Once more a whore
The multiple rounds of edits are in, the W&N lawyer’s questions answered – “please confirm the hotel does supply pornography as alleged on pg 3,” that kind of thing – and the bound advance proofs starting to land on the desks of booksellers. And so it begins again: the whoring and hyping of a book ahead of publication.
The title of the next book (barring last minute changes) is “The Kings of the Road Club” and it’s the story of what happened when I decided – nearly three years ago – to sell almost all of my possessions, abandon my London flat and begin what was supposed to be a one-year experiment living in upscale hotels around the world. The fact that I still live in hotels should probably give you a clue as to the outcome. Except not. Because what starts as a story about travelling the world and living in fancy rooms soon turned – thanks in part to a well-timed pun and some Las Vegas hairdressers – into something very different, and more than a little fucked up.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll explain more about the contents later. For now, Bea at W&N has just sent me the current version of the cover. Here is is!
The car? That’d be this.
Get out of the way, old man! You’re being Disrupted! Screw you, newspapers: blogs are stealing your readers and Craigslist is pillaging your revenue! Take that publishers: Andrew Wiley doesn’t need you and your stupid dead trees!
And as for you, hotels – ha! hotels! – if ever there was an industry ripe for disruption, it’s you clowns. Charging $300 a night for a bed and a shower and a tiny plastic enema of shampoo when AirBnB will let you get the same, and more, for $50, so long as you don’t mind the creepy thrill of living in a stranger’s apartment. Kapow! See you in hell, hotels!
But of course the old men are fighting back – dusting down their old service uniforms and oiling their muskets and surrounding themselves with legislative sandbags to prolong their pathetic existence for another few months. This week, New York Governor, David Paterson, signed a bill outlawing the use of private dwellings as makeshift hotels. The bill, supported by hotel industry lobbyists (natch), bans rentals of less than 30 days and makes operating a residential apartment as a transient hotel illegal in New York City. Good news for big hotels, bad news for poor old New Yorkers who now find themselves banned from letting space in their apartments using AirBnB or Craigslist. And even worse news for NY-bound tourists who will now struggle to find a room in Manhattan for less than $100 a night (apart from these).
As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick puts it, “the internet has made it so that people can be more efficient in things like transportation or short-term housing, and the old guard doesn’t like it one bit, so they come up with regulations like these to outlaw it.”
Yeah!
Except, no.
Come On Barbie, Let’s Go Party
Make no mistake, we get some weird stuff sent to TCHQ, especially when it’s addressed to our Belgian reporter, Robin Wauters. Which is why I always make a point of opening his mail before it’s sent on.
Today, though, was a special day.
Today, wrapped innocently in tissue paper, came “Barbie Video Girl”: a genuine Barbie doll, featuring a hidden webcam in her necklace. It’s hard to get across in text alone how messed up this thing is, so I hopped on to Skype with CrunchGear’s John Biggs in New York for the first episode of a new video segment I’m calling “What’s Fucked Up In Toys… With John Biggs.”
“Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”
- Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, Slaughterhouse Five
In Kurt Vonnegut Jnr’s most famous book, Billy Pilgrim is a former soldier who finds himself lost in time: forced to live and relive the periods of his life in random order. Today I know how Billy Pilgrim feels.
Sure, for Pilgrim the trigger was the trauma of war, while for me it’s the lunacy of getting ready to launch TechCrunch TV in a few days (more on that soon), but apart from that we’re basically the same. Except that I’m not American. Or a fictional character.
What I am though, is confused. I’m sitting here in the TechCrunch office, on a Sunday evening, trying to placate my editorial paymasters by bashing out something resembling a column in the five minutes I have between conference calls with TCTV contributors. To expedite the process I’m trawling the web; pinging the major technology news sites to find out what big stories I’ve missed this week. The only problem is, every time I click on a story, I discover that I’ve been transported back in time.
A Death Of A Thousand Hacks: New Forbes Editorial Genius In Bold Plan To Kill Forbes
Yesterday, I wrote a column contrasting the attitude towards ‘content’ displayed by old and new media. My conclusion was that, in the Internet world, quality, originality and exclusivity are fast becoming irrelevant. Instead, online publications increasingly treat content as low-paid, illiterate swill, commissioned by the ton to provide SEO ad inventory.
To show that the phenomenon wasn’t limited to online-only brands, I gave the example of Forbes.com – with its mish-mash of celebrity slideshows and tacky lists of ‘Americas best paying blue-collar jobs’ and ‘hottest summer convertibles’. Since the column was posted, I’ve spoken to a number of former and current Forbes employees who (off the record, naturally) have expressed agreement with my criticisms. Forbes’ obsession with page views at all costs (or, rather, no cost) is just plain embarrassing.
But clearly the company have taken my criticism to heart: earlier today Paul Maidment, chief editor of Forbes.com, tendered his resignation, while new ‘chief product officer’ Lewis Dvorkin called an on-the-record meeting to announce a bold new online strategy for the company. Prior to joining Forbes, Dvorkin was founder and CEO of crowdsourced news site, True/Slant, which was acquired by Forbes back in May. And, what’s his bold plan to improve the journalistic standards of one of the world’s most respected business publications?
That Forbes.com will soon be opening its doors to 1000s of unpaid contributors and that [rather than commissioning quality in-house journalism] “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent”.
Gggggaaaaaaahhhhh.
You are reading PaulCarr.com, Paul Carr's pseudo-daily blog of things too weird, libellous, self-indulgent or dull to sell to anyone. A director's commentary to his life, if you like.It is also the companion site to his writings for various publications and to his book, Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions Of A New Media Whore, which is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. About Paul...