This Media Life

The Big Chill

The struggle it portrayed was about the vicissitudes of life at the ever-more-crowded top of the economic pinnacle. Indeed, in the magazine's go-go view, the pyramid has been inverted. It's the rich competing for the last morsels.

We are all individual entrepreneurs, personal brands (in that fast-fading lingo), duking it out for mindshare and market penetration.

The Times Magazine seemed like a mean Fast Company -- or the real-life version of Survivor, or this new show, The Weakest Link, with its innovation of a rude host (which may also go down in history as the only show we got sick of before it went on the air).

Possibly that is how its editors would defend their tonal choice -- where we are now, post-boom, is Fast Company with the gloves off, everyone trying to hold on to what gains he's gotten.

Now, I may be a stickler, but to me, this defines a past or even lost aspiration rather than a new one.

It does, however, bring up the issue of Fast Company, which was acquired last fall by Gruner + Jahr, a division of Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, for something like $500 million -- so you might interpret this move as a major media prognostication. Likewise, Condé Nast, which owns Wired, also bid big for the title. Now, it seems fair to ask on what basis these companies could possibly imagine that, with the overthrow of the dot-com nation and the collapse of the New Economy, anyone would want to read such a magazine.

It occurs to me, though, that this is another way to approach the conundrum of what's next. If your pockets are deep enough, you can just wait around till everybody else goes out of business -- it's the consolidation or Last Man Standing view of the market (indeed, many people say consolidation is what's next).

But it doesn't do much for the rest of us, who have to know what's next before the cash runs out.

I call up Kurt Andersen, whose company Inside.com, one of the best-funded and most highly publicized launches of the past year, was just sold for what, in essence, was the cash it had on hand (reportedly, the company had $10 million worth of venture capital left -- its cash was its asset).

We have a somewhat prickly conversation because Kurt is trying to put the best face on his situation. "Victory with an asterisk," he's calling it. "We've lost an arm, but we're still alive," he says. (This is partly my point: If Kurt's confidence is qualified, then whose isn't?)

But that's not really why I'm calling him. Rather, I want to tap his famous Zeitgeist sense at this exposed and vulnerable moment.

"All bets are off," Kurt says.

What he sees in the marketplace, and among those trying to bring things to the marketplace, is "simultaneous confusion and bewilderment."

It is, in his analysis, not just a mood thing but also a structural issue.

It used to be, he says, that if you built "a passionate audience around a media product, unless you were insanely stupid, a revenue-and-profit model would follow, but now that's not the case. It's like a law of physics being overturned."

There's an unbundling, he says, of advertising and media.

New media may not have worked, but old media doesn't work, either.

As for politics, he adds, "the system is almost Soviet, it's so behind the curve."

The dysfunction, says Kurt, who seemed fairly optimistic the last time I talked to him, has "never been so great on so many fronts."

His image of where we are now is a "big hung-over kid sitting in front of the contraption he's taken apart, and the pieces are shining, but he doesn't know how to put it back together."

Kurt is, no doubt, feeling the kind of blues that so many people are feeling now as their enterprises and sure things crumble.

Indeed, these blues, in and of themselves, probably exert a powerful influence on what's next.

I wonder if part of what is occurring is an opposite, but similar, condition to consumer confidence. That is, we have a deep crisis in sellers' confidence. The hype is suffering. The confidence to sell has been damaged. The hypesters are abashed.

The good thing about this, you can rationalize, is that the playing field is even.

We are all, at least for the moment, traumatized and clueless. (Talk magazine, heretofore embarrassing for its cluelessness, turns out to be prescient.)

Nobody has any advantage. Money isn't talking, technology is not a salvation, prime time is loony, magazine covers aren't selling, and AOL Time Warner (the AOL people just call it AOL) is about to be torn asunder by cultural revolution.

And your e-mails won't reach me until I find a new DSL provider.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com

What's "The Next Big Thing"? Talk with "This Media Life" columnist Michael Wolff in an online chat Wednesday, April 18, at 8 p.m. on newyorkmag.about.com.