Felix Salmon

Did you know that an Australian film star, who was in all three Lord of the

Rings films as well as loads of critically-acclaimed features, is starring in

Hedda Gabler

at BAM? Well yes, we all know that Cate Blanchett is in town: BAM has been plastering

her noble profile all over the place. I was actually talking about Hugo

Weaving.

Weaving is a very accomplished actor with many great films to his name and

at least as much name recognition as Blanchett, thanks to the Matrix films.

Both Blanchett and Weaving are real theatrical actors, rather than film stars

going on stage for a laugh. Yet BAM seems to understand on a gut level that

people will pay to see Blanchett, but won’t pay to see Weaving (although his

performance, which I saw last night, is fantastic). I’m not sure why this is:

I don’t think it’s Blanchett’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Aviator.

And I don’t think it’s simply sex appeal, either: While Blanchett is certainly

very beautiful, I can think of other film stars who are much uglier who would

get the same treatment over Weaving. Rather, I think it’s some kind of inchoate

star quality, which Blanchett has and Weaving doesn’t.

Do people really go to the theater to see stars? I guess they do. In this case,

they’ll be well rewarded. But most of the time, the presence of a big-name film

star in a Broadway production is a good indication that the play might well

be worth missing.

Nick Denton is very excited

about his latest franchise, Gawker Stalker Maps. I’ve never been a fan of Gawker

Stalker: the feature has always seemed to me to be little more than a cheap

way of getting readers to interact with the website. Indeed, I said

back in 2003 that the introduction of Gawker Stalker was "the beginning

of the end of Gawker as it was originally envisaged". Gawker Stalker Maps,

however, moves beyond uninteresting and well into the realm of positively unpleasant.

The spectacle of Gawker vs Flacks in the New York Daily News today is particularly

unedifying:

As innovative as it might be, it dangerously puts these people in harm’s

way. Somebody’s going to get hurt," warned flack Leslie Sloane Zelnik,

who reps Lohan, Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher and other soft targets.

"These people are trying to lead a normal life, and I think at some point

the government is going to have to step in and regulate this. I really think

this crosses a line."

Coen retorted: "I think the government should get involved to stop Leslie

Sloane Zelnik."

Up until now, Gawker has been the bitchy office queen, gossiping about NYC

media types and occasionally common-or-garden celebrities as well. Jessica Coen

might have been mean about many people, but she’s been mean in the manner of

the powerless snarking about the powerful. Now, Denton has upgraded the "Stalker"

part of "Gawker Stalker" from ironic to literal.

Your friend is walking down Broadway and sees Sarah Jessica Parker walking

towards her. The following day, she finds herself seated a couple of tables

down from SJP at a trendy restaurant. The following week, the two of them are

in the same dog run at the same time. "I’m becoming a Sarah Jessica Parker

stalker," she says. Funny or scary? Funny.

Now think what would happen if your friend reported all of these sightings,

in real time, to Gawker Stalker. Apropos Denton, this should eventually be able

to happen directly, without even being filtered through the two extra interns

that he’s reportedly brought on for this project. Your friend would be building

up a database of exactly when and where Sarah Jessica Parker is seen in public.

On her own, that might be harmless enough: three datapoints over the course

of a couple of weeks. But Gawker has well over a million readers. It only takes

a very small percentage of those to get in on the game, and pretty soon Gawker

is able to "pinpoint the location of every stalkworthy celebrity".

Yes, that’s their stated

aim. Funny or scary? Scary.

Part of what makes cities work is the anonymity conferred by large crowds.

One of the reasons why people move to New York from Smalltown is that in Smalltown,

everybody knew where they were and what they were doing at all times. Here,

you can walk down the streets wearing nothing but an inflatable crocodile, and

no one will care. Gawker Stalker Maps is an exercise in taking those comfortingly

anonymous crowds and turning them into a million-eyed intelligent beast, collating

and organising information on hundreds of individuals unlucky enough to be recognisable

in public.

That information, of course, will be incredibly useful to genuine stalkers,

who will be able to use it to work out their prey’s habitual wanderings. There

might even be genuine security implications to posting regular sightings of

Bill Clinton or Rupert Murdoch or any number of other world-famous New Yorkers.

But even without those worries, Gawker Stalker is destroying the implicit compact

between New Yorkers and celebrities. It’s one thing being recognised on the

street; it’s another thing entirely having to wonder how many of the people

who recognise you will be posting your exact location on the internet in real

time, on a web page devoted to that very purpose.

Nick Denton has a refreshing couldn’t-care-less attitude to what other people

think of Gawker Media and its properties. You don’t like his porn site? Doesn’t

bother him, he’s not forcing you to go there. I’m sure that he saw the technological

potential of a site like this, and decided to grab himself a first-mover advantage,

complete with sponsorship from E! Online. After all, if he didn’t do it, someone

else would, sooner or later. But there are lines he won’t cross: he won’t publish,

for instance, a database of celebrities’ cellphone numbers and home and email

addresses.

At the moment, Gawker Stalker Maps is new, so it doesn’t have the really scary

functionality: being able to see not all celebrity sightings over the past couple

of hours or days, but rather being able to see all the sightings, ever, of any

given celebrity. I can only hope that day will never come. And for the first

time ever, I also hope that this webpage will not grow itself an RSS

feed, since it would be trivial to create such a celebrity-specific database

through a simple RSS filter. All the same, Gawker Stalker Maps is already a

nasty and dangerous web page, and really should never have been created in the

first place.

When I gave up my cable TV, the only thing I really missed was The Daily Show.

So I was very happy indeed when I found it available

on iTunes. I bought a pass, $9.99 for 16 episodes, and successfully downloaded

the two episodes which were already there. Since then, there have been two further

episodes, which are meant to have automatically downloaded, but I haven’t got

them on my computer. When I sign into my account at iTunes, however, it says

that I have received 4 episodes. What am I to do?

UPDATE: Problem solved! You go to the Advanced menu in iTunes, and select “Check for Purchases”.

Comment is free

has launched. It looks handsome, but. At its heart, it’s an aggregation of Guardian

columnists, and of course if you’re a newspaper columnist you don’t write with

hyperlinks. So there’s precious little of the link-juice that really drives

the blogosphere: no indication that every link out is rewarded with a new link

in. The likes of Jeff Jarvis (who consults for the Guardian) love to say that

blogs are a conversation; well, these ones aren’t, or aren’t yet, at

any rate.

The site also suffers

from its corporate ownership:

We don’t include full text at the moment because we’d prefer you visit the

site and participate. It’s also very hard to tell who’s reading what if you

offer full text RSS, and on a free site that information is quite important.

