Peter Lauria

When BuzzFeed announced the launch of its new business vertical, many people skeptically wondered how a site that is known for its animal listicles would carve out space in the relatively straitlaced world of business reporting.

“People on Wall Street like to laugh, they have humor,” Peter Lauria, editor of Business Buzz, told Off the Record. “So I think being able to mix serious scoops, smart analysis and fun stuff together is a fun recipe that we have the ability to do that no one else does.”

True to form, two of their inaugural stories last week had animal themes: the site launched with a story called “14 CEOs And Their Animal Doppelgängers” and followed that two days later with a post titled “The Life-
cycle Of A Goldman Sachs Transaction Is Exactly Like The Mating Embrace Of Frogs,” which compared a chart explaining the bank’s transaction-review process to amphibian sexual habits.

“It’s been fantastic to see Peter, his great team and their exclusive reporting right in the middle of the business conversation from Day 1,” said BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith. “We are also very proud of our dead-on CEO animal doppelgängers.”

Overall, a big part of the aim of the new business vertical is to engage BuzzFeed’s core audience of 18- to 25-year-olds. To that end, Mr. Lauria said that he planned the section so that he and his team of reporters will cover the corporate angle of media and entertainment, specialty retail “important to the BuzzFeed audience” (such as The Gap, Urban Outfitters and, one imagines, American Apparel), consumer technology and Wall Street—but with a sexy angle.

“I remember that part of my life as moving in with my girlfriend, investing in 401ks, maybe looking to buy a house, so those things are becoming more prominent in their lives,” Mr. Lauria said about his time in the BuzzFeed demo. “We don’t need every Wall Street Journal reader or every BuzzFeed reader, but if we can get portions of those two audiences to overlap on a Venn diagram on a regular basis, then I think we have the basis of something really good.”

So far, in addition to animal comparisons, posts include a piece on the experience of calling the cable company as told through pop-culture gifs, a selection of 14 comics about post-collegiate job hunting, and a scoop about the Abercrombie and Fitch CEO’s partner.

We asked Mr. Lauria whom he sees as his major competitors.

“To me, that’s an old-media question. That’s thinking about what platforms compete with editors,” Mr. Lauria told OTR. “In 2013, my competitor is everyone out there on Twitter, because what we want is for people to talk about and look at our work. I don’t care where you go to look at it, but we want to be in that conversation, dominating that conversation.”

And where else can you find stock tips from Grumpy Cat?

BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Perretti.

When people hear the traffic figures for big blogs and blog networks, they assume the sites must be swimming in money. How could they not be? With hundreds of millions, if not billions, of impressions annually, one would think that revenue would automatically follow.

But it doesn’t.

At the time of its acquisition in February 2011, the Huffington Post was earning roughly $30 million a year in revenue. Later in 2011, as the site began pulling in more than 1 billion page views a month, the site’s revenues were reportedly only $40 million. In 2012, Business Insider had revenues of only $10 million (up from 2011, when it reported a profit of, no joke, $2,127). And though eight figures in revenue is still a lot, consider that BI has more than 24 million unique visitors per month.

By comparison, in 2012, The New York Times company had revenues of nearly $2 billion. For all the talk of the death of the newspaper, you could take all the annual revenues of most of the big blogging empires combined, subtract them from the Times’s income statements and the paper might have to tell Wall Street that it had a bad quarter.

The point is this: the blogging model of “Oh, we’ll just get as many page views as possible and then profit” clearly hasn’t worked out. Like, at all.

For those of you who are only peripherally involved in the media business, the death of the page-views-as-profit model is why you’re beginning to see a lot of chatter about a new form of advertising called native ads. Since the market is flooded with more inventory than could ever possibly be purchased, CPMs (the amount advertisers pay per thousand impressions) have been driven essentially to zero. Now, desperate to generate cash, blogs have to create new kinds of inventory.

The controversial Atlantic advertorial.

