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Who is Felix Salmon?

Wired

It’s hard to find halfways-decent magazines these days, and when, like me, you’ve gone on one airline journey already this month, the range of reading materials at Orange County airport can start to look rather thin. Which is how I ended up picking up a copy of Wired for the first time in years, paying $4.95 for the privilege – a full dollar more than the much glossier and more enjoyable copy of W I read on my flight the following day.

Wired, you probably won’t be interested to learn, has had a full-scale redesign this month, and there’s even an editor’s letter talking about how “the changes are both editorial and visual, reflecting my own vision for the magazine”. The vision, in case you were confused, is that of the Editor in Chief. He’s not alone on the masthead, however: others glory in the titles of Executive Editor, Managing Editor, Deputy Editor, Articles Editor, Senior Editor (nine of these), Assistant Managing Editor, Senior Associate Editor, Assistant Editor, Copy Editor (two, who look as though they work for the Copy Chief), Research Editor, Assistant Resesarch Editor (three), Editor at Large, Contributing Editor (sixteen of these), Contributing Copy Editor (another two), Photo Editor, Deputy Photo Editor, and finally the Founding Editor and the Editorial Director. Add in the 32 Contributing Writers, 21 Contributing Artists, 29 Contributing Photographers, two Contributing Photo Researchers, as well as the Creative Director, Design Director, Assistant Design Directors (two), Senior Designers (two), Designer, Design Department Assistant, Photo Editor, Deputy Photo Editor, Photo Assistant, Production Director, Associate Production Director, Associate Production Manager, Senior Production Artist, Production Artist, Prepress Specialist, Editorial Business Coordinator, Assistant to the Editor in Chief, Director of Photography and – of course – the Special Correspondent, and it’s lucky someone has a vision to keep all this together.

When you stop to consider that the three main features, including the cover story, are all by people who don’t appear anywhere on the masthead, you do pause, briefly, to wonder what all these people actually do. I’d love to bump into Jennifer Hillner at a party, just to find out whether “Senior Associate Editor” means anything at all, and if so, what.

The job titles also seem to bear no relation to the structure of the magazine. Our friendly Editor in Chief guides us through the signposts: first there’s the Start section, then Play, then View, then Found. Features get a subordinate clause somewhere in the middle there.

The sections all look and read exactly the same way, however, rather defeating their purpose, at least as far as the long-suffering reader is concerned. Magazine sections only become memorable when they stand out from the rest of the book, but no-one at Wired seems to have realised this.

The new design is even more depressing. After all, Wired was always, at least before it was bought by Condé Nast, the most visually innovative magazine on newsstands. (Raygun competed for that distinction, but got marked down for being so innovative as to be unreadable most of the time.)

What we have now, in any case, is lots of white space and a general design which looks like it was lifted wholesale from The Face circa 1989.

What we also have is a credulousness of will-sapping proportions. The cover story, on Steven Spielberg, is as fluffy as any Vanity Fair cover story, only without any actual writing: it’s in Q&A format. It’s followed by a six-page blowjob for a Star Wars spin-off video game, and later on by a similarly uncritical piece on the new Stephen Wolfram book (“even if he is wrong, A New Kind of Science is an incredible achievement, one that will richly reward adventuresome readers”). Maybe Stefan can tell me what that rich reward is – bigger biceps from lifting the thing, perhaps?

There are two pieces worth reading in the magazine: one on computer-animated faces by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wechsler, and one on rusting supertankers by Richard Martin. Niether seems particularly suited to Wired, as opposed to, say, GQ or Gear or the New York Times Magazine. In other words, insofar as the new Wired is good, it doesn’t have an identity; insofar as it has an identity, it isn’t any good.

Meanwhile, judging at least from the size of the masthead, Condé Nast is losing a fortune on this franchise. I was one of Wired's most avid readers ten or 12 years ago, so it pains me to say this, but it's time to put the thing out of its misery. Let it be a fond memory, rather than an embarrassing rebuke to its former self.

Journalistic innumeracy, cont.

I've written before about journalists and statistics (scroll down to the final item), but a couple of recent articles in America's paper of record, the New York Times, make it worth banging this particular drum a little bit more.

First of all, Rick Lyman, the Hollywood reporter, weighed in on Monday with an article about the relative box-office successes of Spider-Man and the new Star Wars film. Here's the relevant bits:

It starts off with the genuine studio estimates: although the Star Wars numbers were subsequently revised downwards by a substantial $6 million, the blame for that must lie with Fox and not with Lyman.

But then comes this sentence saying that Star Wars made $27,254 a screen over 6,000 screens. If that was true, it would have grossed an astonishing – I daresay impossible – $163,524,000 in its opening weekend. They just gave us the actual gross, which was $116.3 million: can't they see that their numbers don't add up?

And the "per-screen" numbers are obviously meant to give us an opportunity to compare like with like, so they wouldn't give us a comparison between the three-day gross for Spider-Man, on the one hand, and the four-day gross for Star Wars, on the other. In fact, the average for Star Wars was based on its Friday-Sunday gross. But that's automatically going to put it at a disadvantage: since the real fanatics will have all seen the film on Thursday, the averages exclude the first (and, presumably, the most important) day of release.