In other words, given the choice between serving readers and serving advertisers,

the Guardian chose the latter. Which is understandable, given that the Guardian

is an advertising-funded company. But RSS with advertising is much better than

broken RSS.

Still, one wish has been granted: Marina Hyde now has a homepage

and an RSS

feed!

Most people who love places like the East Village, the West Village, or the

Lower East Side love them for basically the same reason. They’re real neighborhoods:

each one has a unique culture, a feeling you get when you walk its

streets. The reason that people hate it when the Gap or Starbucks arrives in

such a place is not because they hate the Gap or Starbucks, but because they’re

chains: they’re not unique.

Other New York neighborhoods can be described in terms of the type of brands

that one finds there: when tourists come to New York, they can find brands they’ve

heard of on the Upper West Side or on Madison Avenue or in Soho. Increasingly,

they can even get the same frisson of familiarity in the West Village too, especially

on Bleecker Street.

So far, however, the East Village and the Lower East Side have proved relatively

immune to this phenomenon: the only big national brands making incursions are

really the banks, and even they seem very hesitant to venture south of Houston.

(The long-standing exception to this rule, of course, is Delancey Street, which

has everything from Sleepy’s to Starbucks, Chase Manhattan to The Children’s

Store. Even Delancey, however, has its fair share of unique, only-in-New-York

establishments, like Solid Gold Jewelry on Norfolk.)

That said, gentrification will always breed changes. Consider Sol

Moscot, the optitician’s which has anchored the north-east corner of Orchard

and Delancey since 1951 and which has been on the Lower East Side since 1915.

I was flicking through my records there on Saturday – they’re still kept

on 3×5 index cards – and it turns out that I’ve bought all my glasses

(or at least all my lenses) there since June 1998.

When I first started going to Sol Moscot, they were an incredibly friendly,

family-run Lower East Side institution. They’re still all of those things, but

there’s no doubt that Moscot’s has changed along with the neighborhood. As the

number of hipsters increased, so did the space that Moscot devoted to expensive

designer frames; the store has even recently started its own retro-cool hipster-targeted

brand. Meanwhile,

the minimum cost of going to Moscot’s was inexorably increasing. The price of

lenses is now merely at the cheap end of the spectrum, where they used to be

significantly cheaper than anybody else. No longer will they throw in a basic

frame if you’re buying decent lenses. And they now charge $125 for an eye test.

This weekend I wanted to get prescription polarized sunglasses for my trip

to Patagonia at the end of the month.(!) Sol Moscot was happy to oblige, but

only at what seemed like excessive cost. The staff there seemed to have less

sympathy for my plight than they would have done in the past, and were more

likely to try to justify the vast expense than they were to try and come up

with a way of bringing it down.

Reluctantly moving away from Sol Moscot, I found myself at Manhattan

Grand Optical, a Little Chitaly opticians which is absolutely wonderful.

There’s not a hint of a hard sell there, they have a wide selection of cheap

frames, they’re extremely friendly, professional and knowledgeable – and

they don’t focus on hipsters at the expense of real people. They came up with

a smart solution to my problem (clip-on magnetically attachable polarized

lenses, don’t laugh, they can look pretty cool these days), and they even gave

me a full-scale eye exam for only $15. I can’t recommend them highly enough

– tell them Felix sent you!

Coming home from Manhattan Grand Optical on the way back home, I stopped off

at the best supermarket in the Lower East Side, the Clinton Street Supermarket,

on Clinton between Delancey and Rivington. I bought a pork loin for a dinner

party, but their meat department has a very wide selection, and their fish department

is even better; most of the stuff there is alive until the minute you buy it.

The produce is fresh, the prices are rock-bottom, and the whole store is super-clean.

The tanks of live fish reminded me of the excellent meal I’d had the night

before, at Ping’s

on Mott Street. Coming from London, I’m normally pretty snobbish about Chinese

food in this city: I reckon New York is great at pretty much everything, but

comes up short in the Chinese and Indian departments. Ping’s is definitely of

London standards, however, almost as good as the great Mandarin Kitchen on Queensway.

Maybe the comparison is invidious, but I reckon its noodles are better (yes,

better) than the Japanese noodles at Omen on Thompson, and the prices are definitely

lower.

Manhattan Grand Optical, Clinton Street Supermarket, Ping’s Seafood –

what these places have in common, of course, is that they’re all Chinese. While

everybody else in downtown Manhattan seems to be chasing the latest trendiest

thing, the Chinese have carved out a hugely valuable niche providing excellent

products and services at bargain prices. Whether it’s glasses or apples or noodles

or even electrical equipment from Lendy’s, Chinatown is the last remaining neighborhood

south of 110th Street that seems to care how much things cost. Think of it as

Manhattan’s answer to Wal-Mart. How I would have loved to have bought an apartment

in Chinatown, had there only been any available! But I think there are precious

few co-op or condo buildings there. Maybe that’s why it has stubbornly resisted

the gentrification that’s happened elsewhere.

After I posted my entry

about the willingness of WIN bloggers to correct their errors, the WIN machine

moved into action. First Jason Calacanis left a comment

on my blog, saying that he was looking into it. He also said that there should

be a tip form on every WIN site. In fact, he’s right about that. The narrow

column to the right of the main column is mainly used for advertising. But in

between the ads, there’s a series of links for sending news tips or pointing

out corrections. It might be worth making those links easier to find, rather

than burying them in a series of ads.

If you click on the corrections link, it takes you to a form

which you can fill out, saying "Use the form below to get in touch with

the people at The Unofficial Google Weblog." On the face of it, that doesn’t

help much, since it has the same effect as leaving a comment on the entry in

question. And as we saw with the Google

Earth entry, that alone doesn’t seem to result in a correction. In fact,

however, I have now been informed by Judith Meskill, WIN’s editorial director,

that filling out the corrections form brings the error to her attention as well

as the blogger’s. It might be worth mentioning that on the form.

Not long after Jason left his comments, I got an email from Judith Meskill.

At the bottom of the email, she checked a little box saying that it was not

bloggable and was private and confidential, so I won’t tell you what it said.

But it wasn’t long until the Google Earth entry was updated, rather than corrected.

Here’s what it said originally:

The Indian government was worried about sensitive areas being available through

Google Earth searches, so Google will be taking high resolution versions offline.

Here’s what it was changed to, with no indication that changes had been made:

The Indian government was worried about sensitive areas being available through

Google Earth searches, so Google will look at taking these high resolution

versions offline when presented to them.

That update, it would seem, came from Chris Gilmer, the author of the entry.

