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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
At least Enron and WorldCom went down because of greed. But as James Ledbetter's "Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year" reveals, the Industry Standard pissed away a fortune out of mere carelessness.
Jan 10, 2003 | An ancient Greek playwright, you might think, could have had a lot of fun with the story of the rise and fall of the Industry Standard.
You've got your obvious case of self-damning hubris: founder John Battelle and his dream of global media domination. You've got an especially painful episode of vengeful Furies hounding your ass: Rarely indeed in this world does the founder of a magazine, in this case Battelle, fail twice (first at Wired) at storming the heights of Mount Olympus (usually you only get one try, and then you're done). You've even got that primal high note of tragic denouement -- a parent killing the child. Just as the obstinate and puritanical King Pentheus ended up murdered by his own mother, Queen Agave, who had been driven mad by the god Dionysus, so too did IDG, the Industry Standard's corporate backer, assassinate its own spawn. And even worse, in an act of humiliating revenge that is just so like a Greek deity, IDG rubbed salt in the Standard's wounds by purchasing the remaining assets of the magazine at a bankruptcy auction. Euripides would have been proud.
But if not a classic to grace the amphitheater at Corinth, well then, at least a riveting TV movie, right? Look at the numbers! In the year 2000, the Industry Standard grossed $200 million in revenue, and boasted more advertising pages than any other magazine ever, in all of publishing history. But less than a year later, the magazine's subscription renewal rates had plummeted to an astounding 35 percent -- a figure lower than anyone in the publishing world could remember seeing. And then in August 2001, it was over: The Standard ceased publication. How could such a fall from grace happen? In the summer of 2001, as the new economy shuddered to a halt, the question begged for an answer. And ever since, there's been a nagging puzzlement: Could a close examination of the Standard's entrails explain the delirium that swept over Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the publishing world?
Although he's not a writer with the chops of Sophocles, James Ledbetter, a former media critic for the Village Voice who was plucked to run the Standard's New York office and then head its ill-fated attempt to start a European edition, sounds at first like a good choice to handle the postmortem. The Industry Standard, under the leadership of editor in chief Jonathan Weber, produced some of the better journalism to be found in the plethora of new-economy mags that polluted the magazine landscape at the turn of the century. So who better to chronicle its own meteoric circuit than one of its own journalists? Neither a self-serving dot-com booster nor the even more annoying opposite, a told-you-so naysayer à la Michael Wolff, Ledbetter spent his year of post-Standard unemployment summing it all up.
But Ledbetter doesn't quite deliver the goods. Part of the problem is his location at the periphery. The story of the Industry Standard is both physically and psychically a Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area story. As a writer at Salon, when I drove to work one day across the San Francisco Bay Bridge and saw, running across the Standard's giant downtown electronic billboard sign, a headline announcing a round of Salon's own layoffs, it was like a punch to the solar plexus delivered by the heavyweight champ: It meant something. Likewise, when the news came that the billboard itself was shutting down, all of San Francisco had to concede that the boom was really, truly over. But as a New Yorker, parachuting into town every now and then, Ledbetter isn't able to effectively evoke the visceral sense of how crazed the technology media world became in the late '90s, especially in California.
Even worse, while all hell was breaking loose in the spring and summer of 2001, Ledbetter was in London, an awfully long way from the scene of the crime. The flaw could have been remedied if the book was reported from more of an outside perspective, but Ledbetter chooses instead to tell a mostly personal story -- the rise and fall of the Standard as Ledbetter saw it, at the time. Thus, at the most dramatic period in the meltdown, the narrative in the book is taking place 6,000 miles away, with chapter after chapter focusing on extraneous minutiae, such as a libel suit that never actually materialized in the U.K.
"Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year" is also a title that promises more of an edge, more of a sarcastic, Michael Lewis-style skewering. But this is no "Liar's Poker" or even "Burn Rate." Ledbetter is a capable writer, but his tone is breezy, treating both the important and unimportant detail in the same monotone. There is little drama.
The lack of excitement isn't Ledbetter's fault. The story itself is the culprit. In 1999 and 2000, to those who lived and worked in it, the dot-com explosion and its attendant media frenzy seemed like a huge, world-changing story, whether one was a fan or a detractor. But in retrospect, while the rise of the Internet was truly earth-shattering, the economic frenzy that surrounded it was just so much froth, an excuse for public relations companies and advertising agencies to suck from the venture capital teat. The fact that the Standard sold 7,000 pages of ads in 2000 to a horde of companies that didn't even exist a year later isn't a tragedy, and it isn't even a farce.
In light of what has happened since, it's hardly more than a footnote. When the news of the Standard's bankruptcy in August 2001 hit the media world, yes, it was startling. But that was before Sept. 11, before Enron, before WorldCom, before the public embarrassment of Wall Street's most famous stock analysts or such crimes against nature as Harvey Pitt's appointment as SEC chairman. Today, less than two years after the Standard's demise, "The Short, Absurd Life of the Industry Standard" (as the subtitle to Ledbetter's book reads) has lost much of its ability to shock. It's as if Oedipus was revealed to be a used car salesman forced by a malign destiny to drive one of his own clunkers. Big deal. At the end, the Standard was a badly run business that published competent stories about a great many badly run businesses. There's nothing to see in these entrails except a mess.
