Nick Denton of Gawker Media threw a party Wednesday night welcoming the Huffington Post to the neighborhood -- both to the Soho neighborhood, where our office is, and to the online neighborhood.
It was an incredibly gracious gesture -- and a hell of a bash.
The party was held in Denton's glorious loft -- the kind of living space that makes a West Coaster immediately want to leave LA and move to Soho. The waiters, dressed in all black, were constantly wandering through the throng with drinks and delicious hors d'oeuvres -- so much so that one wag familiar with what Denton pays his writers (which is way more than we do) joked: "He laid out more on booze tonight than he does for his entire stable of bloggers in a year!"
The media-centric crowd was mostly new media with a sprinkling of old -- and more than a few who straddle both. And Michael Stipe of R.E.M., holding court at the bar. The online community was there in force, including Jessica Coen and Jesse Oxfeld of Gawker; Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers; Josh Marshall; John Batelle; Jacob Weisberg and Bryan Curtis of Slate; Jim Bankoff and Michael Wolfson of AOL; Meg Hourihan of megnut and co-founder of Blogger; Jake Dobkin of Gothamist; Salon's Kerry Lauerman; Peter Koechly of the Onion; Andrew Krucoff, Danielle Romano, and Dennis Crowley of dodgeball; and CollegeHumor.com's Alex Lisowski, Jakob Lodwick, Zach Klein, Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen.
MSM representatives included Kit Seelye of the New York Times; Serena Torrey of New York magazine; Lloyd Grove of the Daily News; Peter Maass of the New York Times Magazine; Julia Rothwax and Josh Green of The Atlantic; and Lawrence O'Donnell of The McLaughlin Group and West Wing; with Jason Rapp of NYTimes.com; Eric Alterman; Joe Conason; Rufus Griscom of Nerve; Remy Stern and Maer Roshan of Radar; Nathan Richardson of WSJ Online; and Jeremy Phillips of News Corp among the straddlers.
There was much obsessive talk about the surging growth in online traffic and advertising. And the way old media moguls like Rupert Murdoch are set on becoming online media moguls as well. And the growing newspaper troubles -- including more layoffs at the New York Times and circulation drops at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle.
And much was made of how unusual it was to have Denton throwing a party for one of his perceived competitors. But then one of the great things about the blogosphere is that it's not a zero-sum game. It's not like Good Morning America fighting to take away viewers from the Today Show -- and now the other way around. The growth is limitless. Indeed, the growth of Denton's sites made it easier for the Huffington Post, just as the growth of HuffPost makes it easier for others. And so much is about linking to each other. So a new site's success can actually help boost your readership.
But trust me, the night wasn't all business. When it came time for toasts, Denton hopped onto a table so everyone could see him and asked me to join him (which made me feel -- as soon as I had kicked off my high heels, that is -- right back in Greece).
I loved his toast, especially when he read from Nikki Finke's hysterical review of HuffPost which, within hours of our existence, declared us "such a bomb that it's the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar, and Heaven's Gate rolled into one." To which Nick responded: "In the annals of media criticism that was a misjudgment as embarrassing as, well, 'Dewey Defeats Truman.'"
In my toast, I questioned how Nick's vast array of blog sites would cover the party: Would Defamer scan the room, obsessively looking for Ari Emanuel? Would Fleshbot publish nude photos of Nick and me? Would Sploid find a way to work "blowjob" into yet another headline? Would Wonkette figure out the percentage of party guests who enjoy anal sex?
It was such a great night, I decided on the spot to continue the tradition, and host an L.A. party for Defamer (and of course I'll invite Ari).
The shifting nature of the media world was doubly reinforced after Nick's party broke up and I stopped by the Plaza Athenee at the end of a dinner held to celebrate the premiere of Good Night, and Good Luck, the new film about Edward R. Murrow produced and directed by George Clooney.
Murrow was renowned for having the courage to speak truth to power, castigating the MSM of his time for being "fat, comfortable, and complacent" and television for "being used to detract, delude, amuse and insulate us." Holding the MSM's feet to the fire is, of course, also a blogospheric specialty.
The MSM elite at the Plaza Athenee included media icon and occasional HuffPost blogger Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, Morley Safer, Andrew Heyward, and Les Moonves.
Even among this crowd the conversation soon veered onto the online universe (maybe it's me...) and how some of the old guard get it and some don't. Among those who clearly do: Brian Williams (who has started to blog) and Moonves and Hayward, who have thrown their support behind CBS News' all-out leap into the Internet. While MSNBC fights tooth and nail to find 200,000 people willing to watch Tucker Carlson for an hour, CBS is turning its back on cable and betting on the Web.
Maybe who gets it and who doesn't will determine who survives and flourishes in the brave new world and who goes the way of the T-Rex, the Dodo bird, and the 8-track.