By James Ledbetter
To
get a dollop of what the dot-com days were about for those of us in the hot new
field of New Economy journalism, consider this vignette: In the fall of 1999,
when I was working as European editor of a publication called Red Herring, I was asked to speak at a conference in
two dayÕs time, in Interlaken, Switzerland. I was busy but I acquiesced. The
next day I flew to Zurich, where a waiting Mercedes spirited me to the
Victoria-Jungfrau, one of the finest hotels in the world. After our panel
discussion, the event organizer invited me to chopper with him and a few others
through the Alps to the top of a glacier and pop a magnum of champagne. We
ended up riding back to the airport in the Bentley of one the British speakers
(always a mystery to me how the car came to be in Switzerland).
From
Zurich I then puddle-jumped to Geneva for a ten-day telecom trade show,
interrupted by a three-day side-trip to Monaco for a venture capital
conference, where, to complete the motif of the moment, I helicoptered to and
from the airport and stayed at the Hotel Les Bains, where guests receive
special passes into the casino. Back in Geneva to moderate a panel at the trade
show, I caught a flight to San Francisco for a hastily-called one-day editorial
strategy meeting.
This
isnÕt an attempt to impress but to explain. No excess seemed too extravagant
during the boom years and no deprivation seemed too extreme when it all fell
apart. My two-week jaunt through Switzerland was, indeed, typical in many ways.
There was that time in the fall of 2000, when I shared a bumpy ride beside
Baron Eric de Rothschild touring Palestinian factories in Ramallah, and then
scrambled to a private airstrip in the middle of England for a three-hour
interview with Vivendi CEO Jean-Marie Messier. Then to California to speak on a
panel and then yet another editorial meeting to talk strategy. I kept detailed
journals and records from the time. I figured that if I wasnÕt going to be the
chronicler of the carnivale Ð that honor would go to others more enmeshed in the
era like celebrity investor James Cramer and new media entrepreneur and writer
Michael Wolff Ñ then perhaps I would at least be prepared to write the epitaph.
Call it my dot-com post-coitum triste.
Others
went into it with the same idea. The difficultyÑas we all learned and as James
Ledbetter points out in his memoir of those yearsÑwas that if you ventured too
close you got infected, but if you kept your distance you couldnÕt understand
it. Ledbetter had a good seat. As it happens, he was stationed in the same city
as me, editing the Industry Standard Europe from south of the Thames while I watched
the show from Covent Garden. Comparisons between our publications were drawn
regularly by LondonÕs digerati (which earns me a cameo on page 200 of
LedbetterÕs account). We met once, in January 2001, a few days before I left
the magazine Ð and a few months before the Internet industry would completely
collapse, taking our branch of journalism with it. The StandardÕs own demise followed in August 2001.
Today
the carcass of Red Herring
litters the landscape as well: the magazine closed down in February 2003, on
the eve of its 10th anniversary issue. And now LedbetterÕs book arrives as a
tangible reminder that for magazines, like rock stars, itÕs better to burn out
than to fade away. More to the point, it reminds us of a time when reporters were rock stars.
* * *
Even
the most outrageous office anecdotes never became legendary at Red Herring because we all took them for granted and
they were continually outdone. One reporter, after pulling an all-nighter to
complete a cover story, was told to take a week-long vacation and expense it
allÑwhereupon he set out for a private island in the Caribbean and amassed an
$8,000 bill. Then there was the case of the reporter who rode to a private
airstrip with some venture capitalists he interviewed and decided simply to
continue the chat in the air, and grab a commercial flight back from wherever
he happened to land. That one might have been apocryphal, but it seemed natural
to me when I heard it in 2000. At the magazineÕs offices in San Francisco,
weekly half-hour back massages were de rigeur. Yoga classes were held at noon.
One day some dot-com startup sent lunches over for the entire staff Ð and
instead of sending them back on ethical grounds, employees griped on the
internal mailing list over who got what. As the staff grew the magazineÕs human
resources department ballooned, developing its own logo and printing it on pens
and post-it notes. They paid staffers $500 for every person they recommended who got hired, and
gave the person who reeled in the most new employees a mountain bike. In fact,
they continued to give local delis hundreds of free lunch bags printed with Red
Herring recruitment ads,
even when layoffs were planned.
We
held conferences at tony hotels like the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. Rock
stars really did hang out with us. The US ambassador to Britain came to one of
my cocktail parties. The fashion photographer Helmut Newton snapped a cover for
us. Herb Ritts did another, of a naked, semi-exposed Pamela Anderson, which was
said to cost something approaching $100,000 and which went unused since it was
so tasteless (in order to justify the expense, we used the photo on a special,
small-run edition). For the annual employee picnic in 2000, the company rented
out Pacific Bell Park, the stadium of the San Francisco Giants, where a few
hundred employees and guests took batting practice and gorged themselves and
gulped made-to-order smoothies along the first-base line. For the Christmas party, Red Herring rented out the San Francisco City Hall.
Meanwhile, from my London base, I was making around four international trips a
month and appearing on television almost once a week.
