Archives: February 2005

You might not have noticed, now that Ken Auletta is focusing on Dan Rather this week (check out the audio, it’s worth the wait), but CBS prez Les Moonves’ housecleaning is quietly taking shape: Betsy West and Mary Murphy, who held out for the legal cavalry instead of taking the fall for the network’s Bush service record scandal, have left the building, CBS chose to confirm – on Oscar night, where two pissed-off interns would have been the only people to pick up that story.

This means that Moonves, who might have faced a raft of suits (and, one supposes, countersuits should he want to sue the suers for not leaving), will now only have to contend with the last of the Three – Josh Howard (see glum picture at left) – who still clings to his desk and refuses to leave, and who promises to be the hardest case to get rid of.

Advantage: Les, even if purging Howard will necessitate being nice to Martin Garbus. Very nice.

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Like many major media corporations singlemindedly pursuing total world domination, FishbowlNY has decided to globalize our existing operations. To that end, we’re adding a Foreign Correspondent, which brings our staff to three. (Four if you include FishbowlNY Obesity Correspondent and Men’s Fitness Editor-in-Chief, Neal Boulton.)

But New York being the center of the universe, we see no real need to cover anything that happens outside of the five boroughs. So rather than sending our Foreign Correspondent to far-flung locales to report on media people in said far-flung locales, we’re sending him off to far-flung locales to report on media people in New York.

Without further ado, we’re pleased to introduce FishbowlNY Foreign Correspondent, Sacramento Is The New New York—or “SAC” for short. [Translation: we don't know his real name.] We’re starting him off slow by having him cover New York bloggers, and when he’s ready to deal with the maelstrom of discontent and ego confusion that is New York old media, we’ll have him take a crack at the Barry Dillers and Mort Zuckermans.

SAC’s initial investigations seemed to indicate that the New York bloggers are merely badly scripted computer programs (“bots,” he said) that generate random textual outputs and, occasionally, photos of cats. We pointed out that were this true, it would mean that he was now in the employ of a piece of software—and badly scripted software, at that—but he had his fingers in his ears and was loudly singing a song with the somewhat odd refrain, “I can’t heeeeear yoooou…”

SAC’s first dispatch, following last week’s events:

Will blog for food: Jason Kottke™ has short-circuited, running a stored procedure wherein it quit its day job in favor of working on its blog full-time. In order to do so, the Kottke mechanism has asked its readers to help sustain itself in perpituity. It even randomly generated an adorable banner that you can place on your blog (you do have one, don’t you?) to show your solidarity with this brave pioneer. Also, the Kottke is wondering if it can crash on your couch for “a few days, tops and, oh yeah, I drank that six-pack that was in the fridge, it was like, waay in the back so I figured you didn’t want it.” I suggest that Kottke get himself pregnant and whore out his sure-to-be adorable belly for advertising dollars.

This phenomenon is not without precedent, as proto-bot Andrew Sullivan attempted the same algorithim sometime last year, with mixed results. I say mixed because then it will sound like I have some thoughful insight into Sullivan when in fact, I haven’t ever read a single word he’s written. I’m not kidding. But I hear that that he can benchpress, like, 500 pounds or something, so don’t tell him I said anything. I don’t want him to lift almost 3 of me into the air. At least, not without a spotter.

This move has caused a shockwave throughout NYC. People are scrambling to make sense of this, each person dealing with it in their own, unique way. Some have jumped on the Kottke bandwagon and shown their support monetarily, while others have quietly given up blogging althogether. The reaction here in Sacramento can be summed up in the following interaction I had with the bakery girl at Safeway this morning:

Me: Do you have any chocolate old-fashioned?

Bakery Girl: Not yet, they’ll be out in about 10 minutes.

Me: That’s cool, I’ll just grab a glazed instead.

Bakery Girl: (blank stare)

Fishbowl rushes to apologize for the unintelligibility of the above headline, which we think must have been beamed to our page directly from the Governator’s brain. Because despite what George Stephanopoulos lets Schwarzenegger get away with on his air, we sense that the one thought most present on the Austrian Oak’s mind is “President? I always think about that.”

We mean, George, let him deny that he will ever seek office, for cryin’ out loud, not be allowed to bury the answer in a joke. You’re dealing, after all, with the guy who went public on Leno with his ambition to be Governor, with an operator so canny he’ll deny his further ambitions right up to the point where he declares the date of Jack LaLanne’s birth a national holiday from inside 1600 Penn Ave. Next time, George, act your resume and try a little Reporting and Writing 101. Because this is embarrassing.

It happens about as often as as peep-show patron has a sudden change of heart during the good parts, but Fishbowl was here to see it earlier today: Drudge started his day with a splash across the page quoting Pope John Paul II as asking, in apparent alarm, “WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO ME?” after his tracheotomy. Moments later, the screed was rectified to read only “POPE JOKES: WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO ME?” – which was always the point of the linked story. Perhaps Drudge, whose human sensitivity meter usually seems lower than the water table in Lake Powell in August, got a bell from his red-state buds whose PR gauges are just a tad more alert. To quote Fishbowl’s old editor: Well done, m’boy. Well done.

After Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide last Sunday, we’ve witnessed – as expected – skyrocketing sales of his old classics. To wit: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas shot from # 1,412 on Amazon to # 23 today. Vintage has said they’ll order a “significant” reprinting.

