oct17.com Blog

A little preview of what’s coming: MoneyWatch

MoneyWatch.com is a personal finance site for professionals — people who know how to use a spreadsheet, who know that diversification reduces risk, and who are wondering why their 401(k) was still knocked back to 2005. This is a big project for my team at BNET, and I’ve been hiring a fantastic new people to work on it. It’s also been the focus on my education in the much wider world of TV — courtesy of CBS News. More news from me on this in the future, but now you know what Stephen’s been up to lately

JANA throws in the towel

CNET Networks Inc shareholder Jana Partners LLC on Thursday said it dropped its effort to win control of CNET’s board in light of CBS Corp’s plan to buy the Internet media company.

And good riddance. Paul Gardi can take his profits on his 129,199 CNET shares, two installments of his $25,000 per quarter consulting fee, and go find a real job.

Vivu and CBS

Time to update the Ole Blog here with two major pieces of employment news.

• Saloni works at Vivu. It happened by slow degrees; first a get-to-know-you meeting with the CEO, then some follow-up discussions on the direction of the startup, and before you know it she’s printing business cards for the whole company including one for herself that says, “Director of Marketing.” Vivu is definitely in startup mode: barely a dozen people, still fervently pitching investors for capital, staff meetings on Sunday mornings. She’s thrilled, I’m thrilled, and a video-streaming startup makes a nice complement to my new employer…
• CNET’s being acquired by CBS. Starting in (roughly) July, I’ll work for the giant media company that’s the home of “Wheel of Fortune” and “CSI” (and CBS Sports, too, David). This is a huge relief and a presumed release from the sneaky barbarians at the gate of JANA. For CNET, I think this opens up huge advertiser opportunities in categories where CBS is a major player and CNET is not. For me personally, this means some fantastic opportunities to expand BNET onto radio and possibly TV, while learning something about those media. Hey, I made the jump from print to online more than 10 years ago; time to learn some new tricks.

Hopefully no more job updates for a while. It’s been a busy month!

Millennials? Oh, my.

We’ve been working on a editorial package at work about the new management issues around those born after 1980 — the so-called “millennials.” I take all groupthink descriptions of a generation with a grain of salt, since I remember the silly stuff propounded about Generation X. Still and all, I do wonder about those crazy kids and their rock-and-roll music. It’s hard not to look for differences.

UPDATE: Did an interview with MarketWatch Radio on May 16 about this topic. The big takeaway (subject to Steve Potisk’s editing) is that the millennials respect leadership not position. And this tends to piss people off. BNET blogger Sean Silverthorne has a post about the resulting unhappy Generation X workers that has really struck a chord.

Mary Jo Foley is coming to town

Mary Jo, a longtime colleague of mine and the world’s Number One blogger on Microsoft, is coming to San Francisco next month to promote her book, Microsoft 2.0. We’re trying to set up a live interview(videotaped, natch) between her and amateur tree photographer Dan Farber.

We all cooperate. We all compete.

I spent last week in New York, meeting with a cable network, glossy magazine, and blog network – a real buffet of business media. All these meetings were about working together with BNET, even though all the parties have substantial Web operations.

• Amusing aside: Transportation reveals hierarchy. We drove out of NY for an audience with the cable network. We cabbed it across Manhattan to visit the magazine. The blog network came to us.

Everyone we met with makes their money from advertising. In fact, there’s probably a core of advertisers from whom we all wrestle budgets. We all compete for users’ time and affection, and in some cases I bet the very same humans consume what we cook up. In every way that matters, we’re competitors. Some are incumbents, others startups; some are multiple media, others pure-play. We’re all trying to skin the cat a different way, sure, but one could argue that there’s only one cat.

Why in the world are we sitting in conference rooms trying to figure out ways to work together?

We don’t normally act like this. Normally media companies fight battles petty or grand over users, editors, and advertisers. Professionally, I think such competition is terrific. An editor who doesn’t want to beat somebody is not nearly as interesting as one who does.

