Solo practitioner

Mickey Kaus takes to the Web. Plus, why no one's talking about Talk, and Brian McGrory tries something new (no, it's not the revised sketch over his column)

by Dan Kennedy

Mickey Kaus says he doesn't think of himself as a media critic. But his nearly four-month-old Web site, Kausfiles.com, features some wickedly funny media commentary, and sharp observations about politics and culture as well.

If you've ever felt too stupid to follow the writing of brilliant but arrogant Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, then you can't help but love Kaus's description of him as "a poseur whose writings on sociobiology and IQ seem more designed to dazzle leftish graduate students and hone his crude, paleo-left self-image than to get at the truth." Take that, genius-boy! And if you've ever felt guilty about enjoying the tawdry exploration of George W. Bush's alleged drug use, you can take heart in Kaus's own excuse: "It's fun. Why wait for some Yale historian in 2025 to get tenure by proving that President George W. Bush did/did not drop acid? If it's worth discussing then, it's worth discussing now."

Still, that doesn't answer why someone as well established as Kaus -- a former New Republic senior editor and the author of the pro-welfare-reform tract The End of Equality (1992) -- would choose to go it alone. Nor does it explain how he expects to support himself. Like virtually every Web site not devoted to financial advice or pornography, Kausfiles.com is free. And though Kaus says he'd eventually like to be supported by advertising, at the moment the only ad banner he's flying is for Slate, a former employer and future business partner.

"I haven't even begun to figure out who might want to advertise on the site," Kaus admitted in an e-mail interview.

Kausfiles.com is essentially a continuation of the writing Kaus used to do for Slate's

political-and-media-gossip column, "Chatterbox." Kaus gave up chattering about a year ago in order to accept a six-month job at Newsweek, where he'd previously worked in 1987 and '88. By the time his Newsweek stint was over, "Chatterbox" was being written by Timothy Noah. At that point -- with the encouragement of Slate editor Michael Kinsley, a friend of several decades' and magazines' standing -- Kaus decided to strike out on his own, unveiling Kausfiles.com in late June.

Though Kaus is a serious policy geek, his best Kausfiles bits take advantage of the Web's instantaneous, ephemeral quality. Kaus offers smart analysis of media moments that seem world-shatteringly important for maybe 12 hours, only to be nearly forgotten a few days later.

Perhaps the best example of this was his commentary on Lucinda Franks, who profiled Hillary Rodham Clinton for the debut issue of Talk magazine. You may remember that Hillary discussed the abuse that Bill had allegedly suffered as a child, and seemed, by any fair reading, to be using that as an excuse to explain his philandering ways. But no sooner had the article appeared than HRC's minions put out the word that of course the wanna-be senator had not made any connection between the abuse and the screwing around -- and Franks, incredibly, contradicted her own story by publicly agreeing. Kaus called for Talk editor Tina Brown to fire Franks, not for her "dumb, fawning profile," but for "Franks's behavior afterwards, in which she let herself become part of the Hillary spin machine and began saying things to reporters and TV cameras that were patently not true."

The next step for Kausfiles.com is a planned partnership with Slate, which would pay Kaus for the right to run his column a few hours before it goes up on Kaus's own site. "I tried to persuade him just to do it for us, but he wanted to be an entrepreneur like everyone else -- and also have total editorial freedom," said Kinsley by e-mail. (Running Kaus's column in the same webzine as Noah's "Chatterbox," by the way, raises some interesting turf issues in terms of the columns' content.)

The possibility of real financial viability, though, will have to wait for technological change. Kaus cites Matt Drudge as his model, but Drudge has never made more than a subsistence income from his Drudge Report. The real utility of Drudge's Internet presence was that it gave him the visibility to launch a lucrative secondary career as a minor TV and radio star.

To make money directly from Web journalism would require so-called microtransactions, by which readers would pay some small amount of money, on the order of 10 to 25 cents, to read an article. Multiply that by a few thousand readers, which Kaus says he already has, and it becomes possible to envision a steady income.

Brock Meeks, chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC.com and a pioneering online journalist with his CyberWire Dispatch, says those who establish a brand name for themselves now will reap the benefits when microtransactions become a reality. "Those who have been doing it for a long time and building up a reputation, building up an integrity currency with their readers, will be able to make it on their own," Meeks says.

Kaus, for one, hopes Meeks is right, but denies any such calculation in launching Kausfiles.com. "I guess I have some sense that the Web is the future, and that it might be good to be first," he says. "And I've talked with fellow writers about the possibility that in the future microtransactions might enable independent writers to make a living in the manner you say. But you're attributing to me a degree of foresight that I don't really have. My basic approach is to do it quickly, have fun, and see what happens."