It didn’t stay that way for long: pretty soon the entire entry was put in strikethrough,

with an update at the top. The exclamation mark, and the fact that Gilmer is

referred to in the third person, are clear indications that the update and strikethrough

were the work of Meskill:

UPDATE: Thanks to Frank Taylor of Google Earth for pointing to Stefan Geens’

correction (in the comments below) of the Times of India article, cited below

as the source for this post. Chris Gilmer will follow up shortly with a revision

of this post. Thanks!

By this time the headline of the post had been changed, from "Sensitive

India Areas Removed from Google Earth" to "Sensitive India Areas Rumored

to be Removed from Google Earth?". There was no indication that the headline

had changed.

In response to the update, Stefan updated his entry

at Ogle Earth:

The Unofficial Google Weblog has now retracted its post, after some further

prodding by Felix Salmon. But Kudos for running the correction, though.

The kudos was to be short-lived, as was the correction. For this morning, the

update and the strikethrough were all removed, and a whole new story put in

their place. It starts off with exactly the same altered sentence that Gilmer

changed at the beginning, referring to Google looking at taking images offline.

Gilmer then changes the story he’s linking to, from one at the Times of India

to a UPI story at physorg.com. At the end of the entry, we find this:

Thank you to Felix Simon (sic), Frank Taylor, and Stefan Geens for

pointing out that there might be flaws in the India Times article previously

referenced.

Of course, I never pointed out any flaws in the India Times article; most of

us were, rather, pointing out flaws in Gilmer’s own blog entry. But Gilmer refuses

to admit that he made any mistakes, only that his sources might have been erroneous.

He completely elides the fact that there was a part of the original blog entry

about Google blurring imagery at the request of the US government – that

was wholly Gilmer’s own work, and it was completely wrong.

On an informational level, Gilmer’s new entry is nearly as bad as his original

entry. "He no longer makes unsubstantiated claims, but none of it is coherent,"

says Geens.

Gilmer completely misses Geens’s point that in the past, Google has made images

higher-resolution, or has clarified images which were previously blurred or

blacked out. It has never gone in the opposite direction, as Gilmer’s article

implies it might.

In any case, Google doesn’t provide its own imagery: Google just buys this

stuff from satellite companies. The American ones sometimes have to censor,

but Google can buy from French companies if it wants to, and they don’t have

to censor. Gilmer seems newly obsessed with the fact that some imagery in Google

is censored – he doesn’t seem interested that that’s nothing to do with

Google. Google didn’t want the information to be censored, they just

happened to buy censored information, which they de-censored when they could.

So Gilmer’s links are irrelevant to the putative point of the story, which is

that Google might actively censor on its own – something it has never

done until now.

On a journalistic level, however, what Gilmer did is much worse than his factual

disingenuousness. With the latest revision to the blog entry, there is no indication

that Gilmer ever made a mistake, except for a comment at the bottom of the post

which no longer makes sense. The links in blog entries by me and by Stefan Geens

are now semi-broken, since they link to something entirely different from what

they linked to originally. Far from being open and honest about corrections,

Gilmer and WIN seem to be doing their very best to make it seem as though they

never got anything wrong at all.

If I might, I would like to refer Gilmer and Meskill to a very

good blog entry from April 2004:

We know we’re error prone, we know we report things quickly, and as such

we make corrections in real time with the help of our audience. Blogs are

so error prone that we have our own device for deal with errors: strikethrough!

If an error occurs we use strikethrough to note the error and correct it immediately

in the existing article. This is a lot more than any print publication does.

Print publications can’t correct like this because they are not real time.

Can you imagine if the New York Times reprinted every article with the incorrect

facts noted with stickethrough the day after they came out – in the

same location? That is what blogs do, so we are clearly more responsible than

print publications in issuing corrections. We should be because we are more

error prone.

The author of that blog entry? Jason Calacanis. His employees would be well

advised to pay attention.

How often does the New York Times publish email addresses or mobile phone numbers

for people in the news, let alone people important enough to merit their

own story on the front page? Well, it’s done

it today. But maybe giving out an Iraqi mobile phone number isn’t as irresponsible

as giving out an American one? All I know is that even the most irresponsible

bloggers tend to redact that kind of information. If the NYT wanted to reproduce

this chap’s business card, that’s one thing. But failing to blur out at least

a few letters or digits, that’s just wrong.

I’m a fan of Tyler Cowen, at Marginal

Revolution: one of the better and more entertaining blogging economists.

I’m not such a fan of his co-blogger, Alex Tabarrok, however. His entry

on Ethiopian drought insurance,

for instance, refused to even address concerns that it might not be a wonderful

idea. And then, today, he moves

on to New York pedicabs:

There are fewer taxicabs in New York City today than in 1937. Entry restrictions

have meant too few taxis, too many private cars, and gridlock so bad that

in downtown Manhattan, pedicabs, basically tricycle-rickshaws, are faster

than cars.

The first sentence is flat-out

wrong. There are 12,487 taxicabs in New York City today, compared to 11,787

in 1937. The second sentence is hard to parse. What is Tabarrok talking about

when he refers to "entry restrictions"? Does he mean bridge and tunnel

tolls? I think what he means is that it’s hard to enter the taxicab

market, because the number of taxi medallions is artificially constrained by

law. That might mean that there are too few taxis, but I can’t see how it has

much of an effect on the number of private cars. To constrain that, one would

need to implement some sort of congestion charging.

In any case, there really aren’t any pedicabs in downtown Manhattan,

let alone pedicabs which are faster than cars. Pedicabs are overwhelmingly found

in the tourist-heavy parts of midtown Manhattan, and while they might

in certain circumstances be faster than cars, they’re not generally used for

their speed. In cases of gridlock, speed is a function of width, and pedicabs

are pretty wide – almost as wide as cars. While I can speed past most

backed-up traffic on my bicycle, that traffic often includes motorcycles, since

even they are too wide to squeeze in between traffic and parked cars a lot of

the time. And pedicabs are certainly wider than motorcycles, so I doubt they’re

much faster than cars.

Pedicabs might like to claim that they’re faster than cars, but I’d be interested

to do the experiment. Take a typical midtown trip, say from Barney’s to Times

Square, and time how long it takes by subway, by taxi, by foot, by pedicab,

and by bicycle. My guess is that since that trip doesn’t involve changing trains,

the bike and the subway will be easily the fastest, followed by the taxi, the

pedicab, and the pedestrian.

Josephine Jansen’s Snack

Dragon Taco Shack, on 3rd and B, is the place to go for high-end

low-price tacos when you’re out drinking in the East Village. The best tacos

you’ve ever had in NYC are all freshly made, and are only $3.

But what if you’re not in the East Village, but rather on the Lower East Side?

