Nick Denton and Brown Triumphalism: A Photo Essay

A certain Tweet about a certain blog post on a certain blog (see above)—from the face-orifice of a certain blog-owner—may not be being received so well by a certain blog staff ("Don't get me started." - Direct Quote). So it is: A wonderful tradition gone silent for too long, back in action, wherein Dark Lord Balth gets back on the boss-as-troll saddle for some ass-riding action.

But while we're on (pause) the indelicate matter of ass-riding: It's no secret that Nick's love-life resembles less the average gay New Yorker's Electric Company of Eclectic Tastes so much as British Colonialism at its finest, poppers not included. For example!

A basketball player:

A drama-maker:

A painter:

A, uh, guy who once accused his college of racially profiling him:

And more! Reports of candlestick makers, bakers, and so on are unconfirmed but also totally probable (that they're black). And this is just a sampling. The question, inevitable: 

How come, indeed? If anyone knows anything about Brown Triumphalism, it's this guy.

Born Wenners: Nepotism, Now

LEAD OPTION 1: Someone get Ben Fucking Fong-Torres on the phone. Or Terry Chen.

LEAD OPTION 2: Aspiring Rolling Stone cover-photographers and/or writers, we finally know exactly what it takes to get that gig you've dreamed up since posting the old double-wide covers on your locker, and it's not—as Toure once explained to us on the corner of Houston and Broadway, true goddamn story—"Get on a TV show."

Whatever, you know what's next: Jann Wenner's giving his kids some great gigs.

Not only did Theo Wenner get to shoot Taylor Swift on some Terry Richardson-lite bullshit for the cover, and get his name dropped in web lead-in text (something they couldn't even do for the apparently nameless photographer who shot the last cover story Brian Hiatt wrote for Rolling Stone on Breaking Bad), but: In the same issue, Gus Wenner has a 1.5 page spread on The ATL Twins (p. 46-47).

Gus Wenner, who, if you didn't know, is 21 years-old, and goes to Brown, and is in a band with Bruce Willis' kid.

Theo Wenner, who's 25 or so, is way ahead of his younger brother, having stamped his passport on the nepotism train quite a few times already.

READER POLL: Do you feel worse for

(A) Whatever poor senior editor is tasked with gluing together the inevitably tinned-out contraction-less awkward virgin prose Gus Wenner turns in, or

(B) Gus Wenner, for having to look forward to living a life of being Yes-Man'd by Papa Jann's bullpen capos who have to keep baby from getting feverish when turning in said copy or even before that, when he's pitching grossly out-of-touch featurettes, being told they're great ideas, and having to walk them through the middle-book meat purification process?

Only Dropping Clues

Whatever happened to Canibus but cred from 'heads? Let's face it: Battle raps aside, that shit was, indeed, a bitch move.

So: Can we talk about bitch moves for a second?

The kid TV BRUISER gets his paws on an early drop, that Arianna got moved around.

Headline:

"Huffington Gains More Control in AOL Revamping."

Okay, you think, they're stupid enough for this to make sense.

Quotes are from Lady Ouzo, a former Times editor now working under her, an analyst, and an NBC flack who's peacing 'out the Peacock for A(rianna)OL in short order:

...Technology, business development, marketing and communications units that were woven into AOL last year will begin to report to her. The advertising sales unit will remain inside AOL “at the moment,” she said.

The shifts, said Ms. Huffington, the site’s co-founder, will let The Huffington Post add sections and products more quickly.

The changes appear to give Ms. Huffington more authority within the closely watched media company, where her title is president and editor in chief of the Huffington Post Media Group.

Oh do they? [No.] 

And who watches the close-watchers, if you should say so yourself, media reporter? [The Dread Pirate Ship Business Insider, and Henry Blodget's Merry Band of Urethrae.]

Nick Carlson:

For example, Huffington no longer has oversight over TechCrunch, Engadget, Moviephone, Stylist, AOL Video, or, most importantly, AOL.com. Combined, those sites – recently removed from Huffington's portfolio – account for audience more than 50 million people strong. Jay Kirsch is now the business leader owning and operating those brands.

