Matthew Garrahan

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“You Need To Be Insulated From The Critics”

September 2, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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What perplexed me about Gawker during the last few years of existence and throughout its holy-shit Hulk Hogan trial was that the principals on the inside of the company seemed tone-deaf at best and oblivious at worst. That allowed an emotional homunculus like Peter Thiel to use a short stack from his billions to drive the media company into bankruptcy.

In Matthew Garrahan’s Financial Times interview with Nick Denton, the former owner discusses why Thiel and others in Silicon Valley were so angered about darts thrown at them by Gawker, stressing insulation from criticism on the outside can be vital when building a corporation. Perhaps the same is true of those running an independent media empire?

An excerpt:

The appeal is likely to take at least a year to get to court, which means Denton and Thiel will not be burying the hatchet soon. And yet they have much in common. They are of similar age: Denton turned 50 last month, while Thiel will be 49 in October. They are both gay, tech-obsessed European émigrés (Thiel is from Germany; Denton from the UK) and they are both libertarians.

There the similarities end, Denton suggests. “Thiel’s idea of freedom is that you can create a society that is insulated from mainstream society … and imagine your own world in which none of the old rules apply.” He is alluding to Thiel’s interest in seasteading — the largely theoretical creation of autonomous societies beyond the reach of meddling national governments. “My idea of free society always had more of an anarcho-syndicalist bent,” he says. “If I was in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war [an anarcho-syndicalist] is probably what I would have been.”

Still, he says he understands the desire to operate beyond the restrictions of normal society, saying that such thinking is common in start-up culture. He points to Uber, the ride-sharing app, to underline the point. When its founders set out to launch a product that would up-end the personal transportation industry, they had to protect their vision from external doubters or naysayers. “You need to be insulated from the critics if you’re going to persuade people to join you, believe in you, invest in you.” Great companies are often based on a single idea, he continues. “And if someone questions that idea, it can undermine the support within the organisation for that idea.”

This, he says, explains Thiel’s animosity towards Gawker. Valleywag, a Denton-owned tech site that was eventually folded into Gawker.com, used to cover Silicon Valley with a critical eye and was a constant thorn in the side of its community of companies and investors — including Thiel.•

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“He Says He No Longer Thinks The Story Was A Failure”

May 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Unsurprisingly, Sean Penn, misguided and stubborn, has still not realized the deep flaws of his ill-advised Rolling Stone jungle flatulence about El Chapo. The actor came off as poetaster, poseur and pawn, allowing the Mexican drug kingpin to use the nouveau print-journalist’s naivete to greatly downplay his horrific crimes. The lack of recognition comes across clearly in Matthew Garrahan’s smart Financial Times profile of the contentious actor-director, though Penn must be credited with summing up the Trump campaign quite succinctly: “It’s a masturbatory populism.”

An excerpt:

Now that the dust has settled, I wonder how he feels about his Rolling Stone article and the controversial visit to Guzmán. In the immediate aftermath of the fugitive’s arrest and the story’s publication, Penn appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes, where he told Charlie Rose that he thought the article had failed. His intention had been to “start a conversation” about the war on drugs but, instead of a dialogue, most of the commentary about the piece was scathing about the publicity it gave to a violent killer.

Was he surprised by the criticism? “No. I’ve had reason to have concerns about the state of English-speaking media for a long time. But this was an all-time high.” Many people reading it missed the point or missed crucial parts, he says, such as the fact that he never actually interviewed Guzmán directly (the then fugitive answered prepared questions on video). He says he no longer thinks the story was a failure. “When I said it failed, that turned out not to be the case. There’s no question there’s ultimately been more conversation about the drug war.” And he’s sure that’s because of this story? “I can’t prove it. But I’ve noticed that there’s been more debate.”

He seems sure; I am less so.•

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“The News Brands That Have Attracted The Most Interest Are Digital, Mobile And Global”

July 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The news business isn’t dead, just a tale of haves and have-nots like most of contemporary culture, and we may have reached an inflection point in that arrangement over the past year or so. From Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post to Nikkei snapping up the Financial Times, those publications with a global name are being acquired and reformatted for a mobile world where smartphones are the main medium. 

The question for me remains whether the New York Times, the most valuable erstwhile newspaper in the U.S., will be able to go it alone as a “mom-and-pop” shop, or if they must also become part of a gigantic, diversified company. I’d hope for the former and bet the latter.

From Matthew Garrahan at the Financial Times:

What has convinced investors to take another look at news? “There has been a lot of disruption but there has never been a lack of consumer demand for quality news content,” says Jim Bankoff, chief executive of Vox Media.

Another clue can be found in the actions of Apple and Facebook, which have built news offerings. The technology companies have realised that, like photo sharing and music apps, news can attract and retain users of their mobile services. This year will be the first when smartphones are responsible for 50 per cent of news consumption, up from 25 per cent in 2012, according to Ken Doctor, an analyst with Newsonomics. The smartphone has become “the primary access point for many readers,” he says.

The news brands that have attracted the most interest are digital, mobile and global. For Nikkei, buying the FT gives it an opportunity to expand into new markets — particularly in Asia, says Mr Doctor, where markets such as South Korea, Indonesia and India are growing rapidly. The FT “gives Nikkei more weight and more smarts in how to compete,” he says.•

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“Facebook Has A Larger Population Than The People’s Republic Of China”

July 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Every new medium or platform you work on has some effect on the content. The stage informs the play, the medium is still the message.