Some sites call it “native advertising.” Some call it “sponsored posts.” Some call it “advertorial.” But regardless of the name, it’s based on short-term thinking and built almost exclusively on industry hype. It’s not a long-term strategy; it’s just a way to juice dumb media buyers for cash—or in other cases, to create just enough semblance of a business model to convince dumb brands to acquire them.

To back up for a second, think about how the fashion business works: a designer creates a couture or high-end fashion brand that is highly sought-
after (it could be Gucci or it could be Ecko Unltd.). The first phase of growth comes from selling a product directly to customers or to retailers like department stores. Then investors see an opportunity and swoop in to “license” this brand. The next thing you know, there is a sunglasses line in China, a home decor line at Macy’s or Kmart, or even an Eddie Bauer-style car edition.

If the brand is strong, it can withstand this dilution (think: Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein); if it isn’t, it quickly booms and then busts (think: FUBU). The problem comes when weak brands attempt to squeeze too much money out of their business by licensing too much too quickly.

And that’s what we’re seeing online right now.

For the last few years, sites like the Huffington Post, Gawker, Business Insider, The Atlantic, Politico, AOL and others (including Betabeat, to some extent) have directed all their efforts at increasing page views at the expense of the reputation of their brand (see: crappy slide shows, wild speculation, worthless gossip and untrained writers). Now they’re suddenly trying to leverage that “brand” to develop other revenue sources.

And they’re hoping that advertisers and investors will be dumb enough to go along with it.

On one end of the spectrum, we have our old media brands that rushed to the web.

Take the naked greed of a site like Forbes.com. In Forbes, we have a 100-year-old media brand that has spent the last few years opening up its platform to literally any “contributor” who wanted to post there—and, in fact, paying many of these writers per page view generated. As a result, the site’s traffic has doubled since 2010—blowing past sites like Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.

But at what cost? Is Forbes.com the same as Forbes the magazine? Certainly the Forbes family never would have published articles like “Top 10 Best Horror Movies Of The Last 2 Years,” “6 Ways to Burn Your Belly Fat Fast,” “Do I Buy Apple On Monday?” and “Glenn Beck Just Doesn’t Get America’s Strong Character” (all abysmal pieces currently atop its most-read list). And yet Forbes.com turns around and tries to sell editorial privileges to advertisers for $75,000 a month.

Think about the insanity of that position. Essentially any writer can publish on Forbes.com (I currently know at least 10 different writers who do so, and I have done so myself), making it no different from any other free blog network, yet Forbes maintains that it’s a premium brand that other brands should pay to be featured on. Do you know who would buy that? An idiot.

Or take The Atlantic and its traffic-trolling sister, TheAtlanticWire.com. Here we have another venerable media brand that publishes all sorts of link-baity stories designed solely to generate traffic. When one reads a story on TheAtlantic.com or TheAtlanticWire.com, you’re not getting the same magazine for which Mark Twain once wrote, you’re getting the same stuff you can find on any blog (with the exception of Ta-Nehisi Coates, of course, who is amazing). For instance, over the weekend, as I spent time thinking about and working on this column, AtlanticWire blogger Connor Simpson churned out 13 posts in two days. That is quantity over quality embodied.

And yet The Atlantic turns around and sells “sponsor content” to advertisers, whose main appeal is that readers hardly notice the difference between editorial and advertising content. Why would you even want to trick people into thinking your ad was produced by one of these quantity-over-quality bloggers? (The Observer also sells sponsored content on Observer.com.)

On the other end of the spectrum are sites like Business Insider and Gawker, which are licensing their names in foreign countries. In 2013, both announced separate deals with The Times of India to create versions of their sites in India. Gawker already has similar deals in Brazil, the U.K,. Japan and Hungary.

Like I said, I thought your brand had to be worth something—had to mean something—to be worth licensing.

