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June 6, 2003
Sympathy for Jason Blair? Let me say at the outset that I have no sympathy for Jason Blair. But as I've said before, in an article posted here a couple of weeks ago, Blair's conduct must be put into its proper context. He was, as I've said, a "Dot-Com Reporter", and in the original article, I sought to sketch out a few features of the world he inhabited prior to being promoted to covering national stories for the New York Times, and to suggest that he'd picked up some fairly rotten habits during his tenure there covering this world. What is a Dot-Com Reporter? Well, I'm not talking about people like Chris Bryan, Chip Beyers, or John Dvorak here, whose reportage generally follows the old-line rule that a reporter needs to be highly skeptical when confronted with any information from any source with any possible motive for disseminating it. These guys - and many other good technology reporters - know that their role as information gate-keepers means that corporations and flacks are going to try to spin them for their own ends, and they do their best to avoid being used. Instead, I'm talking about your run-of-the-mill Dot-Com reporter - a young person, like Blair, who's being overworked, underpaid, and consistently being fed a stream of self-serving information from people who are richer, more powerful, popular and influential than they are. In Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley in the 1990's, when you couldn't even take a cab ride without the cab driver bragging about his tech portfolio, that was just about everybody. You used to see these sad, unkempt tech scribes at COMDEX and PC Expo back when they were big computer trade shows (I was one of them), drinking free coffee and eating free cheese cubes in the Press Center, fearful of the time they'd have to walk out on the floor with their bright-blue PRESS badges stuck on their lapels, because they knew that every marketing guy making three times their salary would instantly attack them and force them to watch some agonizingly boring product demo. They also simmered in the knowledge that in the overall scheme of the tech biz, they were abject losers, because the agreements their employers made them sign forbade them from owning stock in any of the companies they covered (several enterprising tech scribes attempted to circumvent this restriction, but that's another story). Now Blair, obviously, was never one of these sad sacks. He didn't work for E-Commerce Times or Computer Shopper, he worked for the Times, which meant that the people he reported on knew how much he could do for them. Consequently, he transcended the "shlubby tech reporter" category - as I mentioned before, he was considered "A Pundit" - which is something that few people from Embedded Processor Monthly ever get to be. So what is a Dot-Com Reporter? Well, a bottom-feeder, working for a trade publication, whose bosses clearly don't suffer from the same ethical headaches that "Real Journalists" have to struggle with in the "Real Media". Why? Well, it's really not part of his culture. His editor has told him, in not so many words, that "words are woodchips". They're a necessary evil that's only required because if a magazine doesn't have 25% editorial content in its pages, it's billed not at Magazine Rates, but at (much higher) Catalog Rates. Hence the need for the poor sad tech scribe: to produce gobs and gobs of copy that is accurate enough not to get the readers pissed off, but not so accurate that the advertisers get pissed off. Truth, integrity, and high-falutin' notions that some professor at Journalism School may have put into the tech scribe's are washed away by the time he's filed his 100th Product Review. Let me give you an example of what most Dot-Com Reporters did during the Great Technology Boom. I happened to run across this story by accident, while researching a short article that I was writing on BizBuyer for Ghost Sites. Bylined by two reporters named Andy Wang and James Hollander, it appeared in the June 22, 1999 issue of E-Commerce Times. You can find it at the URL: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/635.html Here are two key blocks of text that I'd like you to look at: From The E-Commerce Times Article (paragraphs 4 and 5): In 1998, 22 million small businesses purchased $800 billion in products and services, and BizBuyer.com is aiming to tap into this fast-growing market by simplifying the buying process. "By 2003, thousands of small businesses will be purchasing mission-critical products and services online, resulting in a $1.3 billion boom in business-to-business e-commerce," said Peter Mills, managing partner of @Ventures.
