End Game

Few things are more entertaining than watching the never-ending cycle of media experts doing their annual "I told you so" calisthenics. Like the beer guzzling, chain smoking slub that finds religion, again, after watching an NBA play-off game and soon tortures his family with wheezes and grunts set to the rhythm of his pointless exercise, the omniscient media expert persists. 

Case in point, the golden old boy of schadenfreude Kurt Andersen and his recent pronouncement regarding the Internet 2.0 bubble ("The Way We Boom Now," New York, April 24, 2006). Andersen tells us to beware new media hype, and in the same breathe hints that his own observations are suspect, claiming, "Nobody knows anything." The perfect syllogistic mulch upon which to plant your argument when you know you're about to talk about something that essentially escapes you. 

Proving that he's "just like one of us" in that he was late to finding out about blogs and RSS (even though many of us were, in fact, not late), Andersen invokes the specter of venture capital, and why today's web-entrepreneurs should avoid it, and IPOs. What he doesn't mention (because he didn't know?) is that the Internet 2.0 boom started back in 2004 and scores of web businesses have been thriving absent any VC involvement. Anderson and much of the mainstream media are sucking on fumes. 

Interestingly, while heaping scorn upon new media fiascos Kozmo and UBO to make his points, he only briefly mentions Inside magazine, his own over-funded creation that also went bust after a very short run (full disclosure: I wrote for Inside). I had a front row seat to the multi-million dollar media deals that flowed throughout Silicon Alley, and I even brokered a few. But I never lost sight of the fact that media content had clearly passed into the hands of the nimble new media experimentalists who didn't care if the markets were up or down, or whether a sexy cover story had signaled the dawn of a new age or not. The only "experts" who truly understand the new face of media are those who felt the fire of 2001's financial bloodbath and kept the faith by plugging onward, producing content and driving new media models. 

Predictably, towards the end of the article, the great prognosticator invokes the name of Digg.com, a new news venture so outside anything old media heads could formulate that it's only getting recognition after it's mostly played out and now being copied by the likes of Newsvine.com and others. What Andersen and company fail to grasp is that playing in the new stream of media (print, web or mobile) requires living in that constant flux of change. Merely peeking in at opportune moments makes you a tourist, not an expert. Appropriately, the magazine bearing the dated Andersen spiel leads off with a ringing ode to Brooklyn's newfound status as a hipster mecca. The only problem with the premise is that it's about a decade late.