February 2006 Archives

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Eater on Bruni on Del Posto

Ben Leventhal handicaps the NYT review of Del Posto, due on the web at midnight tonight: "The safe money is on three stars. The betting man takes 50-1 odds on two stars and 100-1 on four." Either of which I'd happily take. After all, I do have a pretty good track record of winning bets entered into with Eater editors. (I have a much worse track record of actually collecting on the bets, however.)

Posted by Felix at 18:02 EST | Comments (1)

New Yorker covers

No one likes it when something they do for a magazine gets spiked. Bill Robinson, a New Yorker illustrator, did a cover for the magazine to tie in with Mardi Gras, and it ultimately got bumped for a more topical Dick Cheney – Brokeback Mountain cover when the shooting incident occurred. Robinson tells his story with rancor:

Louisiana had received its share of coverage lately I was told. They tried to find a place for it inside the magazine. Everyone said they were sympathetic. But nothing happened.
So we've been shunted aside again.
Our collective sorrow and tragedy mattered less than a single hunting accident.
I really had hoped that compassion would win out over clever.

But Robinson doesn't have distance, of course. The fact is that the cover the New Yorker ended up going with was fantastic, one of the best in recent memory. Gothamist has them side-by-side, and there's really no contest. The Cheney cover elegantly covers many bases, from Brokeback and the shooting to the carefully-cultivated cowboy image of both Cheney and Bush; it does so cleverly and with impressive visual power. The Mardi Gras cover, on the other hand, is visually a bit wishy-washy, and is rhetorically clunky ("Katrina" written out on a party frock for those who didn't get the meaning of the tears on all the faces.) Yes, the spiked cover works better when blown up to full size. But it's not the kind of thing which grabs attention at the newsstand.

Posted by Felix at 16:58 EST | Comments (0)

Experimenting

The long-awaited All New felixsalmon.com will be here Real Soon Now, so I'm experimenting with shorter entries. Do not be alarmed.

Posted by Felix at 0:54 EST | Comments (4)

The global carry trade

It's good to see that global financial markets can still get volatile occasionally. Last week the Icelandic krona fell 9% in two days for no real reason: the plunge was precipitated by a ratings downgrade from Fitch. Of course, people sold the krona not because they feared an Icelandic default but because, well, everybody else was selling the krona. And if everybody's selling, then the carry-trade salad days are coming to an end.

Brad Setser has some very good analysis on all this. Of course, being Brad Setser, he feels compelled to mention that Iceland was running a large current-acccount deficit. But Iceland's current-account deficit, as Brad knows full well, was no more the cause of the krona's fall than the Fitch downgrade was. The point is that currencies which benefit from the carry trade are always going to be in a precarious position, because there's no hotter money than the money which is sitting in overnight bank accounts run by traders with hair-trigger reflexes.

Here's how it works: hedge funds, and prop desks, borrow money at something less than 5%, and then buy the Icelandic krona, which yields something more than 10% thanks to the central bank desperately trying to cool down an overheating economy. It's a great trade, unless and until there's a sudden fall in the krona, which can – and did – wipe out a year's worth of carry in a day and a half.

Where does this leave Brazil? I still think the Brazilian carry trade is a no-brainer. It doesn't even really matter where you're borrowing: it can be in yen at 0%, or in Swiss francs at 1%, or in euros at 2.25%, or in dollars at 4.5%. The only number worth concentrating on is where you're investing: in Brazilian reais at 17%. No credit rating agency is going to downgrade Brazil any time soon, I can assure you. And Brazil doesn't have a current-account deficit, so there's no "natural" downward pressure on the currency. Yes, there's an election this year, which can cause volatility, but the worst-case scenario, as far as the markets are concerned, is the status quo of a continuation Lula government.

The krona collapse spilled over into Brazil (now there's a textbook example of contagion for you) not because traders were worried about Brazil being next, but because they'd made so much money in Brazil that they needed to cash out some of their positions there in order to cover losses in Iceland. Smart investors will have treated the Icelandic affair as a fantastic Brazilian buying opportunity.

