Geek tragedy

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Jamie Malanowski

STARVING TO DEATH ON $200 MILLION The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard by James Ledbetter Public Affairs, $26.00

IT'S IN THE NATURE OF WRITERS to love their stories, all their stories, even the lop-eared, runt-of-the-litter stories that for mercy's sake should be stuffed into a sack and heaved into a swift-moving stream. It's also in the nature of writers, particularly youngish writers at newish, underdoggy, out-of-the-mainstream publications, to love those publications deeply, and romantically. This is because the work is exciting and involving, and because bosses at newish, underdoggy, out-of-the-mainstream publications classically feed their underlings a motivational line that makes them feel like Che Guevara in the mountains, even when they happen to be writing about latte or cell-phone corporations. In the end, the work becomes not merely the writer's community and family, but also his or her raison d'etre. These idiotically romantic feelings become especially intense if the publication craps out before descending into disappointing middle age. In death, a magazine or a newspaper, like a lover, can forever remain perfect in its possibilities. In Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard, a very fine journalist, James Ledbetter, succumbs to both of these tendencies like the swoony boy lead in a Kirsten Dunst movie. The problem is that he simply has less of a story than he thinks he does.

You remember the Internet--not the helpful tool most of us use every day for a host of tasks, but Internet the Idea, the belief system which held that the Internet was a transformational force that was going to completely remake the society in ways so far-reaching that most humans could not yet begin to comprehend them. This belief was so powerful that people invested fortunes in the hope and expectation that soon, maybe even within a couple of quarters, vast numbers of people would be downloading their dog food and consulting anonymous on-line physicians about their medical problems, and other such miraculous transmogrifications. The Industry Standard was a weekly magazine that for about two years chronicled this industry. It was a good publication, but it was one of a bunch that did what it did; its claims of unique excellence, fashioned over so brief an existence, aren't immediately apparent to an outside observer. However, during the height of Internet fever, its weekly status gave it a club-newsletter cachet, and over one extraordinary 12-month period, The Industry Standard raked in advertising revenue at phenomenal levels--$2 million a week. Of course, the boom didn't last. The dot.coms that advertised in it went broke and stopped advertising; the tech giants like Intel that sold hardware to the dot.coms stopped advertising; and the dot.communists who worked at these disappearing businesses, and who had billed the cost of their subscriptions back to their companies, were laid off and chose not to subscribe with their own money. Soon the phenomenally profitable publication, which had grown and expanded and set up subsidiary ventures and foreign bureaus and generally acquired all the other apparatus of an Information Age empire, was hemorrhaging money. Whereupon the fusty old media company that owned a big chunk of the publication--IDG, the corporation that publishes the "for Dummies" books (Wine for Dummies, etc.) among a host of profitable, dirt-dull niche publications--turned out the lights.

This story--a hot publication's rise and fall, the charismatic founder who was all grasshopper and no ant, the conflict between the New Media dreamers and the Old Media bean counters--sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, Ledbetter was less than ideally positioned to capture the tale. The Industry Standard was headquartered in San Francisco; Ledbetter was the New York bureau chief, stationed a continent away. At least he was a continent away until things got really hairy at the company, and the conflict started heating up, at which point he became the editor of the tiny European edition, and moved to London, a continent and an ocean away. It's like telling us about the fall of the Roman Empire from the frontiers of Gaul. Ledbetter gives us snapshots of life at HQ from time to time--the profligacy, the chaos, the company's disorganized growth--but we never get a real feel for the personalities, for their fevered delusions, for their terror as the train wreck approaches. Ledbetter doesn't tell these stories because he doesn't have these stories. He has his story, and a pretty boring tale it is. He really does treat us to accounts of his problems finding decent office space in Manhattan, his run-ins with copy editors, and his troubles with publicists and how he got back at them. Occasionally there's a tale of "How I Got That Story," but it's not that gripping. Back in San Francisco, his bosses were busy building and crashing a Hindenburg; Ledbetter tells the story of operating their outposts. Had he reported the story, and done interviews and dug around, his closeness to the story might have given him insights into the tale. But he didn't.