Fear not: I can reveal that Snack Dragon is expanding, and will soon open an

outpost on the corner of Stanton and Allen – in good time, I’m sure, for

all the hotel

traffic which will surely be passing that way. Lower East Siders rejoice! The

hotel might be horrible, but I promise you that Josephine will always keep things

real.

UPDATE: The WIN blog entry in question has now been greatly altered, in a rather disturbing manner. Details here.

If you’re blogging professionally, people are going to hold

you to higher standards than if you’re just another guy in his pyjamas.

Jason Kottke never understood that, I think, and now I wonder if that other

Jason – Calacanis – really cares about it either.

Calacanis, of course, has famously sold

his Weblogs, Inc empire to AOL; he is now rumoured

to be moving on to bigger things. But someone is surely in charge of editorial

content at WIN, and they should be taking their job extremely seriously now

that everybody with a WIN blog is ultimately working for Time Warner. Apparently

WIN has an editorial director named Judith

Meskill, who might be an expert

on "online social and knowledge networking practices and tools," but

she doesn’t have any journalism background, as far as I can tell, and she certainly

can’t write particularly well.

Jason Calacanis and Pete Rojas, of course, both know the media world very well:

it’s not like no one at WIN understands the issues involved in publishing information.

But neither of them is likely to get involved in issues which arise at the level

of individual blog entries.

So what happens when a WIN blogger publishes something which is lazy and wrong?

Stefan Geens, over at Ogle Earth, called

out WIN’s Chris Gilmer yesterday for publishing something completely false:

an entry

about Google Earth which (a) displays an obvious lack of familiarity with

the product, and (b) didn’t receive even the most cursory fact-checking. Now

Chris Gilmer is the primary author of The Unofficial Google Weblog, so one might

presume that he knows a little bit about Google Earth. But if he doesn’t, one

might certainly presume that he’d bother to check easily-checkable facts before

publishing something.

Now I’ve been following Jason

Calacanis for long enough that I’m pretty sure what he would do if he found

a false blog entry. In the interests of transparency, he would correct the entry

to the best of his abilities, crediting whomever pointed out the mistake, all

while being very open about the fact that WIN got it wrong to begin with.

But Chris Gilmer, it seems, is no Jason Calacanis. His blog entry was posted

on Thursday evening. Later that night, Geens fisked it. Early the next morning,

Frank Taylor, of Google Earth Blog,

left a comment on Gilmer’s entry pointing out the mistake and leaving a link

to Ogle Earth in case Gilmer needed more information. Since then? Nothing.

Says Geens (who, full disclosure, is a friend and the designer of this site):

There has never been a case, in the US or elsewhere, where existing imagery

has been switched for blurred images. Nor has the US ever asked for areas

to be blurred, something

which Google has confirmed. For a blog to say it has doesn’t make it so.

Nevertheless, expect this meme to do the rounds now that a mainstream blog

has validated it. Who watches the watchers, indeed? This kind of sloppiness

gives blogging a bad name.

The implicit point, here, is that if Gilmer is going to blog professionally

as part of the Time Warner empire, he ought to care about accuracy since he

has something of a bully pulpit. Simply by dint of his blog’s ownership, he

has a high-profile mainstream blog which can and will shape conversations and

opinions.

Everybody makes mistakes, of course, or has a bad day. But any time that happens

to a blogger, he should embrace the fact that he can easily and transparently

correct the error. The fact that that hasn’t happened at The Unofficial Google

Weblog gives WIN even more of a bad name than the fact that the error was made

in the first place.

(By the way, on the subject of transparency, there seems to be no way of finding

email addresses for WIN bloggers. I had no way of asking Gilmer or Meskill for

their comments about this, because they refuse to publish any email or IM address

by which I might be able to reach them.)

You heard it here first: Next year, the film studios jostling for recognition

at the Academy Awards are going to move a small part of their publicity budgets

online. Not to advertising, mind, but to bet on themselves.

For the past three years, I’ve had a bit of fun betting on the Oscars at Tradesports,

an online prediction

market. I’ve lost some money betting on early favourites (Martin Scorsese

to win Best Director for Aviator) but won more betting on outsiders (Adrien

Brody to win Best Actor for The Pianist) who won. This year, I was lucky

enough to be watching the Oscars in a wifi-enabled house when I realised

shortly before the announcement was made that Crash was going to win. Which

was a pretty lucrative bet.

The Oscars are an interesting event to bet on, since there’s infinite amounts

of speculation as to who will win, but in reality nobody knows anything. All

the same, films do build up momentum, and the Academy does seem to have a tendency

to vote for perceived favourites. Which is one way of explaining why Lord of

the Rings III swept the awards, winning 11 Oscars including Best Director, Best

Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay as well as Best Picture, while Lord of the

Rings I and II, which were of pretty much the same quality, had to make do with

only technical awards.

Increasingly, the best way of working out which films are the perceived favourites

is to go to somewhere like Tradesports. Indeed, Allen Wastler today has the

temerity to complain

that this year, the markets were wrong:

The contracts also indicated that Paul Giamatti would edge out George Clooney

as Best Supporting Actor. Instead, Clooney walked off with the statuette and

"Crash" shattered Best Picture expectations.

That was unfortunate for me since I made my office-pool picks using the futures

contracts. I trusted, as we are so often told to do, in the wisdom of markets.

The FT is allowing free access to its articles this week, so if you go over

the next couple of days, you’ll be able to read Matthew Engel’s article

on the leadership election in the Liberal Democratic Party. Which isn’t really

about the leadership of the Lib Dems at all: it’s about the storied history

of bookies and politics in England.

Political punting has long been a particularly British phenomenon, helped

along by the first-past-the-post electoral system and the liberal betting

laws.

The phenomenon is believed to date back to the 1973 Isle of Ely by-election

when the Liberal candidate Clement Freud famously placed a bet on himself

at 33-1, helping to create a buzz that brought him victory.

There was also reputedly an Irish local council candidate who started at similarly

long odds with the local betting shop and then issued a leaflet telling people

to both back him and vote for him. "Vote yourself some money," was

the slogan.

It worked there, too. But this can only happen in a contest where the electorate

is too small to make opinion polls viable: buzz is meaningless if the pollsters

keep saying a candidate is 20 points behind. The 73,000 paid-up Liberal Democrats

eligible to vote in the leadership election were, in effect, unpollable. It

might have taken 500 calls to find one voter.

The Academy, of course, is even more unpollable than the UK’s Lib Dems. So

as increasing numbers of people, including Academy members, turn to the prediction

markets to tell them who the favourites are, it makes all the sense in the world

for film studios to start betting on their own pictures. A few thousand dollars

– a pittance in the promotional budget of any studio – would be

enough to make any film or actor an overwhelming favourite on Tradesports, with

a price in the mid-80s somewhere. That kind of intelligence could easily trickle

out to Hollywood, become conventional wisdom, and even help drive voting in

the real world.

