»America Is An Entirely Business-driven Culture«

Interview with John Battelle, Chairman, President and CEO of The Industry Standard and ex editor of Wired.

The business magazine The Industry Standard was founded two years ago and became already profitabel by 1999. Advertising revenue increased by almost 700 percent in last year. According to the American nagazine Brills Content The Standard has surpassed its competition, the Red Herring as well as Wired Magazine. Especially the comparison to Wired is of significance to John Battelle, since he was its managing editor from 1993 to 1997. The change from Wired to The Standard reflects also a change the media perception of the Internet has gone through. Whereas Wired has been selling a networked future in neon-glue colors, this future has by now arrived but in a much more tamed version. The editorial line and graphics design of The Industry Standard matches this more pragmatic approach.

Battelle has not yet arrived where he wants to be with his magazine, up on the pantheon of established business magazines with high circulation and worldwide brand recognition. Essentially The Standard is still a trade magazine for Silicon Valley, with half of its 150.000 circulation being mailed out for free to a selected audience. A 10 Million Dollar advertisement campaign should change that and help selling it at every newsagents in the English speaking world. Hari Kunzru, co-editor of Mute Magazine and ex-editor of Wire UK was in San Francisco for the Webby Awards and used the opportunity for an interview with John Battelle. The interview was conducted at 394 Pacific Av. San Francisco, California, Headquarter of the Industry Standard, on 11.5th of May 2000.

John Battelle: Commitment. I think that the people here, certainly in California, are really ideologically committed to the idea that through technology you will find market efficiency and through market efficiency you will find business success. No one's going to alter that belief. It's the ideology of the United States. It's manifest destiny, the same shit that's been going on forever.

John Battelle: Absolutely. It's not a trend. It's just the latest expression of a much broader philosophical bent. Whether or not the optimism meme gets embraced in Europe is a deeply interesting question.

John Battelle: I see that in London and you see glimmers of that in Amsterdam and Berlin. Looking around Europe now there aren't too many other places. France perhaps. I wouldn't want to lay claim to too much knowledge of Europe when it comes to this stuff. It's still to me a kind of odd place. It doesn't make much sense to me.

John Battelle: The media? Given that my whole career has been in the media, I tend to take the approach that you don't ever not talk to anybody. It serves you poorly. However what I say is very guarded. It's got to be. I have opinions but I tend to keep them to myself unless I feel in command of the space that I'm talking about, which is why things always tend to come back to my company, because I have command of that. I have a certain amount of command over my trajectory through the industry. Btu when someone asks what my opinion is about Excite, @home or whatever, I've got very strong opinions but I generally keep them to myself. To succeed in this world is extraordinarily tied by personal relationships - that's why the geographic region is so important, that's why people are prepared to pay $100 per square foot for real estate, because they want to be within a stone's throw of everyone else. There's this almost indefensible explosion of parties - the reason I'm dressed like this [suit and tie] is because tonight's the Webbies and I'm a judge.

John Battelle: See you this evening.

John Battelle: Clearly. There's just not that much to say about work if work is not knowledge-based. You know, other than, hey, the coalmine sucks! There's not that much to say. But if you're a manager in an industrial economy there's lots to talk about but very few people to talk to because there's only one manager for every hundred people. In this environment, in this economy, everyone who works at my place thinks they're going to be CEO some day - because they could. It's quite conceivable. It's quite democratic. They're smart enough. They know enough of the right people. They have good enough ideas. They will move up and become significant players. The assumption in a knowledge economy, if you're a knowledge worker is that you're not stuck. So there's this relentless networking to get ahead that occurs. It's just relentless. And we have benefited greatly by it. It's a publisher's job to be a platform for communication between a market.

John Battelle: Look at this - this is Fortune, biweekly. Look at that. One hundred and fifty pages. Filled with dotcom ads dotcom...dotcom...dotcom...dotcom..dotcom...dotcom... dotcom...dotcom... dotcom...I gotta call my ad guy, Jesus Christ look at that. Doctom ...dotcom... dotcom...That is amazing.

John Battelle: Yes. There clearly at the moment is a discontinuity between the amount of demand for attention in the world, and the amount of attention there is. But there is not a discontinuity and the amount of attention there will be. And I think that's what you've got in every aspect of this market. Take pets.com. A classic pet store. Is the pets market x billion? Yes. In ten years will a significant portion of that be IP-enabled? Yes. So at the end of theday is there a big enough goal for everyone to go after. Probably .But four companies all of whom claim to be on a business plan to capture thirty to forty percent of the market, the math doesn't work out. So either four companies all scale back to twenty five percent or something else happens - a dominant one comes out. I think in the magazine market - yes - fundamentally the entire future of business publishing is at stake, the story is moving again, just like it did in the twenties and thirties when it was moving towards economies of scale and mass industrialisation, new transportation systems and new mass media systems, you know I've been reading the histories of Dow Jones, Pearson, McGraw Hill and Time Inc to place the motion I'm spearheading in some kind of historical perspective - McGraw hill started as a bunch of trade magazines about nuclear science, train engineering

John Battelle: Exactly - it was like look at this new cool business stuff! boom! Business Week, boom! Dow Jones!- Dow Jones started as a probably-biased trade rag for a bunch of brokers who were scratching each others backs, and it became one of the preeminent brands in the business world. I think that kind of transformation is occurring now in business and it is as big a story as the one that created the last set of business press. And so everybody's going holy shit! It's up for grabs so while we at the Standard and Wired and the Herring and Upside - we proved something , well maybe the Herring and Upside didn't really prove it but Wired and the Standard and Business 2.0 proved it - so here, Forbes special issue - Forbes dotcom! - hahaha - this is a 210 page exercise in marketing. There's clearly not enough attention for all of this - however theres enough attention for some, and some more than there was before. I think that media is incredibly malleable. Media is not efficient in the present, but over a timeline it's usually figures out how to maximise attention. And my job is to maximise attention.