Case in point: We had a brief flap over one of our contributors that very same week. Carmine Gallo, an executive coach and speaker, wrote a book — on his own time and presumably with his own ideas. (Learn more about it in the video below.) I like Carmine’s stuff. He’s the regular host of BNET’s Useful Commute podcast and frequent star in our videos. Carmine adapted from his book an article for BusinessWeek, a similar article for BNET, and collaborated with us on a fun video. Later this month he’s doing a Webcast for Ziff Davis Enterprise on the same topic.

The Webcast got us all into a tizzy. Ziff Davis Enterprise is an fierce competitor of ZDNet, which is the site I’ve spent most of my professional life midwifing. When Ziff sells a Webcast, it means my team lost money. And to think we lost money because the Other Guys used one of our contributors?! Outrage! But of course BusinessWeek.com is a direct competitor of BNET (another, ahem, major focus for my team), and nobody’s blood pressure rose over Carmine’s article there. Why not?

I think the difference is the relative youth of business media online, versus the relative age of technology media. In tech, we’ve spent the last 10 years moving the center of gravity to the Web. We’re all there, and now it’s time to fight for turf. In business media, however, the same transition has just begun. The game is to survive through the inevitable shake-up and still be around 10 years from now. Then we’ll fight.

Oxymoron of the day: the unaffected employee

Today I had to inform several coworkers in Louisville, KY that they were losing their jobs in a companywide layoff at CNET Networks. This was the rueful culmination of a short but intense period when we had to figure out how to make staff cuts and still produce three award-winning sites, figure out how and when to communicate to people, and generally not sleep very well. Having worked in online media before and during the dotcom bust, this was not my first experience of layoffs — not by a long shot — but practice doesn’t make this perfect. Not by a long shot.

In the vernacular of HR documents, people losing their jobs are “the affected employees,” and the 90% who are left are the “unaffected employees.” But in facing the whole staff today in an all-hands meeting, it struck me that, of course, there are no “unaffected” employees. There are just those who will be coming back into the office Monday, looking over at an empty cubicle, and wondering what happens next.

The great thing about working with pros is that they are professional when the shit hits the fan. Some saw it coming (we share a lot of info about the state of the business with the entire team), some were taken completely by surprise. But all dealt with the bad news with enormous character. It was impressive in a way that you never want to have to see.

If anyone reading this needs to hire some strong editorial or product management talent, I’ve got names for you.

• From the bitter-irony dept.: Hours before the cuts, a manager informed me that we had a previously scheduled ice cream social planned for that day. The ice cream guy could not shift it to the next day, because he had hired help to haul the gallons of frozen sweets into the office. I saw a lot of stress eating this afternoon, which I suppose was a comfort of sorts. But c’mon! An ice cream social?!

Henry Blodget mea culpa

From the do-you-really-think-anyone-cares dept.: I was a wrong about Henry Blodget. He’s a good blogger and a necessary read in the online media field.

Over year ago, some of my coworkers (includng my boss) were praising Blodget’s blog, Silicon Alley Insider, and suggesting we should get his stuff on the BNET blogs. I fussed and frumped, because of high-minded belief that someone booted from the securities industry for hyping stocks had no place in a serious business site. Not my site, anyway.

So while I was smugly ignoring the advice of people whom I usually trust, Blodget proceeded to blog his heart out on the business of the Internet and increasingly of the media. He did it well, and he’s gotten better. He’s recruited solid writers to back him up, and now the SAI gang is one of the few things I read every day to stay sharp on my industry. (You can see the feed of interesting stories I read the box to the right.)

• My latest SAI favorite: “Web Ads: Lots of Impressions, Little Value” by Michael Learmonth. I agree completely that theres’s a glut of of ad inventory and ad real estate on professional Web pages. (On CIO.com the other day, I counted more than a dozen graphical ads, sponsorship logos, or blocks of paid links.) The inexorable logic of ad networks will make this situation worse, except for sites that can create a stronger environment for fewer ads, and get paid more for that choice than for what Learmonth calls, “bombarding its users with low-value ad units.”