Lavished
with such sumptuosity, I tried to run the other way. I went on a wacky spartan
diet Ð most people thought I looked ill because of it Ð where I consumed only
rice, miso soup, and freshly-squeezed juice. I often ate alone, searching for
sanctuary in my austerity. In this world of asinine luxuries, my body was
reacting the same way as my mind: rejecting it all from an innate sense of
guilt. (My reaction reached its physio-psychological climax one day during the
Cannes Film Festival, when after breaking the regime to dine at a Michelin three-star
restaurant, I immediately vomited.)
My
behavior wasnÕt odd. Everyone touched by the torrent of money had to come to
terms with it somehow. Some understood it was a transient thing and took it
healthily. Others didnÕt.
* * *
James
Ledbetter observes the whirl not as one implicit in the madness but as someone
paid to remain outside and above it, i.e., a journalist. This turns out to be
more a liability than an asset, since the technology press was going from
covering the story to being the story. From the outside, the story appeared
mainly to be the matter of insane competition between the ÒNew EconomyÓ
magazines, which each bulked up to hundreds of pages per issue as the
advertising flowed. From the inside, the story was the historic bid by the tech
magazines to move up the media food chain: No longer would they be mere trade
publications for the computer industry but mainstream business titles.
James
CramerÕs TheStreet.com,
for instance, made no secret of wanting to be the ÒDow Jones of the 21st
CenturyÓ Ð their executives applied the phrase liberally. The Industry
Standard, as Ledbetter
writes, aimed to be Òa younger, hipper Business Week.Ó The senior editors at Red Herring modeled the magazine on The Economist, with a splash of Vanity Fair for flavor. Wired, the granddaddy of mass-market tech
titles, was considered vulnerable since it was more lifestyle- than
business-minded. Fast Company
geared itself to that pathetic stratum of middle managers who fed off the tech
industry, flattering its readers as ÒRoad Warriors.Ó Business 2.0Ñwith its tagline, ÒNew Economy, New
Rules, New LeadersÓÑaimed even lower, offering formulaic Òhow-toÓ articles
accompanied by a sausage-shaped mascot. Time-WarnerÕs late entry into the
sweepstakes, a publication it unashamedly named eCompanyNow, aimed at those middle-aged organization
men who knew they didnÕt Òget itÓ but knew they had to pretend that they did.
For
most readers, however, these different magazines smacked as basically the same.
What sustained us was myth. The new economy press believed in a sort of media
manifest destiny, that we had discovered the pattern of history Ð technology
coupled with capital Ð that was now driving progress and the world economy. We
compared ourselves to other magazines that defined and transcended their era,
such as Playboy and Rolling
Stone, but with one big difference:
We were not only Òpresent at the creationÓ; we were the creators, too.
*
* *
When
a magazine of ambition and self-importance dies, it suffers an Òironic echo and
cackling aftermath,Ó in the words of former New Yorker writer Renata Adler, as its once-lofty principles are
perverted and then turned against itself. No one remembers today and no one
cares, but Red Herring was
actually founded on the precepts of skepticism about the technology industry.
The magazine was created in 1993, before tech-talk went mainstream; it avoided
covering the Internet during the initial hype-up of 1995Ð1998. A 1997 editorial
was entitled, ÒThere Is No New Economy.Ó In 1999, the founding editors
published The Internet Bubble, a
book which foretold the crash and coined the term Òdot-bomb.Ó
Behind
all that, though, was a less flattering reality. Herring old timers watched aghast as hot pink covers rolled
off the presses in the summer of 2000. Where we had once prided ourselves for
being sober guardians of the classic Silicon Valley values of hard work and big
risk, the new neon hue signaled a gaudy arriviste feeling. Then there was the
piece about celebrities who launched dot-com companies, which aimed at retail
investors caught up in the bubble rather than the serious venture capitalists
we usually targeted. We chided Business 2.0 for publishing the same article in two different
issues (they justified it by claiming they had many new readers since it first
appeared); later, we did the same thing Ð twice. Ledbetter relishes that one in
his recollections, justifiably.
By
the time the Herring was
reprinting its own stories I had already left, but I was still able to watch
the demise from the inside. I was accidentally kept on the internal email list
for months, which provided me a box seat view of the annihilation. The tone of
the emails changed dramatically. Where a spirit of cooperation and friendliness
once prevailed, now there was panic, anger, recrimination. Someone in the
office was stealing things from peopleÕs desks, and the emails started to sound
like a police blotter. As the financial situation got worse, more rounds of
layoffs came. When the long-serving editor was pushed aside in 2002, he
compared his tenure to The New
Yorker under ÒWallace Shawn,Ó a
particularly ironic mistake since William Shawn had been famous for his high
standards of accuracy. Then, when they shuttered Red Herring for good in February 2003, the co-founderÕs final
column celebrated the magazineÕs Òstring editorial product.Ó Sic, alas. Ironic
echo had met cackling aftermath.