My feeling is that the good times will come to an end in Brazil, as good times always will. But it won't be because of a collapse in the value of the Brazilian real, so much as it will be due to a slow decrease in Brazilian interest rates, combined with a slow increase in interest rates in the rest of the world. For the time being, however, if I had any money to invest, I'd put it in Brazilian reais.

Extra Credit Question: What happens to the dollar if and when the global carry trade is unwound? I don't think anybody knows the answer to that one. Historically, the dollar has been the recipient of the flight-to-quality trade, which is the opposite of the carry trade. On the other hand, as Brad notes, "can the currency of a country with a $1 trillion external deficit really offer a safe haven in an uncertain world?" And if it can't, what will the new safe haven be? Will people put even more money into property? It seems unlikely, although no more unlikely than anything else.

Posted by Felix at 0:49 EST | Comments (1)

New Blu on Ave C

Nublu, the nightclub on Avenue C between 4th and 5th Streets (I won't link 'cos the website resizes one's browser) has long marked itself with a blue light above the door. Now, a block down, between 3rd and 4th, there's another blue light. This one is a gorgeous high-def vertical screen (LED? I dunno), animated with bubbles slowly rising to the top. I'd love to know what the story behind it is.

Posted by Felix at 0:28 EST | Comments (0)

Web stats

Statistics are hard, as Charles helpfully pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago. But one has the idea that techier people grasp the relevant concepts more than your standard arty journalist might. And then one reads Paul Boutin in Slate:

While the Web guys admit they could be off by half, Nielsen claims its television ratings have a margin of error of 4 percent.

If you follow that link, you'll find that it doesn't quite say what Boutin says it says. In fact, the words "margin of error" don't even appear. Rather, one finds this:

According to sampling theory and a very tasty laboratory test, 19 out of 20 times we take a well-stirred sample of soup containing 5,000 vegetable pieces, we get between 48% and 52% carrots. There is no guarantee that the percentage of carrots in a sample of this size will be between 48% and 52% (one time in 20 it will be outside this range, but usually not far outside this range). The same sampling errors apply to a representative sample of television viewers.

Ignore the carrot language for the time being. What Nielsen is saying here is that the company is 95% certain that its TV ratings are within 4 percentage points of well, something. But that something isn't the "true figure" – the actual number of households watching a certain program. Nielsen first assumes that its sample is perfectly representative (that's what they mean by "a well-stirred sample"); only then does it calculate the margin of error. (This is true of all opinion polls, by the way, including – and especially – political ones.)

In other words, there are two ways that Nielsen can be more than 4% out in its TV ratings. On the one hand, it could simply be unlucky. Indeed, 5% of its ratings are more than 4% out; it's just that no one knows which 5% they are. Alternatively, its methodology could be imperfect. Any problem with the representativeness of the sample, or reporting bias, or technological glitches, is not included in what Boutin calls the "margin of error". Which means that if there was any way of actually measuring exactly how many households were watching a given TV program on a given night, we'd find that more than 5% of Nielsen's ratings would be more than 4% off base.

But there isn't. So Nielsen ratings are accepted as the least bad option for broadcasters and advertisers. On the web, of course, there are alternative ways of measuring traffic to websites – looking at one's own server logs being the most obvious – and so it's much easier to tell when Nielsen is wide of the mark. "The more I dig into how Web ratings work, the more I realize people in other media are in denial," says Boutin. Which might be true, if people in other media really believed the Nielsen rankings. But in fact, those people are simply making the only decision they can make: to take Nielsen's figures at face value, because there is no alternative.

Anybody counting anything is going to make a mistake. Take SAT scores, for instance. There will, on occasion, be errors in the way that a certain person's test has been graded. The machine goes wonky, the wrong score is spat out, with major or minor consequences. One hopes those errors are very infrequent. But more to the point, there will often be occasions when someone with high scholastic aptitude gets a low SAT score, or someone with low scholastic aptitude gets a high SAT score. Everything from a hangover to a complicated love life to a successful test-cramming service can affect SAT scores, which means they are a far from perfect proxy for whatever it is they're trying to measure. But it's useful for there to be something standard and quantifiable in the academic world, and the SAT is one of the least-bad options.