Somewhere in the middle, we have BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is essentially the same content that Jonah Peretti pioneered on the Huffington Post—pictures, gossip and cute viral news—that sells for fractions of a penny per view at the Huffington Post. These rates are well established and well known. Yet, dressed up as “native content,” those same posts are being packaged to brands like Virgin America at $100,000 per month. As Virgin all but admitted to New York magazine in this month’s big profile of BuzzFeed, these ads aren’t really effective—they’re just shiny and new.

In other words, these sites are trying the same type of hustle they pulled last time, having already exhausted the hustle that came before that. As CPMs have slowly dropped and settled at their rock-bottom rates, online publishers have begun to realize that they will never be nine- or ten-figure companies with business models as simple as Ad inventory x Price per view = Revenue. So they’ve come up with made-up stuff for which they can charge made-up prices. How long will that last?

It’s a shame. They’re spending all their energy coming up with the next advertising con when they could just put some effort into making a product that readers, you know, believe is worth paying for.

editorial@observer.com

It was enough to make even a Google employee jealous. Not that Google’s New York offices don’t have their own enviably cool visitors—Stephen Colbert, Lang Lang and Toni Morrison, to name just a few. Employees also get razor scooters. And pool tables. And arcade games. And subsidized massages. And free gourmet meals. And a full-service, full-size dessert truck permanently parked on the eighth floor.

These days, visitors to a New York office are as likely to stumble into a game of Ping-Pong as they are to find suited workers shuffling through a grim landscape of carpet tile and cubicles. Thrillist has a kegerator; building-mate Foursquare has shuffleboard and a beer of the week. Etsy’s Dumbo headquarters blends homemade coziness and high-end design so masterfully it could make an Urban Outfitters executive weep.

Until quite recently, such perks were considered the eccentric luxuries of 20-something tech prodigies, edgy advertising firms and cash-flush startups. Corporate America dismissed the cool office as a fleeting phenomenon. But the wild successes of companies like Google and Facebook have made even the stodgiest CEOs contemplate the potential benefits of video game consoles and French-press coffee. A Ping-Pong table in the middle of your office used to imply that you were run by a 24-year-old. Now a lot of companies want to imply that they’re run by a 24-year-old.

Indeed, the cool office has become a national fixation. And in the country’s collective imagination—an imagination fed by countless magazines, blogs and secondhand stories—it is a utopia of lofted ceilings and abundant natural light, where no one ever seems bored or blocked or fatigued (how could anyone be tired with both a nap room and an espresso machine?), where workers always appear to be seriously having fun, furiously exchanging ideas, or seriously having fun as they furiously exchange ideas. Even the after-work hours are better. Rather than rushing home to drown their sorrows in drink (like some mid-century suburban send-up), workers hang out in their hip, bar-like lounges, knocking back craft brews in celebration of yet another ridiculously productive day of creative cathexis.

In this way, the cool office goes so far as to suggest that the inherent tensions of the workplace—between labor and management, between our authentic selves and our professional selves, between working for love and working for money—can be overcome. It’s a paradise wrought by the Protestant work ethic, where creativity and massive profits can be merged painlessly, a delightful feedback loop in which greater happiness yields greater productivity yields greater happiness—salvation by way of Ping-Pong and Stumptown coffee.

Last October, French beverage conglomerate Pernod Ricard moved into an 82,000-square-foot space at 250 Park Avenue—a buttoned-up 20-story tower in Midtown that has traditionally been a great favorite of white-shoe law firms (Sullivan & Cromwell occupied the space before Pernod).

While the location and the building seemed an obvious choice for a huge international corporation, the distillery-chic space was not: exposed 14-foot ceilings, concrete floors, vast walls of brick and glass, plus a massive bar, a game room (foosball and pool) and huge terraces. If you overlooked the fact that it spanned the 16th through 18th floors of prime Manhattan real estate, Pernod’s office was more suggestive of a craft Brooklyn brewery or one of the many places where the company’s ubiquitous labels (Absolut, Malibu, Jameson, Beefeater, et al.) are consumed than a corporate headquarters.

