Dan Rosenbaum / Center Ring Media

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Trivializing the Worst

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Bob Woodward’s new book about the invasion of Iraq quotes Colin Powell as telling George W. of the importance of a post-war political solution. This has apparently upset the good folks at Pottery Barn.

From the NYDailyNews:

“You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations and problems. You’ll own it all,” Woodward quotes Powell as warning Bush about the consequences of invading Iraq. “Privately, Powell and [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.”

Yesterday, Pottery Barn’s Oshirak complained bitterly: “This is certainly not our policy in any of our 174 Pottery Barn retail outlets in North America. In fact, there is no policy regarding this whatsoever.”

And, instead of dealing with, like, important stuff, a State Department spokesman actually responded to this:

“I don’t think anybody from the State Department would ever have intended to cast aspersions on Pottery Barn’s commitment to customer service,” [spokesman Adam] Ereli told me.

Oshirak shot back: “Well, it’s out there.”

Yes, this is surely the worst thing about the U.S. Iraq policy; that Pottery Barn is upset. Haliburton, however, seems fine with it.

John Evans, 66

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Unless you were deeply, madly, hopelessly deep into the worlds of online media and magazines, you probably don’t know John Evans, who passed away the other day at the age of 66.

Evans spent a lot of years an exec for Rupert Murdoch, which makes him sort of an odd person for me to have liked. When Murdoch was trying to figure out the US magazine business, he put Evans in charge. The result was some excellent titles that made it, like Automobile, and some that didn’t, like Men’s Life. At its peak, Murdoch Magazines also ran TV Guide.

When Murdoch got out of the magazine business, he became interested in the Internet, and was one of the very first Big Media people to dip much more of a toe into it. Evans ran Murdoch’s Net business in the early-to-mid 90s — Delphi and a bunch of companies I no longer remember — and spent an ungodly amount of money on noble experiments in content that never amounted to much but employed a lot of my colleagues. (Murdoch set up his Net shop in a desolate and underdeveloped area of Manhattan: 6th Ave in the low ’20s. That the neighborhood is now so vibrant is due in no small measure to Murdoch’s bet on those few blocks.)

My own affection for Evans came from his magazine days. I wrote a few days ago about John Klingel and my attempt to start a music magazine in the ’80s. By making a few selected cold calls and exhibiting perhaps more nerve than sense, I got a meeting with Automobile’s David E. Davis Jr., an editor I greatly admire, where we spent a couple of hours bouncing ideas around. Without my knowing, Davis passed my stuff along to Evans, whose assistant called shortly thereafter to set up a meeting. It took several days after that call for the blood to return to my head.

Evans turned down the project, but I remember his courtesy and insight, and the seriousness with which he considered the pitch. I thought him an uncommon gentleman with an adventurous spirit, and never saw a reason to change my mind.

Blogging as Journalism Redux

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There’s been a recent flare-up in BlogSpace regarding the evergreen question of whether weblogging is or can be journalism. I do try to avoid excess navel-gazing, but there are so many otherwise smart people spinning their wheels on the subject, that I feel like I have to weigh in briefly.

The short version:

Don’t confuse the tool with the result. Is blogging journalism? It can be, if the people committing journalism use weblogs.

Weblogs are tools. What people do with those tools is up to them. Weblogs themselves are no more journalism than compilers are programming or automobiles are commuting.

Tool. Function. Result. They’re different. Why is that so hard to understand?

(For newcomers to this site, I have some small expertise in the area of journalism and technology.)
One thing that we know weblogging isn’t (except in a vanishingly small number of cases) is a paying gig, which leads to my next point.

There’s been some foaming in the last couple of days about the Pulitzers, which were announced yesterday. The question has arisen: will Pulitzer-level journalism ever come out of a weblog?

Sure. Why not? But first, the business case of weblogs has to be established. Journalism costs money and time — and excellent, in-depth journalism takes lots of both. The resources required to cover a state-wide wildfire, or a major corporation covering up an unsafe workplace, or events in a 40-year-old war half a world away, are more than considerable.

