Back in web 1.0, I worked at a music industry dot-com that, at one point, was the #3 music site on the internet. We grew so fast that they tripled us up in our tiny offices in Encino. From the very day I started there were big meetings about going public, about stock options, and as the months wore on we jostled for friends and family shares so our loved ones could get rich with us. We rented out two floors of a building on Wilshire that had been E!’s. We would have sinage, the execs told us — they were very excited about the sinage.
But those offices were still being designed and prepped when we finally made it to the day of our IPO, so — at least this is how I remember it — the entire staff, too big for any room in our office, gathered instead at Sportsman’s Lodge, an old-school Valley banquet-ish place. Did they have us watching TVs? Or listening to the radio? People stood on chairs, in khakis or polo shirts or with tattoos or carefully tended dreads. We were going to hear our opening price announced, and then we’d listen to it climb. Or maybe that all happened later, the meeting hall and the crowd standing on chairs. When they tried to explain.
Because we went public the day the market tanked.
We didn’t know it at the time; we thought it was, maybe, just a slight dip. The NASDAQ had doubled its value in the year between March 1999 and 2000, going up and up and up and maybe down for a moment before heading up again. Its bigtime high was 18 days before my company went public, and when our IPO hit, the slide was on.
But we continued; we moved into the new space, which despite its fancy design afforded less privacy than sitting in each other’s laps in our old rabbit warren. We tried not to pay attention to stock reports. We went about our business promoting the Backstreet Boys, listened to a wild-eyed SEO expert discuss the tricks for being the top hit for “Britney Spears naked.” We heard lots and lots and lots about the still-in-the-works sinage. And for Christmas — or was it just because? — everyone got a copy of the book Who Moved My Cheese?
It was a horrid little self-help business book about coping with change. It couldn’t reach the end of a sentence without plopping in a couple of exhausted cliches then thumping on ’em a little. It was an allegory about two mice — one with a can do attitude and another who got disheartened — who are looking for their cheese which, as you might have guessed, has been moved.
Who Moved My Cheese? was supposed to make us all feel better. About the whole dot-com bust thing. About not getting rich. I don’t know a single staff person, besides our deluded, disheartened executives, who found a single thing to like about the horrid condescending platintudinous book.
Except that now I find myself, oddly, remembering it because of the latest news about the Washington Post. The paper will get rid of its stand-alone book section, folding it in to the rest of the paper and keeping it online. Getting rid of the section is shitty, because may mean fewer reviews, because some people still prefer print over online, and lots of people who think about these things think an independent book section is meaningful.
But on the other hand, putting books coverage next to movie coverage might just encourage spillover, might just nudge books further into the slipstream of our multivaried culture. Maybe it’s exactly the right thing to do. Maybe books coverage will be enhanced by online media; maybe being able to Digg a book review wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
Mostly, though, the question of whether or not this change is good or tragic is moot. It’s happening. Books coverage is going looking different now than it did five years ago or ten years ago or 113 years ago, when the NY Times Book Review first ran. But that’s to be expected. And expect it’ll look different in 2010, and so on.
A lot of effort has gone into bemoaning book review changes and it’s hard for me not to think that, coming from book critics, it’s both self-serving and a little cheesy. And it’s certainly less interesting than engaging with books.
Hi ho the derry-o.
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