“They all want some kind of cool vibe,” said Scott Spector, a principal at the Spector Group, the architectural firm that designed Pernod’s space, adding that even law firms and hedge funds are requesting the “factory-meets-art-gallery look.”
While the first cool offices started appearing more than a decade ago—Mr. Spector credited Deutsch advertising with pioneering the use of scooters for intraoffice transportation—there’s now been a fundamental shift in office design. What were once features found mostly at tech companies—open, collaborative areas, kitchens, game rooms—are becoming standard. Even traditional firms that grimace at the idea of clients catching them playing pool still want the hardwood floors and pendant lights.

“Cool has conquered all,” he said.

At the very least, it has helped fuel the growth of places like WeWork—a co-working company that started two years ago with the intention of catering to creative freelancers and startups with less than 50 people. The company now has five offices in Manhattan, with two more on the way at (Bryant Park and 222 Broadway), and three in California. And while some of that growth is connected to the thriving startup scene and the dissolution of the traditional economy—freelancers needing places to work—the company is increasingly being asked to accommodate larger companies in a range of industries, from modeling agencies to nonprofits.

“I definitely think that there is something that makes you feel more excited to come here in the morning and stay late at night,” WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey told The Observer when he took us on a tour of the company’s Varick Street offices in late February. Weak winter sunlight flooded through the 105,000-square-foot space. Decorative items were scattered about—a vintage bike here, a typewriter there—banishing the impersonal barrenness that is a hallmark of so many offices.

He pointed out a paper shredder that had been covered in a purplish-gray floral print.

“We thought, ‘We can’t put that super-ugly gray box in here,’” Mr. McKelvey said. “We would never stand for the ugliest, easiest solution. We always try to analyze things and say, ‘How can we make this look cooler?’”

A decade ago, workplace innovation revolved primarily around where people worked. Working remotely was all the rage, and “being able to work in your pajamas” was talked about as though it were one of the great hopes of humanity that could finally now, through the miracle of technology, be achieved. Companies contemplated the cost-
saving potential of vastly reduced work spaces, and workers welcomed the end of commuting and simpler child care arrangements.

But like other work-space panaceas before it, telecommuting proved less than revolutionary. (It’s worth noting that the cubicle, maligned though it is today, was seen as an innovative solution to the problems of the modern office when it first debuted in the 1960s.)

“Now innovation is all about what’s cool,” said Lenny Beaudoin, a senior managing director of CBRE’s global corporate services. Mr. Beaudoin, a workplace strategist who helps the real estate company’s clients revamp their workplaces to enhance productivity, is currently working with a number of traditional companies (a large bank, a San Francisco law firm) that want to create “cooler,” less traditional offices in happening neighborhoods.

“The new office is part hospitality, part retail. People work 24/7, and they want their workplaces to appeal to their lifestyles,” he said. “The idea of going into a high-rise and sitting in a cubicle all day, the tyranny of the traditional office, that’s going away. It’s about lifestyle integration.”

And why shouldn’t it be? Given that the BlackBerry has long since sullied the domestic sphere, aren’t we entitled to comfortable furniture and good lighting in the public sphere? Even the idea of the domestic versus the public sphere sounds quaint, a Victorian concept burnished in ’80s academic conferences more than something resembling the lived experience of professional workers in 2013.

Google has been criticized in the past for using its admittedly amazing amenities to lure workers into longer and longer days at the office. But its offices remain the envy of workers everywhere, because many Americans aren’t offered any trade-offs for their devotion to their desks, let alone a package of lavish, extravagant ones. The modern office is transforming into a worker’s everything—the place where she not only works, but eats, exercises, relaxes and socializes.

“A home away from home,” is how ZocDoc director of people Karsten Vagner describes the website’s Soho offices. Which struck us as slightly misleading—how many New Yorkers’ neglected apartments have two fridges and a freezer stocked daily with healthy snacks? Which is to say nothing of a game room and a hammock flanked by blow-up palm trees.

