Casual
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Casual DOT-COM-FREUDE I doubt that anybody has made better or more valuable use of the Internet than I have. In my time, I've bought a new car online at a few hundred dollars over cost, rounded...
...The loss of their virtual millions certainly was an element of our dot-com-freude...
...A friend of mine was on a reporting trip to Botswana, and took time out to find his way to an Internet cafe to check up on the day's Rome-nesko gossip...
...They are either magazines or catalogues—and catalogues are just magazines made up entirely of ads...
...And I'm not alone...
...They allow this to happen by discounting each issue in order to boost readership enough to attract advertisers who'll pay them lots of money...
...And yet, throughout 1999, we journalists read and heard about and even knew people who had migrated to dot-commery whose stock options made them worth millions of dollars...
...So it's not as though we haven't suffered...
...This attitude of taking unholy pleasure in the wounds suffered by our fellow writing and editing professionals is one of the reasons that non-journalists complain about journalism's negativity...
...What they don't have to do is print and mail their product, which certainly looks attractive at first glance...
...They were on the cutting edge...
...And what we know is that it is exceedingly difficult for magazines to make money...
...But the dot-coms were another story entirely...
...The dictionary definition of "schadenfreude," the term from which I've derived my neologism, is "enjoyment in the troubles of others...
...They can perceive our ill will, and are repelled by our bad taste...
...The money they earn from subscriptions and newsstand sales is real, honest-to-God cash, and is an important means of defraying their fixed costs— like salaries, rent on office space, and health care benefits...
...Most print publications don't discount to the extent of simply handing issues out (though some do, in a dubious marketing strategy known as "controlled circulation...
...The emperor truly had no clothes...
...It's the flip side of envy, and like envy, it's a sin in which writers seem to specialize...
...Bad taste it may be, but being indiscriminately positive can have dire consequences as well, as the cries emanating from 100 million households watching their 401(k)s diminish in value indicate...
...It turned out that print was dead only because stock analysts, brokerages, and fantasists looking for a big score had a vested interest in foisting a false market on an unsuspecting public...
...Of course, like everybody else, print journalists have had to watch our 401(k)s plunge and our stock holdings deteriorate in value...
...But at least we have dot-com-freude to give us a nice warm feeling as the Nasdaq collapses...
...In my time, I've bought a new car online at a few hundred dollars over cost, rounded out various obsessive collections through auctions, and researched hundreds upon hundreds of articles without moving from my desk...
...And yet, despite the bounty that I've been provided, I find myself absolutely, chillingly delighted by the Nasdaq crash and by the ghoulish daily reports about the bankruptcy or collapse of new-media companies...
...JOHN PODHORETZ...
...The dot-coms were created by the Internet, whose infrastructure Cisco helped to build, while The Weekly Standard is produced in a modern print facility based (like all production lines) on the assembly-line model perfected by Henry Ford...
...If there's one thing that journalists know about, it's the financial structure of magazines...
...Everybody in the world of journalism uses Microsoft products, and it was almost impossible to understand just what Cisco made...
...It was, for a brief but long-enough time, far more chic to work for an online publication than it was to write for something that actually had to run through an offset printer and be sent through the mail...
...After all, we log on daily to Jim Romenesko's Media News website to see who's been fired, laid off, transferred...
...Consider the dot-com boom...
...They had the same relation to Cisco that a magazine like this one has to an automobile factory...
...And while that was certainly enviable, what was even worse for us was the cultural heat the dot-coms generated...
...Most large-circulation magazines actually lose money on every issue they sell...
...The emotion is so widespread in journalistic circles that it deserves its own name: dot-com-freude...
...But far more important was the way the bear market finally revealed the hollowness behind the idea that print was dead...
...Every cent spent by a magazine like this one (which does very little discounting, actually) on its fixed costs is spent by dot-coms as well...
...But maintaining their websites with server capacity and HTML experts and such turns out to cost about the same as printing and mailing—or at least the dot-coms threw the same sort of money at the technical aspects of production as conventional magazines...
...We were dinosaurs...
...Nobody who writes for a living (save a few scientifically literate journalists) had any real cause to be skeptical of the run-up in the so-called tech stocks, like Microsoft and Cisco...
...Once you take away all the blather about the revolution in consciousness the Internet was creating and the Brave New Instant World, what are dot-coms anyway...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 29