Next year, then, I’ll be keeping my eye out for contracts trading at improbably

high levels. Maybe I can make as much money on the short side in 2007 as I made

on the long side in 2006.

The good folks at Curbed linked

to my entry on Manhattan valuations yesterday; they also posted that entry to

the real estate section

of VillageVoice.com, as part of their syndication deal with that website. Syndications

should be a win-win deal: the Voice gets content, while Curbed gets extra eyeballs.

How many extra eyeballs? Let’s look at my referrer log:

www.curbed.com: 140 visits to felixsalmon.com.

www.curbed.com/index.php?page=2 (where the entry ended up after falling off

the home page): 6 visits to felixsalmon.com.

www.villagevoice.com/realestate/: 3 visits to felixsalmon.com.

In other words, if there’s any correlation at all between how many people read

a blog entry and how many people click on the links in that blog entry, then

the Village Voice syndication deal is something of a bust, it would seem.

Tabloids use simpler language than broadsheets, because they aspire to appeal

to a broader audience. So why is it that when I run up against a completely

unknown word or expression, it always seems to be in the New York Post? Here’s

Braden Keil today, on a new high-end restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel:

The fare ranges from an $18 crusty veal pate with foie gras and Sicilian

pistachios appetizer, to a $70 seared tuna belly with crispy onion rings.

Other rib-sticking dishes will include a free range quail stuffed with foie

gras and a $48 lobster salad.

So much to say about this, but first, what does "rib-sticking" mean?

I IM’ed an editor friend of mine, who hazarded a guess that it means expensive,

as in a stick-up with a gun. But no other usages of the term seemed to fit with

that. Dictionaries and glossaries are ignorant of the term, but it mostly seems

to refer to simple and hearty food, not high-end gourmet cuisine, which would

mean that Keil was being ironic. And then I found this,

the closest thing to an outright definition: "rib-sticking is used for

all kinds of filling, rich foods". So now I don’t know if Keil was being

ironic or not, since the food described is certainly rich.

Next, what is a "crusty veal pate"? Again, my friend’s first guess

is that it was a misprint for "plate", but my first guess was that

the Post is bad at diacriticals and meant paté. But who’s ever heard

of a crusty paté? Not that such a thing is inconceivable, of course,

just that the dish seems a little on the improbable side.

In any case, I doubt I’ll be eating any of this stuff. Very expensive restaurants

are a turn-off for me these days: I’d much rather have my expectations exceeded

at a neighborhood place like Chubo

than have them so high to begin with, thanks to these kinds of prices, that

they can barely be met. I went to a freebie lunch at Per Se on Tuesday, and

of course since it was a corporate lunch and everybody had to be served at the

same time, the food was, I’m sure, not up to the kind of quality one would have

as a paying diner. But still. It all looked great, and the dessert

was delicious, but everything else was decidedly forgettable.

Maybe it’s just that I’m moving away from food and towards wine.

Wine needs food, of course, to make it really sing. But I’d rather crack open

a great bottle of wine at a good restaurant than find myself scouring the cheapest

end of the wine list at a high-end place. I had a wonderful meal at Veritas

last year, and I remember ordering the venison; it tasted like venison. What

I really remember is the wine, which was truly magnificent, some of the best

I’ve ever had. Now Veritas has, by all accounts, some of the best cooking in

New York. But a great wine puts any cuisine into a supporting role.

So my new search is for good restaurants which are either BYO

or which have reasonable corkage fees, in the $5 to $10 range. That has to be

the best way to eat well and cheaply in any city. I did it in Australia last

year, at a suburban restaurant in Sydney called Oscillate Wildly. Corkage was

just A$3 per person for unlimited bottles of wine, the food was a mere A$40

for three courses ($30 in real money), and we pushed the boat out on wine from

one of the eight million amazing wine merchants in the city. We ended up with

a bottle of Cyril Henschke

which turned the very good food into a remember-for-years meal.

Any suggestions on where to do the same kind of thing in New York?

Frank Bruni reports

today that EU is on!

The E.U., a restaurant in the East Village, was mentioned in those same previews.

It too hasn’t opened. One of its owners, Bob Giraldi, told me yesterday

that it would be unveiled in early April.

The E.U. has been engaged in a protracted battle for a liquor license and

was rejected

by the state authority last week. Mr. Giraldi said he was weighing his options

and would open without a license if he has no other choice.

(Um, my link to Eater, not Frank’s. He might have a blog, but he doesn’t seem

to have learned how to link out, yet.)

This is possibly fantastic news for those of us in the neighborhood. We get

what should be a great new restaurant, in a lovely-looking space, which reportedly

cost over $1 million to build out; and we get to bring our own wine,

paying retail rather than restaurant prices!

Two European countries. Country A is the recipient of tens of billions of dollars

in foreign direct investment – $90 billion in 2005, to be precise. Country

B, well, isn’t. Every time someone wants to throw money at the country, the

government finds a way of preventing the deal from happening. Which country

is likely to be in the stronger competitive position? If you lived in Country

A, would you complain about Country B’s behaviour, or would you secretly relish

it?

Of course, this being Europe, everything is topsy-turvey, and in fact Country

A is putting

up an enormous stink about how Country B’s policies are unfair. A, to make

things clear, is the UK; B is France. Or Spain. Or Germany. It’s not entirely

clear. But it’s not just the leftists in the trades unions who are coming out

with protectionist nonsense:

The head of the Confederation of British Industry also expressed concern.

"I don’t want to live in a Britain where we ban overseas companies but

you can’t expect Britain to go on and watch other countries change the rules

when they want to," said Sir Digby Jones.

The problem, insofar as there is a problem, is that it’s easier for French

companies to buy UK companies than it is for UK companies to buy French companies.

Yes, this is the sort of thing which the EU exists to resolve, and yes, the

European commission has already promised to take legal action against France

for its protectionist moves. But really, which country is more harmed here?

I’m not an expert on industry, but I know a little bit about Cemex, which is

the best-run cement company in the world. It recently bought Britain’s RMC.

That’s great news for Britain, because not only did RMC go for $6 billion in

cash, but it’s now got a significantly improved management which will make Britain’s

cement industry increasingly competitive vis-a-vis Lafarge, of France. Meanwhile,

Lafarge, protected from takeover, is losing ground to Cemex-RMC.

Yes, UK companies should be able to expand in Europe through large-scale M&A

transactions. But it’s idiotic to point enviously at France and talk about how

they "support the principle of national champions" over there. I can

tell you that here in the US, Americans love the wonderfully British Mini Cooper.