“More than once I’ve heard parents say, ‘Is this real?’ when they see the hammock,” said Mr. Vagner. “I brought my dad into the office last week. It was the first thing he wanted to do when he got off the train.”

Speaking with Mr. Vagner and company spokeswoman Jessica Aptman, it was striking how happy they sounded. When we grumbled about yet more snow in March, they told us how everyone at the office was Instagramming the snow from the office’s big windows.

“I think that people can change a company and a space can change a person,” said Mr. Vagner. “I know that if I’m sitting on my yoga ball and I can see other people, if I have plants or action figures on my desk, I’m going to be a lot happier and more productive than if I was isolated in a dark cubicle.”

Still, some of it seemed a little silly. When did workers really need a hammock?

“When don’t you need a hammock!” they exclaimed in unison.

Just the prospect of moving to a cool office is enough to make some workers giddy. Ryan Alovis, the CEO and founder of ArkNet Media, a midsize Long Island startup, was surprised at how psyched his 16 employees were when he told them they’d be ditching their traditional office in Valley Stream for a hip, college-campus-like complex in Garden City.

“They’re so hyped up, everyone’s freaking out,” he said. “I walked by my VP of operations and he showed me a pool table that they have at L.A.’s Hard Rock Cafe that he wanted us to get—every time you hit a ball, it either reveals a girl in a bikini or it looks like a ball of fire. The other day, someone showed me a robotic bar.”

There will not be the bikini/flame pool table or a robotic bar at the new office, but there will be a normal bar, a fitness center, a “coffee center, not just coffee,” a juicer and pizza parties. “You have to wow people,” said Mr. Alovis. “A juicer, a fitness center, a cafeteria—people expect this now. Tech workers are the new rock stars.”

And they have the Rock Band setups to prove it.

It should not come as a surprise that corporate America—its once-promised financial security and career stability having vanished—would be drawn to the cultural blueprint and anti-status ethos provided by tech. While tech’s DNA is fundamentally capitalist—create something new and make a lot of money selling it—the industry proved that it could not only make money and be cool at the same time, but that it could make money by being cool.

By following the path that tech forged, companies have an opportunity to remake their images along with their offices. Now companies talk endlessly of creating interactions, of CEOs getting right into the mix of things, of ideas circulating and flourishing in their open floor plans. As though we were all creative geniuses or industry trailblazers and office drudgery were a thing of the past. As though we could wipe out the thankless, unglamorous tasks that make up the entirety of some jobs right along with bad fluorescent lighting.

The cool office sells not only an image of a creative hotbed to clients, but perhaps more importantly, to employees. It invites them to see their job as a form of self-expression rather than rote labor, granting flexibility in exchange for loyalty and long hours. And worker bees have responded enthusiastically, taking to Instagram and Twitter to brag about their amazing workplaces. Some even pen boastful CNN iReports, like the recent one by an MKG employee that started “Our office is our playground” and described taking “goofy group shots” in the office photobooth.

There is something vaguely unsettling, though, something overwrought about the descriptions of all the fun being had: the Tuesday-night runs that “take off from the office and end at a local pub,” the spontaneous exercise breaks where employees can be found “shaking the sillies out in a no-judgement zone,” the craft nights with wine and cheese where everyone makes “holiday themed cards, or mugs, or whatever strikes our fancy!”

Is day-to-day office life really so thrilling that a photobooth is needed to capture all the precious moments? Since when is any workplace a no-judgement zone? (And why should it be?) Moreover, who really wants to sit around making mugs with their co-workers?

There is a cult-like undertone in this all-encompassing existence, in the blurring of lines between home and office, between personal time and work time, between employee and self. The cool office works to disguise the very basis of the relationship between company and employee: the exchange of money for work. Work is a lot of things, but this is its fundamental essence.

