[Re: Loose Cannon: You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.com, Direct Newsline, June 16, 2003]
I always enjoy reading your column and got a few good laughs out of today’s.
One comment you made hinted at something that I think desperately needs to be examined on a much larger scale, but to my knowledge really has not:
“The industry’s ability to detect phony baloney took a multi-year leave during the dot-com craze.”
When you say “the industry” I’m not sure what exactly you mean, but you could certainly lump in the media watchdog industry in that. During the late 90s, it seemed that every article written about “the Internet,” “dot-coms,” “dot-commers,” “venture capital,” “I.P.O.s,” etc was written as if it was a press release written by the subject’s PR firm. There was so much gushing, so much swaggering, so much “isn’t the subject of this article the coolest, hippest, playest by his own rulesest person you’ve ever seen? And by association, isn’t yours truly, the author of this piece?”
Where was the skepticism? Where was the questioning? Why was the press (and I don’t just mean the trade press) so willing to buy what was being stated about the “New Economy” by the New Economists hook, line and sinker?
Well, that’s my rant for today. Please don’t think that I am blasting you in particular. I just find it frustrating that, to my mind, the same media who helped make the “dot-com bubble” look so sexy in the first place by breathlessly hyping it are now tsk-tsking the once mighty who have since fallen and the “obvious” mistakes made that apparently weren’t so obvious 4 or 5 years ago.
David Juhl
Director of Circulation
American Nurseryman Pub. Co.
Chicago
Network
