just parts of a million different things that I've done,' she says. 'Any one of them would not have been interesting to me because I didn't want to do the web again, I didn't want to do media reporting, and I'm sick of blogging. But when you put them together, it's all of my areas of experience smashed together. It was a great opportunity.'
Laurel Touby, founder of mediabistro.com, says Spiers' intelligence and obsession with the media are what make her a good fit for the job. Another plus is that she has a Wall Street background, she adds, so she understands that mediabistro is not just a community website, but also a business.
In fact, Spiers' first moves at the helm included a complete redesign of the site and the introduction of additional blogs, including one that she co-writes called FishbowlNY, centered on the New York media scene.
Although she is working at a different outlet, the Gawker name is something that has proven difficult to shake. 'Gawker (was) an alter ego, but it's my voice,' she says, adding that some bloggers recently accused her of ripping off the voice of Gawker for FishbowlNY.
'I can't even argue back because the logic baffles me.'
Touby says that she agrees with Spiers' vision for the redesigned site.
'She wants to make it buzzy, smarter, funnier, and a must-read,' she says.
'What's not to like?' And it helps that Spiers understands that to attract readers that will pay for premium content, the site will have to offer more how-to items. 'She's the perfect marriage of editorial prowess and business practicality,' Touby adds.
That business sense proved to be handy when it came time to redesign and relaunch the well-known site on practically no editorial budget, a task Spiers refers to as 'daunting.' It is an experience that could prove useful, she says, should she ever decide to go into media property. For now, her day-to-day activities run the gamut from the business side (running profit and loss statements) to the editorial side (writing for FishbowlNY) to communicating to the site's readers via message posts on the bulletin board.
Spiers acknowledges that it's sometimes surreal to be considered a media expert by such outlets as The New York Times, but maintains that the New York media world is so closely connected that she doesn't appreciate the scope of it.
'It feels a little bit provincial,' she says. 'I guess if I had any sense of what it looked like from the outside it would creep me out.'
While the past few years of her life have certainly been chaotic, Spiers says she's gotten more laid-back since Gawker. 'Having to go through all this stuff has made me chill out,' she adds.
Though she is still working crazy hours, for the first time she is able to have detachment from that work, even writing a novel in her spare time.
Still, if her past has taught her anything, it is that the next surprise could be just around the corner. And it's something for which she's prepared.
'I'm having a great time,' she says matter-of-factly, 'but if it falls apart tomorrow and I had to go back to work on Wall Street, I wouldn't kill myself.'
[Ed.—wherein I stupidly admit, on the record, that I used to be a cheerleader...]
Master of the Self-Referential Realm of Blogs
By SHAILA K. DEWAN
Published: December 23, 2003
IT is not enough to have guilt-inducing stacks of unread New Yorkers and alumni magazines from three years back. Those who wish to keep current must now contend with the constantly replenished form of written chatter known as Weblogs.
Despite the obvious problems inherent to a genre whose authors write as much as they want about anything they want, a few blogs have become must-reads (don't worry, they're archived).
The blame goes to people like Elizabeth Spiers, 27, from Wetumpka, Ala. Her raised-eyebrow approach to the sacred syllogisms of Manhattan culture and gossip made a blog called gawker.com so popular that Entertainment Weekly called it the It blog and The Guardian, a British newspaper, quoted a fan as saying it was "like living in New York without paying the rent."
Gawker's publisher, Nick Denton, envisioned the site as primarily an opinionated entertainment guide. But Ms. Spiers (pronounced SPY-ers) went light on the guide, heavy on the opinion, calling Gawker a chronicle of "the darker Manhattan-centric themes: class warfare as recreational sport; pathological status obsession; and the complete, total, and wholly unapologetic embrace of decadence"...