Now take a look at an archived CMGI press release, also dated 6/22/99: Its URL is: http://www.cmgi.com/news/prdata/Ventures_Funds_ From The CMGI Press Release (paragraphs 3 and 4): In 1998, 22 million small businesses purchased $800 billion in products and services. Researching these products and services has been a source of frustration for countless professionals due to the time and resources needed to identify appropriate vendors and obtain competitive bids. Recognizing this unmet need, Bernard Louvat formed BizBuyer.com to provide small business operators with a one-stop solution - the first comprehensive online business-to-business marketplace where they can put their product and service needs out for bid and receive quotes from qualified vendors. "By 2003, thousands of small businesses will be purchasing mission-critical products and services online, resulting in a $1.3 billion boom in business-to-business e-commerce," noted Peter Mills, Managing Partner, @Ventures. "BizBuyer.com has the management team, the know-how and the vendors in place to be the de-facto standard in this exploding market." Also note this passage (paragraph 3 in the news article): Currently, the Web site is in beta testing with 1,000 Internet service providers bidding on requests from buyers across the country. BizBuyer.com's service is free to buyers, while sellers are charged for submitting bids. And compare it to a block of text from paragaph 4 in the CMGI press release: The site is currently in Beta testing with its Internet Services category; 1,000 Internet Service Providers are bidding on incoming requests for proposal from buyers across the country. The service is free to buyers, while vendors will pay to submit bids. As you can see, these paragraphs contain not only major similarities with the CMGI press release, but entire entences that have been lifted out and plopped into the news article. Reading the E-Commerce Times article also leads one to believe that Peter Mills "said" what he said to the reporters, whereas it was just a mention in the press release. Other sections of the news article contain the same information printed in the press release, but are rewordings, not verbatim cut and pastes. At no time is there any indication that the main, possibly the only source of the information in the news article is a CMGI press release. Do you think that CMGI called back on June 23rd and said: "hey - you guys ripped off our press release?" Not on your life - the story did the job of getting the word out about bizbuyer.com. Do you think that any reasonable reader of E-Commerce Times happened to note the similarities, and called the editors? Unlikely. Again, I only happened to stumble upon this article by accident, four years too late to do anything about it but observe that this is what Dot-Com reporters do - they suck in information (often under extremely intense pressure to scoop their online competition - note the June 22 date on both the press release and the news article), chew it for a bit, and spit it out. This is how press releases become Gospel Truth, and, if you multiply this instance by a couple of thousand "News Articles" over a period of years, credulous, press-release friendly Dot-Com style reporting explains in large part how the investing public got euchered by the unseemliest elements of Corporate America in the late 1990's. It seems to me that the New York Times, and other well-reputed newspapers across the land, will likely take meaningful steps to reform their internal processes to prevent another Jason Blair from emerging anytime soon. But the situation among the technology press and trade publishing in general is far murkier. Until such time as people start raising a stink about the way these news organizations do their work, especially in regard to how they distinguish between flack-fed information and real reporting, we all have a far more sinister thing to worry about than the possibility that one or two "Jayson Blairs" will emerge.
Which is, of course, that a vast, uncounted army of Jayson Blairs is out there right now, clicking away in the darkness, and these people will never emerge.
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Ghost-o-Meter You're on the web a lot. You've seen many a dead site. You've forgotten our email address... and you don't feel like coming back here to get it. What do you do? Ghost-o-Meter (javascript required) The Ghost-o-Meter opens a small, movable window... if you've found a Ghost Site, fill in the blanks, fire it off, and go back to foolin' around. Its that easy. You can also use this form: What the ??! Well, this is all very interesting, but what the heck is Ghost Sites anyway? Why devote a live site to Dead Sites? If you're interested in this Ghost Sites thing, it is a project that I began in the summer of 1996 while I was working for Time-Warner's Pathfinder. Late in the evening of July 4th, while piloting a small craft across Long Island Sound, I had what only can be described as an epiphany. From out of the depths came a cruel vision of the World Wide Web. It wasn't a friendly place - an innocent place of community, commerce and chat. It was a great and utterly pitiless electronic ocean that swallowed up sites, careers, and venture capital like a ravenous killer whale. Great sites - sites like Mecklerweb and iGuide - were going down with all hands. Great fortunes were collapsing and proud content sites lay wrecked on the bottom. No one seemed to care. The future was a vast abyss - who would record these days of New Media folly, disaster and despair? Back on shore, but still haunted by this vision, I launched Ghost Sites as a modest attempt to document the great disappearing fleet of web sites sinking beneath the waves. This project briefly made me spectacularly famous, and then I was quickly, and completely forgotten. By March of 1997, Ghost Sites had succumbed to the same deadly entropy that had settled over the Internet, and became a crewless wreck itself. For six cruel months, it drifted like a despised garbage barge, broke its keel in a summer squall, and finally washed up on Geocities. On an icy November morning, Morbus boarded the wreck, inspected the damage, and offered the captain a safe harbor. The bilge pump was started, and the squealing, rusty hull lifted off the sands again. It soon arrived here - in the dark, unquiet waters of Disobey.Com. If you have a favorite rotting site that you'd like to mention, email me at Steve_Baldwin@hotmail.com. Ghost Sites has appeared in a number of places including Time Magazine, ZDNet, The Netly News and more. For a list of all those we know of, as well as links to online counterparts, click here. You can also take a look at the limited edition t-shirt we once offered. Previous Issues Text issues? Click here.
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