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June 21, 1999 |
This is not a lament: The IPO was announced long before I jumped, and I was hardly going to buy a country -- certainly not a good country -- with my minor stake in it. What's a little sad, really, is that I'll be missing out on my little piece of the 1999 Zeitgeist, the chance, when I'm gray and doddering, to be like one of those old guys who really did do the Charleston and swallow goldfish in the '20s. More important, even though I wouldn't have been Croesus-ized, I could have at least let people think I had. Now I will not have the chance to be mentioned in a Dave Kansas conversation. You probably haven't had a Dave Kansas conversation, unless you're a working journalist, in which case you certainly have. Kansas became the young editor of TheStreet.com after leaving the Wall Street Journal to his colleagues' snickers; the financial site went public in May, as a result of which he held options worth at one point about $9 million, though the stock's fallen since. (Because of the spate of articles that followed, which naturally estimated his wealth at its peak, the guy will be forever saddled as the $9 Million Man even if the stock never comes back. At this writing he's in the $4 million neighborhood, if you're counting.) James Poniewozik's column has appeared in Media, every Monday and Thursday I've had Dave Kansas conversations. They start with light-hearted head-shaking. They contain phrases like "out of nowhere!" and "dumb luck!" and "windfall!" They detour through conversations about one's family, one's future plans, one's educational and vocational choices. They end with wan, smiling stares into the middle distance. Internet IPOs have been going on forever -- months, years even -- but until recently they particularly blessed people who are supposed to get rich. Whatever the fact of journalists reaping the stock boom says to the general investing public (e.g. "Sell! For the love of God, sell now!"), to the journalistic community it means that IPOs are suddenly lifestyle news. The Washington Post, New York Times and others did Dave Kansas stories. New York magazine released its envy issue (precipitating the question of precisely which issue of that gazetteer of the swank life is not the envy issue), with Alex Williams' affecting essay including an account of idly chatting years ago about "the allure of selling out" with hardworking young reporter Dave Kansas. Well, what else is new? Writers, journalists are liberal arts people by trade, which means they can make a third the money of their college friends yet be five times as guilty and neurotic about it. Let Esquire's Tom Junod land a contract that pays him like a mediocre NBA rookie with an incompetent agent, and his compeers will carp as though he'd taken Nazi gold. But while the current market may have changed the numbers fueling our drunken rants, has it actually changed the business of journalism? (Giggle alert: I am about to use the terms "Internet" and "the long term" in the same sentence.) I suspect the Internet IPO windfall that offers hope for writers in the long term is not Dave Kansas' but C. Everett Koop's; the former surgeon general took his site drkoop.com public for a paper payday of, at one point, $56 million. (It's sort of poignant, by the way, that the blizzard of coverage for Koop's windfall ignored the fact that he'd been involved with a Web site -- anyone remember Shape Up America? -- since 1996; but hey, that was before the Internet started printing money, so who cares, right?)
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