Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Inside.com wants your undivided attention, and $19.95 a month. Plus: Jesus goes local.
May 16, 2000 | After the stealth launch of Inside.com last week, the e-mail started flying. Despite a "Sneak Preview" disclaimer on its home page, a lot of people viewed this version (which they might have called a "beta launch" a few years back) as the final cut. Responses were mixed.
Jim Romenesko, auteur of the popular Media News site, asked readers for their reactions. So far, they have run the gamut from gotta have it to fugedaboutit. Romenesko's site, which has been cited as a source of inspiration (at the very least) for the Inside.com idea, stands to lose as much traffic as anyone (Salon included) to the megasite. But ignoring the arrival of the much-hyped brainchild of Powerful Media founders Kurt Andersen and Michael Hirschorn is like trying to ignore a dolphin in your bathtub. (That dorsal fin might give you the wrong idea.)
For those of us in the media who write about the media, tackling something like Inside.com is a lose-lose proposition. Fulsome praise might be interpreted, at worst, as job hunting (Kurt, you still have my risumi?) and at best as the sort of hall-of-mirrors reporting that people outside the media abhor. Criticism, of course, would sound like sour grapes, an SOS from a fishing boat about to be swept up in a tsunami.
That said, I have to admit that my first reaction to the site (which will cost $19.95 a month but is available now on a free 30-day trial basis) was weariness. It made me tired. Not bored, or filled with ennui (that describes the rest of my life), just intimidated by the seeming depth of Inside's coverage.
It reminded me of when I first began working on the Web five years ago. I called a movie publicist I knew to tell her about my new venture. She was more annoyed than intrigued.
"What is that, something else I have to learn?" she asked bitterly. "I already follow magazines, newspapers, film and TV -- now I have to look at something else?"
That's roughly how I felt upon first viewing Inside, like someone had just dropped a phone book on top of my pile of morning reading material and said, "Be sure to finish that by noon." I called some of my fellow media watchers to see if they felt similarly intimidated.
"I think the technology is terrific, but it still has a few start-up glitches -- such as Inside Dope not showing up for me when I clicked on [it] earlier today [Monday]," said Keith Kelly of the New York Post. "My job of finding and publishing scoops in the Post has so far not become any harder (or for that matter any easier) now that Powerful Media has added its own reporters to the beats I cover. That said, they have talented people plying the waters and I'd expect them to bring in some big catches at some point."
Other people seemed overwhelmed -- or maybe just annoyed -- by the basic ambition of the thing. "Inside's like reading an application for a kid trying to get into Harvard," said New York magazine's Carl Swanson. "It's intelligently, even hyperkinetically compiled to appeal to the insider, but in the end so densely well rounded to the point of being undifferentiated. It's hard to tell in all that blue text what's new, what's Web-speed 'news' and what's going to be just fun to read, and why I can't figure out whether those charts and data snippets that take up a huge part of the page are actually important. Being definitive is an awful lot of pressure to put on yourself."
All that copy -- diced up into comestible lists, numbers and gossip -- shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Andersen's C.V. Spy magazine, which he co-edited with Graydon Carter, was chock-full o' graphs and dingbats, a rolling parody of infofluff culture in the '80s, and New York magazine took on its own mildly subversive slant -- much to its owners' chagrin -- under his editorship. The problem with such an online embarrassment of riches is how to sort it all out.
Inside offers subscribers the chance to "customize" the site according to their interests. I ignored this feature at first and logged on Monday to find the late-breaking salvation of "Friends" at the top of The Big News, a feature on the front page. Fascinated as I was to learn that Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer were determined to hold out for $1 million an episode (I guess the success of "The Pallbearer" really went to Schwimmer's head), I thought there must be more to life than this. So I made a hierarchy of my interests with media on top and TV on the bottom, reloaded the page -- and nothing changed.
Of course, it could be that I'm doing it wrong ...
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