March 16, 2006

Where are we actually going?

What got me to show up in Austin this week, besides the lovely weather, endless music, and barbeque, was an invitation to be on a panel about blogging movies. Of course, my first response was, "Stop using the word blog for every kind of internet site!" Then I remembered that I have an actually blog, The Hot Blog, and that Karina Longworth had just left Cinematical's editorship to run a still supersecret pop culture thang for AOL, which already owned Cinematical through its purchase of Weblogs, Inc. Legitimate internet players are under attack daily, both by major corporations that are getting hip to the focused power of the web and by Traditional Media, which is clearly worried about how close to the precipice they are... ironically, only secondarily due to content issues, but primarily due to the corporate bloat of the print business. The idea of a $100,000 a year columnist replaced by some blogging kid for $30k is scary enough. The idea that for $50k, a newspaper can hire someone with equal or superior experience to the TM writer who has a more current, more aggressively self-educated position than the old columnist... now that is enough to stain the back of a lot of Dockers.

This may also explain what seems to be a growing streak of intellectual conservatism amongst journalists who cover the film industry. There is some debate over whether Winston Churchill, who officially became a Liberal at 35, actually said, "If a man is not a liberal by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain."

But someone did. And the spirit of the comment continues to ring true to many, because it reaches beyond politics. Youth is arrogant and assumes the world has a set of open arms for all. At 40, most people have something to lose and therefore embrace more conservative position to protect what they have.

I hear, though I was not in attendance, that Peter Bart practically split his pants, exploding with rage over Those Darn Bloggers in his panel the day before. Fortunately, only Those Kids Today Over The Age Of 30 are even aware of who Peter Bart is, much less feeling the weight of his smackdowns, which are then regurgitated by his younger Variety staff, most of whom will end up returning to the web before this decade runs out, laughing and removing the shoes from their mouths about how dangerous that 'ol web was.

All that snarked, all is not well in Media Mudville. Casey has not yet come to bat (talk about your references that will elude the Gen Y set), but both teams, Traditional and Web, are taking swings. And we are already seeing troubling effects on all sides. In all candor, the internet is bringing TM (which is not the Main Stream anymore, as we all know, but often forget) down to its level.

Web Media is on its own shakedown cruise. No one is steering the ship and thousands of people serious about the web are learning lessons via experience every day. That is both good and bad. There is a lot of shit out there. And it often gets more attention than the quality efforts. The still unresolved mystery of having a media business on the web is the allure of the dazzle combined with the reality that there is limited interest in all that dazzle. YouTube is an interesting success, but for every 1000 clips that are thrown onto that site, there may be one that attains some sort of viral identity. And that ratio will get worse. And the quality will be reduced further as more content creators enforce their copyrights.

If I were at YouTube, I would be seriously considering a spin-off for professional commercials only... the one high-quality product that is designed to be given away for free. It wouldn't take long to create a worldwide web (think I'll copyright that!) of ad agencies and ad producers who want their work to be seen. Creating a group of hard core content raters for the new stuff of the site would also make sense. But in the end, some guy or gal will run into something they like and tell two friends and they'll tell two friends and so on and so on. This is the nature of the web. You can lead a horse to water, but it may well kick you in the head and go drink out of some pond it found... and the pond might be contaminated... but you won't know until the horse gets sick... and the next time, the pond might have some magic formula that will make the horse younger and more healthy. That Darn Internet!

The impulse to try to control anarchy is what is at the center of monetizing the internet.

That said, Traditional Media is stuck in between their traditions and expectations and the very allure of the web chaos. Web sites covering the Pellicano case have never been shy about making the connection to Brad Grey. But the New York Times felt compelled to wait until they had someone on the record about the situation before moving forward. Unfortunately, that "someone" turned out to be Garry Shandling's ex-fiance', who has almost no first-hand knowledge of anything and whose insights were limited mostly to casting aspersions. But in the Traditional Media, that is how it's done.

Even Nikki Finke, who is just starting to try to straddle the two sides of the media line, was so pleased to have Bernie Brillstein on the record that she completely seemed to ignore the fact that the story she is endlessly hyping - from her "exclusive" insight that the NYT would publish their story about 4 whole hours before it printed to her own reported and opinionated insights - is still nothing but a 2-year-old shell to the reporting community.

After the explosion of a few weeks ago about how terrible internet rumors were, Traditional Media seems anxious to beat the web at its own alleged game. And I can't applaud that. Peter Bart is right that a standard is an absolute necessity. And one has to wonder whether these massive companies have or will take a deep breath, stop, and reset their priorities, not in an endless state of reaction to what is happening around them, but on their own terms.

On "our" side of the aisle, we need to start doing a better job of defining ourselves. We don't need to shun sites loaded with excrement. But we need to start differentiating ourselves, much as print media is differentiated on a newsstand. There are different standards in that part of the stand with The New Yorker and Harper's and Columbia Journalism Review than in the section with Maxim and FHM. But even among magazines with semi-nude women on the cover, Stuff has a different place on the stand than Playboy or W. Comics in one area, sports mags in another, and motor grease in another.

Even "blogs" that actually are blogs are wildly varied. The blog package at MCN (Hot Blog, Movie City Indie, Pride, Unprejudiced, The Reeler and the just launched, Digital Dretzka) has no real counterparts in the world of Gawker Media. And vice versa. We don't have a gossip-focused blog. It's a different conversation. And that's alright.

I guess I don't know where anyone is going… except for where the sites I am involved with are headed, though I collaborate with my business partner and our writers in determining where we might go.

Each piece builds the puzzle. Each piece has responsibility. Each piece has freedom. If any group should understand that chasing popularity is a near-guarantee of failure, it's entertainment journalists. Leadership, high standards, and the freedom to do your work without looking over your shoulder the whole time…. doesn't seem like that much to ask, does it?

EMe.