I’m still enjoying that special lassitude that comes from trying to persuade my bone marrow to pump out enough red blood cells to deal with the oxygen pressure at 2,600 meters — Hello Bogota!….
…but I’ve been watching this blog go ape over the last few days (in a good way) and feel the need to see if I can’t contribute something to the show.
So here’s a bit of meta-media snark I worked on a bit ago, only to see it vanish into the end-of term swamp:
I know that the party-strewn resume of Tina Brown is of little moment (very little) compared with all the examples of GOP folly and malice chronicled there, everywhere, and here, today and everyday. Even so I just can’t quite get past the astonishingly inadvertant MSM self-revelation in the Times Sunday Magazine profile of Brown — that once and present editor, now running both her upper-middle-brow web project, The Daily Beast, and that moss-covered perpetual second sister, Newsweek.
This paragraph was the first to set me off:
The Beast, as Brown calls it, is a long way from profitability, it’s an impressive achievement whose relatively few visitors (just under four million uniques per month) belie its cultural influence.
Its cultural influence? I mean, I know I’m out of it, but except for some mild fun at Meghan McCain’s expense, and a kind of genteel averting of eyes at some of the more vacuously embarrassing conventional wisdom retreads that showed up there early on, I can’t recall any real engagement with yon wee beastie.
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Rather, what it actually seems to be, as the Times can’t quite avoid saying, is an expensive but mediocre performer by the metric that matters in the infotainment business: people ain’t coming and the dollars aren’t following its diminuitive audience. Losses last year, according to the article, reached a cool ten million.
Now I know that both Brown and her Boswell are trying to suggest that the place is still somehow influential, a shaper of minds and ideas. But again, unless I’ve just completely missed it, no.
Hell, just to do due diligence I’ve been and come back to this post in the last five minutes to see what’s up there. [This visit took place more than a week ago. Too lazy to repeat.] Retreads of info about Bin Laden that is everywhere else on the web, including much more straight-news branded sites, a review of advice from Mika Brzezinski about how to ask for a raise, (Mika Brzinski!), complete with a description of the book party at which Morning Joe folks told the author how wonderful Mika is (scoop!…up to a point, Lady Evans), a piece I refused to click on Osama Bin Laden and Michael Douglas as Viagra brothers…and you get the idea.
What a huge, holy hillock of who cares.
And then there is the searing instinct for the new, the zeitgeist of modern media and those who can bend it into new forms of making meaning. As old friend Hendrick Hertzberg says, “Tina’s a revolutionary leader.”
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Or not:
Brown’s early issues have been strewn with standbys from her Rolodex: Hillary Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Judith Regan, James Carville, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yup, when I think of media revolutionaries, Ahhhnold and Regan (she of the O. J. Simpson “confession“) are names that pop right to top of mind.
And then there are her plans to remake Newsweek. I can’t say I have had any interest in the magazine for decades, which is a symptom of the problem Brown was hired to address, of course. But I’m not sure this is going to help:
A new section called Omnivore: Want has featured $2,100 Chanel shoes, a $6,500 Audi bicycle and a $10,000 Burberry “Python” trench, items that would not be within reach of your average newsmagazine reader but that would feel right at home in, say, Vanity Fair.
So the salvation of the newsweekly business is to turn them into smaller, more cheaply produced versions of the aspirational titles? Apparently yes:
“There’s a great kind of high-low, newsy, sexy thing that the European newsmagazines have,” Brown said. “They have this great sort of slightly freewheeling pagination, where they go from a great sexy picture of an expensive watch to Libya or something. So I’d like to have more of that feeling in Newsweek. I think that’s a great thing for a magazine, because that’s where we all sort of are now, we’re all multiplatformed, everything’s messed up with everything else.”
Ahh, the smell of word salad in the morning.
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It’s not just that I have no desire to go from pictures of a fancy watch, say, or even of the good Bruni — Carla, of course — to the sight of wrecked lives…it’s that there are already folks who do this better, and Brown seems to be putting Newsweek into a familiar second banana kind of place: chasing somebody else’s editorial vision and formula.
The multiplatform blather at the end of the quote is a subject for another day; here I’ll just say that this sounds exactly like traditional media spouting of about a decade ago, when the great idea was to dump print onto a web page and call it multimedia.
OK — that’s enough sideswipes at Tina Brown. There’s a bigger (to me) point here: All of this appeared in the Times Magazine.
The real howlers here are not Brown’s — for all of the crass money-as-pheramone, Sully-chasing inanity attending this merger, she’s pursuing a recognizable strategy to pull a lazarus on Newsweek. I’m not sure Dr. House himself could save that patient, but full marks for trying.