As architect Sam Jacob recently wrote in Dezeen, the rise of the fun office can be seen “as a denial of the very real power structures inherent in labour relations.” And “even more fundamentally sinister is the idea of work colonising the real spaces of intimacy and freedom: when your office resembles all the places that you go to escape work, maybe there is no escape from work itself.”

But for better or worse, Americans have always embraced that “you are what you do.” The idea that “you are where you work—literally” is new. For many of us, the cool office ministers not only to our immediate needs, but also to our fantasies: fantasies about the kind of people we would like to be, the jobs we wish we had, the lives we wish we were leading. We might not land that dream job, but the dream office could be within reach!

And yet, as much as the cool office can seem to matter, it can also matter very little. Of the many conversations that The Observer had with the haves and the have-nots of the office world—in the twinges and, okay, flashes of envy we sometimes felt—our thoughts returned frequently to what a Google engineer said to us, after describing a Vermont ski weekend the company had taken him on, Lang Lang’s visit, and a lunch of expertly prepared salmon and roasted Brussels sprouts: “At the end of the day, whether you enjoy your job or not is more important than getting roasted Brussels sprouts.”

But, he added, just so long as we were writing about cool offices, we should know that as good as New York’s Google headquarters are, “the truly awesome stuff is in Mountain View.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Photo credit: The New Yorker.

BuzzFeed and The New Yorker couldn't be more different, right? Well, what if you combined them? In honor (we assume) of the news of tech editor Matt Buchanan's seemingly unlikely path from the Internet-friendly world of BuzzFeed to the prestige brand of The New Yorker, a hashtag has sprung up on Twitter to mash up the two sensibilities. Meet #BuzzFeedNewYorker.

Here are our nine of our favorites (in no particular order):

https://twitter.com/scottalyoung/status/296756759958286337

https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/296755753266577408

https://twitter.com/EmilyGould/status/296742568933335040

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/296738719082360832

https://twitter.com/joshspero/status/296755287942127617

https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status/296735471709589504

https://twitter.com/mjanssen/status/296753200713850881

https://twitter.com/brfreed/status/296752510826323968

https://twitter.com/NickyWoolf/status/296751930447908869

But other than that, the assumptions of publicists, clients and journalists—that being featured matters, that being written about will drive awareness or sales or public image—are a collective chimera. The widespread belief is that the media has "reach."

Trust me, they don't. Not anymore. It's become almost pathetic.

It hit me the other day when I snagged a profile for a client on a well-known website. The day it ran, the editor sent me an email: "Hey, we hate to ask but could you guys be sure to tweet and share the article for us?”

Dear God, I realized, my client has more readers than they do. The website needed us to attract an audience for them. They wanted the subject of the piece to send his readers over to them rather than the other way around.

This is our new media reality.

Today, after a media outlet or a blog writes about someone or something, the outlet typically engages in a frank discussion with that subject on how they can promote the piece together. The bigger the draw or online presence of the subject (whether an individual or a brand) being written about, the more conflicted the media is. A publisher can hardly expect to do solid journalism when the real reason they’re agreeing to the article is because the person has a lot of Twitter followers or a big email list.

The problem is, unlike the old days, when a media outlet could count on a set number of subscribers or tune-in viewers or newsstand sales, online there is more competition for everyone’s attention and no guarantee of anyone seeing what gets published.

Check out Forbes.com or Business Insider, two sites honest (or stupid) enough to show their pageview stats. Despite the sites’ huge viral reach, it’s not uncommon to catch articles with 250 views. Or 25. Or 2. Gawker has a better floor, but from time to time you’ll see a post do less than 1,000 views. Sure, these numbers are better than nothing, but these sites claim to have millions of “readers” each month. Many sites get far less. Which means that placing an item (as we used to say) is akin to pissing in the wind unless you’re willing to do the extra legwork of promoting it’s existence.

Check online versions of articles from some major magazines and you’ll notice the same thing: Most pieces draw zero comments (another way of saying nobody read it or cares). It’s true for this column as well: if I don't get it started on social media, there is a risk it could go unnoticed.

