Out of Print : A Techie and Media Dinosaur Square Off
With fingers tapping nervously on both knees and eyes darting about the room, Halsey Minor appears a wee bit agitated. Given that he’s meeting a representative of a media company he expects to bankrupt, his discomfort comes as no surprise to the visitor.
Minor is co-founder and chief executive of C/NET: The Computer Network, a “new-media” start-up, and he’s talking with a reporter from The Times--just the sort of media dinosaur C/NET vows to bury.
But Minor would like some publicity, and as it happens, an article printed in ink on dead trees is a much better vehicle than bits and bytes displayed by a computer. That makes an awkward situation even more so.
The C/NET computer news service might boast of 500,000 “members,” but none of them pays for the privilege. The Times, on the other hand, has more than a million paying customers every day of the week--hence Minor’s interest.
From a trendy warehouse office on the edge of San Francisco’s upscale Embarcadero district--replete with open steel beams, angular-looking furniture, state-of-the-art computer gear--the 31-year-old would-be new-media mogul rattles off statistics that dramatize what he predicts will be a downward spiral for print media.
To wit: “The New York Times’ circulation hasn’t increased during the last 20 years,” Minor observes. The problem, as he and other new-media enthusiasts see it, is that newspapers aren’t flexible; they can’t be customized for individual readers.
Now it’s time for the reporter to feel uneasy. Five years older than Minor, she begins to feel a bit like an old woman quaking in her support hose because she’s figured out the world has passed her by. The environment--C/NET’s young staffers looking self-important as they rush about its self-consciously high-tech newsroom--does little to make her feel more at home.
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Feeling defensive, the reporter informs Minor that The Times is launching a site on the World Wide Web. He nods but seems less than impressed.
“For the print guys, going online is a zero-sum game,” Minor says. “It’s the same problem IBM faced with the advent of the [personal computer]. Did they want the new thing to kill off the old? [Print] is the mainframe of the ‘90s.”
Minor can say this easily because he has little invested--financially or emotionally--in the world of print. A graduate of the University of Virginia, he began his career as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch. After discovering he didn’t like Wall Street, he went on to be a “bag carrier” for executive recruiter Russell Reynolds.
Reynolds gave him $25,000 to start C/NET.
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Minor may ooze confidence--even a bit of arrogance--and his analysis of the media business may not seem very original, but he’s convinced more than a few people that he’s on to something. Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen has bought a 20% stake in the company, and the USA Network owns 5%. Minor is secretive about where the rest of the money comes from.
In fact it will be a while before C/NET takes on the mainstream media: For now, it’s trying to carve out a niche by going after computer trade publications. Minor reasons that the technology junkies who read the trades will be most tolerant of the Internet and its constraints, and thus C/NET offers a daily dose of tech news. So far, C/NET has lured 47 advertisers to its site, offering rates far below what a print publication would charge.
Although Ziff-Davis, International Data Group and CMP Publications are all putting their popular computer trade publications onto the Internet’s World Wide Web--and should have loyal audiences to follow them there--Minor says he has an edge.
“This is awkward for them,” he maintains. “The advertising pie hasn’t gotten bigger because of the Internet.”
And so they’ve gone online somewhat halfheartedly, he maintains. “They’re just dumping their print stuff online,” he says. “Pages and pages of product reviews that you would run in a magazine won’t do it on a visual medium.”
A senior editor with one of the Big Three of computer trade publishing compares C/NET to the canary sent down the mine shaft to see if it’s safe for humans. “There’s a lot of things about this that hasn’t been proven yet,” he says. “But they have pushed us to experiment.”
C/NET hasn’t entirely ignored traditional media. In fact, it started out as a cable programming service: C/NET Central, its cable television series, reaches 1.2 million viewers a week, and it supplies news segments to 16 TV stations around the country. Minor sees the two parts of the business as complementary, with TV fueling interest in online.
Company co-founder Kevin Wendle, 37, a former programming executive for Fox Television Network, oversees that part of the business.
Wendle, who started his career in TV news, gives the visitor a tour. A digital camera, on at all times, tracks them as they stroll around the stark, stylized surroundings. As they pass one of the many large computer monitors, Wendle points at their images being displayed real-time on the screen.
“I feel like I have a front-row seat at the birth of a new medium,” he says, beaming.
* Julie Pitta can be reached via e-mail at Pittaj@aol.com