The fact is that it's not people in other media who are in denial, it's Boutin's "web moguls". They think that because they have hard-and-fast numbers for their own website, that there is or can be some kind of knowable truth about how many pageviews and unique visitors they have. In reality, however, just like anything else quantifiable, there are going to be measuring mistakes both big and small. Everybody else has been resigned to this for decades. It's only on the web where people still dare to hope.

Posted by Felix at 21:25 EST | Comments (0)

Kottke and promises

One year ago, Jason Kottke gave up his $10,000-a-month web design gig to become a full-time blogger. A good website, he assured us, was about to get much better:

The goal is to use the increased level of focus and time to create a (much) better site. More time means there will be more content of a greater variety. Some days, that may mean more posts and more links. I'll be able to go to more (hopefully interesting) events in NYC (& elsewhere) and write about them. I'll have time do the occasional bit of real journalism, collaborate on neat projects like Dropcash, and do larger projects that require longer time scales to finish...dare I hint at a return to more 0sil8-like projects? (I dare.) And there are opportunities that I'm sure will present themselves as I settle into the luxuriant folds of full-timeness.

Inspired by Jason's promises, 1,450 micropatrons clubbed together and raised $39,900 for the newly-impecunious blogger. They then sat back, and... well, nothing happened. Today, Jason falls short of apologising to his micropatrons for not giving them what he promised. Instead, he says he won't be raising any more money (well, duh) and that his reason for not doing much more on kottke.org than he had done all along was that "life intervened".

The annoying thing here, more than anything else, is the lack of transparency. Kottke apparently felt no responsibility to his employers either to do what he said he would do, or even to explain to them why he wasn't doing it. "I've been trying to think about what to say on this occasion for, oh, about six months now," he writes – which is at least as long as we, his readers, have been wondering what on earth was (or, more to the point, wasn't) going on. But he said nothing at the time, and has said little more today.

Bloggers are entitled to a private life, but at the same time if they're going to commit to doing something – especially something they're being paid to do – then they should live up to that commitment. It's worth noting that the kind of blogs which make the cover of New York magazine are the blogs which are updated dozens of times per day, whether the editors particularly feel up to it or not. In other words, they're not a stereotypical blog, the product of some guy in his pyjamas uploading whatever he feels like on a semi-irregular basis. They're professional operations, where blogging is a paid job with well-defined responsibilities. Pete Rojas might now be a millionaire. But he got there by working 80-hour weeks more or less non-stop since the launch of Gizmodo in August 2002.

When I moderated a blogging panel at the Apple Store in May 2004, I think the tide was turning. At the time, Nick Denton was still in his blogs-will-never-make-money mode, but both Jen Chung and Choire Sicha conceded that what they were doing was a far cry from what 99% of other bloggers did. They updated their sites regularly because they had to, which was great in terms of building a readership, but much less great in terms of the kind of satisfaction that most people get from publishing their thoughts on the internet and getting feedback on them. Blogging had, for them, stopped being something they loved to do, and had turned into being a job.

There are many jobs which start as loves. Orchestral musicians, for instance, always start off with a love of music, but it's hard to keep that love alive when you're toiling away in the pit of a Broadway musical eight times a week. And the cynical bastards who populate the art world all had a love of art somewhere in their childhoods, before it was beaten out of them by backstabbing gallerists. The fact is that when you turn something you love to do into a full-time job, there's a very good chance you're not going to continue to love doing it indefinitely. The best way to stop loving Mars Bars is to be forced to eat 12 of them per day for a year.

Jason Kottke, it appears, failed to understand this, or at least to understand it fully. Who knows: maybe the "life" which "intervened" was indeed wholly unexpected and could never have been anticipated. But life happens to most of us. In Jason Kottke's case, he let his life take precedence over his job. Which is possibly an admirable thing. But he should have addressed that possibility at the outset, when he was raising money. And he certainly should have publicly addressed the fact that he wasn't doing his job once it became clear to him that he wasn't going to meet his own earlier expectations.

Jason asked his readers to contribute $30 each to support the site. That number is (was) very close to the cost of a magazine subscription. And, like a magazine, Kottke asked his readers to pay up front for future content. Maybe it would have been better if he'd asked for payment in arrears: that way there wouldn't have been the possibility of dashed expectations. Magazines do go bust, of course, leaving their subscribers on the hook. But that's the exception. Kottke was the first blogger to experiment with the micropatron model, and now there's a good chance that his flameout will result in his being the last, as well.