Public Lives: Master of the Self-Referential Realm of Blogs [New York Times]
In a "my so-called commentary" tone, Ms. Spiers, armed with a list of people deemed important by Mr. Denton, skewered the likes of Anna Wintour, SoHo House, Friendster, J.Lo, Liz Smith and (gasp) The New York Times. She posted links to the day's tabloid items, with footnotes. She provided running accounts of doings inside the Condé Nast building and even, she claims, scooped Page Six once or twice.
It was a simple enough formula: write about the news media and the news media pays attention. Soon, when Ms. Spiers linked to an article, she would often receive an e-mail message from its writer. "It got to be, like, really viral with media people," she says.
Of course, Manhattan licks the hand that skewers it, and in September, Ms. Spiers was hired by one of her targets, New York magazine. There, she is writing its new blog, The Kicker, and editing its gossip column, Intelligencer.
The Kicker has not gained the reputation that Gawker has. Still, Ms. Spiers has branched out, writing satirical quizzes for the print version of the magazine. How many times, she wrote, did Tina Brown plug her own talk show during a live Internet chat? "a) Zero (it's technically possible); b) 10; c) 15; d) We're still counting."
In her cubicle, there are copies of Spy, the defunct, pranksterish magazine that seems to be her spiritual predecessor. "I can't believe I get paid to do satire, on any level," she says.
According to the Tocqueville model of cultural observation, becoming a gossip maven is easier when you are a nonjournalist from suburban Alabama. The daughter of a lineman and an accounts-payable clerk (both work for the Alabama Power Company), Ms. Spiers was student body president, a basketball and a softball player, and a cheerleader. "But I'm not sure I want to say that on the record," she adds.
She had a difficult time persuading her parents to let her apply to an out-of-state college, but nonetheless ended up at Duke University, where she took Arabic, wrote a paper on terrorism and considered working for the State Department or an intelligence service. "I applied to the C.I.A. but nobody called me back," she says.
When she graduated in 1999, she joined the ranks of the dot-commers in New York City, and went on to analyze Internet business plans for venture capitalists.
During that time, she found a software program for writing blogs. "I set up a blog and did it for about a week, which is what I think a lot of people do," she says. Later, she started Capital Influx, a blog that covered the investment world in what she calls Michael Lewis-style rants. When Mr. Denton, a former financial writer, had the idea to start Gawker, he came to her.
"I've never had a five-year plan," she says. "And I'm kind of an opportunist in the respect that if a door opened, I would check it out and think about doing it."
In December 2002, Gawker went online. Ms. Spiers, who lives in the East Village, would get up, read the papers, and start posting by 9 a.m.
UNDERSTANDING the media landscape was not that different from analyzing unfamiliar businesses. "I was trying to navigate how the industry worked. If I was wrong, somebody would send an e-mail and correct me."
Soon, she had joined what she calls the blogger "meta-conversation," and many bloggers began writing posts tailor-made for Gawker in hopes of being linked. "It's one of those things that's highly mockable," she admits.
Although Ms. Spiers wrote about parties and premieres, she did not often attend them. Standing around ogling celebrities was not her idea of a good time. And, she says, "I'm not the type to go up and introduce myself."
But people kept e-mailing tidbits - some even asking her out for coffee or a drink, wanting to meet this character who freely disparages Manolo Blahniks. "We showed that you don't need to go to parties or talk to publicists to do a gossip column," she says.
(In case you were under the mistaken impression that this site is anything more than a placeholder for my clips and resumé. If it's any consolation, I'll move this sort of thing on a separate page when I figure out how to do that.)
· Clare Zulkey Interview
· "Blog blog blog" [New York Mag]
· "The Trend Report" ("If an agoraphobic Dorothy Parker edited US Magazine from a laptop in her apartment, the result might read something like the daily dish on gawker.com...") [Departures, November/December 2003]
· An Unlikely New Source of Writing Talent: Blogs [Chicago Tribune]
· "Best of New York: Best Gossip" [Village Voice]
· Fighting with Lloyd Grove (Actually, that was Choire.) [Philadelphia Inquirer]