Publishing Trends

Is the Grass Really Greener In the Internet Economy?

As Ross Perot might have said, there’s a giant sucking sound sluicing toward Silicon Alley. And as anyone in publishing will tell you, the by now epic saga of dot-com defection — young turks storming out of investment banks, law clerks leaping like lemmings into the dot-com beyond — is sweeping before it scores of content-types who have turned on, tuned in, and dropped out of their old-media careers. Whether it’s IDG’s Steven Berkowitz traipsing off to YourDoctor.com, or the ex-Harper duo (Linda Cunningham and Joana Jebsen) who morphed into e-publishers at Questia, it seems the writing on the digital whiteboard is plain enough for even Luddites to read.

“Publishers are going to have a big problem retaining anyone younger than 25,” admonishes Bill Jensen of the Jensen Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in change and communication strategies. “Millions of people that might want to consider publishing are asking themselves, ‘Why should I want to work for you?’ And they’re not coming up with good enough answers.” Indeed, the hyperbole can hardly beat reality as assistants are whisked off to start-ups for salaries said to be as high as $60,000 (provoking one flabbergasted publishing veteran to moan, “What does this business run on but lunch and assistants?”) and even buttoned-down Wall Streeters are ripping out cuff-links and collar stays (with Citigroup giving employees cut-rate discounts at J. Crew and Banana Republic to ease the fashion crisis) to keep the best and brightest from alighting at the mere mention of the words “suitless in SoHo.”

Yet it seems it’s going to take more than Birkenstocks in the publishing boardroom to keep the book biz solvent in human capital. Full-time jobs at new media companies in New York City soared 151% to 104,665 last year, according to a study prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the New York New Media Association. Full-time publishing jobs, by comparison, drifted up just 5% to about 59,000. And Internet firms in the city cavalierly predict a 37% annual increase in the number of industry jobs through the year 2002, presumably with or without the Nasdaq’s cooperation. In other words, you can bet the cherry-picking of old-media talent isn’t going to let up anytime soon.

Living La Vida Loca?

“They drink a lot more coffee in Silicon Alley,” was how one dot-commer proudly summed up the cultural gulf between his erstwhile book publishing career and the terminally buzzed e-conomy lifestyle. And then there’s that certain je ne sais quoi of the startup experience, wonderfully evoked in another deserter’s tale of bumping into a publishing colleague last seen in a Condé Nast cubicle. “I feel like you just ran away with a 22-year-old boy!” the colleague stammered, blushing at the sight of the deserter’s standard-issue black leather pants.

“You really have to have a certain personality to want to work for a dot-com startup,” says Karen Kelly, former editorial director of Rodale imprint Daybreak who ended up at Careerbay.com last December. “There’s no status quo. There’s no infrastructure. You have to be ready to roll with the punches.” And the flip side of not having “to worry about stepping on someone’s toes who’s been there for 50 years,” as she says, is a delirious experience of freedom: “When you have an idea, you can run with it. You get to do a lot more innovating.” Now vp and publisher for the site, Kelly recalls swooning the minute she heard the company president’s do-or-die motto: “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.”

We’re not in Midtown anymore, Toto. “I’m impressed at how much responsibility is given to young and intelligent people,” adds Ted Hill, the 39-year-old publisher at Macmillan Digital Reference who left to become director of business development for About.com last July. Having made the leap, he says, going back to trade publishing would be like living on Neptune. “We don’t talk the same language,” Hill says of his former publishing colleagues. “In publishing, it’s sell-through. Here, it’s all about monetizing page views, RPMs [revenue per thousand impressions], and stickiness.” Despite his bullpen-style office and the sometimes grueling hours (“I’ve got newborn twins at home, and I’m still working 11-hour days.”) the new job still beats publishing hands down. “We’re working in an arena where you can conceive, launch, and develop a successful business in three months,” Hill says. “You can’t even get an editor to review a manuscript and buy it in that amount of time.”