Well, that’s all well and good, but what about these (projected) numbers:

Percentage of people ordering F&L who’ll actually read it: 14.

Percentage of buyers who will display it on their coffee table to get literary street points: 78.

Percentage of readers who think Johnny Depp wrote it, or some of it: 52.

Percentage of reprinted runs in which Douglas Brinkley will write a long foreword: 100.

Percentage of under-30 readers who’ll buy it because they miss Kurt Cobain: 9.

Percentage of over-55 readers who will do so because they miss the Sixties: 96.

Rest easy, Mike B. For trusty AP today can report that the International Olympic Committee, which was coddled in NYC this week, will leave town with “a very, very good feeling about this bid,” according to IOC boss Peter Ueberroth.

Certainly sounds like a lock to us. The AP even mentions that the IOC lads, who have already gotten the same treatment in London and Madrid, will next go to Moscow and Paris where, surely, no bid will taste as sweet.

Fishbowl suggests the AP try challenging a puff quote and the guy who gave it. Because the IOC bid for New York is hanging in the balance now that the West Side stadium bid has been thrown into turmoil. Paris has better facilities. The Russkies will make their subway run on time. The IOC has been investigated for corruption. And everyone but your reporter knows it.

(We were going to title this post “Is Consumer Reports dead or is Michael Wolff a jerk?” but we’ve been leveled with charges of journalistic nihilism before and we’re reluctant to keep reinforcing Shafer’s point…Well, somewhat reluctant.) At any rate…

Wired EIC Chris Anderson is writing a blog about a book he’s writing, based on this article. At the moment, he’s fixated on a quote by Michael Wolff in the disappeared IWantMedia article from last week’s edition of FishbowlNY:

WOLFF: Well, I think Consumer Reports at one time was the brand in product evaluation. That’s what you would say: “Check Consumer Reports.” But if you want to buy something now, it’s “Check the Web.” It’s not that Consumer Reports doesn’t have a business, but it has certainly lost its position as the grail of product evaluation.

Anderson’s theory:

There are three kind of people, which being a science geek, I will describe in physics terms (that noise is the sound of a readership stampeding for the exits):

A) Position People
B) Velocity People (first derivative)
C) Acceleration People (second derivative)

Category A people think: “4 million subscribers is a lot. Consumer Reports must be doing something right.”

Category B people think: “It used to be 4.2 million. Consumer Reports is in decline.”

Category C people think: “They lost 200,000 readers in three years! Consumer Reports is dead.”

Now I should quickly add that I have no idea if Consumer Reports is indeed losing readers; I just made those figures up for illustrative purposes (and to add to the evidence that blogs are not journalism)…the third, which is clearly false, is the one that gets all the attention. People are drawn to grand overstatement, especially if it’s in service of a broader point.

The pinnacle of grand overstatement is endism, the declaration that the moment something stops growing it is effectively dead. In this, Wolff is in good company…The reason endism is not necessarily a sin is that all three of those perspectives are legitimate.

We get endism, but we’re more well-versed in trendism, which is sort of the opposite. Growth indicates that something is over, and therefore, effectively dead. This happens most frequently in fashion—see ponchos, trucker hats, and soon, if we’re lucky, Ugg boots (which should have been over two years ago)—but also in entertainment, media, etc. If we’re wrong about this, we’d imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of column inches of intellectually dishonest “In/Out” charticles in American magazines that need to be abolished permanently. (You don’t want to have to fill that space with actual reportage, do you? Then just admit we’re right.)

One commenter adds:

Wow, did you miss an opportunity. Consider:

A) Position People
B) Velocity People (first derivative)
C) Acceleration People (second derivative)

should have been followed by:

D) Jerks (third derivative)

I’m not making it up. That’s the name for the third derivative of position. The name for the fourth is inauguration.

In defense of endism [The Long Tail]

Along these lines, a reader sends in the following:

Saw some frazzled, knitting bag-toting, middleaged Brooklyn lady reading a pamphlet on the uptown 2 this AM: “Blogging for Profit.” Key section: “Fame and Fortune.” Key do’s/don’ts: “Never, ever slander a person, business, or service!” and my favorite, “Get Links!”

We’d really like to get our hands on a copy of that pamphlet. If anyone has one, do send. Email FishbowlNY@mediabistro.com and we’ll give you a mailing address.

Blogging: the new Amway. We always knew it’d come to this.

Speaking of not taking long, Suede magazine has shut down after only four issues. From AdAge:

“We knew this wasn’t sustainable,” said Michelle Ebanks, group publisher of Essence and Suede. “It was consuming more time and resources than we thought [it would require] to get to a level of equilibrium.”

We’ll be the first to admit that we didn’t really see that one coming. (But it was so pretty! And Suzanne Boyd was going to be the next Anna Wintour!)

Guess we can put this on eBay now.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? As we predicted, someone’s been leaning on Judas Iscariot-of-the-moment Doug Wead, who has suddenly had a change of heart about leaking the Bush tapes to the Times. He’s cancelled a Hardball appearance and wants to give back the tapes, the cash, the whole thing.

Hate to say Fishbowl told you so, Doug, but this is only the beginning of The Treatment. Time for plastic surgery and plane tickets to countries whose names you can’t pronounce.