The Fanciest Dive / Christopher Byron
I have a certain admiration for someone who very clearly has no fear of pissing in the pool he's swimming in, biting the hand that feeds, cutting off his nose to spite his face, and abusing cliches til the bleed. Chris Byron does a lot fo the first three, and even a little bit of the latter in this book. When I lived in the West Village, I used to read Byron a lot in the weekly NY Observer. Mostly, he came across like a harsh shot of whiskey after all the soothing, full release (with an occassional shiv in the back) style of writing that the Observer specialized in. Byron happily told the self-regarding Upper East Side types who were assumed to read the Observeer that they, and their peers in the financial industry, were fools, marks, and scam artists. I mostly remember he seemed to hate Revlon with a passion, and Martha Stewart Omnimedia. When I lived in the West Village, I used to read Byron a lot in the weekly NY Observer. Mostly, he came across like a harsh shot of whiskey after all the soothing, full release (with an occassional shiv in the back) style of writing that the Observer specialized in. Byron happily told the self-regarding Upper East Side types who were assumed to read the Observeer that they, and their peers in the financial industry, were fools, marks, and scam artists. I mostly remember he seemed to hate Revlon with a passion, and Martha Stewart Omnimedia. I picked up a used copy of The Fanciest Dive for a buck in a local library. Read it in a few hours. It's a story of a startup magazine -- TV-Cable Week -- from Time, Inc., back before Warner or AOL got connected to the company. Time wanted to have a magazine that would capitalize on the growth of cable TV in the 80s, so they poured money into an untested idea and lost tens of millions in months. A ton of this MBA shitbaggery sounded awfully familiar to someone who had been through various rises and crashes in Silicon Alley in the 90s.

I picked up a used copy of The Fanciest Dive for a buck in a local library. Read it in a few hours. It's a story of a startup magazine -- TV-Cable Week -- from Time, Inc., back before Warner or AOL got connected to the company. Time wanted to have a magazine that would capitalize on the growth of cable TV in the 80s, so they poured money into an untested idea and lost tens of millions in months. A ton of this MBA shitbaggery sounded awfully familiar to someone who had been through various rises and crashes in Silicon Alley in the 90s.

Just some examples:

1) The young Harvard MBAs who had analyzed the idea and the market has specifically recommended testing it with potential audiences before committing all the way. The top magazine executives of Time (who were like most executives: more full of themselves than competence) dived right in, because they were desperate to be as successful as the Video side of Time, who were making Scrooge McDuck amounts of cash in cable.

2) At one point, the operations of the magazine moved up to White Plains. Having been part of a magazine that got moved up to White Plains, I had flashbacks of pain and commute.

3) Senior tech managers promised results that just couldn’t be done with the technology of the time. The tech guys who were actually making the systems work did heroic work, until reality finally caught up with them.

4) Money thrown at parties and gift bags and other accoutrements that would impress Manhattan peers, but not accomplish anything for the project.

And so on.

But my favorite parts were when Byron made it clear how little he thought of henry Grunwald, the editor-in-chief of Time, Inc. (and former managing editor of Time magazine). Grunwald just died a few months ago, before I picked up Byron’s book, and the media was full of hagiography, treating him like some Solon of our age instead of a typical mouthpiece of the establishment. Byron describes the time when Daniel Zucchi, the publisher of TV-Cable Week took Grunwald on a tour of the White plain facility during construction. Then Zucchi took Grunwald across the street to the White Plains Galleria, which was pretty new in 1986.

Keep in mind, Grunwald was clearly kind of a sheltered type, the kid of New York executive who flew in a helicopter to White Plains, even though it would have taken less time to take a car. (Well, limo. People like Grunwald wouldn’t ride in the back of a Ford Crown Vic, unless they were finally fleeing the Children of 1789.) Anyway, this is from Byron:

That is currently in my top five of literary takedowns, the list that Steve Erickson’s takedown of Al Gore permanently ensconced at the top.

Byron's book also appears to imply that Gerlad Levin, the Candide of NYC media executives, may have hidden a memo that would have scuttled the money-losing project right at the beginning. While Byron never says it, it seems obvious that Levin might have done it deliberately to make his rival execs in the Magazine division of Time Inc. look like dopes.

Anyway, no one should be surprised that the execs at the top got promoted and rewarded, while most of the middle and lower level execs got demoted and punished. That’s the way corporations work.

Anyway