No, what really got me about this piece was what it confirms (again) about how the Village sees itself. What does it say that a writer could write and an editor could pass with straight faces all that heavy breathing about the cultural significance of a place that provides a soft-landing for Judy Regan?
It tells me that it’s same-old, same-old over there. There is an information cartel at the center of our national media, struggling to maintain its hold on the bytestream. And, just to connect all this to the themes of this blog over the last few days, I’d say that the fact that the Times could produce such hagiography over the fact that Tina Brown is ruling a new roost for conventional, right-leaning hacktitutde tells us all a lot about why the mainstream media has found it so hard to cover even the basics about things that might actually interest the broad middle class audience the newsweeklies used to own.
*Couldn’t resist the title, not least because this title lets me post this:
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”425″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/TP6cwPCewgQ” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
Images: Poster for the Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Great Shows Combined c. 1897.
Eduoard Manet, Running at Longchamp, 1864
MikeJ
I hate to use money made as a metric for success. It’s a bit too Galtian (and Capraesque (remember the scene in Mr. Deeds about how the opera company ought to play pop tunes?)). Also too, your favourite restaurant probably makes a lower percentage of profit per customer than McDonald’s.
It’s just not the proper metric for judging the travesty that is the Daily Beast. As you point out, it’s so dreadful in so many ways, the fact that it’s making horrible people poorer has to be counted as one of the few good things about it.
alwhite
I’ll admit to not following Ms. Brown’s meteoric (or should that mediocratic?) rise from meh to meh but tell me, has there been a post she held that was better off during her tenure than before? I seriously can’t think of one.
Like a baseball manager or football coach, once someone gives you that job no matter how hard you fail there is always some other team that thinks of you as a coach and gives you another shot at meh.
JGabriel
NY Times:
“Sorry about the vagueness,” Brown added, “but we’re not terribly chuffed about the actual content. We just want that watch ad.”
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Cat Lady
I read Newsweek the paper version at the gym the other day for the first time in 10 years or so. What a total piece of crap in every way. There’s so much more insight and information on this here shitty blog ;-) every day in every way, for free, and pet pictures!
MikeJ
@Cat Lady: I’m still waiting for Cat Fancier magazine to do a think piece on the I/P conflict and I won’t need this blog for anything.
Amir_Khalid
Why should I read a magazine that aspires to be some other magazine, when that other magazine is right next to it at the newsstand? Newsweek spent decades trying to be Time, then a couple of years trying to be The Economist. The first strategy finally went south a few years ago, the second never paid off. If it is to survive, Newsweek has to figure out how to be its own desirable self, not a copycat of somebody else.
But when I hear that Tina Brown is just looking for another model for Newsweek to ape — that convinces me that the title is just going to get folded, sooner rather than later.
It will go through a few more desperate makeovers, but they won’t disguise the fact that there’s no real reason to pick Newsweek up rather than The Title Newsweek Wants To Copy. Sales will keep drying up, the advertisers won’t bite, there’ll be ineffectual staff changes, and in the end Newsweek goes out with a pitiful whimper.
JGabriel
NY Times:
“Just last week,” said Brown, “while trekking through the tropical jungles of our HR department, I discoverd an entire tribe of the most ethnic editors! They have such strange mating rituals — one of them offered me a red pen. And they all drink pre-ground canned coffee from a drip machine, which is so quaint and twentieth century. We’re doing an article on their sex lives next month!”
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Brian S
But but but but but…. Sully!
Maybe one day I’ll regret never clicking on a Daily Beast link, but I doubt it. It’s as crappy as HuffPo.
Cat Lady
@MikeJ:
You’d miss m_c’s musings and the ODS crew derailing every other thread though, admit it.
Ed in NJ
What makes the Daily Beast even worse is the cesspool of conservatards that hang out on the site all day, endlessly attacking and bullying anyone who dares to say something positive about Democrats. It’s almost as bad as Mediaite.
Tom Levenson
@JGabriel: Oh yeah. I forgot that quote.
Pitiful.
Tehanu
@JGabriel:
I’d like to wave an ostrich-feather fan over this comment and feed it delicious grapes.
James E. Powell
@MikeJ:
What are the chances that any of the big shots have a dime of their own money in this venture? Our Galtian Overlords are very bold and brave with other peoples’ money.
Mo's Bike Shop
Newsweek looks like a Weekly Reader.
That “multiplatformed” pitch speaks volumes. Volumes of Lame.
JGabriel
NY Times:
Except for one heir, who was heard to mutter, “No, dammit, I want that dollar back.”
