The Hot Blog

« Oscar Movie du Jour 2 - Frost/Nixon | Main | Who Will Defend This Poor Man? »

October 29, 2008

I Broke A Sweat This Morning.

Change, like death, is a funny thing. You may know it’s coming… stages come and you see them… but every now and again, while in process, you realize that it is actually happening.

This morning was one of those moments. On the heels of critics getting knocked off left & right, more LA Times lay-offs, both Hollywood trades going up for sale, Peter Bart publicly whining about not getting enough awards ads (and sinking to claiming it was a betrayal of the talent… another pathetic tactic from Variety), and the Christian Science Monitor going weekly in print but primarily online, this morning brought a round-up of more of the out-of-work from Anne Thompson, a private e-mail gone public via Crazy Nikki suggesting that Below-The-Line is just a few lost ads from shutting down the paper, and your freindly neighboorhood film critic is one step closer to being The Manohla & Tony Show today.

Holy Jesus Marimba, Batman!

We have run a very tight little ship at Movie City News through our six years in business. And right now, we face one of the oddest moments in our site’s experience. Suddenly, there is a rather large group of higher-profile journalists who are now in our price range… too many for our price range. There are even a significant number of quality writers who would simply be happy to have a place to keep their work in front of the industry.

But now, faced with an abundance of talent out there, we have to determine how much candy we can eat and still serve our readers and the writers who work with and for us. It has been our experience that more is not necessarily better.

And then there are the economics of it all.

We too are facing a bit of an advertising slump this awards season. We feel that we will make it up, for the most part. But the smaller the organization, the smaller the pinch needs to be to be felt.

And it’s very personal. Unlike bigger companies, I don’t feel entitled to cut salaries, take our few full-timers from full to part time or to ask for less (for even less money) from the part-timers, and to be any less generous than our revenues allow. When we hire someone like Kim Voynar, it is not just a hire, it is a personal obligation to another human being who has responsibilities and needs. She becomes a part of our family. (Not everyone has felt that way… and in each case, the person has moved along to other opportunities.)

Still, Kim has been going to Cannes for years with Cinematical and our ad sales during the rest of the season will determine whether she can make that trip for us this year. I’m not one for bake sales or begging. So we will see.

But these kinds of luxuries have already been confronted over the last couple of years by outlets like the LA Times, where debates over how many are heading to Toronto have been reported in both the last festival years. We’ve been cruising comfortably above that fray. But not so much today.

And while there is so much compelling and suddenly low-hanging fruit, the truth for us is that we should invest more in the staff we have than go out looking to add more names to the masthead.

The other choice would be to seek outside dollars to build the machine. But that seems INSANE.

The history of the Huffington Post, to my eye, is that the idea of a load of celebrity bloggers was never a successful driver of that site… that the site only really accelerated when the election season heated up and the they started sections like “Off The Bus,” which cost almost nothing and have generated more attention to the site than any of their celebrity efforts. They also became a much more successful aggregator of news in the last six months, becoming a legitimate liberal response to The Drudge Report.

That said, Andrew Sullivan, all on his own and very committed, has become a better political aggregator than the entire staff of the HuffPo.

Still, HuffPo continues to expand into new and more irrelevant sections.

Tina Brown joined the fray with the unnavigable The Daily Beast, which is loaded with name talent and gets a click on its bookmark from me only after I have gone through every other thing I have to get through in my surfing day. And even then, I have never read more than one thing on that site. It isn’t an indictment of the writing on the site… it’s just too f-ing much. And 80% for more of it seems frivolous while at least 18% more of it seems like old news in internet time. There is no Woolcott or Sullivan or even a strong play of until-recently-unknown guys like the left/right Politico pairing of Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin.

So here is Movie City News doing… what? Taking on the trades? Adding more voices to an already-so-loud landscape? Parsing Hollywood to the point where people start turning all of it off because they just get overwhelmed (Too Much Candy Syndrome)?

I know, from history, that what happens to an industry in a severe narrowing is that many people are forced to give up on that industry. And in that process, many of those people are really, really talented. Someone like Sheigh Crabtree, who is very, very smart and strong in certain areas of journalism and ready to step to the next level in others, is writing screenplays. Now, maybe 90% of journos have a secret screenplay… but that tough business has looked tougher than journalism… until these days.

And really, the internet has become a home for cast-offs. Nikki Finke and Jeffrey Wells are both former TM journos who had pretty much run out of places that would hire them. But both have found a place doing it on their own on the web to some real success. And I, admittedly, hated working for traditional media, and knew I would from the start, starting my career by pitching a column (denied! and revived for the web, 11 years ago). We are all quite different and play by very different rules, but we are Personality Bloggers. There are Outlet Bloggers, like Anne Thompson, Peter Bart, and Patrick Goldstein. And the only real crossover blogger covering the movie beat remains David Carr, who is a big-time Personality Blogger for the biggest Outlet, the New York Times. But there are no other such creatures at NYT or at any of the other majors. (CNN’s Jack Cafferty has become the first such crossover television blogger, another breakthrough hybrid.)

Anyway… it’s ugly out there. MCN is fortunate, amazingly, to not have a business loaded down with a dozen $70,000 a year (or more) journalists. But the urge to continue to grow and finding the resources to do it, even in our more modest way, will be every bit as challenging for us as maintaining has been for LAT and most of the rest of Traditional Media.

We are all suddenly – though we all saw it coming - facing the question of who we are, who we want to be, and what we need to do in order to preserve the things we consider critically important to our ongoing futures. Traditional Media, New Media, Big Media, Small Media. If you're not Batman or Spider-Man, you are thinking... a lot.

We could use a 10 Commandments to guide us. But we are on our own in this desert. I hope we find our way to the next great future.

Posted by dpoland at October 29, 2008 01:04 PM

Comments

Posted by: LYT at October 29, 2008 03:21 PM

Posted by: Dave Vernon at October 29, 2008 07:17 PM

Posted by: frankbooth at October 30, 2008 12:55 AM

Posted by: LYT at October 30, 2008 02:23 AM

Posted by: hcat at October 30, 2008 08:15 AM

Post a comment