I like blogging; I am not a professional blogger. Very soon, felixsalmon.com is going to unveil a major redesign, which I anticipate will come with a significant uptick in posting frequency. There will still be long-form pieces, but there will also be shorter posts, and delicious links, and I have no idea what else. I might start devoting multiple posts per day to a single subject. If all this results in an increased readership, then I might even make some money from advertising. But I'm not going to promise anything. Because I don't want to break any promises.

Posted by Felix at 15:59 EST | Comments (4)

Wine Contest!

I hosted a wine contest last night. Thirteen people came, and each brought two bottles of wine. We all tasted one of the bottles, while the other bottle was put into a prize pool. (Hat tip to Gothamist for the idea.) Every person scored every wine on a scale from 1 to 20, and then the scores were aggregated. For this contest, we decided to taste red wines retailing for between $15 and $40. Here are the results:

*The scores with an asterisk are the two wines from people who took the game a little too seriously, who recognised their own wines and gave them their highest score just so that they would have a better chance of winning. Of course, neither won. The full results, in Excel format, can be downloaded here.

If you plug the scores and prices into a correlation calculator, you get a result of +0.61, which I have to admit is higher than I thought it would be. Here's a scatter chart so that you can see the results visually:

There was one wine which everybody hated – the Le Schmitou. Interestingly, it's a Fitou from Maria Fita's Eric Schmitt, just like the Maria Fita Fitou which came in at a much more respectable 9th place. The difference is where in France the wine comes from – the location seems to make an enormous difference, since the Languedoc was quite dark and bitter, while the wine from the Vallée du Paradis, near the Spanish border, was far too sweet for anybody's taste.

Beyond that, it seems that there was a large number of more-or-less average wines, getting between 125 and 136 points, and ranging from $14 to $34 a bottle. To no one's great surprise, the really overpriced wine – worse and more expensive than most of the rest – came from California: the Robert Sinskey Pinot Noir.

The top two wines were both reasonably expensive. The winner was by far my favourite wine of the lot (I gave it 17 points, while my second-favourite got 12), and I was happy to see Luke walk away with his choice of the prize pool. That included my wine, the Caro, which I was very disappointed I didn't rate more highly.

The party itself was a huge success, lots of fun, and we'll definitely do it again. But I did learn a couple of lessons. Firstly, when you're tasting a lot of wines in succession, on their own and not in the context of a meal, it's hard to really appreciate them all. Secondly, the wines which we were rating average, and giving 10 points or so to, were all much more expensive than the wines we normally drink, and we would probably love them in most everyday contexts. So these results should probably not be taken too seriously. But I think I might try and track down a couple of bottles of that Clos del Rey all the same.

Posted by Felix at 16:23 EST | Comments (12)

Long live the glossies

Simon Dumenco is not a lazy columnist. But even the most avid columnist has an off week, when he simply can't think of anything to write about. The worst solution to this problem is the "I can't think of anything to write about" column. The second-worst solution to this problem is the knee-jerk "X will be killed by the internet" column, where X can be anything from TV news to your neighborhood grocer. In Dumenco's weak effort this week, X is glossy fashion magazines.

Obviously, new media is not the most obvious candidate for giant-killer in this particular case: Vogue and its ilk have only been getting fatter and fatter of late, more or less in line with the extent of internet penetration among the mag-reading demographic. But Dumenco sees disaster in his crystal ball:

But inevitably, fashion advertisers that prop up the glossies will, like everyone else, increasingly migrate to Web and mobile interactive advertising. And here’s why: Google’s emphasis on text-only ads notwithstanding, we’re all increasingly seeing incredibly cool, sophisticated, Flash-animated and even streaming ads that actually don’t crash our Web browsers. (What used to not usually work ... now usually works.) Suddenly it’s entirely conceivable that say, Diesel could find the right combination of interactive advertising -- animated Web spots, sponsored mobisodes, etc. -- that would not only give it the same aura of cool it used to get from its perversely witty glossy ads, but would be more cost-effective and truly measurable in a way that print will never be. (Diesel has already created one static ad that appears only online, at ZooZoom.com.)