Do they know it’s made by BMW? Quite possibly. But do they think that makes

it less British? I don’t think so. The nationality of one’s owners really shouldn’t

be relevant these days. Neither in British industry nor in US ports.

This is one of those stories which raise more questions than they answer: an

innovative approach to aid in Africa. The World Food Program, a United Nations

agency, spent $930,000 on an insurance policy with French insurer AXA Re. If

there’s a drought in Ethiopia, the policy will pay out as much as $7.1 million.

At first glance, I thought that the $7.1 million would go towards the enormous

expenses that the World Food Program is bound to incur in such an event.

When a severe drought hits Ethiopia or some other poor country prone to the

ravages of nature, aid agencies typically spend and spend. This year, though,

one aid organization may get some money back.

Instead of waiting for drought to hit and people to suffer, and then pursuing

money from donors to be able to respond, the World Food Program has crunched

the numbers from past droughts and taken out insurance on the income losses

that Ethiopian farmers would face should the rains fail.

That sounds like a good idea: in any natural disaster, it saves money and lives

to respond promptly – and insurance money can be put to work without bureaucratic

wrangling and Congressional ratification and all the other things that normally

have to happen before aid finds its way to a disaster area.

But other parts of the story – along with the official

press release – make it seem that the money is for Ethiopian subsistence

farmers, and that the World Food Program would rather not touch the money at

all:

AXA Re, a large French insurer, will pay up to $7.1 million to partly cover

expected losses by farmers.

Mr. Wilcox said the ultimate goal was for African governments to take out

their own insurance policies so that a year of drought would have less of

an impact on their populations.

Under the insurance policy, the food agency will receive a payoff if rainfall

drops so low that 17 million subsistence farmers lose the equivalent of $55

million in income.

If it turns out that the $7.1 million is meant to be distributed to 17 million

subsistence farmers to partly offset their drought losses, then I think this

is actually a very bad idea. The costs of distributing the money would almost

certainly be more than the amount of money distributed, for one thing. I know

this is only a pilot program, but still, the maximum loss envisaged is only

$3.23 per farmer, and I doubt such sums can be transferred in Ethiopia for less

than that.

The farmers do seem to be central to this whole scheme: the insurance policy

was based very explicitly on farmers’ losses. Nomads, by contrast, "have

been left out of the insurance model" because it’s harder to model their

income.

This I don’t get. It would make sense to me if the World Food Program went

up to AXA Re and said, essentially, "we, the World Food Program, are going

to need to spend a lot of money in Ethiopia if there’s a drought; we’d like

to insure against that risk". But that has nothing directly to do with

farmers’ losses. Instead, the World Food Program seems to think that it’s simply

intermediating (and paying for) an insurance contract which is basically between

AXA Re and 17 million Ethiopian farmers.

Note the quotation at the end of the story, from a US official:

"I would like to see it spread," he said in an interview from Washington,

noting that most American farmers already had insurance in case of drought.

That’s insurance, of course, which results in cash payments directly to the

farmer in the event of a payout. Is that what he would like to see in Ethiopia

too? Ethiopia does not have the institutions, including the payments system,

of the USA.

As for the idea that African governments should be spending precious dollars

on insurance payments to foreign reinsurers, I will need a lot of convincing.

It’s a question of opportunity cost: what could those dollars do if they were

spent domestically? If you hired a domestic company to dig wells instead, maybe

you could increase crop yields in drought years and pump a bunch of money into

the domestic economy while doing so – money which would go to laborers

and small construction companies who would then turn around and spend it on

other things.

Robert Shiller thinks this is all fabulous:

"The portfolio effect of bringing emergency aid into the international

risk markets is a win-win for developed and developing countries. With this

deal, WFP is making a bold move towards more equitable and effective international

risk management," said Robert Shiller, Professor of Financial Economics

at Yale University and author of ‘The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st

Century’.

Maybe I should talk to him and get him to talk me through it. Because this

is the sort of thing which, it seems to me, is much more useful for middle-income

countries than for countries like Ethiopia.

A country like Ecuador, for instance, could hedge against El Nino, the weather

phenomenon which devastates its shrimp harvest, possibly with some kind of oil-for-hedge

swap. That way Ecuador doesn’t need to commit to spending dollars: it just commits

to diverting a certain number of barrels of its oil exports to a vehicle set

up for the purpose. That vehicle then swaps the future oil flow for a contract

which starts to pay out money when domestic shrimp revenues fall below a certain

level: the more that such revenues fall, the more it pays out. I can think of

a few bankers off the top of my head who would love to structure such a deal,

possibly even on a pro bono basis, in conjunction with the World Bank Commodity

Risk Management Group.

But Ethiopia? I just have a gut feeling it’s trying to run before it can walk. (Via)

I only just noticed that Gawker Media finally has a website.

I’m very late to this game: Scott Kidder linked

to it back in October, and I have no idea how long it was up before then. It

already needs updating: Valleywag and Consumerist aren’t mentioned in the list

of titles, and neither is Fleshbot, which recently got elevated to the Gawker

Media logo/masthead thingy. In any case, there are three

different

pages

with Gawker’s ad rates, so you can easily see how much blog advertising can

cost these days. It turns out that a banner across the top of the page costs

less than a box well below the fold: internet readers must really be good at

tuning out ads which aren’t in the direct line of copy.

As ever, Nick Denton is good at letting the public see his stats: we can see,

for instance, that Defamer not only gets significantly more traffic than Gawker,

but even gets more traffic than Fleshbot.

Defamer gets 355,011

pageviews per day; Fleshbot gets 321,898;

Gawker gets 271,486;

Lifehacker gets 130,233;

Kotaku gets 123,029;

Deadspin gets 109,527;

Wonkette gets 95,359;

Jalopnik gets 89,695;

Sploid gets 30,220;

Screenhead gets 21,494;

and Gridskipper gets 16,104.

The top website of all is Gizmodo, with 456,561

pageviews per day; the brand-new Consumerist and Valleywag are already up to

24,860

and 37,769

respectively, and I’m sure will rise much higher. Kinja I’m not sure about,

but we can assume it’s negligible.

There are some interesting numbers there: I, for one, had no idea that Kotaku

was so popular, or that Sploid and Gridskipper were still going absolutely nowhere,

even with Gridskipper’s archive pages slowly beefing up. In any case, Gawker

Media’s total inventory, adding everything up, is now over 2 million pageviews

per day.

In theory, if all four ad spaces were sold on each page, that would generate

$28 per thousand pageviews. In Gawker’s case, if all four ad spaces were sold

to the same advertiser, it would generate $50. But the fact is that most of

Gawker Media’s ad pages still seem to be pretty free of ads most of the time,

except for text ads sold by Adbrite.

