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The media minuet
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May 4, 2000 | But at conventions such as the Media
Summit, produced by the Standard and New
York magazine and held in New York's
Museum of Modern Art Wednesday, these
moguls are given the opportunity to talk
about something else for a change. Like
their competitors. But like the
Pokémon they resemble, they keep
steering conversation back to themselves
and their businesses. Michael Wolff, New York's media
columnist and the author of "Burn Rate,"
kicked off the proceedings by saying he
had been to 63 such conferences in the
'90s. Then he added, "Kurt Andersen was
on that many [panels] last week." Andersen, erstwhile New York magazine
editor and founder of the forthcoming
media gang-bang known as Inside.com, was
supposed to appear that morning, but
apparently did not want to cross the
picket lines outside. (The MOMA staff is
striking for better salaries, health
care, etc.) And probably didn't need to
be on another panel. Wolff mentioned seeing David Remnick at
the Technology Entertainment Design
Conference in Monterey, Calif., this
year and asked him why he was there.
"You told me I had to start going to
these things," Remnick said. Why? For media reporters such as
himself, said Wolff, it was for access
-- how to get your phone calls returned
the next time you're on deadline. For
entrepreneurs and players they provide a
chance to talk one-on-one. Before
lawyers get involved, Wolff added, "and
suddenly you're off the air." This was the first of several references
to the ABC-Time Warner
fiasco that morning. The summit's
first guest, AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong,
took the stage looking pretty pert for a
man whose company's shares had fallen 14
percent the day before. Speaking of the
brave new future of broadband and
wireless surfing (a future he has
invested over $1 billion of AT&T's money
in) he said, "No longer will we be able
to draw a bright line between content
and conduit." Tell the folks at ABC. Jonathan Weber, the editor in chief of
the Standard and Wolff's co-moderator,
followed Armstrong's remarks with a
question about the ABC-Time Warner
dust-up, calling it an example of
not adhering to principles of
collaboration and putting the customer
first. In moderating terms, this is called a
"softball," but Armstrong chose not to
gloat over the misfortunes of other
conglomerates. His outlook was
consistently sunny, focusing on the
future of 1,500 channels, with carriage
for everyone and greed for none. But the blackout (which ended the
previous day, about 36 hours after it
began) seemed to be on everyone else's
minds. If nothing else, it made the
consequences of monopolization less
abstract than, say, the Department of
Justice's brief against Microsoft.
Suddenly, people couldn't find their
favorite channel on cable and it all had
to do with synergies. ABC-ESPN-Disney
was tangling with Time Warner-AOL and
its minions, reminding me of that old
AIDS maxim: When you go to bed with
someone, you're going to bed with
everyone they ever slept with. When you do a deal in the world of media
monopolies, you're doing a deal with
everyone that company has done deals
with. Which works until it doesn't. Geraldine Laybourne, chairwoman and CEO
of Oxygen Media, learned this lesson the
hard way. Her nascent network can't be
seen on Time-Warner cable; they'd have
to remove one of those Arabic stations
or C-Span II to accommodate her. (This
may all change given AOL's deal with
Oxygen.) She was on a panel considering
the convergence of the Internet and
entertainment Wednesday morning. "I
thought Monday morning Time Warner was
going to put us in that Channel 7 spot,"
she said dryly. The news panel that followed was a
little more old guard: Arthur O.
Sulzberger Jr. of the New York Times and
Norman Pearlstine of Time, Inc. compared
notes and concluded, after all the
tsoris of years past, maybe the Internet
wasn't such a bad thing after all. "We want to reach the audience and we'll
reach them in any media," said
Sulzberger with the fervor of recent
convert. "The game is news." Is converging print and new media
something you spend a lot of time
thinking about? Weber asked Pearlstine. "We did," Pearlstine replied. "It was
called Pathfinder."
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