JANA and CNET: what’s up with that?

I’ve had to explain this many times to different family and friends so I thought I’d write it out once and for all, with updates as things change. Here’s the short version:

A hedge fund is trying to take over CNET Networks, my employer. They have until summer to convince CNET shareholders that the company should change strategy and stop expanding into non-technology areas, such as entertainment, lifestyle, and business. I’ve spent most of the last two years working on the business prong of CNET’s strategy, so if the hedgies win my future employment is up for grabs.

Here’s the long version:

A group of Wall Street hedge funds, high-tech venture capitalists, plus one Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, banded together to acquire a big chunk of CNET Networks. The big money outfit in this group is JANA Partners, but the former entrepreneur a guy named Paul Gardi, seems to be the visionary behind this move.

Their goal is to take over CNET’s board of directors, remove our current management, and change the strategy of the media company. Publicly they haven’t disclosed much about what they would change other than to refocus on technology content and improve the moneymaking operations of CNET.

JANA currently owns about 10% of CNET — an investment greater than $100 million — so by any fair-minded shareholder standard they deserve a hearing. Their partners in this effort control even more shares, so as a bloc they get a big say. Acquiring big chunks of a company and using that voting power to force changes in strategy or management is the formula for “activist shareholders,” which this group certainly is. (Similar activist-shareholder groups are taking a run at the New York Times, tried and failed to shift focus at Time Warner, and succeeded with disastrous results at Knight-Ridder.)

Their efforts started last fall and became public in January. The shareholder meeting where their efforts will succeed or fail is this summer, I believe in June. Between now and then, JANA must convince two-thirds of the CNET shareholders that their proposed changes are a good idea. Given that the JANA bloc controls about 20% of the shares, it seems to me they really just have to convince 50% of the other shareholders to join their cause. CNET’s executive management, on the other hand, must convince the shareholders that current strategy is right and current management is aggressive and profit-minded enough to raise the stock price.

I expect that between now and the shareholder meeting there will be an increasingly public airing of claims and counterclaims, promises and threats. I don’t know if this will be a formal proxy battle or just a broader hearts-and-minds campaign. Since CNET’s stock has performed poorly for the last two years, some shareholders may be inclined to try anything to change the status quo.

My friends are on the Internet!

David Morgenstern sent me and Raines this amusing link to a video on ValleyWag. Where should I start with the explanations?

1) David Morgenstern is a dear friend, former coworker, and fellow alumna of BMUG. (Funny aside: www.BMUG.com is now for sale!)

1a) While volunteering at meetings and geek dinners, all BMUGers of a certain age got to know John “Captain Crunch” Draper, the semi-infamous hacker/creepy guy in the background of the above video. That’s why David sent it to me.

1b) It’s odd to note in retrospect that all of us college kids in BMUG (and some high schoolers) knew that Draper liked to get unusually physical with young men. (Nothing serious, but no other old guy was asking for or offering backrubs.) And we just kept a wary eye and snickered about it. I guess communities get used to errant behavior within bounds.

2) ValleyWag (a blog offering up frequent snarky comments on Silicon Valley life and the low-rent celebrity that goes with success in technology) has been really taking the piss out of ZDNet — the Web site that I run at CNET. Most especially the ZDNet Blogs.

2a) ValleyWag has made vicious fun of one of our first bloggers, Steve Gillmor, who recently resigned (in his blog!) from blogging on ZDNet.

3) In a followup to his resignation post, Gillmor explained his recent history of hopping from firm to firm in tech media, all as explanation for his latest hop. In the post, he takes a swipe at his former editors at eWeek:

“As with InfoWorld, I was fired for cause, in this case cause I just didn’t give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about.”

3a) That “online pinhead” was David Morgenstern.

3b) Matthew Rothenberg, another dear friend and former editor-in-chief of eWeek, takes a velvet-gloved swipe right back at Gillmor in the comments section of the ZDNet blog.

 Who can keep up?