“Say no to slo-mo” could also be the motto at VitaminShoppe.com, where former Workman e-publishing director Anne Kostick was hired as director of content development. “There’s a stately procession of business in publishing from season to season, from advance to pub date to drop ship to reorder to remainder,” she says. “None of that applies to ecommerce.” And compared to publishing, the whole gestalt of the web world is more like a crash course in chaos theory. “Book publishing is very linear,” Kostick says. “First you do something, and then someone else does something, and eventually the book reaches the customer. Site development is far more of a simultaneously collaborative effort.”

Others are just pumped to take their crack at global domination. “I work for a company that really sets the rules,” says Ina Gottinger, senior director of market development for Fatbrain.com. “That gives me a kick almost every day.” Gottinger, who worked in trade publishing for 12 years and was most recently director of marketing for S&S Online, decamped to San Francisco when the retailer offered her the job. Now, despite the two-and-a-half hour commute, and the fact that she logs more hours at her desk than she ever did in New York, Gottinger thrives on the challenge of creating a new market from the ground up. “My job changes almost every day,” she says. “People out here have to adjust their priorities. As for those who like to have a very clear plan, maybe Silicon Valley’s not the place to be.”

The Cats Come Back

Alas, the grass on the other side of 14th Street isn’t always 32-bit, true-color green. “The labor can be menial, the hours endless, and the compensation is about 50% of what I was earning before,” gripes one defector. “One could add that there’s no security, the benefits packages aren’t as good, and the perks have disappeared.” Just ask 31-year-old Colin Dickerman, who was a senior editor at Rob Weisbach Books but found himself out of a job when the imprint was closed following HarperCollins’ purchase of the Hearst books division. He went to content development at self-improvement site dreamlife.com for just six weeks before seeking a better home at book packager Melcher Media.

“Maybe I just picked the wrong one,” he jokes about dreamlife, which recently featured a live e-dieting chat and a primer on how not to get lost in love. More seriously, he says, his experience indicates that many Internet sites lavish attention on the business and technical side, relegating editorial matters to an afterthought. “Content is the last thing some of these places think about,” he explains, “and that is certainly reflected in the budgets they create.” For Dickerman, the buzz of working for a startup wasn’t enough to make those secrets to healthy eating worth his while. He realized he could stay involved with meaningful content in the publishing world, but retain the freedom to work on a wide range of projects by joining a small, vibrant publisher such as Melcher.

What’s in store for the larger houses? “Publishers should definitely be worried about this,” says Mike Delisle, vp of new media for Management Recruiters International. “What they have to do is start recognizing how valuable people are. They have to focus on skill-set development and managerial mentoring. Obviously, people at dot-coms have a better opportunity to be closer to where things are happening. Those opportunities are not communicated to the rank and file at large organizations.” Random House, for its part, is beginning to see the light. “Our recruitment and retention efforts are a priority of enormous importance to us,” says spokesperson Stuart Applebaum, “and one that Random House CEO Peter Olson has personally taken an interest in.” Initiatives on the table include a close look at salaries (managers say they’ve been told to offer $30,000 starting salaries as of July 1), training programs, and mentoring opportunities. And at the Random sales conference on May 2, Olson is expected to beg executives for creative strategies to keep employees from hitting the ejector button. Moreover, such high-flying rhetoric is being translated into practice. One Random staffer, who attempted to flee but was lured back with a counteroffer she couldn’t resist, says the company has indeed vowed to “think outside of the box.”

In the end, the best way for publishers to give employees the freedom they crave may be to spin off their own dot-com shops, à la the New York Times Company’s New York Times Digital division, or Macmillan USA’s InformIT portal, focused on IT professionals. It would at least keep many in publishing from facing the dilemma expressed in an email from one Random employee who got away: “I felt increasingly that I was being forced to choose between doing the same-old, same-old at a trade house at a time when trade houses may become less and less relevant, and, on the other hand, an industry that had a future.” Or, as About.com’s Ted Hill concludes, “There are a lot of challenges to the Internet, but at least they’re new ones.”