Business 2.0's blog fantasy·
So, the Business 2.0 piece on Gawker Media is out. For a business piece written by a gossip columnist, it's not as absurd as it could have been. Greg Lindsay, the writer, makes me out to be more cunning than I am -- but that's kind of flattering.
There's only one problem: Business 2.0's desperation to show that there is big business in independent internet media. Even if there isn't yet. Lindsay has to inflate or project forward the numbers, or there's no story.
It's happened before. Last year, in an analysis of the economics of the Drudge Report, Business 2.0 guessed the gossip hound was making $800,000 per year. And forgot to adjust for the fact that he only sells a fraction of his inventory at full price. Oops. [I wrote about that mistake a year ago.]
In this latest article, Business 2.0's financial guesswork is again heroic to the point of foolishness. Lindsay quotes "associates" as saying that the Gawker sites make $6,000 per site. He's just plucking those numbers out of the air. They're wrong. And I should know. In fact, I'm the only person who knows. So Lindsay's numbers, or his sourcing, are fabricated. Business 2.0's central premise rests on shaky foundations. Greg Lindsay is about as reliable as a journalist who turns to an Iraqi exile for intelligence on Saddam's hidden nukes.
But this is all detail. There's a more interesting question. Why are business journalists so obsessed by blogs? (For total overkill, there's another profile, coming out the next Wired Magazine.) Even if one believed the hyper-ventilating estimates of the medium's potential, the fact remains that they are small businesses with, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, the revenues of a Burger King franchise. Why the attention?
The media is simply narcissistic. That's part of the answer. Maer Roshan's Radar project, for instance, has enjoyed and suffered far more scrutiny than the financial investment would normally warrant. Greg Lindsay's personal preoccupation with Gawker seems to stem from the fact that we used to write about him and, since he "went freelance", no longer do. Media about media about media.
But there's something more than that. Writers like Greg Lindsay, and editors such as Josh Quittner of Business 2.0, wrote about the 1990s internet boom. They saw acquaintances get rich, and they missed the opportunity. Many of them ended up, after stints at bubble publications such as Inside, out of work.
After living through a boom, a bust, and now a tentative rebound, they're obsessed, and disoriented: nostalgic, cynical and now, with the revival of independent web media, daring to dream again. This journalistic fascination with blogs: it's not analysis; it's wish-fulfilment.
