BOOKS
Wild Ride
Last Stop on the Dot-Com Express
Starving To Death on $200 Million: The
Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard |
When a journalist hears news of his or her publication’s death, the first impulse, believe it or not, may not be to commiserate with family and friends, but rather to pick up the pen; the problem comes when the journalist realizes that his or her forum for eulogy is gone. On the day I lost my job as New York editor at a magazine quite similar in scope to The Industry Standard, I remember having the primary urge to write about it; instead, I did the next best thing: I called The New York Times media reporter I knew. On the phone, I expressed regret that I wouldn’t be able to cover the publication’s wake. His response: “You can. You just have to find the right place to put it.”
It didn’t take long for James Ledbetter, first The Industry Standard’s New York editor and then editor of its European edition, to find his forum for grieving. Within weeks of the publication’s folding, word had reached media circles that Ledbetter would be writing the definitive tale of what happened. The results of his effort, Starving To Death On $200 Million, deserves to be read not merely as a tale of how the Standard lived and died in accordance with the great dot-com standard of the day, but also how one survivor from the wreck managed to put to rest his early post-mortem suspicion that the publication, despite all its hype-wielding and free-spending sins, had died prematurely.
In 1998, a year after John Battelle left Wired magazine to launch
the Internet business’s “version of Variety” with
the technology trade-publishing house of IDG, James Ledbetter
got seduced. Battelle and editor Jonathan Weber recruited Ledbetter
from his post as media critic for The Village Voice to run the
Standard’s New York bureau, even though, as Ledbetter admits,
he had only a passing familiarity with what was going on. “The
companies that made the Internet work constituted an unfamiliar
galaxy to me,” he writes as he attends his first dot-com
party. “I had that unmistakable sensation of there’s-something-happening-here-but-you-
don’t-know-what-it-is. My first impression was of youth:
here were more than 150 people, and at the ripe old age of thirty-three
I could plausibly have been the oldest person in the room.”
Ledbetter found himself fascinated by what was going on in this shadowy parallel universe where big money and foreign technojargon were being thrown around at will. Despite the anxiety that went with less than full comprehension, he took the job.
Ledbetter wasn’t alone in jumping on the fast-moving train heading somewhere, if not up. In April 1999, a year after the publication was launched, the Standard employed twelve full-time writers and two executive-level editors to fill sixty-page issues. By the end of that year, the editorial staff had tripled and was producing issues 250 pages thick. By the end of the following year, in 2000, the editorial staff had tripled again (to 129 employees), even though the advertising revenues were starting to bleed.
At the time, growth seemed the obvious course. The Standard (like other magazines in the New Economy field) had been sharing the same bed as the men and women it had been profiling in its pages. Venture capitalists invested hundreds of millions of dollars into tech companies. Tech companies were told to eye the public market by growing as quickly as possible. The only way for the companies to do that was to advertise, and what better place to advertise than in publications the companies’ executives claimed to be “reading”? In turn, the magazines themselves became fatter and fatter, and the only way to keep a healthy advertising-editorial ratio was for them to hire more reporters and expand operations.
Throughout the book, Ledbetter alternates between waxing whimsical at what fine features and news spreads were going into the magazine, and feeling somewhat uncomfortable with a phenomenon that was surely getting its share of hype from a growing pool of reporters, who just had to talk about something, one way or the other. Ledbetter acknowledges that when he was asked on television what a company called Bamboo.com was all about, he completely muffed the answer. “The most telling angle of the story,” he writes, “is that no one ever bothered to point out my error.”
It would be a mistake to call Ledbetter’s book an atonement for The Industry Standard’s sins. No, his op-ed in the January 3 New York Times would try to do that. Here, Ledbetter’s guilt for being part of the hype machine is far outweighed by his admiration for the publication he worked for. For all its excesses, Ledbetter believes it was well worth saving, and he hunts for a possible culprit. Indeed, the book is framed as a mystery — “Was it a murder?” “Was it an overdose?” Ledbetter asks in the introduction — and by the time he gets around to settling the question, he has examined as suspects a parent (IDG) rife with jealousy and bruised ego; an out-of-touch, disillusioned founder (Battelle); and overspending executives who failed to pursue an IPO, another partner, or anything else that could have prolonged the Standard’s life.
Ledbetter spends the last chapters imagining some of these scenarios. Most of them are confusing. On one page, Ledbetter argues that the company could have spent $6 million less on marketing p.r.; just a few pages later, he argues that the Standard could have become a younger, hipper Business Week, if only the company had spent a lot of its marketing money on publicizing the editorial changes it started to make in 2001.
By that time, of course, advertising had fallen an astonishing
74 percent from the previous year and the European edition that
Ledbetter edited had folded. The American edition would soon follow.
“It’s nearly impossible to see how the story could have
ended differently — even if the company’s management
had been flawless,” he writes. Like a grieving family member
of a victimized relative, Ledbetter’s trauma has come full
circle — from denial and anger, to bargaining and depression,
to final acceptance. In the end, Ledbetter settles on neither
murder nor overdose; rather, he concludes, it might simply have
been the magazine’s time to go.
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