But the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and other erstwhile print giants who’ve thus far survived the Digital Age have less-esoteric concerns when it comes to their partnering with Facebook and Google and the like. Will new media cannibalize their business models, further reducing their currency? Or is it at long last a path forward in not just an Internet world but a mobile one as well?

In a Financial Times piece, Matthew Garrahan and Hannah Kuchler explore the new abnormal, the joining of Zuckerbergs and Sulzbergers. An excerpt:

Given the industry’s bruising experiences, it is perhaps natural that publishers have greeted the new services with a mixture of fear and optimism. Mark Thompson, chief executive of The New York Times, points to the benefits of being able to provide its news content to a vast new audience. “We’re talking about an opportunity to distribute your content at no charge at all to well over 1bn people,” he says. “[Facebook] has a larger population than the People’s Republic of China.”

But there are concerns that Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles — which are not paying for the content — will chip away at the notion of a newspaper or magazine website as a standalone brand to be digested whole, rather than broken up into individual stories and scattered across different apps. The services could “dilute [publisher] brands as destination sites and . . .  boost the platform brand”, says Gordon Crovitz, a media adviser and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

Publishers have also privately voiced concerns about the power Apple and Facebook will wield and the potential harm the new aggregation services could cause to paid subscription models. Apple has told publishers its service will eventually include subscription capability and, like Facebook, has told them they will be able to keep all the advertising revenue they generate. But neither company has ruled out changing this arrangement in the future.

Facebook and Apple have a shared aim: increasing the amount of time their users spend on their services, which are increasingly being accessed via smartphones. Smartphones have become the dominant way to read news: this year will mark the first time that smartphones were responsible for 50 per cent of news consumption, up from 25 per cent in 2012, according to Ken Doctor, an analyst with Newsonomics.

Driving Facebook and Apple’s interest in news “is the arrival of the smartphone as the primary access point for many readers”, he says. A publisher who has had negotiations with both companies puts it differently. Facebook and Apple have “finally woken up to the fact that news has value on mobile.”•

 

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“The Industry Has A Long History Of Producing Sequels”

December 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A global marketplace essentially demands Hollywood build franchises and make sequels, with their relatively controllable advertising costs, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. While the long-ago serials were B-movie productions, cheaply made things, and sequels from the ’70s through the ’90s usually exploited a product rather than nurtured it, by the new century no expense was spared to make several highly entertaining variations on a theme. That doesn’t mean success is always–or even often–achieved, but that’s the intention. A little from Matthew Garrahan of the Financial Times about the unsure early attempts to build can’t-miss franchises:

“While the current vogue for producing and maintaining franchises is relatively new in Hollywood, the industry has a long history of producing sequels. In the 1930s, episodic movie ‘serials’ such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon drew cinema audiences week after week. The horror movies produced by Universal Studios in the same decade also spawned numerous sequels, such as Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s Daughter. In the decades that followed, the biggest studios produced countless genre movies — comedies, westerns, musicals, gangster films — featuring stars such as James Cagney, Fred Astaire, John Wayne and the Marx Brothers, in which the lead actor would often play variations on the same character.

The paradigm shifted in the 1970s, when The Godfather: Part II became the first sequel to win best picture at the Academy Awards. But, far from ushering in an era of critical excellence, the studios saw instead an opportunity to squeeze their successes for all they were worth, spawning a catalogue of inferior follow-ups to hit films over the next 20 years. The blockbuster success of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Oscar-winning Jaws, for instance, spawned four sequels, each worse than its predecessor (Spielberg wisely declined to be involved in any of them), culminating in the appalling Jaws: The Revenge (1987) regarded widely as one of the worst films ever made. ‘I’ve never seen it, but by all accounts it’s terrible,’ Michael Caine, the film’s star, once said. ‘However, I have seen the house it built and it’s terrific.’

In the 1980s and early 1990s a clear trend for sequels had been established, particularly with action films. Assuming the first film was a success, a second could be produced using essentially the same plot but in a different setting.”

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“There Was A Lot Of Film Around”

February 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Bill Gates grew up in Seattle near an early computer center and Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley. Would they have chosen different paths in life if they were raised in Idaho or Kansas? How much does the place where we’re raised have to do with who we become? How much of it is chance and how much of it is hardwired?

David Fincher spent his formative years in the shadow of Northern California filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and believes that explains to a good extent why he’s a filmmaker. From a really good Financial Times piece about Fincher by Matthew Garrahan:

“Though Fincher’s childhood experience of Rear Window convinced him that he wanted to work in Hollywood, there was already plenty of film-making taking place around him in Marin County. He grew up in a middle-class family but their neighbors were some of Hollywood’s biggest names. ‘George Lucas was my neighbor, Francis Coppola was shooting The Godfather [nearby] in Shady Lane. There was a lot of film around.’

Lucas, who had not yet made Star Wars, was then embarking on his film career. ‘I was walking down the street one day with a friend of mine and saw a crew setting up lights for American Graffiti. We saw these old [Ford] Thunderbirds driving around. And then the movie came out. They found a part of a street in Petaluma that looked 10 years old and were able to transport an audience back in time with wardrobe, the hairstyles. To see that happen … was unbelievable.’ And fortunate, I say. Imagine if he had been raised in Idaho instead of Marin County. ‘I’d be a rancher. I’d be delivering calves now.’

When he was 14 his parents moved to Oregon but three years later the 17-year-old Fincher returned to California, where he stayed with a friend and his mother, and, unusually for a film director of his generation, did not attend film school. Within two years, however, he had found himself a job working for Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, where he was part of the crew that made Return of the Jedi.”

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