Episode Report Card Wing Chun: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Scribbling Rivalry
By Wing Chun | Season 2 | Episode 9 | Aired on 01.16.2001
At Booklovers, Judy uses her product-placed blueberry iBook to read Lily's email. She has a stricken expression, and calls Lily, leaving a terse and loaded message for Lily to call her immediately. Ruh roh!
PagesAlive. D.B. Sweeney is telling a group of staffers to meet back later with suggestions on how each of their departments can bring in revenue. To get them started, he suggests that, since the site reviews restaurants, theatre, and the like, PagesAlive could charge a fee when users click through to a merchant's site. Uh. No. You can't do that. Because that would compromise the integrity of the review. What if a restaurant declined to participate in the revenue model? Would PagesAlive then give said restaurant a bad review -- or refuse to review the restaurant at all? The Man from F.U.N.K.L.E., my partner on Fametracker, used to work for Toronto Life, primarily a "service" magazine that was about 60% reviews and listings of events and stores in Toronto. They had to enact a very strict policy about advertising to make sure that no one could charge that the magazine was, in effect, taking bribes; even when various companies would send them free stuff with no apparent strings attached, if an item was worth more than (I believe) $5, they put it in a box and then auctioned it off in the office at the end of the year, giving all the revenue to charity. If PagesAlive -- or, indeed, any magazine, whether print or online -- expects to be taken seriously as a journalistic enterprise, they cannot endorse a revenue model like that. I see where D.B. Sweeney's going with that, but he's talking like a businessman, not an editor. Next he suggests looking for opportunities within articles to seek financial partnerships with online retailers, so that PagesAlive could link products mentioned to retailers that sell them. Okay, when you're talking about striking a strategic partnership with a given retailer -- like Amazon, which I think has such deals in place at every website in existence -- where a separate entity is providing the service, and the review is of a book and not of Amazon itself, that's a different story, and if this magazine were basically the Chicago version of Salon, I'm surprised they wouldn't have already done so. Crusty's body language is increasingly agitated, and when D.B. Sweeney describes his ideas for e-commerce opportunities within an article about religion in Chicago (such as links to sites selling books about the subject, religious jewellery, or trips to religious sites), she interrupts him to charge that he wants to turn the site into a shopping mall. D.B. Sweeney argues that PagesAlive would be offering a service to the user (and he's right -- I did it within this very recap, but I'm doing it the dumb way because I'm not getting paid for it). She leaps out of her chair and snarls, "Reviews for a fee? It's completely unethical." And...well, you already know she's right. Oh, and today she's wearing a black turtleneck (good), black tights (also good), and an extremely short and spangly brown mini-skirt with, I think, cargo pockets (baaaaaaad). D.B. Sweeney claims, "The web is the Wild West, not the editorial rooms of the New York Times. The same rules don't apply." Bullshit. "They do if we apply them," Crusty spits. Word. Online retailers already have in-house content on their own sites. If all your site is doing is acting as a middleman between users and third-party retailers, without any editorial integrity, why not just sell the products yourself? Dude, I'm a sellout, and even I know that. Crusty storms out, and D.B. Sweeney quietly says that the meeting is adjourned until later.