Stop the presses!

Sorry Mr. Gore

June 8, 2009 | Filed under: News

Any blog that takes manhood as its subject matter must address the singular topic of American masculinity at some point. That, of course, is the automobile. My wife and I bought a new one this weekend. Its purpose was mostly utilitarian - a safe vehicle to carry a baby along with a couple of dogs and all the stuff that goes with them - but we wanted a bit of style. Yet in this age of second-guessing, buying that kind of vehicle was anything but straightforward. 

The most obvious choice is, of course, the mini-van. It has utilitarian written all over it. It’s safe, easy to get things in and out of, and utterly practical. The problem, though, is it’s pathetic. It’s an admission that life is beating you with a stick. I’ve only met one person who could drive a minivan and maintain his dignity. But he took the seats out - and also happened to pull the gun out of Sirhan Sirhan’s hand. I believed him when he said it was good vehicle in which to haul things to Nantucket. As for the great mass of mini-vanners, my heart would break for them, if they were not either cutting me off or driving so slowly as to make me want to rush out and buy a Hummer to roll over them. 

That leaves the SUV, the pariah of well-meaning liberal folk, of which I sometimes consider myself a member. They’re gas guzzlers, of course, and road hogs, and probably unnecessary. But read a few crash test reports and next thing you know you worry less about carbon footprints and more about roll ratios and side-impact airbags. (Plus, if all goes according to plan, President Obama’s carbon trading proposals will allow me to absolve myself, right?)  I have a baby to protect: a Civic isn’t going to cut it! 

And so, after a month of testing, my wife and I took advantage of a crummy Saturday afternoon and went once again to the car dealerships. We’d spent over a month and tested everything, from American to German to Japanese, we could possibly want. Still, we hadn’t found one we loved. We tried to buy a Cadillac or a Lincoln but the models we wanted were either not ludicrously priced for a bankrupt company or not in stock. We thought we wanted a Lexus but turns out the one we could afford wasn’t so comfortable. She loved the Mercedes, which I thought was a tank. I loved the Audi Q7, but she thought it was too big. Our fallback was a Volvo, because we already had one, but it didn’t feel like getting a new car.

Long story short, on Saturday we walked into the dealership of the one car my wife said she would never buy, Range Rover. Her objection could be summed up as the things are just too much of everything. (I once felt similarly about the Porsche Cayenne - does anyone need to go that fast kids, groceries and plants in the back - but then my best friend’s mom got one and I saw it was a pretty spiffy mobile.) We test drove the LR3, which is old school Land Rover, and it was okay. We were about to leave, undecided still. But as we were walking out the door, we saw a Range Rover Sport for a deal. We hesitated but having already wasted our afternoon figured we might as well drive it. 

The rest was a blur. The thing was perfect - a Jaguar engine! leather seats! a cooler for baby formula in the console! Two hours later we owned it. The moral of the story? Sorry, Mr. Gore….

A Farewell to Paws

May 21, 2009 | Filed under: News

Fatherhood. It has its joys, I’m sure, but three months out I’ve experienced its first sacrifice. My wife and I sold our boat, Sea Paws. The upside was I got to write a fun story in today’s New York Times, In Selling A Boat, No Port in the Storm.

The best part was I received a bunch of great readers stories through my Times page. The gist was the same - remembrances of boats past. But far and away the best one came from my friend Doug, in the guise of Caddyshack’s Judge Smails: 

It’s hard not to grin

cause Ginnie’s coming in

and you’ve got the book market beat.

But the man who’s worthwhile

is the man who can smile

because his dog pants aren’t too tight in the seat.

Here’s a nice Miami Vice shot with the Doctor, as he’s known:

Sea Paws on the Gulf

Nothing for everything

May 15, 2009 | Filed under: News

This is the year of the bottom feeder. I’ve seen it in Naples, Florida, the Palm Beach for the merely rich. Hail-thee-well fellows from Ohio and Michigan cruised down I-75 with visions of buying up “property” at back-home prices. You can imagine the conversation. “$2 million for that? Back home, a house like that goes for $200,000 on a good day.”

Therein lies the rub. Back-home means different things to everyone but it is really a play where someone with a bit of dough can feel like a big man. Naples is like New York: you can be a billionaire and not be the richest guy around. And bottom feeder, too, is up for interpretation. Everything has a price and he is simply making an offer, albeit low in a time of anxiety, but no one is obliged to accept it. What is unctuous is his manner: that house used to be worth $1 million but I’m going to get it for $300,000 because they need my cash. We all like a deal, but no one likes to be duped. 

And this brings be to my foray into “group blogging”. It’s very description should have tipped me off. But I’m an amenable guy: invite me to your party, flatter me a bit and I’ll probably show up with a nice bottle of wine. This is sort of what happened with True/Slant. I was contacted in a Kevin Bacon-ish way - a friend of a friend of my wife. I met one of the men in charge who explained the model, and suddenly I had dreams of the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast. If I blogged hard enough (oxymoron alert, I know) I could have a Drudge-like following quicker than you could say blue dress. I was sucked in. 

There was a catch, of course. The pay was a pittance at first, but after a few months there would be equity. I knew enough to know most equity during the last boom was worthless. But I wasn’t scared: I’m a business writer by trade and a University of Chicago drop-out by choice:  this is long-hand for “I know how to compute stock options on the back of a napkin”. And so it goes: they asked and I danced.