In an environment with zero publishing constraints—where it doesn’t cost anything to publish and there is infinite editorial space—most modern media outlets have adopted the simple but self-defeating strategy of publishing everything they possibly can. Translation: throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. Well, most doesn't.

Unsurprisingly, readers have an awkward relationship with this kind of content. Mostly, they don’t value or trust it much. So nobody—or basically nobody—reads Business Insider every morning. They read articles from Business Insider (or Politico or Buzzfeed or Huffington Post or Bleacher Report), in a one-off capacity. Most readers have probably never even seen the home pages of these sites.

Pulling up one site and browsing for good stuff is increasingly rare. Instead, we read the links that get passed around or come up in web searches. Or we see them on aggregators like Reddit or Google or Yahoo News. In other words, we’re an audience of glancers, and sites have to do whatever it takes to catch our eyes.

Aside from the obvious implications of this One Off reality—which mostly means more of the kind of content that is easy and fun to share, like BuzzFeed listicles—it undermines an important power once reserved by media outlets. They used to have an audience they served and could count on. This gave them an upper hand when it came to what or what not to write about. It allowed them to preserve an editorial mission and perspective.

Either that or was necessary illusion, because when nobody really knew how many old media subscribers actually plowed through that 7000 word feature on Richard Gere, we could at least hold onto hope. The media was in the driver’s seat because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to dispute their right to it.

Today, when stories risk going unread or unnoticed, the subjects of such coverage must ask themselves why they should bother cooperating at all. (For a small business, the equivalent is when Groupon or LivingSocial asks you to advertise their offer to your existing customers. Um, I thought you had your own audience and if you don't, why are we working together?) The purpose of getting media is exposure, to spread the word through an impartial source. If the media no longer has a dedicated audience, what good is it? Why would Taylor Swift (21.3M followers) ever need the New York Times (6.7M followers)? In the future, the Times might think twice about bashing Guy Fieri, considering he’s got nearly 1M of his own followers, a television platform and I’m sure an enormous mailing list.

As PR person, this means I’m doing two jobs. I take one of my clients and get them an excerpt or an article or a guest post on a "respected" outlet and then also have to drive an audience to it if I want people to know that it happened. Why not cut out the middleman and publish myself?

Simply put, it’s more effective to borrow a publication’s name. It makes an article seem less self-serving, more objective. And the website goes along with it because they need the pageviews. We create the news and then launder it via your “trusted” media outlets.

The saddest part is how the desperation for traffic makes media brands so easy to hijack. Marketing firms—the smart ones, anyway—will get an article published, then drive tens or hundreds of thousands of "visitors" to it through paid traffic sources like StumbleUpon in order to make sure that the article seems like a hit—driving it to the front page or most popular lists. (The same happens on YouTube, where the first 50-100,000 views might well be fake.) From here, cumulative advantage takes care of the rest.

How much longer media brands can greedily spend down the credibility that took decades to build? They sure aren’t making many deposits these days. In my view, it’s akin to a high fashion brand that started off doing a little bit of licensing with third parties but then grew addicted to the cheap cash flow. At some point, when you say yes to everything, you start undermining the intangibles that made the brand worth licensing in the first place…and the whole house comes crashing down.

It's a short term play by both parties—exploiting the difference between perception and reality. Outlets hoping to catch handfuls of the audiences they've lost their grips on, marketers and brands leveraging their own access to fans in order to get the "credibility" that comes from being featured. The result is readers being fed more crap news.

It’s going to stay that way—and getting press will continue to be of less and less value—until media outlets start thinking about a new business model.

Until then, I, along with every other public figure, brand, and business, am stuck tweeting about my own article. So please, for the love of god, share this on Facebook and Twitter for me. Thanks!

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers. Follow him on Twitter: @RyanHoliday.