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Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
so what exactly would be a fresh angle for a news weekly? tina brown may be doing it wrong, but who is doing it right? blogs week? nudesweek, get people somewhat involved in a story to tell their view while we get a view of them?
dj spellchecka
fwiw, to put the beast’s 4 million uniques a month into context, huffpo was getting between 25 and 40 million a month before the aol merger.
MikeBoyScout
SYNERGY!
Tom Levenson
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: A) It’s not entirely clear that the newsweekly has any legs anymore. It was already getting a just a bit nervous during my jurassic stint at Time Inc. (1981-4), but it’s very hard to see what they can do in any kind of niche-distinguishing (and protecting) way with news-and-opinion.
My view has always been that the one moat has been a strong journalism staff — that’s the NYT’s signal advantage — but you’d then have to come up with a set of beats that reach enough reasonably wealthy people to create a subscriber base. That’s very hard to do, especially when mass market semi-specialized media shops already exist.
My guess is that Tina Brown is maybe almost onto the only strategy that seems to me to make sense — which is the polite reading of the HuffPo approach. Newsweeklies were intended to be a convenient one-stop package to give you a gloss on all that seemed important to middle-class middle-brow readerships, thus eliminating the need to stack up on a pile of publications. You’d have already heard the news by the time Time or Newsweek arrived, but the weeklies would tell you what to make of it all.
THe modern analogue to that would be some kind of curatorial and critical function. If Newsweek did that, combined with a small but sustained operation of high-quality journalism, might be in with a chance. Not gonna happen with 1000 buck watches juxtaposed with bomb-damaged kids.
Roger Moore
@Amir_Khalid:
But it’s much easier to find a model to copy, and much easier to explain to your backers what it is you’re trying to do by copying it, than to come up with something new and original.
JGabriel
NY Times:
Suddenly, Brown stood up, walked over to my side, leaned over to pour tea in my cup, and — breasts swinging pendulously before me, within reach, mocking me with their nearness — she whispered seductively in my ear, “Next week, we’re publishing a major essay about Molly Ringwald’s break with John Hughes.” She stood, smiling triumphantly. “And Jay McInerny is writing it.”
.
Yutsano
@JGabriel: You are channeling your inner Sarah Proud & Tall. I couldn’t be prouder. (sniff)
Roger Moore
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
I think what we really need is a good counterbalance to the overwhelming number of short, punchy, shallow articles in newspapers, web sites, and blogs. A great weekly would have a half dozen or so well researched, long-form articles on topics that get short shrift in typical news media because they require an attention span of more than a couple of minutes. Ideally, I’d like one that focuses more on facts and numbers than personalities, which I see as the weakness of a lot of long-form journalism, but I’m willing to put up with some personal stuff to get good, in-depth articles.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Tom Levenson:
something along the lines of the once upon a time world press review magazine,perhaps. i could see that, going once again for the mass market, rendering the wonks and the punditry for those who play farmville.
bryanD
When, oh when, will the professional Left just swallow its pride and simply clone Matt Drudge’s easy-peasy, plain-jane, WYSIWYG table-of-content-style format?
It is very instructive that the #1 “left” news site, HuffPo, is a click vortex that would shame John D Rockefeller in its exploitation of its customer’s good faith by way of blind links and extra doors (superfluous clicks). Other leftist aggregrator sites (RawStory/Truth Dig) are just plain 3-day-a-week lazy.
News weekly mag? The Economist. It’s good. Establishment; middle-of-the-road; but good. (Reading it religiously would certainly make one seem a veritable genius on innertoob comment threads, for sure. Newsweek seems to be synergized to TV Guide or Tivo. It’s a childrens’ version of current events. My Weekly Reader. And at about the same page count, too.)
Tom Levenson
@Roger Moore: I’m getting interested in places like The Atavist.
Also — you’ve kind of described the New Yorker, at least on its good weeks.
That’s a big part of Newsweek’s problem: what they think they should be doing is either silly (I want features and the like) or being done elsewhere by people who’ve thought hard about what they want to do, rather than what the market might want them to turn into.
PeakVT
@Yutsano: Is that what he’s doing? I was thinking more along the lines, “Where did he score those shrooms?” but maybe the two are related.
arguingwithsignposts
@Tom Levenson: I’m sure there are some who will do so, but $3 per story? Seems high to me. Hell, you can get a whole issue of wired, for instance, on the ipad for $5.
And i wish someone would tell me what Tina brown ever did to become a very serious editor?