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Arnold's back, proclaims the cover of November's Talk magazine. And to the extent that Schwarzenegger's cigar-chomping mug is, indeed, once again on the cover of a national magazine, then I suppose he is.

But if by "back" you mean "re-emerging as a pop-cultural force" (as opposed to "starring in a new movie that will no doubt bomb just like his last several"), then Arnold is back the way Elizabeth Taylor -- cover girl of the October Talk -- is back. Which is to say he's not. Which is to say that this is only the third issue, and already Tina Brown's new venture appears to be in deep trouble.

The bad news is coming in waves, with the New York media leading the charge. This week's New York Observer features a bitchy Carl Swanson piece on the "screamingly, impossibly, unyieldingly demanding" Brown. Taking special delight is the New York Post, a situation that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that Harry Evans (Mr. Tina Brown) quit as editor of London's Sunday Times some years back when that vulgarian Rupert Murdoch added it to his holdings. Murdoch, of course, also owns the New York Post -- and Evans, troubleshooter for real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman's media properties, spends much of his time at the Post's archrival, the Daily News.

The Post has documented in loving detail the departures of Talk's top staffers, who jumped overboard allegedly because of Brown's workaholic demands and erratic leadership. The fallen: managing editor Howard Lalli, gone to Atlanta magazine; production director David Randall White, now with Mirabella; and features editor Lisa Chase and editor-at-large Walter Hodgman, who reportedly chose unemployment over life with Tina. (To Brown's credit, she came up with a pretty good comeback line for the Post: "Most magazine launches in the first six months have more people vanishing than Idi Amin's cabinet.")

Next, New York magazine reported that Talk lost out on an exclusive interview with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, when Brown ordered a last-minute edit after the story had already been edited, fact-checked, and laid out. The writer, Stephen Dubner, pulled the story and took it to Time magazine -- supposedly contributing to Chase's decision to leave.

Now, landing an interview with a serial killer isn't much to be proud of. But it certainly would have livened up this sorry issue of Talk, which, in addition to the gushing profile of Schwarzenegger, includes a gushing profile of Oliver Stone, a gushing piece on Al Gore's Vietnam service, a gushing George Stephanopoulos Q&A with Václav Havel, and a gushing Tucker Carlson column on John McCain. Even the worthy stuff -- an essay by Simon Carr on raising his sons after the death of his wife, and an article on bureaucratic fumbling over a planned World War II memorial, to name two -- isn't particularly enticing.

It's not unusual for a new magazine to make a striking debut and then stagger for a while before finding its legs. The questions for Talk are whether Brown's backers, Disney and Hearst, will give her enough time to pull it off -- and whether the onetime savior of Vanity Fair and resuscitator of the New Yorker still has what it takes, or is stuck hopelessly in 1994.

Based on the evidence thus far, it doesn't look good. Arnold isn't the only Terminator Tina should keep an eye on.

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Random observations

* The new sketch accompanying Brian McGrory's Boston Globe column may be merely a cosmetic change, but changes in his column are more promising. Wildly erratic since he and Adrian Walker replaced Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith late last year, McGrory has settled into a nice groove in the past couple of months. Although I could have done without Tuesday's paean to newly minted zillionaires Barry and Eliot Tatelman (his second this year), he's written some nice pieces on Governor Paul Cellucci's political woes, Ray Flynn's quiet comeback, Franklin Park golfers, a public-school teacher who made a difference, and the once-crowded Locke-Ober restaurant's struggle to survive. He's still overwriting, but the pretentiousness is greatly diminished. The main thing, though, is that he's telling stories rather than pontificating, and is thus figuring out the difference between a metro columnist and a pundit.

* Doreen Carvajal's October 5 front-page New York Times profile of Random House editor Robert Loomis, who oversaw Edmund Morris's Dutch, was a puff piece, but it couldn't mask the truth: Loomis committed a gross act of professional betrayal. Morris was clearly desperate when he came to Loomis in 1992 and proposed adding fictional characters to his biography of Ronald Reagan. All Loomis needed to say was no; perhaps a shot of reality would have been the impetus Morris needed to break his writer's block and get down to work. Instead, Loomis indulged him. The result is a best-selling embarrassment that will forever tarnish Morris's reputation as a serious historian.

* Correction of the year? "In last week's issue of Bay Windows [October 7], we published a quote from Northampton mayoral candidate Tony Long saying, 'I always have enjoyed politics and I believe I have the skill and knowledge Northampton needs. I have three years of investigating, reviewing and interviewing every shitty board in Northampton.' In fact, Long referred to every 'city board,' not 'shitty board.' We regret the error." I would hope so.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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