Crying Wolff

We have always had mixed feelings about Michael Wolff, the media critic and self-appointed expert on the nexus of Internet, media, and business. His main credential has always been his spectacular failure at publishing on the web, so it has always seemed odd that his judgment is considered golden when it comes to all things related to media. (The things we admire about Wolff: He’s a pretty good stylist, and he is fearless about skewering sacred cows in the media business. When you’ve been burned like he has, and still have the bank book he has, you know there’s an invulnerable safety net of some kind under the man.)

In his remarks to some convoluted conference on information, transcribed today at I Want Media, we started to realize precisely what it is we don’t like about him: He is a black-hearted cynic and a crab. Today, the tune he is singing goes basically like this: “Information wants to be free. (By the way, I was the first one to coin that phrase, y’know.) That is a truth that will kill media companies, because it devalues information across the board. If you are in the information business—as all media companies are—you are in a dying industry. You’re like the farmer who keeps planting corn after the industrial revolution.”

Here, we’ll let you read a few telling points for yourself:

“In the marketing and information business, there’s always a balance of power. In the magazine business, because there was this other revenue stream that allowed the magazine people to maintain what was commonly referred to (but what is almost never referred to anymore) as this church and state separation, we can do this thing. We can put out our product and we can have a marketing relationship with your product at the same time. It’s a sort of a parallel relationship.

“…As soon as you got rid of the subscription side, that parallel relationship started to change. And what you had was a marketing relationship, which almost in every case — certainly in the magazine business — took over the information side. And so in all but a few cases magazines have become marketing vehicles.

“…Why can’t anyone hold an audience? Well, people can’t hold an audience because there’s lots of competition and lots of other things to do. And media companies can’t hold an audience because what they produce is shit.

“…they just turn the dial or throw the magazine. We’ve created a situation of such high disposability of information that, of course, the value is going to drop.”

By way of illustration, Wolff suggests that the Wall Street Journal “stopped mattering” after it started charging for its content online. We’re not sure what this means, considering that the WSJ is still one of the most widely respected, profitable media companies in the world; if it is not the nation’s largest circulation newspaper, it is its second-largest. Wolff admits that the product did not change in any way—and he admits that it is still one of the greatest periodicals around. So what does he mean when he says it does not matter anymore, merely because Dow Jones clings to the silly idea that people will pay for their content online? If we had to hazard a guess, we’d say he’s talking about the elusive, evanescent quality of “buzz” that is primarily an inert gas that changes the voices of publishers, editors, and media critics—and that’s about all. (In the best case, ad buyers begin to huff the stuff, and then it’s Katie-grab-your-guns.)

See, the basic problem here is that Wolff reduces all information to a commodity—at the same time insisting that the media biz is dying because it provides a steady stream of “shit” for content. He gets moralistic about media content when it suits his grumpiness, but this is logically inconsistent, because he seems to believe that all content is interchangeable—it’s just ones and zeros, afterall. The steady move toward free content has, in his mind, compromised the line between marketing and credible editorial content.

He is probably right in the main, but this should be seen as an opportunity for contrarians. Just because the trend is toward free content does not mean that content has to be shit. The New Yorker and Vanity Fair are not crap publications because they make no money from their readers—nor because their cover price is but a laundering operation to defray the high cost of distribution. They are good because they are good.

Being a free publication ourselves, we have a few ideas on this subject. It is certainly true that readers have come to expect a great deal of information for free—both on the web and in the analog world. But the widespread availability of information does not automatically equalize all information, nor “devalue” it. (One could ask a very telling question from the other side of the equation—does the ubiquity of advertising devalue all advertisements? Maybe—but that just means there is pressure for advertisers to produce more memorable, higher quality ads, not fewer, less memorable ones. ‘Twas every thus: Quality is judged by, well, quality.) The existence of blogs does not compell us to set aside our dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick, nor does our rereading Moby-Dick prevent us from checking up on our favorite blogs.

We’re honestly kinda tired of this widespread dyspepsia that reduces the human mind—and the human attention span—to a sort of closed-economy with only so much warehouse space. The attention economy is merely the normal, longstanding human transaction of making quick, precise judgments as to what is worthy, and what is not. The vehicle of delivery, and the price of delivery have merely been distractions from which Wolff has fashioned a very lucrative punditing career indeed.