One of my first stops each morning is Jim Romenesko’s venerable blog of news-industry items. Since I work with one foot in the world of politics and journalism and the other in the tech world, sometimes the headlines trip me up.
This morning, for instance, I learned from Romenesko that “WP promotes Perl.” Aha! The Washington Post has decided that the open-source programming/scripting language Perl is the answer to its problems! No, this is a journalist named Peter Perl, and he’s becoming the Post’s associate managing editor. I’m not sure how many of Romenesko’s readers know, or care, what Perl is. But maybe they should.
Case in point: today’s dose of Romenesko pointed me toward New York magazine, where Kurt Andersen ponders whether the Web industry is once more heading into bubble territory — and concludes that it is. I don’t know which is scarier: Andersen’s general portrait of ignorance chasing investment returns, or his specific news that Michael Wolff (of “Burn Rate” fame) is plotting his return to the Net industry.
Andersen takes a bemused stance, suggesting that nobody really knows how far the insanity will go this time around. It’s hard to argue with that. But — as many media-industry-focused, New-York-based writers trying to get their heads around trends incubated in other places often have — he generalizes his own sense of ignorance a bit too broadly, implying that his own failures to pick up the scent of important new tech trends mean that any effort to do so must be doomed.
He kicks off with a series of anecdotes: In 1994, Time’s Walter Isaacson told him to nab the “New York” domain name for New York mag, which he was editing. Andersen admits he didn’t know what Isaacson was talking about. In 2000, when he was launching Inside.com, his partner Michael Hirschorn suggested that they create blogs on their site. Andersen didn’t know what blogs were. Two years later, as Inside was imploding, a friend in the business told him he should look into RSS. The term drew another blank stare.
These experiences, Andersen concludes, “confirm William Goldman’s truism about show business: Nobody knows anything.”
No, they don’t do that at all. In fact, Andersen’s advisers all seem to have known some very valuable and important things, things that he could have learned — and profited — from. I’ll give him credit for openly admitting his ignorance; that’s more than a lot of writers would do. But the leap from “I keep missing the boat” to “there is no boat” is unwarranted.
In the mid-’90s, as the hard work of building the Web industry began, it was hard to get people in New York to take what was happening on the Internet seriously. Then, in the late ’90s, as the prospect of vast IPO returns loomed, it was hard to get them to view anything that was happening on the Net critically. When the bubble burst, the general feeling in the corridors of media power was, “Thank God that Web stuff is over — now we can stop paying attention to all those Silicon Valley acronyms.” Today, apparently, the bit has flipped once more, and New York is returning to an uncritical embrace of all things Webbish.
What about the middle position? The one where you say, there’s enormous value and considerable crap bubbling out of the technology industry, and you try to do the hard work of sorting one from the other?
Ah, but that would mean trying to learn about things like domain names and blogs and RSS before they become buzzwords. And that, it seems, is simply asking too much.