Things that appeared in this paragraph that did not appear in Brian Stelter's filing:

1. Jay Kirch's name.
2. The words "TechCrunch" "Engadget" "Moviephone" "Styleist" or "AOL Video."

And why didn't they? Supposes Carlson:

A source close to AOL has a theory: Stelter is a TV writer who is also writing a book about the Today Show, NBC's morning show. AOL just hired the chief PR person for NBC News, Lauren Kapp, to run marketing and press relations for The Huffington Post. Our source's theory is that Kapp placed Stelter's story to kill two birds with one stone: to promote her own hiring, and to promote (and impress) her new boss by getting ahead of the demotion story you are reading here. "Brian and Lauren are close. She wanted him to break the story. This is not a major change, but got played to be a major change for two people's egos."

If you're Brian Stelter, right about now, you're thinking: "Shitballs."

Because the remote possibility Carlson's wrong about you trading a nice story for access on that book (and also, the inevitable HBO Movie option your ICM team has been lining up for packaging before you even inked your deal, homie) notwithstanding, he's absolutely right about one thing:

You got pitched a \slowball over the center of the plate and whiffed it. Forget the majors, they'd trash you in single-A dugouts for this.

TechCrunch cost AOL twenty-five mil. AOL was warned: You bought a pissy, conflict-happy snake. You took him from the wild and put him in your box, and if he eats your mice, fucks up the nice china, well, you know what you bought.

Either Arianna didn't get the message because she was too busy laughing backstage with Bill Mahr about when she used to be a Republican, or she was arrogant enough to think this would work out. Lady Ouzo ain't stupid. She done fucked up, and as a result, helped the snake out the front door with his freedom and AOL's money intact, and he even had the chance to shit all over their nice china on his way out, too.

As a result of Michael Arrington leaving, TechCrunch experienced an exodus in publishing and edit, and what's left is basically a chick trying to blog her way into unemployment benefits (although, one could actually reasonably argue that this complete lack of topicality and relevance in favor of bloggy seppuku is actually TechCrunch at an editorial peak). Oh, also, TechCrunch's traffic plummeted.

Somehow, Stelter missed all of this.

[Including Arrington's inevitable, hysterical return to the site, incidentally—hmm—in the same week it left Arianna's freshly-clipped maw.]

And if David Carr or Bruce Headlam didn't smack the shit out of TV BRUISER for that, they should've for his response (see above): Rating three on-record quotes as greater than a filing that communicates the essential, actual thrust of AOL and Arianna's reality. She fucked up. She couldn't handle her new responsibilities. She's been a crucial element of continuing AOL's great tradition of shitting the bed. And you're suggesting your story is somehow better because it's what, official? Yeah, it's official. It's a press release, Cochise, and you wrote it. They threw Carlson four balls way outside because they were looking down the field at his pissed-source-loaded bat.

And you sat there and called it a strike.

Fuck outta here with that. Just because the 1's don't come up on the Caller ID anymore doesn't mean it's no longer your job to order off the menu. Canibus didn't deserve a Vanguard award, but he at least was owed an apology for LL's bitch move, or an acknowledgement that he fought back and won. From the world, he has that: It's pretty much all he's known for.

L probably didn't say shit. You don't have to when you have that money, even if it's been forever since he "tapped" it right. Just like your paws never get dirty when you're too busy having someone scrubbing on them.

This Street Won't Bear It Long

If not because proving that It was once a decent blog is now a moot point, one mostly obscured by mouthbreathing chronic masturbators who consider their memes of memes stemming from inside jokes they don't even quite understand as what passes for humor, and if not for those* who get hard at the first sign of something they can grind out some righteous indignation for (take your pick: contrived dollar-store feminism, ableism, Minor Threat C-Sides, the egregious human rights crisis that is a Tumblr outtage, anything they can't say with a .Gif, etc) and then pistol-whipping the issue with the closest thing they can afford to overcompensate with (outrage), then simply because it's been too long since we've snorted curb. But finally, yes—finally—something is right on the internet.

But mostly because we wanted to write a media blog and talk some shit without getting paid nothin' but a hoot.

For a while, that seemed quaint. Now that everyone's getting paid (in public)—or has a login—it legitimately is.

Does anyone remember laughter? (Or Disqus, or Haloscan?) Everyone got boring, including me. So: Here's to all of that! Anonybloggers with legitimate day jobs and other public identities marginally worth protecting are welcome, anonymous commenters, not so much.

[*And Krucoff's not even one of them! That's how bad this all got.]