I tried to get friends to join, because the whole thing had a chain-letter quality to it. “We’ve been thinking a lot about marketing bonuses over the past couple of weeks and we’ve generated a pretty robust plan,” wrote the man who protected the Wizard. “I think you’ll find that every stage of the plan benefits you and the site. I’d like to introduce you to the first phase: $100 for 100 Followers.” But after I received this email I started to wonder what I was doing. 

Worse, the three guys running True/Slant started referring to me as their “A-Talent”, meaning I would get a better deal when it came to equity. Now, I’m a sucker for flattery, but I’m also pretty honest with myself. My career as a journalist is going well. I write the Wealth Matters column for The New York Times and am working on a pretty interesting book for Penguin. But I’m leagues away from my friend Joe Nocera. He’s A-list; on a good day I’m B-plus. But who doesn’t want to be the big fish? 

The problem was the other fish were a vicious school. I started blogging to earn my pittance - think of it as sweat labor in the recession - but made the mistake of writing what I thought. The auto bailout wasn’t the greatest idea. Vilifying Wall Street executives was not going to solve the economic problems. The president’s dog debate was a distraction.  The next thing I knew my fellow bloggers had descended on me like piranha on a drunk tourist who had fallen off the boat.

Now, I can take a good lashing. By having a link to my email on nytimes.com I get them quite often. My first editor, Tom Lamont, is a legend for yelling at green, dumb reporters and either driving them into PR or onto a career path as serious financial journalists. When Matt Winkler, also a yeller, screamed at me during my brief tenure at Bloomberg, I was able to brush it off: scream all you want, I thought, but you don’t have Lamont’s cheap cigar smoke wafting into my face.

What I don’t get is personal attacks from colleagues, even virtual ones. (And perhaps that is a fault of mainstream journalism: the knowledge that the guy you call a buffoon today could turn around and call you a cuckold tomorrow usually acts as a deterrent. Vicious gossip around the office replaces condescension in print.) While most of them were of the sticks and stones variety - you can’t really take someone’s attack seriously, if they don’t understand what they’re mocking you for - the problem was the highly efficient search tool. One day I typed in my name only to get a post from a contributor who in his dozens of daily posts found time to dissect my dissection of a dissection. (Follow that?)  

At that point I paused and thought, what am I doing? I could lie to myself and rejoice in my cameo in a Walt Mossberg video of the site and its “A-list contributors” but that would have felt like a cannonball in a kiddie pool. Or I could be honest: sure, journalism is changing but I don’t want it to change into this. (I believe that reporters will still report, but what will change is how news is delivered. Crazy, I know.) Yet - and here is the conflicted part - I hadn’t heard about the options yet.

They were astonishing, but not in the Google way. They were more like the feeling contestants had to get when they saw a hungry goat staring out from Door Number Three on the Price Is Right. The number would have even been unimpressive to Austin Powers - and far, far away from “one milliooooon dollars!” It was so awful - 2500 options (compared to 1000 options for the  un-”A-talent”). They could have a value equivalent to a stripped down Toyota Camry if the company gets sold two or three years hence for an awful lot of m oney. The rub for me was you got today’s Camry in three years - not the 2012 model - or you got absolutely nothing at all. Binion’s Casino any one?

It was such a lop-sided deal - you write for us and help us increase the traffic to our site so we can sell it for hundreds of millions of dollars and get rich and we’ll give you a 2009 Camry in three years - that I figured I had made a mistake. I am, after all, a Ph.D. drop-out, not a U of C professor. It was perfectly possible that I had misunderstood something. 

Alas, after many phone calls with True/Slant higher-ups - two of the three, at least - I was right, sadly. I had understood everything correctly. More than that, I was told I was the only one of the 60 contributors to question the terms of the agreement. This was shocking. Two, once-well-known financial journalists are on the site: if they don’t know how to calculate options, then God help us. And, so, I parted ways. I live on with a cached Paul Sullivan page, but I keep checking back to make sure my purge is complete. 

Kurt Vonnegut might have ended this with, “so it goes”. But I’m too scared: make it stop, would be my motto. If the bottom feeders take over, the world may or may not be worse, but those who judge it will be broke.

My Mossberg Solution

April 8, 2009 | Filed under: News

Today was a day for getting yelled at, but none of it was my fault. A friend from Boston - and former 7-Up spokes model, no less - yelled at me first thing this morning for not posting more to this site. Later, the winner of my high school’s ninth-grade English award took a moment out of packing for Disney World to yell at me for being equally behind. But it was really my wife, yelling at me for a different but related reason, who got me to thinking. I haven’t been posting to this site very much for two reasons: one, I sold a book on a completely different topic and I have been working on it in every spare moment, and two, I have been posting on a paying site as part of a group of journalists. It’s called True/Slant.

Not really talking about it until it went live was what got my wife miffed. More than that, I didn’t mention it until someone else did. (This is why it’s a good thing I am not on Twitter - self-promotion is my weak spot.) Walter Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal technology critic, reviewed the site tonight. His piece, True/Slant Tests Another Model of Web Journalism, came out a few hours ago. I received an email about it so I read the piece with my wife next to me and then watched Mossberg’s video, which features me. This was great. It highlights Money Talks, the site I blog on at True/Slant, and is generally favorable. 

So, chances are, this is where I will be blogging from now on. Please go there.