Let’s say that in reality, Gawker Media gets $3 per thousand pageviews. That’s

still $6,250 per day, or almost $2.3 million per year. Such a number is far

from outlandish, considering that Daily Candy reportedly

thinks it will have revenue of $20 million this year. If Gawker Media could

sell 50% of its ad inventory, it would be up to $10.7 million in revenues. Then,

of course, there’s whatever revenue Gawker gets from its deal

with Yahoo.

Nick Denton clearly loves launching blogs, and I’m sure he’s both got and is

making so much money that he’s not overly concerned with squeezing every last

dollar out of Gawker Media that he can. But it’s worth noting that if Gawker

Media were to partner with a media company with excess demand from online advertisers,

Denton could offer over three quarters of a billion pageviews per year:

he’s certain to hit the billion mark pretty soon. Not that Gawker Media is for

sale, of course. But think about it: iVillage was generating

about 362 million pageviews per month when it was sold to NBC Universal for

$600 million. At $1.65 per pageview per month, Gawker Media would be worth over

$100 million. And Gawker Media, of course, doesn’t come with $80 million per

year in expenses.

I believe Nick when he says he doesn’t want to sell – especially now

that Fleshbot seems to be fully part of the Gawker Media fold. The company is

not a natural fit for any strategic buyer, even if headlines like this

one are not quite as common as they used to be. But the fact is that his

equity in Gawker Media is worth a hell of a lot of money. If I had to guess,

I’d say that Nick will build his up traffic for another couple of years, suddenly

start selling a lot more ads to generate monster earnings growth, and then cash

out by taking Gawker Media public. Imagine: the first blog IPO.

I’ve

been staring for far too long at the map on the left, which can be seen in much

bigger format here.

It’s a map of the tax assessment value of the land in Manhattan, with the darker

areas being worth more dollars per square foot of dirt. Apparently Central Park

is assessed at $1.9 billion.A few things stand out:

Firstly, it’s a bit weird how, on this small island, the most valuable property

seems in general to be the property furthest away from the water. If you look

at Manhattan below 59th Street, there’s a clear strip of dark blue running down

the middle of the island, with values getting lower the further away from it

you get. Now, of course, since this is a map of values per square foot of lot

size, there’s going to be an extremely strong correlation between darkness of

blue and height of building. That’s why 3 World Financial Center and 4 World

Financial Center are darker than 1 World Financial Center and 2 World Financial

Center. But it’s certainly worth noting that most of the value of Manhattan

lies along a relatively narrow central strip.

It’s also fascinating to compare the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side.

The UWS is still very much the inferior side of the park, it would seem, and

especially Central Park West can’t dream of comparing itself to Fifth Avenue

or Central Park South. Plus, on the UES, the highest values seem to stretch

all the way over to 3rd Avenue, which is four blocks from Central Park. On the

UWS, virtually nothing has that kind of valuation.

That said, the UWS keeps its value much further north than the UES does. You

can see a very hard demarcation line on the UES at 96th Street, above which

you’re pretty much plunged directly into Harlem. Only 5th Avenue itself, it

would seem, has any real value on the UES north of there. On the UWS, by contrast,

the drop in values is much more genteel.

In terms of the practical meaning of this map, I wonder if it means that those

of us who live in the East Village, the Lower East Side and in Harlem should

be worried about an increase in the assessed value of our apartments. And, indeed,

if all of downtown between Chambers and 14th Street – definitely a more

expensive area, in terms of market value, than the Upper East Side – shouldn’t

share that fear. My East Village apartment has an assessed value of $33,689,

which is based on a "market value" of $80,848. I’m not sure how either

of these numbers are arrived at, but I fear what might happen to my property

taxes if either of them started being adjusted for reality.

Jonathan Rauch wrote the most popular essay

The Atlantic has ever run, at least judging by web traffic. Three years later,

he revisits its themes in an interview,

talking about the problems that introverts have with extroverts. I was particularly

struck by a this:

I marvel at Michael who can always somehow turn the conversation right over

effortlessly and keep it going even when what he says is not necessarily profound

or interesting. What he comes up with is perfectly tuned to the sense and

flow of the conversation. But it’s not words that are particularly intended

to convey ideas or mean things. It’s words that socialize—that simply

continue the conversation. It’s chit-chat. I have no gift for that. I have

to think about what to say next, and sometimes I can’t think fast enough and

end up saying something stupid. Or sometimes I just come up dry and the conversation

kind of ends for while until I can think of another topic. This is why it’s

work for me. It takes positive cognition on my part.

The weather’s not interesting. But once an introvert gets on a subject that

they know about or care about or that intrigues them intellectually, the opposite

often takes hold. They get passionately engaged and turned on by the conversation.

But it’s not socializing that’s going on there. It’s learning or teaching

or analyzing, which involves, I’m convinced, a whole different part of the

brain from the socializing part.

I do think that there’s been, in the last ten years or so, a major economic

resurgence for introversion—the "geek" economy. The prototypical

geek is really good at thinking, has superb powers of concentration (which

tends to be an introvert trait), and works very well independently. They’re

often pretty awesomely brilliant people.

When I read that, I couldn’t stop thinking about Oliver Sacks. Brilliant, yes,

and someone who gets passionately engaged by all manner of subjects. But also

a person with essentially no social skills. Did I mention

that I had dinner with him in December? Sorry, I can’t seem to drop that name

often enough. Sacks is a man with zero interest in small talk, so conversations

with him can feel very stilted, denuded as they are of the normal conversational

lubricants. He doesn’t follow the standard conventions of looking at the person

talking to him, nodding when appropriate, that sort of thing – so it’s

quite easy to feel he’s ignoring you, until he gives you a reasoned and well-considered

and interesting reply which demonstrates that he’s understood all the implications

of what you’ve said. It’s almost like talking to a Turing machine, were such

a thing to exist.

Rauch mentions in his interview that he’s not aware of anybody else writing

about introversion; I think Oliver Sacks has to be the perfect person to do

it.

I almost fell asleep reading DealBook’s extracts

from the Greenspan book proposal:

The book will ultimately conclude that the longer-term outlook for the global

economy and, for that matter the U.S. economy as well, will be significantly

affected by the future of China. And China’s future, in turn, will depend

to a large degree on the internal struggle within China between the liberal

technocrats, who seek a market-based China, and those whose primary concern

is political control.

Someone at Penguin, however, either hasn’t heard this stuff a million times

already, or else reckons that the Greenspan name is such a draw that the general

public will read his book regardless. Of course, there’s always a third possibility:

that they don’t really expect Greenspan to earn out his $9

million advance, but they’re paying that much anyway basically for bragging

rights.

