Dave Winer posted an MP3
podcast yesterday where he floated a friend's idea for an online radio
show focused on the intellectual life of Silicon Valley, including
interviews with venture capitalists at Kleiner Perkins.
The idea sounds a lot like the first few issues of Red
Herring. Hear me out ;->
This is the legend as relayed to me by a Sand Hill road VC principal
back in 2000. Back around 1993, Tony Perkins, having recently left Upside,
which he started, gathers a bunch of venture capitalists for drinks at a
bar and essentially asks, "what is the buzz out there? What is happening?
What is new and interesting on Sand Hill? What gets you excited? What is
the off the record truth, and by the way I'm turning all your tips into a
magazine."
The first issue was distributed BY HAND to offices on Sand Hill road
and other VC offices and probably some tech companies. It was laid out
over his business partner's parents garage on a mac with quark or
pagemaker. It had this great disclaimer in each issue that read something
like, "The information contained herein was obtained over drinks at such
and such, pancakes at Buck's, whispered behind the stage at such and such
show, passed across the dinner at such and such restaurant." The idea was,
we can't guarantee the absolute truth of every single statement, but we're
giving you the real insider chatter.
There was a certain intellectual energy and excitement at that point in
Silicon Valley, and Red Herring took off because it was where people who
were passionate about technology, especially mass technology and otherwise
monetizable technology, could read these spirited discussions and see who
the money thought was going to really take off and why and who was out of
favor and why and oh by the way here's some random new idea you might not
have heard of before. (Upside had been doing the same thing since 1989 but
Red Herring brought a maniacal focus on the Sand Hill VC community and was
more rabidly "insider". It also had free interns from Stanford to do a lot
of the grunt work.)
(For more on the early days of the magazine, read Gordon
Young's 1996 SF Weekly story.)
Unfortunately most people never met Red Herring until 1999 or 2000,
when it quickly became about money, money and did I mention money, put
out by a monster staff many of whom were transplants or felt like
transplants (the editor spoke with a British accent but grew up mostly in
LA).
What Dave is proposing hearkens back to the original mission and spirit
of Red Herring and even Upside, where you are interested in technology,
and the money is interesting because of what it says about the technology,
and in ideas, and the money is interesting because of what it says about
the ideas. I can tell you from direct experience, the idea in media since
the downturn began is, "we can't afford to talk about ideas. We don't have
the money to pay for the time and space. Talking about ideas and
technology in and of itself is a luxury we can't afford. Show me the
money. I am interested in the tech and the ideas only insofar as it
reflects on the money." Notice the inversion there.
Talking about the money is a great way to cut through all the PR crap
and hype but as it happens a terrible way to tell readers what is coming,
to give them the edge they want and, probably more importantly, is also a
poor way to stimulate their minds. It's ultimately a lazy shortcut if any
of those are your goals. In other words, writing about Google after it
goes public or RSS after the NYT adopts it is great for grandma but has
little utility for most readers.
Somehow newspapers and magazines are stuck in this idea that we need to
conserve space and words are a luxury. Umm, no. Why is the Washington Post
editor demanding
shorter stories? Has he gone hard drive shopping lately? Why is the
NYT charging for
opeds? Have they seen Google's
financials? Across the country, we have papers shrinking in size (literally, from
broadsheet to tabloid)
and ordering reporters to writer short little stories. Because space is a
luxury.
When in actuality we all, us reporters, should be encouraged to write
longgggg and deeeeep. To compete with the weblogs? Sure. But also because
-- why not? If the newsprint is really costing an arm and a leg, put a
condensed version in print and a link at the end. Put it on the website,
where the economics are more profitable anyway. The last paper I worked
for now offers
bonuses for short stories. They should offer bonuses (duh) for long in
depth stories that make the website something other than what most
newspaper sites are, "a pimple on the butt of something much larger," as a
wise man once put it.
Anyway, while the newspapers are NOT busy doing that, Dave's busy
actually USING all the space. Dave's VC podcast idea, or his friend's, or
colleague's, is bright because it does hat a lot of print media has
stopped doing, which is explore ideas for the sake of ideas, technology
for the sake of technology, and put money second. And Dave can do it
because he realizes there's ROOM. There
always was room, but for anyone to not SEE that today, when you can buy a
GB for well under a dollar, boggles my mind.
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