Yutsano
@PeakVT: This is not a mutual exclusivity situation here I agree. One never knows what one can do when under the influence of magic mushrooms.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
The Daily Beast is the ugliest site on the web (other than some southern local GOP candidate campaign site from 1987). Its chock full of more ‘who cares?’ than HuffPo. I can’t figure out what its supposed to be. Newsweek has been decayed organic matter since I was was twelve and starting to read Time Magazine. Its saying something if a twelve year old could detect the overt ideological bias and total bullshit that is Newsweek.
Villago Delenda Est
By “cultural influence” they mean “people who give a rat’s ass what Tina Brown thinks about anything”, which is pretty much confined to Villagers and Villager wannabes.
JGabriel
@Tom Levenson, @Tehanu, @Yutsano: Danke, danke, danke.
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arguingwithsignposts
@JGabriel: Hats off, senor. Of course, to engage in such flights of humor, one must leave the boat. I do not have the stomach to sample the wretched mangoes on yon shore.
Ripley
I don’t know what those words mean.
JGabriel
@PeakVT:
Ha, I wish. I’m just mimicking the style that is already there and continuing to its logical end points.
For instance, once you’re bragging about an essay on Charlie Sheen by Brett Easton Ellis, it’s not a far jump to treating other 80’s stand-bys like Ringwald, Hughes, and McInerney as if they were still new superstars — which seems to be part of Brown’s problem: a belief that the big names of her publishing heyday in the 1980’s-90’s are still the names with relevant power to draw eyeballs in 2011.
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MikeJ
@Ripley: The right sort of people read it. White, rich, friends of the “reporter”.
Tonal Crow
If you need to visit such places frequently, or to function well when you do, try taking up distance running. It does wonders for one’s aerobic capacity.
MattF
Yeah, it’s pitiful. I don’t know if Heaven actually forbids original thinking, but I do know that Ms. Brown’s productions don’t count as evidence.
arguingwithsignposts
@dj spellchecka:
To put it in even more perspective, according to the Statcounter in the left rail here, BJ gets 63,000 visits per day. 1.8 million approx./month.
JGabriel
arguingwithsignposts:
Yo, John Cole! Where are the ads for $20,000 watches? You’re leaving money on the table, man. Money on the table.
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Mike in NC
The ‘talent’ over at the Daily Beast includes Andrew Sullivan, Howard Kurtz, and Michael Medved. Right-leaning hackitude indeed.
Amir_Khalid
@Mike in NC: .
On the other hand, it also includes the more liberal Michael Tomasky, late of the Guardian and certainly no hack. But he seems mostly alone as a liberal voice there, and I’d agree that in general The Daily Beast is far from consistently liberal.
James E. Powell
@Roger Moore:
Whether it is true or not, it seems to be a conviction in the industry that few people would read such a magazine. Has anyone tried it? I don’t think so.
PTirebiter
@JGabriel: Brilliant.
Violet
@arguingwithsignposts:
From Wikipedia:
Slept with the boss. Then married him.
MikeJ
@arguingwithsignposts: Sitemeter shows the #3 referer to balloon-juice right now is The Daily Beast.
Violet
@MikeJ:
So true, so true.
@James E. Powell:
Who is funding the Tina Beast venture? Where does the money come from? They can’t be happy. Those are big losses.
asiangrrlMN
Bullshit upon layers of bullshit these excerpts are. What a lot of public fapping. GET A ROOM!
@JGabriel: You, sir, have won the entire internets for the day with your comments on this thread, this one in particular. My hat’s off to you!
@Yutsano: How you be? You make the drive?
asiangrrlMN
@Violet: Barry Diller put up the start-up money. I can’t find anything about the current situation (lazy Google search).
PeakVT
@JGabriel: It really has been 19 years since she left Vanity Fair, hasn’t it? Man,
am Iis she old.Donut
@Brian S:
I never visited Daily Beast before Sully moved over, but not for any reason other than I never gave a shit about the site.
I especially will not go anywhere near it now – because Sullivan moved over there. I’ve said it 10,000 times: there’s no reason in my miond to read a guy who claims to do a job (blogging) that he really does not actually perform. You know, reading up on current events, forming his own opinions and sharing them on a web site. Sullivan doesn’t actually do that. I find it incredibly tedious to think of reading these posts, created by lackeys, which the by-line holder simply edits or adds to. How fucking boring. You’re not reading Sullivan, you’re reading “Sullivan.”
Yes, I’m an asshole. So what.
Martin
I’ve spent a lot of time researching my investments, particularly startups and tech firms. A lot of these internet media outfits fit the mold quite well. Jason Fried made a comment that everyone that reads quotes like the one that Tom leads with should keep in mind:
If you see an outfit that is more concerned with mindshare than profitability, whether it’s the Daily Beast or some social media service or software, keep your distance. Their implosion is almost inevitable.