Mr. Coppins, who covers the political beat, looks like he is down--or at least going with it. He changed his Twitter avatar to a campaign poster.

In the event of a Coppins capaign, we nominate @Wise_Kaplan to be his campaign manager. His tweets may not fly with more traditional mayoral hopefuls, but we think they strike the right note for a BuzzFeed candidate.

Even NBC's Luke Russert is playing along. Mr. Russert endorsed the writer's hypothetical candidacy on MSNBC's NOW earlier this morning.

Well, the 2013 mayoral field is starting to thin, so it may be a good time for a BuzzFeed writer to get in on the action. Although we don't think that this does much for the lack of Jewish candidates.

Christina Aguilera and YOUR NEW NIGHTMARE perform at the AMAs (YouTube)

- Of course, the real super-insanity of the AMAs came courtesy of Christina Aguilera's Lady Gaga/Harmony Korine-inspired nightmare medley.
http://youtu.be/vh7s6RssfS0

- Lindsay Lohan is furious that her dad fathered a secret half-sister that she never knew about. Of course, she wants nothing to do with her new sibling, because she already has to deal with that usurper Ali trying to make a claim to the Iron Throne.

- How much does Robert Pattinson hate Twilight? So much. (But probably not as much as he hates the fact that Kristen Stewart signed up for a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman.)

"Even though print itself is becoming less prevalent, the conversation-provoking longform journalism and profiles that have long been a staple of magazines are as vital as they’ve ever been, and I'm thrilled to help make this kind of writing a working part of the social web at BuzzFeed,” said Mr. Kandell.

This is the latest, most official move in BuzzFeed's push into longform. The website once  known for animal pictures posted "an exclusive and wide-ranging interview" with Oliver Stone last night and BuzzFeed executive editor Doree Shafrir wrote a first-person account of night terrors in September.

"The social web has created an opportunity for an exciting revival of longform and Steve is perfectly positioned to pioneer the social future of narrative journalism at BuzzFeed," Ms. Shafrir said in an announcement about the hire. "Steve’s deep experience in magazine writing and editing really make him the ideal candidate to craft longform narratives that inspire conversation and sharing."

Not the best location for a server.

Gawker Media sites and BuzzFeed went down last night during the worst of the winds and rain, but they are up and running again--although Gawker is in a slightly different format. Both have servers at Datagram--which, incidentally, is in lower Manhattan and was heavily impacted by the storm.

Gawker sites went down around 7 pm last night. Late this morning, Gawker Media started posting on more spare-looking tumblr sites that were set up when the sites failed. Now, Nick Denton just wants to get the word out.

"If we're the indestructible cockroaches of the media world, now's the time to show it," Mr. Denton wrote in an staff email (full text below). 

BuzzFeed also started posting to a tumblr when their site went down last night, but has since rebuilt the site. "BuzzFeed is up and we expect it to remain up," BuzzFeed Press Manager Ashley McCollum emailed us this evening. "We're no longer operating off the compromised data center."

We're back up on Tumblr. But need to advertise the fact that we're still functioning. (Servers notwithstanding.).

Here's how you can do your bit. Go to our sites' Facebook and Twitter feeds and share the best stories you find with your own friends and
followers.

It's important not only to keep going -- but also to make a public show of that resilience. And what better way than to draw attention to our ability to pull ourselves together under any circumstance short of the apocalypse.

If we're the indestructible cockroaches of the media world, now's the time to show it.

BuzzFail. (Photo caption: Screenshot)

BuzzFeed's website was down for about 20 minutes last night during the presidential debate. If you were relying on its politics vertical for debate coverage, then you may have missed some viral gems.

"Our data center's upstream network providers were having bandwidth and latency issues. We're in the process of putting in place a content delivery network to ensure it doesn't happen again," Ashley McCollum, BuzzFeed's press manager, emailed us this morning.

Thankfully, there is always Twitter for second-by-second debate jokes. And, you know, every other media outlet.