You want this kind of journalism coming out of the world of weblogs? Excellent. Figure out a way to make it pay for journalists and the businessmen who support them, and only then will you see serious, top-flight, finished-work reportage.

Weblogs allow a different kind of storytelling than we’ve seen before, just as radio and television tell stories differently than newspapers. That’s going to be exciting to see happen. Asking whether weblogging is journalism is the wrong question. The right question is asking how weblogging can be used to tell news in a different and, (one hopes) more informative way than ever before.

For more reading on this, check out Jay Rosen’s weblog. He’s a media critic and j-school professor at NYU, and appears to have a pretty good, nuanced handle on the question.

The Record Industry, Lie? Y’Think?

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Confusing correlation for causality, the record industry has long blamed file sharing networks like Napster and Kazaa for a drop in music sales. At last, an independent study says that whatever has caused the woes of the music business — like, for instance, that lots of contemporary music sucks, or that bands can’t build a following when they’re not allowed to release new music for years at a time — the problem isn’t file sharing.

Lot of good that does Napster, of course.

The study shows that people who download music for free were probably not going to be buying it anyway. Why? Most of them can’t afford it, not at $18 a CD.

“Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates,” write its authors, Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill….

“Say I offer you a free flight to Florida,” [Oberholzer-Gee] asks. “How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free.” If there were no free ticket, that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might draw all kinds of people, but “it doesn’t mean that these people would buy CD’s at $18,” he said.

Two questions for further study:

  • What’s happened to the record industry’s profitability since so many list prices were cut from $18 to $12 last year? Has the loss in revenue been replaced by an adequate increase in volume?
  • Do free MP3s really act as promotions for paid music the way many artists, like Janis Ian, suggest? Is there any evidence that downloaders buy more music than non-downloaders when they do get in a position to afford it?

    • Launching Magazines

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    About 20 years ago, I’d decided that I wanted to launch a magazine. Though I had lots of experience in the wire service business and had written for many magazines, I’d never actually worked on staff anywhere.

    Not being a total idiot, I realized that I needed maybe a little more information before diving in. That’s when I found Jim Tobak.

    Tobak is pretty much the World’s Leading Expert about magazine launches, and I spent a couple of days in a seminar room with him at a Folio: magazine show. Tobak has been consulting for something like 50 years; I’ve forgotten details of his background, but he’s successful enough that he lives up in Connecticut and apparently manages to stay true to his stated goal of never having to wear long pants again. He wore shorts to my seminar, and it was not a warm day.

    Tobak’s advice about how to launch magazines hasn’t changed much in the 15 years since I first met him. I’ve learned a ton about the process since then, and I can only say that he’s as right now as he was then.
    Here, from the current Folio: are his nut grafs:

    The basics have changed little: Despite technological advances, we still print magazines en masse and get most of them to readers via the mail. And most mags still depend on advertisers who target certain readers….

    A magazine exists because people have an interest. If that interest is strong enough ﾖ and a magazine satisfies it ﾖ the magazine will be profitable. If you can’t see that a magazine will be highly profitable, you shouldn’t be in the business.

    Wishful thinking about what interests people remains the biggest cause of failure in new magazines.

    Tobak was not impressed by my projections or ideas, which didn’t stop me from getting a pretty serious look from Rupert Murdoch. Some 15 years later, though, the magazine I had in mind has finally been launched : the intriguing Tracks. At the time, though Tobak was right: I couldn’t prove that a) there was an audience, b) that I was the right guy to find it, I still have our exchange of memos, and I prize them.

    Tobak was right about a point c), too: that a big company was almost certainly not the right place to publish it. Simon Dumenco writes, also in this month’s Folio:, about the difference between a BigCo launch and a LittleCo launch — and why the latter is better from pretty much everyone involved.

    Bake for 30 Minutes at 450, Then Call 911

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    The excellent Southern Living magazine has had to recall its April issue because following one of the recipies could apparently cause burns.

    In a recipie for icebox rolls, readers were instructed to boil a cup and a half of shortening in water for five minutes. You may have heard that oil and water don’t mix all that well; four readers were burned by spattering fat.

    The publishers pulled the issue — a difficult and expensive thing to do — and mailed a postcard with a corrected recipie to all subscribers.