Strapping the Daily Beast to Newsweek was like strapping two drunks together. Neither outfit had a fucking clue how to actually become profitable, and together they still don’t have a fucking clue.
Violet
@Martin:
That’s so funny. I read an article/interview with him in some magazine while I was waiting at a doctor’s office. Maybe Inc. magazine, or some such? He said pretty much the same thing there: practice making money from the very beginning. He advises startups against getting venture capital because he says it keeps them from focusing on how to pay their way from the very beginning.
arguingwithsignposts
@MikeJ: No doubt following the trail blazed by the Krugalanche yesterday.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I bagged the drive, although I still may go tomorrow if I feel up to it. I’m just gonna stay home and rest a shit ton. Tomorrow I might just make the hop on over.
@Donut:
You make it sound like this is a bad thing.
JGabriel
@MikeJ:
[Looks through thread.]
Oh.
Guess that’s the last time that’ll happen.
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bryanD
@Martin:
“Strapping the Daily Beast to Newsweek was like strapping two drunks together. Neither outfit had a fucking clue how to actually become profitable…”
Newsweek is owned by Daddy Warbucks, G.E.
MSNBC is owned by G.E.
Money is not the object.
The Iraq and Afghan and Libyan boondoggles are off the table.
Great investment. Casual-left diverted! From above. Which is sad. But per the manual in print since Haymarket times.
JGabriel
@PeakVT:
YouBrown and me both. It’s not like I pull the names of faddish, barely remembered, 80’s novelists out of a hat. Although Brown’s still got roughly a dozen years on me, so at least I have that going for me..
James E. Powell
@Violet:
It strikes me that The Daily Beast is part of a relatively small but well-connected network where each member works to stroke other members and, even more so, the very idea of membership. They need to tell each other, over and over, that they are the smartest, most beautiful, most cultured, most important people on the planet. The ‘losses’ are nothing more than a cost they gladly play to hear the angels sing their names.
uptown
Here’s a area for Newsweek to cover: the states and regions of the good old USA. Yep, there is a whole country out there that is rarely covered in any depth by the national news media (barring disasters). Ignore the usual suspects, toss in a bit of our neighbors (Canada, Mexico, etc), and you’ve got something that no one else is doing.
Tom Levenson
@MikeJ: Sorry, John.
catclub
@MikeJ: I read the article title referred to as Sarah-Palin-Queen-of-right-wing-Erection.
Hill Dweller
I just watched Chuck Todd’s summation of Obama’s European trip on NBC News, and aside from a passing mention of Poland, it consisted almost entirely of rehashing three supposed Faux Paus: a pen that was out of ink, signing the wrong date in a visitors’ log, and continuing his toast when the band prematurely started “God Save the Queen”.
It was the type of quality journalism I’ve come to expect from the beltway stooges.
baldheadeddork
This was the exact same take on Don Imus’s syndicated radio show before he self-immolated. Shitty ratings, but all the right people listen to him so he was important.
Tina Brown has fucked up everything she touched so many times that I actually cheer whenever she has a new venture. Apparently, mortality itself is the only thing that could stop her from ruining every self-important publication on the planet.
Arundel
The Daily Beast seems designed to just annoy the fuck out of me, and its commenters are the worst. Keep in mind the whole vanity fandango is funded by Barry Diller, the most closeted Republican queer on earth. I used to admire Tina Brown a bit- her Vanity Fair was pretty good, actually. But she is stalled at 1992 or so. She had a UK tabloid sensibility that was felt, was a bit crass but new here at the time. But now, the entire culture has that tabloid, lurid sensibility. Where does that leave her?
“There’s a great kind of high-low, newsy, sexy thing that the European newsmagazines have,” Brown said.
This is exactly the same thing she said when she launched the failed Talk magazine with a half-million-dollar party on Liberty Isle in 2000. I’d swear she has never shut up about “OH darling, I want to mix high and low, uptown and downtown! Bette Midler, Mike Ovitz, Dan Quayle! We cover the superstars!” Seriously, that’s her, and the Daily Beast is such a boring piece of shit, slanted hard to the right. No, it’s not influential, no, it’s not part of the “conversation” as Tina would say. It’s just a shoddy aggregator of right-wing corporate memes with some fluff. Fail, bitch, fail!
;)
dj spellchecka
@arguingwithsignposts:
not snarking, but the numbers you put up are all visitors to b-j [possible all page views] while the db and huffpo numbers are different “unique” visitors.
the nyt uniques are approx 18.5 million a month