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# an evening at webzine :: 07.22.2001 

I went to Webzine NY yesterday. Here are some fun quotes.

"I can't write salacious shit anymore, I've got advertisers." - Jason
Calacanis, explaining why his Silicon Alley Reporter can't operate the same way
as sites like Urban Expose, Fucked Company, or Dot Com Scoop, i.e. fast,
irreverant, and often inaccurate.

"I get email 20 different times from 20 different people saying 'my boss just
spent $10,000 of company money on hookers and crack', but I don't post it,
though it would be a lot of fun if I did." -Phil Kaplan, of Fucked Company,
explaining that he doesn't post stories that are explicitly personal.

"I ate that big mac because I wanted people to know that I was a flawed
person." - Michael Moore, on why he ate at McDonald's in one of his films.

I ended up chatting with Cam and Marco, and I met/talked to a bunch of others,
whose names I won't bother dropping. Some notes from the panels:

The Print vs. Web folks seemed to agree that print was much more engaging than
the web, at least for longer or less time-sensitive content. Ok, that's
obvious, I guess.

The "Investigative Zines" panel was the liveliest that I saw, but it was more a
'you had to be there' thing. It was interesting that almost everyone there
agreed that the corporate media were about as far from "objective" as they
could possibly be. Most of them had been misquoted repeatedly. They also agreed
that journalists are generally lazy, so PR has a huge influence on what is
reported. No suprises there, but it's good to hear that people other than left
wing wackos like myself know that the media is Really Quite Messed. Cease and
Desist letters were also mentioned. Ways of dealing with pissed off
corporations ranged from deleting the offending page and asking them to prove
it ever existed, to posting the cease and desist letters and linking them from
the offending comments, to making factual corrections.

Lori Berenson's dad showed up and talked about the vile misrepresentation of
his daughter's trial in Peru. She's been sentenced to 20 years in prison for
doing what a human rights activist does, it seems.

The Free Speech panel was chock full of near-free speech absolutists, but there
was some interesting (if familiar) talk of how corporations (or people with
lots of money) can shut down speech by suing someone with little money who say
things that they don't like. Even if the 'offender' in question wins the case,
they end up being bankrupted by legal fees.

Michael Moore started out kind of mumbly and said "um" a lot, but soon found
his groove, and gave an inspiring series of digressions, all somehow related to
the theme of doing good work (in independent media) without losing your moral
bearings and ideals. He talked about being published/broadcast by the folks who
work for Rupert Murdoch, and how at some point, he would ask for outrageous
things from the corporate types, like spending $250k on free screenings of
movies in poor communities, and people would just say "ok". Compromising to get
ahead, on the other hand, just builds the expectation that you can bend more.
He also talked about/digressed into the idea that we're taught as soon as we
get into school to fear failure, that it's punished, that it's bad, etc.. What
we forget is that one person can make a big difference, if s/he doesn't feel
the need to rely on a system or others to get there. If you want to make a
zine/film/whatever, don't wait for a grant, or funding, or whatever, just make
it happen, and go into debt if you have to, and learn from your mistakes.
Another theme was how powerful the internet is as an organizing tool. Examples
include organizing a nation-wide protest at Fox affiliates in a short amount of
time, whereas before the net, organizing a nation-wide movement would take a
year of hard work. 

Jason Calacanis had some interesting things to say about the whole indy vs.
commercial dichotomy. He said that cultural movements like internet publishing
start out as labours of love, which generate lots of interesting stuff, but
then people get greedy, and try to make money. Nothing I haven't heard before,
but more interestingly, he argued that zines like Inside.com, and even Feed and
Suck failed, and brought the content business down with them, because they
tried to turn themselves into multi million dollar businesses, instead of
regular old magazines. The harder they fall, I guess. He also stressed the need
for alternatives to banner ads, including truly disruptive (to the extent that
they are analagous to TV and Radio) interstitial ads. The porn industry, he
noted, didn't have the option of advertising from day one, so they developed an
industry wide way of paying for access to thousands of sites, which I guess is
worth looking into. Keenspot is working on a similar "pay once, get access to a
whole bunch of sites" model, though they do it by hosting all of the sites.

Somehow, I didn't mention Netslaves. Oh yeah, and Boycott Adobe, or better yet,
boycott Congress until they start making laws that take into account more than
corporate interests. 

karma: 1 (+/-)


6 comments: 

by tim :: 07.23.01 - 04:58 PM 


Calacanis should acknowledge his own conflicts of interest. Given the number of
times Suck has accused him of being everything short of a chicken fucker (and
that only because we couldn't get a second source), and specifically the number
of times we made fun of his harebrained scheme for TV commercials on the web,
his comments on our zillion dollar business plan (which in my 2.5 years as
Suck's editor consisted entirely of earning enough to pay our writers a decent
wage) can by no means be considered as disinterested observations.
by ryan junell :: 07.23.01 - 06:06 PM 


Hey Dru! thank you so much for posting your thoughts about the event. it was a
blast to organize and attend and I'm glad that you got something out of it.
Hopefully other folks will post their thoughts about the event and we can link
to all of them from www.webzine.ws.
by Swerdloff :: 07.23.01 - 11:53 PM 


The event was great, glad to see someone writing a cogent reaction to it.

Wish I'd had a chance to meet everyone there, instead of sitting almost inside
the speaker trying to watch the proceedings, laughing with Moore, getting angry
with Berenson, and wonder what was going on with Robot Frank.

Alas, next year maybe there'll be more chance to be social.
by Jason McCabe Calacanis :: 07.24.01 - 09:03 AM 


> harebrained scheme for TV 
> commercials on the web

I have a hard time taking anything Suck.com staffers say about business
seriously, calling my call for disruptive advertising harebrained shows just
how inept the folks @ Suck.com are when it comes to business. We all know that
advertising on the Internet needs to get bigger and be more distruptive and
CNET, X10, Yahoo, the NYTimes.com and Unicast are all pushing these types of
ads now. I think Tim is stuck in 1996.... which I don't blame him for, that was
the last time people even cared what Suck had to say.
by eddie codel :: 07.24.01 - 10:08 AM 


I was impressed by the fairly diverse and energized set of panelists and
speakers that were attracted to Webzine-NYC. I'm so glad Amy & Ellen took up
the cause and made WZ happen in NYC. It reminded me a lot of the energy of our
first SF event in '98. The takeaway for me is that independent, grassroots web
publishers will always be relevant. We have an obligation to explore and
exploit the full potential of this medium. We really have only scratched the
surface. OK, I'll yank my head out of the clouds now and put my cement shoes
back on.
by eddie codel :: 07.24.01 - 10:17 AM 


> We all know that advertising on
> the Internet needs to get bigger
> and be more distruptive

If it gets too annoying and disruptive, hacker-made tools will become a popular
way to defeat this. They already exist for filtering banner ads, but often they
are not annoying enough to bother figuring out how to install the tool. You can
bet this will change if the annoyance level ratchets up in this forthcoming
"new age of advertising enlightenment".