MEDIA WATCH: Click and Drag

That The New York Times covers dot-coms and the people and money behind them is to be expected; that Town & Country magazine devoted an issue to the subject comes as a delightful shock.

For more than 150 years, Town & Country has covered the doings of old money and what passes for an aristocracy in the United States. We thought it was terribly nice of Town & Country to point out in its June issue that even though the money is new, dot-com millionaires are really nice people.

The tone is pretty much set in editor-in-chief Pamela Fiori’s introduction to the special section. Fiori points out that the section, titled “The New Wild West,” answers one basic question: “So who are all those rich guys in Silicon Valley and Seattle anyway?

“What [we] found out was more intoxicating than the aroma of slow-roasted coffee beans in one of the ubiquitous Starbucks cafes: It was the smell of new money, for one thing – a lot of it,” she continues. “Indeed, they are far more sophisticated, articulate, well dressed and well mannered than we ever imagined.” Indeed.

The articles focus on a handful of dot-com millionaires and how they spend their time and money. The pools, the ponies and the private planes are given as much due, of course, as the long hours at the computer and the charity work for various cultural and humanitarian causes. For instance, Scott Oki, Microsoft’s former director of marketing, is profiled for the Oki Foundation, which he founded to help children around the world.

Not all are strangers to old money, it turns out. In a bylined piece, CompareNet founder Trevor Traina notes that he is the great-great-grandson of Herbert Dow, founder of Dow Chemical Co.

An article on e-commerce is likewise determined to reassure old money that the new dot-commerce and dot-com money will not change its way of life. The piece points out that “Couture will still have to be bought in Paris.” Kewl.

While Town & Country may have had some difficulty handling its subjects, some of them are wryly clear-eyed about the magazine. Amazon.com founder and Seattle-based millionaire Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying, “I’ll probably be the goofiest person ever in Town & Country.”

The May 25 edition of the Times chose to reassure its readers that “online transvestitism” is not as frequent an occurrence in virtual communities as one might fear.

The Bruce Headlam piece, “Boys Will Be Boys, and Sometimes Girls, in Online Communities,” reports on a survey of 400 participants in online communities. Results of the study, Social Geography of Gender-Switching in Virtual Environments on the Internet, were published in the journal Information Communication and Society.

Of the 40% who had taken part in gender-switching – pretending to be a sex other than your assigned one – less than half claimed to still be doing so. The Times quotes one of the survey’s authors as saying: “It means that if someone tells you online that they’re female, they probably are.”

This is most likely good news for marketers that are collecting demographic data. What remains unanswered, however, is how many people reported their gender correctly when they responded to the survey in the first place.