Nothing for everything

May 15, 2009 | Author: Paul Sullivan | 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.

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