Insomniactive

Many of us lost a dear friend and role model today.  Lowell Lebermann died in his sleep at 70, mid-nap in his beloved summer Aspen hideaway.

For most of us, that’s the way we hope to go.  For Lowell, I’m not so sure.  I think he might have preferred signing off in the middle of a well-told story at his corner table near the buffet line at the Headliners.  A quick lunch with Lowell could take two hours, so numerous were the well wishers and ring kissers who stopped by.  For a blind guy, nobody knew any better when you were reaching for the check.  And nothing pissed him off more (other than perhaps a dining room dress code infraction or a loss by any Longhorns team).   By god, that was his table.  I have a feeling that it will remain so,  deservedly and forevermore, regardless of who sits there from time to time.

Roughly ten zillion  people knew Lowell better than I did.  That only makes what I found to be his promiscuous generosity and patient, wise counsel even more remarkable.  My wife says that I get crushes on older men rather than on younger women.  She’s right–mostly.  But this was no crush.  I loved Lowell Lebermann very, very much.  And I–along with about ten zillion others–will miss him terribly.

As Dan Primack posts, at a $10B  annual investment run rate, vc could actually get interesting again.

Nicely done, I thought.

Leave it to the intrepid Insomniactive to give name to a scandelette just as it vanishes from the news cylce beneath the sheer, crushing weight of  MJ’s memorial service, doubtlessly available in HD DolbySurround for a super-low PPV rate.  (Thrill-uhhh!!)   But anybody who’s still with me knows what I’m talking about when I say that we’ll call Katharine Weymouth’s latest of many headaches, DinnerGate.

Now, along comes TPM with the news that WaPo is not alone in manipulating the powerful few into paying for the product which reaches us, the enervated many.  Turns out Atlantic Media is guilty, too, and has been for a long time.  Probably not for as long as somebody in the Graham family has been giving dinner parties that aren’t exactly proletarian affairs divorced entirely from money and power, but close.

Am I the only one who feels the whole topic has more than a little of a “shocked, shocked to find gambling in this casino” feel to it?   (Casa Blanca-Gate?)   In being underoffended by the Post’s and the Atlantic’s dealings am I really showing my ethical pliability, or simply my pragamtism as a student of media business models?  Although it’s not exactly rocket surgery, Zack Roth’s paragraph is probably the most analytical that’s been proffered on the more generic topic of when dinner becomes DinnerGate:

What to make of all this? Clearly, there are degrees of egregiousness here. A corporate-sponsored event that’s off the record and closed to the media and the public seems more objectionable than one that’s open and on the record. Equally, an event that’s focused on a public-policy issue that’s of particular interest to the event’s corporate sponsor seems more objectionable than, say, having a clothing company or an airline put up money for a festival that treats everything from the global economy to indie rock, as in the case of The New Yorker. An event whose advertising seeks to lure corporate lobbyists by promising the ability to directly influence elected officials or journalists seems, perhaps, more objectionable than one where the potential for influence-peddling is at least less explicit. It’s also worth noting that when a daily newspaper risks compromising its coverage of a key policy issue, it probably does more damage than when a monthly ideas magazine appears to do the same.

Degrees of egregiousness, indeed.  But doesn’t this phrase apply to any media model in which ostensibly objective editorial is paid for by renting out the audience that said editorial endeavors to reach?   A tidal metaphor almost always works:  when the tide goes out, lots of ugly junk lies exposed on the rocks, replacing the placid serenity of the ocean’s surface which presented itself only hours before.  And folks, we saw high tide in the media business a long, long time ago.  Somebody has to pay the bills.  That’s why I have a hard time seeing public media as anything but a larger part of the overall mix ten years from now.

More evidence from Alan Mutter that newspaper retail ads spending will look more an L than a U.

Blogging is no longer cool.  Reminds me of the cathartic moment when Elmer Fudd realized that cartoons weren’t……weeeeal.

Paul Krugman argues unsurprisingly in this morning’s NYT that more stimulus is needed.  But he also reminds us that much of the pain will come at the state level, and will be concentrated at the low end of the totem pole:

Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.

I’ve been running around telling anyone who will listen (and several who would prefer not to) that falling and failing journalistic coverage of state budgets is a problem just because of the magnitudes in question.  Add to this the statutory requirements to balance those budgets,and concentration of lost services among those who can least afford to lose them.

Excellent article in VanityFair on Politico, which VF says is now breakeven on $15m of revenue, half each online and in print (32k circ) and 100 employees.

In the fourth issue of Wired magazine, in the fall of 1993, just as the Internet was entering public consciousness, Michael Crichton, the author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, wrote an essay arguing that newspapers were doomed because they were too dumb. As information became cheaper, more plentiful, and easier to get, consumers, he argued, would become ever more immersed in their specific interests and understand that their more generally oriented paper—at least in the matter of a reader’s special interest, but also by inference everything else—had no idea what it was talking about.

Where I think the article misses the mark, however, is by labeling Politco as almost exclusively the Wonkvile Chronicle, which is a description completely out of whack with a website that reaches 6.7 milli0n monthly uniques.  I agree that the new Allbritton publication has done an impressive job being a must read for insiders.  But its relatively irreverent voice and multi-layered content model has irrefutably expanded the debate on politics and public policy.  That’s at least a big a societal contribution as is the example it sets of a high-quality news organization that is closing in on purely commercial viability.