The Call Up

December 19, 2012 9:00 am

"Brian’s insight is that in a world of loudest and fastest, he has turned it down, doing it slow and doing it right,” Mr. Sicha said. “And by being consumer facing, he doesn’t have to have monster numbers. The people come ready to buy."

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Interesting piece on the new affiliate web models, where scale and volume are irrelevant and quality is the barometer. I would love to see a business model that could produce Gawker-esque results without the Nick Denton approach — slave-driving production of snarky drivel.

(Source: The New York Times)

Comment

January 23, 2012 3:30 pm

"Amid the plague that hit the magazine industry back then, Esquire was worse off than most. Beaten up by a crop of lad magazines like Maxim, then hammered by the flight of advertisers and readers to the Web, Esquire suffered a 24.3 percent loss in advertising pages compared with 2008, which was almost as bad, by the way."

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I mostly chose this quote because it uses the term “lad magazines,” which makes me giggle. I imagine Disney-like characters with fair hair and square chins, bounding down cobble-stoned streets, slinging papers, whistling tunes, maybe tipping their caps to the ladies. Also it’s a good article, which uses the aforementioned term more than once.

(Source: The New York Times)

December 27, 2011 11:30 am

"I think that the ability to sit at your desk and check everything against history and narrative, it’s part of how newspapers ended up becoming … daily magazines. All the analytics are baked in because the reporters are able to check stuff as they go. … Now the business model has not kept up with that."

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Between this interview and watching Page One, I have decided I need to read more David Carr.

(Source: NPR)

December 7, 2011 8:14 pm

Everyone needs to watch this movie, if for no other reason than David Carr drops some of the most amazing one-liners I’ve ever heard. And it’s insightful and thought provoking and blah blah blah.