Can you just feel Dumenco desperately trying to hit his wordcount here? There's more extraneous verbiage in this paragraph than in an average Lewis Lapham essay. The gallimaufry serves two purposes: to fill column inches, but also to distract from the fact that the substantive point he's making is, well, bullshit.

Dumenco is quite right when he says that fashion brands rely on advertising in fashion magazines: "The brands are the print ads, and vice versa." But he misses the bigger picture. If someone is going to drop $10,000 on a Prada frock, it certainly helps if the Prada brand has been suitably pumped up for her by print ads and by Prada presence in the editorial pages. But it also helps if she's been convinced that the entire high-fashion edifice is something fabulous and valuable. And for that one needs the glossy magazines. Individual fashion houses can drive demand for individual brands. But to drive demand for fashion in the first place requires a large number of glossy magazines being published month in and month out, each reinforcing the others' message that Fashion Is Good. Websites might respond to demand for fashion content, but they're never about to create it. And no one knows that better than the fashion houses whose entire industry is largely a creation of the very magazines in which they advertise.

Fashion advertising is unlike most advertising in that it only obliquely attempts to get a consumer to buy a product. Perfume ads sell perfume, of course, but ultimately Chanel fashion ads are more for selling perfume than they are for selling fashion. The key is to get the brand buzzing among the people who matter – editors high up on magazines' mastheads, and maybe a handful of department-store buyers. After them, it helps if various fashion-industry insiders get it too. So you use trendy and expensive models, buy enormous swathes of Italian Vogue, and generally ignore the end consumer. Why do you think that there are so many tiny fashion magazines? It's two reasons: firstly, an ad in a tiny magazine, if it's read by the right people, can have much the same practical effect as an ad in a major Condé Nast glossy. And secondly, these magazines more or less give their ad pages away to major advertisers, because the mere presence of a big name on the back cover can give the magazine buzz and legitimacy. Eventually, the magazine can grow up into an Another Magazine or Zing: small by Condé standards, but still successful enough to sustain itself.

But websites don't work like that. For one thing, fashionistas are notoriously computer-illiterate. If you want to reach them, you have to stick to print. But in any case there's nowhere you can advertise online which has the punch and power of a print ad. Dumenco's ZooZoom example actually works against him if you try to find the ad he's talking about: the website is horribly designed, almost impossible to navigate, resizes your browser window, and has no permalinks. Even if a fashionista did see an ad or an editorial shoot they liked, they would find it impossible to send that story to a colleague. And there's certainly no easy way of ripping an image out and putting it in a clipping book somewhere.

Just look at the Diesel ad that Dumenco's talking about: the reason it appears only online is that it's crap. In fact, the only interesting thing about is that it's online. So long as fashion advertisers' idea of an online ad is basically taking a print ad, scanning it, and putting it on the web, online fasion advertising will continue to be irrelevant. And I don't know about you, but I'm not "increasingly seeing incredibly cool, sophisticated, Flash-animated" ads, either, be they for fashion products or anything else. In fact, I can comfortably say that I've never seen a Flash-animated ad which was "incredibly cool".

Dumenco finishes by bringing up the evil spectre of Lucky, the shopping mag. Apparently it has, ahem, "set the entire industry up for a fall by converting the formerly immersive magazine-reading experience into a distracted browse that’s just begging for transactionality." In other words, Lucky readers are looking for shopping ideas, and it's easier to shop from a website than it is to shop from a magazine.

Well, maybe, if and when a website ever manages to come up with a browsing experience as navigable and pleasurable as flicking through a magazine. Remember that websites give you things you didn't know you wanted – it's hard to design a website which can do the same thing. But in any case, Vogue is not Lucky without the transactionality. Vogue sells millions of copies. Its readers are not women who want to know what $10,000 frock to buy, but rather women who like the aspirational frisson of reading a magazine which purports to assume that its readers all buy $10,000 frocks. Lucky isn't a glossy fashion mag; Vogue is. And high-end fashion advertisers will continue to support it because it supports them. And because a double-page spread in Vogue is a very seductive thing. Much more seductive than any mobisode.

Posted by Felix at 11:50 EST | Comments (2)

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