My
own downfall similarly mocked my past achievements. I had cashed out of Red
Herring in February 2001 to become
the technology editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong. Old Economy: security; stability;
slouching towards suburbia. But being a knowledge worker in the information
society still has its risks. Within ten months, I was not only a business-tech
writer at a time when The Story was over, but a Journal-man made redundant after the quarterly earnings
cascaded southward and Dow Jones & Co. had to take bold steps to please The
Street.
I remember that in the chaos to leave London for Hong Kong, I
scooped up all the business cards I had gleaned over the previous 18 months. I
had amassed over 1,300, but I could only recall about two out of every ten
people -- and for each card, I had presumably exchanged one of my own.
Examining them now, the companies and colors and jaunty logos on the cards seem
to me of another world, whooshing past like GatsbyÕs shirts.
*
* *
Starving
to Death on $200 Million doesnÕt nod
toward myth, it sticks to The Industry Standard itself, and like the times it describes, it steers
clear of history or grander meaning. Created in 1998 by the trade publishing
group IDG and John Battelle, the youthful, charismatic managing editor of Wired in its early-Nineties heyday, the Standard sold the most advertising of any publication in
America in 2000. It ran smart and critical pieces on the Internet industry, won
awards, and published some terrific minds who turned their attention to the
sector. Yet by mid-2001 it was bankrupt. Was its death due to its own
extravagances and mismanagement, or because the ad market dried up and its
publisher pulled the plug rather than risk supporting it in lean times?
Ledbetter admits to a variety of factors, but ultimately finds the blood on
IDGÕs hands: It killed the magazine, he argues, to retain millions in deferred
tax-liability assets.
On
a purely narrative level, the book could have been better. The characters never
appear life-size, and the story never transcends the Industry Standard itself to make broader, more substantial points about
the dot-com bubble, the tech press or the US magazine industry. The first
reviewers Ð in a few cases former Standard contributors Ð raced to say there was too little sex and too little
San Francisco in LedbetterÕs account, and theyÕre right. ItÕs a lost
opportunity. ThatÕs because it was precisely the superficial things that were
taken for granted which typified the era, made it distinct, and which are worth
documenting. Ledbetter comes close when he describes the London bureau
post-layoffs as Òsome slowly rotting colonial outpost from a Graham Greene
novel,Ó and earlier when Battelle, Òpractically in tears,Ó uncharacteristically
explodes at a bartender at the magazineÕs Christmas party in 2000, as it all
began to unravel. Where Ledbetter hits it perfectly is, ironically, in a way he
probably didnÕt intend. The description of the magazineÕs over-the-top, costly
conference in Madrid in May 2000 is delicious because he lets it drop that he
didnÕt actually attend. That strikes at the heart of the time: We were all so
busy working Ð even if racing after illusions, be it an IPO or a hot news story
Ð that we ended up missing everything. Sometimes, even our own parties.
But
perhaps I may be too close to it all to be fair. In fact, I could pretty much
calibrate my life story around the events Ledbetter describes, making the book
an uncomfortable cross between the Global Positioning System and an intimate
diary. Reading it made me queasy. When Ledbetter recalls that the StandardÕs opulent anniversary party in 2000 wasnÕt the hottest
fete that Friday night in San Francisco because Elvis Costello was playing a
private party for AskJeeves.com, I remember flying in from London for the show.
Nick Lowe played bass.
Reading
LedbetterÕs recollections is like looking back at an old yearbook and feeling embarrassed
by the dated images and bad haircuts and wide collars and na•ve personal
reflections Ð and then noticing itÕs not your yearbook but someone elseÕs. I
expected to savor the inside look at my former rival but discovered instead
that I just couldnÕt give a damn. This has less to do with any shortcoming in
the story and more to do with the topic itself: ItÕs tough to muster the
ÒbandwidthÓ Ð as we used to say Ð for dot-com war stories in times of real war.
*
* *
As it happens, I never went back to my
journals from those days. I considered doing so for this review, but couldnÕt
out of apathy. As it happens, I weighed whether to forget the book entirely and
write a review of its blurbs, which come from Ð who else? Ð James Cramer and
Michael Wolff. The same people who hyped it all to begin with. Their words,
reeking of an unctuous, formulaic glamour, strike as phony as the era Ledbetter
tries to debunk. WolffÕs language is strait from a book marketerÕs script:
Òrise and fall,Ó Òsharp and knowing look,Ó and Òhow it fell apart.Ó Cramer
leaves no clichŽ unturned: Òeyewitness,Ó Òone of the greatest rags-to-riches
stories,Ó ÒI canÕt believe the stuff É but I know I have to,Ó Òroller coaster,Ó
Òone thingÕs for sure,Ó Òbusiness thrillerÓ Òstart to finish.Ó That LedbetterÕs
book is meant to expose the idiocy of the time rather than revel in it makes
the presence of blurbs insulting.
After the irony, the cackling.
Perhaps this is the fate of all things
that absorb our passions. When news of Red HerringÕs death broke in
February 2003, it provoked an odd feeling for lots of people who used to read
it regularly. They hadnÕt realized the magazine had still been publishing.
Surely it, like
the Standard,
had died earlier, they thought. The truth is, it had.
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