Media people are deeply nostalgic for the media—for when it paid big money and was an exclusive sort of place. This nostalgia is behind Rupert Murdoch’s
new pay-for-content scheme—and his belief that he has a monopoly on what people want to read—which
he will apparently debut in November at the
Sunday Times in London.
But I have found an even better example of gross wistfulness. I missed it on Monday, when I was in deepest north England playing with sheep:
A tearful lament by
New York Times media reporter
David Carr about Tina Brown’s long-dead magazine,
Talk, and the party she threw to launch it 10 years ago.
Truly, it’s astounding that anyone would even bring it up. Brown’s magazine was a clunker from the start, and her party an odd, ungainly, and soulless event that everybody snickered about at the time.
But David Carr, new to media reporting, had recently come to New York, and, uninvited, nose pressed to the glass, was smitten by it all. That’s become his persona at the Times, the last person to be smitten by the media business—stubbornly so (and often nastily). He’s an apologist and a sentimentalist and booster for the good old media days and its personalities and organizations (especially the New York Times).
He is also a log-roller, a great media tradition in which one media person promotes him or herself through another media person (who believes he will be promoted in return). What Brown is doing in her indefatigable rounds of self-promotion is endeavoring to elevate her inconsequential and ignominious failure into a grand and tragic one. “The culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle,” writes Carr, echoing Brown, in a sentence without an iota of reality (or common sense), describing a mere press event where the big news was how much money was spent and how mad everybody involved was at everybody else for spending it.
Carr, in his recollection of the evening and its moment in media history, now admits, with characteristic condescension, that he missed the point of what was going on: “Most of us who covered media did not fully understand the implications of the new technology that could publish and distribute information at zero marginal cost. The Web was viewed as a niche, as a way to supplement and enhance the printed product, certainly not a threat that would make many of those publications obsolete.”
It seems like a lot for a media reporter to have missed.
Nor does Carr yet believe in his or Brown’s obsolescence. The real point of his column, undoubtedly at Brown’s log-rolling instigation, was for him to promote Tina Brown’s website, an online version of the same failed magazine, bank-rolled by Barry Diller, who also continues to believe, however nostalgically, in the media’s glamour (although he seems to have given up on believing in the media’s potential for profits). Carr believes that Tina Brown, who has not mattered for well more than 10 years, is forever.
And, indeed, like the media’s biggest nostalgist (and most desperate one), Rupert Murdoch, Carr also believes that a pay-for-content formula will evolve to save newspapers (at least the
New York Times), because, well, we must be saved. We deserve to be saved. Because where would the media be without media people?
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com.