John Battelle: My gut says it's not going to get to that point this year, but it could. Do they have a broadcast tv deal this year?

John Battelle: I think once it has a broadcast tv deal, that's when. That's a real production question. You got to change the whole architecture of things - it's got to be made worth watching, not just worth participating in.

John Battelle: Exactly.

John Battelle: I think so. We're finally getting television-sized reach numbers and past television sized reach numbers on the web. And os the inevitable mechanics of mass media lumber in, and they say oh, 40% of the American public is online, and if we can create an event where one night 15 to 20 million people are tuned into the tv event and online, well, think of the promotional possibilities! It's an event. It's a Superbowl. People are very passionate about their online experiences and as this stuff gets more in range of the American culture it's fundamentally inevitable it will be reflected in television. Because American culture is television. I think the old and new media thing is a construct. I don't think anyone who has a good business plan makes any distinction, whether they're running a newspaper or a television station or whatever.

John Battelle: Well, here I am, sitting here in a suit, running a huge magazine, talking about the present, not the future. I've talked myself into this position. At the time the job of Wired was to run out front and point, and jump up and down and scream this is happening, pay attention. When Wired got tired for me, on its editorial mission at that time, which I think has changed - but at that time, what was tired was when you're jumping up and down and people are passing you and going yeah, and ... the present passed by the future.

John Battelle: I think cheerleading retreats to verticals. They'll cheerlead in Billboard, they have forever, or in Hollywood Reporter, or in Ad Age - they'll say the best the best the best - but as a posture, an entire editorial posture, I really think its over. If I didn't fundamentally believe that I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. Now there may come a time when there's a need for a new wave of cheerleading - genomics or whatever - but cheerleading is tired. I think the future is a serious business now.

John Battelle: A lot of room for play, but I don't think it's a cultural obsession. In 95 or 96 we thought that the idea of Danny Hillis being at Disney was just like the coolest idea in the world - now it's been five years and - what? They've been there, now they're leaving. But what happened?

John Battelle: Yeah. I think you could trace the intellectual presumptions of Wired directly into the present-day hegemony of business. What seemed radical free-shouting about 'information wants to be free', 'keep the government out of our face' 'encryption is really important' - all of our positions at Wired are now part of the mainstream presumption of doing business. Information wants to be free has now turned into free flow of information. As long as it's uninterrupted in its flow between marketer and customer, between datasets, that's what free means. Free to go where it belongs in an efficient market, not 'no charge anywhere' because no charge anywhere is insane. Take [John Perry] Barlow now, he's now trying to make a business model for the musician business - as opposed to the music business. Where you make money from being a musician, rather than doing it for record companies? But there's still money! And if its not money it's exchange of value, and America for better and for worse is an entirely business-driven culture. Business is culture in America. I don't think business is culture in Europe.

John Battelle: Yeah, but it's all how you look at it. There's a certain beauty in making a business work and there's a fulfilment beyond looking at it as a cold business. It has a heart. It's an organism. This is biblical. Work is an expression of God - fundamentally America is a ridiculously religious society that pretends not to be. Have you heard this? If India is the most religious country and Sweden is the least, then America is a bunch of Indians run by Swedes. We pretend to be Swedish with the first amendment and the separation of church and state and all that, but most of us left because of some kind of persecution that at its fundament had to do with moral beliefs - whether it was the puritans or the sandinistas. We all came to America where you can believe in what you want to believe in.

John Battelle: I think that there's a certain willingness to experiment on the West Coast, that is fundamentally born of the need to experiment. You're out here, you don't have the massive superstructure of societal support that the East Coast has accreted over a couple of hundred years - so you've got to figure out new ways of doing everything. The fact is that most of the interesting innovations in the United States have come from the West Coast - the freeway and silicon valley and aerospace innovation. There's a certain lack of rigidity in thinking that has informed the West coast that creates an environment that is self-fulfilling - Wired just couldn't have happened in New York - it would have been totally uptight. Of course it's owned by New York now - but that's different.

John Battelle: [laughs] You have to believe! I'm hoping that while the cultural underpinnings of 'why' are quite different for here and Europe, that the recognition of 'what' brings Europe to the same place. Here 'why' is 'cos we can!' 'cos it would be cool!' but what's the end result? - this interesting redefinition and restructuring of business culture and by extension, culture - because you're getting your headfood online it's different than if you're going to the store and that changes the dynamics of your society - but the fact that there are new businesses to be built and new ways to think about business is just true, so how you get there whether it's through enthusiasm and quest for fame as an IPO millionaire, or simply because it seems like a rational and logical thing to do, which is a more Germanic point of view - or it seems more 'defensible on its face' which is more British, it's just that my gut tells me there's a big story. It's like - you can't not industrialise - you just can't! You've got to get the factories and the roads and the mass media. So you can't not internet economise - you just have to. If you don't - you lose! And no one, regardless of what drives them philosophically, wants to lose.

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/8/8221/1.html