This Media Life

The Insiders

But it must be hard work all of a sudden. Without the prospective climax of an IPO, Inside.com looks a lot like the regular old publishing business (much to the horror, I'm sure, of Inside.com's VC investors).

Inside.com, which is charging $199 a year for a subscription, appears to be a trade-magazine or newsletter type of business -- or, possibly, it's the database business, an even lower rung on the information totem pole.

The publishing business traditionally (and hierarchically) divides between consumer publications, which are written by relative insiders (opinion-makers) for relative outsiders (people looking for an opinion), and trade magazines, which are written by relative outsiders (often people who could not get a job at non-trade publications) for insiders (the people who actually work in the industry being written about). Trade publications tend to become subservient to the industries they are covering. Given relatively limited audiences and advertising bases, they have to be pretty accommodating. Functionally, when you work for a trade, you work for the industries you're writing about. You're in the service business.

I can't think of two guys less culturally and temperamentally suited to trade publishing than Kurt and Michael.

I suppose you can argue that the verticality and the narrowcast dimensions of the Internet mean that we'll all become trade or specialty writers and publishers and that Kurt, as usual, is just ahead of the pack.

At the same time, I think what Kurt and Michael have in mind is to do the job of a trade publication by being sort of an anti-trade publication. Kurt and Michael believe they can do a better job than Variety or Billboard or Ad Age or Publishers Weekly. I am sure this is true -- although I'm not sure that quality in this context is that much of a trump card. In addition, they believe they have certain content skills that will allow them to transfer the sex appeal of a consumer publication to the heretofore unsexy trade world. (Michael has, in fact, suggested that users will be able to "roll around" in Inside.com's data.)

They believe, too (somewhat late to the party, perhaps), that there is inherent sexiness in the Internet, that a trade magazine is transformed, Cinderella-like, by all the new ways its information is going to be accessible to us: palm, cell, direct-to-cortex route. Indeed, they have a multiplatform mini-empire vision: conferences, push applications, personalized databases, even reverse engineering back to actual paper magazines.

Certainly it makes it sexy if Kurt and Michael are perceived as getting rich off their new business -- less sexy, though, if they're just perceived to be managing people inputting database fields.

As for getting rich, the problem would seem to be that Kurt and Michael are using someone else's $30 million. They've sold themselves to the VCs, who, typically, get at least five times their money back before anybody else gets anything at all. This imbalance worked all right in the easy-money Internet age when a start-up company could get a stock valuation of 20 or 30 times projected revenues. But it's a whole other story if you find yourself worth only what a trade magazine is worth (say twelve or thirteen times actual profits, which is something like a billion-dollar comedown).

Many media insiders I know say, So what's the big deal? Kurt and Michael may not get rich, but they have a job. Which just goes to show, and may explain why Kurt snubbed my panel, that most media insiders are closer to labor than to capital.

But trust me: Capital gets resentful when it finds itself doing nothing but supporting other people (at the New York Magazine-Industry Standard conference, Fortune editor John Huey implied that Jim Cramer had invested in Inside.com only because of his friendship with Kurt; Cramer said maybe you'd invest $100,000 out of friendship but not $3 million -- which is the point).

But assume the vc's turn patient, the Internet-stock market revs up again, and Kurt continues to generate far more publicity than his rivals in the insider-media-information business. Still, the question persists: How interested are people in whether Kurt showed up for my panel? How repeatedly do we want the media to reflect itself? Does the production and dissemination of larger and larger amounts of gossipy information make it more or less titillating, more or less valuable?

The sneak preview of Inside.com seems ably assembled -- but I'd prefer not to know most of what I'm reading here (and, in fact, much of it I've already read somewhere else).

The more important question, though, might be: How interested are Kurt and Michael in this stuff?

Kurt's novel, Turn of the Century, is filled with minutiae and background details about the media business, of who said what to whom and who crossed whom how. So maybe it seemed logical to turn this fascination into a business. But I'd guess that there is a big difference between being interested in the mechanics of the media business and being interested in the comedy of manners that is the media business -- which, do not doubt, is Kurt's essential interest. Kurt is, remember, a co-founder of Spy magazine.

Kurt's novel is an extended joke; Inside.com is a literal and earnest enterprise.

Kurt is a charmingly snobbish writer with an advanced ironic sensibility. The Web is a pretty irony-resistant environment; it's a leveling experience. A snob's purgatory.

But it could, I suppose, be a great place for a hack's trade magazine. It would be something if Inside.com turned Kurt Andersen into an outsider.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com