    I would imagine that there’s an opening for a test kitchen editor in Alabama right about now… (And as of this writing, there’s sho’nuff just such a job posted.)

    Yeah, Like Anyone’s Gonna Stop to Read the Fine Print Anyway

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    Seems that there’s a new federally required warning on condom wrappers.

    From the AP:

    Justin Kleinman hadn’t noticed the condom packet wording until he squinted to read it recently.

    “This is completely pointless,” the 24-year-old Chicagoan said of the warning telling him that, while condoms can help prevent the spread of some sexually transmitted diseases, there are no guarantees.

    I’m with this guy:

    But scientists who study HPV worry that abstinence groups are dismissing important information to promote their own values.

    “I want to be polite. But it appalls me when I see scientific and medical studies being manipulated for a different agenda,” said Tom Broker. He’s a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and president of the International Papillomavirus Society, a coalition of experts who study HPV.

    Hey, You!

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    Maybe the worst-kept secret in publishing has been Time Inc.’s plan to launch a newsstand magazine exclusively distributed through Wal*Marts. (Why Wal*Mart? Because it sells 15 percent of all newsstand copies in the U.S.)

    Name of the magazine: All You.

    Oh-kay

    In the interest of providing some free consulting to Time Inc., here are some proposals for local and demographic editions of All You:

  • All Youse, for the Brooklyn/New Jersey market
  • All Y’All, for the southern demo
  • All Ewe, for the rural/agricultural market, and general Arkansas readership
  • All Me, for actors, performers, and other celebrity readers
  • All You People, for bigots

    • Empty Pages

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    This piece, from the Toronto Globe and Mail, starts to get at something true: that newsstand magazines increasingly suck.

    This pains me. I love magazines. I’ve spent a fair amount of my life making magazines — and, if I may be so bold, some pretty damned good ones. All too often, though, I find myself turning away from newsstands empty-handed.

    A couple of months ago, I spent a few minutes in one of the huge magazine stores in Penn Station. The “laddie” mags (Maxim, HFM, Stuff) were set up next to the skin mags. Of the maybe 35 titles on display between the two categories, the one with the most restrained and dignified cover was Hustler.

    The covers are only part of it. So much the inside of magazines these days is vapid. Sure, there are exceptions. But what editors and publishers have decided is the shrinking attention span of the reading public has resulted in entire magazines that look and read like frenetic fronts of the magazine — the thing that you used to browse past to find the real meat. Now, the browse is the meat.

    Here’s what the Globe and Mail says:

    Off-the-rack magazines, while claiming they preach self-love, in fact teach self-hate, including to those who pose for them. Female readers are told they’re failures; male readers are treated as stupid….

    Summary: Most magazines are bad because they are forced by their owners to be Enron-level greedy, their mandate is to bankrupt their readers and their content is unspeakable because it’s easier to write badly than well. As for the weird numbered advice on their covers, as in 106 Ways to Perk Up Your Glutes/Kitchen/Wardrobe/Face/Life, there aren’t 106 ways to improve anything.

    It’s what I’ve been saying for years and years: public ownership of media companies creates disincentives for excellence. The investment cycles required to build long-lasting media properties are directly antithetical to short-term financial performance. To cite an extreme case, it took Sports Illustrated 35 years to turn a profit. (Most magazines take five years, which is tough enough when you have to justify results quarter by quarter.) That Time Inc. is both public and devoted to franchise development is a miracle of corporate enlightenment. That Time Inc. stands nearly alone as an excellent public publishing company exactly proves my point.

    Funny thing is, it used to be that celebrity magazines were the dumbest thing going; to be seen with a copy of Photoplay was to advertise that you were not a Serious Person. Now, of course, you have to be at least passingly familiar with People if you are to have a water-cooler conversation in most places. Full disclosure: I am an enthusiastic and long-time subscriber to Entertainment Weekly, but EW at least tries to be more about the entertainment than the entertainer. The line is sometimes fine, but it’s what keeps the cred.

    Maybe the lesson is that cheese is what sells, but it’s possible to do cheese well enough that you don’t have to close your eyes when you read it.