One of the key questions in the DealBook vs Dealbreaker debate

is whether the New York Times will link to bloggy rumours or not. If Elizabeth

Spiers wants link love from the NYT, my general feeling was that she would have

to bring her A game. But then as soon as I wrote that, DealBook linked

to random nonsense. And now, reading the NYT’s own intraday coverage of

the AT&T/BellSouth merger, the more I feel that the bar for Spiers is actually

pretty low.

The headline on the NYT

story is "Wall St. Cheers Huge Phone Deal; Others Seem Likely".

Business reporter Vikas Bajaj doesn’t hedge his lead: "AT&T’s proposed

$67 billion purchase of BellSouth was received warmly by Wall Street today,"

he writes.

What do words like "cheers" and "received warmly" mean

in your book? Evidently in the world of the NYT, they are broad enough to cover

a world where Wall Street marked down the value of AT&T by 1.4%, wiping

about $1.5 billion from the company’s market capitalisation. Yes, BellSouth

shares rose, but that’s a simple arbitrage play, not a cheer or warm reception.

AT&T is offering a certain amount for BellSouth’s shares, so those shares

rose to more or less what AT&T is going to pay for them.

It’s perfectly normal, of course, when a big acquisition is announced, for

the stock of the acquirer to fall. What’s weird is when that reaction is then

spun as a Wall Street cheer. I’m sure that Dealbreaker can do better, if it

ever gets around to caring about intraday stock movements.

Oh, and one other thing: "The shares of potential telecommunications acquisitions

like Qwest and Alltel were up about 4 percent each, and shares of the would-be

acquirers Verizon and Comcast fell early in the day but appeared to

recover most of their losses by midday." Huh? Is Mr Bajaj unsure that the

prices he sees on his screen are the actual prices of the stocks in question?

What is the difference between a stock recovering most of its losses, and a

stock appearing to recover most of its losses? Maybe Dealbreaker will

enlighten us.

(Previously: The NYT buggers

up a Murdoch story. Come on, BizDay, you can do better!)

UPDATE: The article has now been updated with closing prices. Wall Street is still cheering in the headline, and is still receiving the deal warmly in the lede, despite the fact that AT&T closed down 3.5%, corresponding to a loss in value of almost $3.7 billion.

DealBook is linking to blogs,

which is a good thing. But someone at the NYT should probably be reading them

more critically, I think. The NYT’s headline is now "UPDATE: Is NBC Stealing

iVillage at $600 Million?", based on a very

sketchy analysis by Paul Kedrosky:

GE’S NBC unit isn’t paying anything like a MySpace-style premium for women’s

destination site iVillage. Picking the company up for $600-million works out

to 5-times annualized fourth-quarter sales, or 17-times annualized fourth-quarter

income.

What Kedrosky fails to note (but Marketwatch is very

clear about) is that iVillage had a very exceptional fourth quarter, with

"a nearly fourfold increase in net income on a 65% jump in fourth-quarter

revenue." I’m sure that NBC thinks those figures are sustainable –

indeed, that they’ll continue to grow. But Kedrosky’s conclusion that NBC is

getting some kind of a bargain, compared to MySpace, is pushing things. After

all, iVillage has nothing like the buzz and the momentum that MySpace has: it’s

basically an old-fashioned media play selling ads against self-published content,

as opposed to a leveraged internet play like MySpace where the users provide

the content and the website gets all the ad revenue. Comparing iVillage multiples

to MySpace multiples and concluding it’s cheap is like comparing New York Times

Company multiples to Google multiples and concluding the same thing.

Elizabeth Spiers can’t be happy this morning. The New York Times has just launched

DealBook, a business-news

blog which seems to do everything one might want a business blog to do, except

maybe snark. It’s very good at pointing to non-NYT stories: it’s AT&T/BellSouth

entry, for instance,

has seven external links. If you’re interested in which investment banks worked

on the deal, the NYT might not tell you yourself, but it will happily point

to a Marketwatch story

which has all the detail you might want. And if you’re interested in the law

firms being brought on board, there’s an entire blog

entry devoted to just that.

So where does that leave Spiers’s Dealbreaker?

She says that the people working on the site are going to be beat reporters,

breaking news. But that puts them in direct competition with the newswires and,

increasingly, newspapers’ websites. If Spiers wants a niche, it’s probably going to be in breaking gossip: hirings and firings, primarily, and maybe bonus speculation.

The other, unfilled, niche, of course, is snark. But I get the feeling that

Spiers, despite more or less inventing the snark-fuelled blog at Gawker, is

soft-pedalling that potential side to Dealbreaker.

The other open niche is free value-added commentary. The NYT’s business columnists,

Norris, Nocera, and Morgenson, are behind the Times Select firewall. Breakingviews,

too, is subscriber-only. But do Spiers and her backers have deep enough pockets

to afford bloggers with enough market experience that their views are worth

listening to? Maybe she can find some laid-off financial journalists who haven’t

been able to find new jobs elsewhere. But then I suspect her turnover might

be very high, with bloggers constantly moving to "real" media as soon

as they get an offer. Just as Spiers

herself did, back in the day.

Remember what I was saying

about the economic perks of white-collar city life?

Look at all the boozy expense-account lunches, the "free" tickets

to the opera, hell, even the packets of post-its brought home from the office.

No one’s going to take you out for a £250 dinner if you’re living in

the countryside.

Well, here’s

a prime example. Jeff Jarvis is a reasonably successful media executive,

but not the kind of person who’d ever dream of spending $10,000 on a plane ticket.

And he’d certainly never be able to afford to charter a private jet. Yet here

he is, comparing his experience on Eos, the new business-class airline, to his

previous experiences flying (a) first-class on British Airways; (b) first-class

on Lufthansa; and (c) in private jets.

Yes, I know that JJ lives in a New Jersey suburb and not in the city. But Tim

Harford was comparing

the costs and benefits of life in the city to the costs and benefits of life

in the countryside. My point was that if you’re city-based (and JJ works in

NYC), you end up becoming a consumer of things like luxury air travel despite

never paying for them out of your own pocket. JJ might complain that "the

few times I ever took corporate jets I had to work the whole time and be nice

to bosses." But I suspect that’s the kind of complaint which is likely

to garner him relatively little sympathy.

Yeah yeah, I know Lindsay

hates it and all. But I honestly thought that Crash was the only good film

of all the nominees, and I’m very happy it won. Especially since I placed a

bet on it winning at TradeSports after

it won the Film Editing award and got a big cheer. No one cheers editors. So

I’m rich and happy! Yay!