But Lyman made a much more important mistake than that: he confused the per-theatre average with the per-screen average. Any Hollywood reporter – hell, any moviegoer – knows that blockbuster films are opened on many different screens in any given theatre. In fact, the per-screen average for Spider-Man, based on the initial studio estimates, was $15,312 – $5,104 per day – while the per-screen average for Star Wars, excluding the initial Thursday, was $14,358 – $4,786 per day. Including the initial Thursday it was $19,383 – $4,846 per day, a difference from Spider-Man of only 5%. When you take into account the fact that Thursday was a school day when people are less free to go to the cinema, the averages become essentially indistinguishable.

There are other factors one could take into account as well, such as the fact that the producers of Star Wars were pickier than most about where their film could be shown, which presumably meant that Star Wars was shown, on average, on screens with more seating than Spider-Man was. Those sorts of numbers are unavailable. But even so, to say that Spider-Man's averages were "far higher" than those for Star Wars is definitely off the mark.

Then, today, the New York Times publishes an article with the headline "Perelman Sells Stake in Bank to Citigroup for $5.8 Billion". The first sentence reads: "The financier Ronald O. Perelman is selling his largest and his most profitable holding, a stake in Golden State Bancorp, as part of a $5.8 billion acquisition of Golden State by Citigroup, the companies announced yesterday." The sentence is right; the headline is wrong. Citigroup is paying $5.8 billion for all of Golden State, not just for Ron Perelman's 30-ish per cent stake. If the headline had said "Perelman Sells Stake in Bank to Citigroup in $5.8 billion Deal", it would have been ambiguous but arguably correct. As it stands, however, it's indisputably wrong. The headline says that Perelman is trousering $5.8 billion, when in fact he's getting maybe $1.75 billion. It's a big difference: more than $4 billion.

I've dealt, once, with the New York Times editing process, and from my experience and that of friends of mine, I can tell you that it's very rigorous. Rigorous with grammar, that is. When it comes to numbers, New York Times editors are obviously asleep at the wheel. After all, both of these articles were internally inconsistent, and in neither of them was the mistake picked up.

Literary financial journalism

Chalk this one up for the annals of self-defeat: it won’t take long before the tireless spiders of Google chance upon this posting and thereby rid my favourite web page of its punch. ‘Your search - “literary financial journalism” - did not match any documents’ it says, or said: I love the idea of the most comprehensive search engine in the world, an index of Borgesian proportions, trawling through its billions of documents in vain, seeking but never finding the object of our present discourse.

On the other hand, there’s an upside: for a while at least, anybody searching for “literary financial journalism” on Google will find but one result. For the purposes of Google, Felix Salmon (or felixsalmon.com) will be the first and last word on the subject.

That shouldn’t be the case, I think. After all, literary journalism is nothing new: most of us, off the top of our heads, can rattle off a list from George Orwell and John Hersey through Truman Capote to Tom Wolfe and PJ O’Rourke. Magazines from GQ to Rolling Stone pride themselves on their literary heritages; the Atlantic and Harper’s go further and define themselves by theirs. Then, of course, there’s the New Yorker, the grandaddy of them all.

But financial magazines don’t think that way, and, with the possible exception of Michael Lewis at the New York Times Magazine, the financial journalism which appears in the generalist press (John Cassidy in the New Yorker; Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Review of Books) aspires more to authoritativeness than it does to any kind of lasting style.

Part of the reason, I think, is that journalism is always written with a certain readership in mind, and financial professionals generally mistrust ornament and beauty: such things tend not to outperform the market. They’re perfectly happy amassing important collections of contemporary art, of course, but that’s different: that’s a hobby, a sideline, not work.

There’s an interesting contrast with lawyers here: while much legal prose is impenetrably dry, there is a long and glowing tradition of carefully and beautifully written juridical opinions, many of which are admired as much for their prose as they are for their clarity and insight.

The best that financial editors ever hope for, by contrast, is a coherent and compelling narrative structure: a story well told, with a beginning, middle and end. And even that’s rare enough, vanishingly so outside the world of M&A.

It’s also worth noting why most major mergers are quickly followed by detailed back-stories in the press: the companies need to file various legal documents to the SEC, and the lawyers who draft those papers generally put in quite a lot of colour. In other words, those narrative pieces aren't reported, most of the time, they're more copied out.

For the time being, rhetorical flourishes in the world of financial journalism never seem to rise above the level of description – what the protagonists are wearing, how their offices are decorated, which Bordeaux they ordered at the celebratory dinner. Metaphor tends to appear only in the guise of cliché.

So, Felix, I hear you ask, are you going to stake your claim to this relatively virgin territory? I dunno, I think I ought to talk to my editors first. Besides, I’m not even sure I’m capable of it: I’ve never written anything literary in my life. But someone ought to go there, and I’ll be cheering them on.

Spider-Man and Hollywood Ending

They're both franchises. Spider-Man, in his various incarnations, and Woody Allen, in his, have been around seemingly forever; both, too, are identified with New York City. Both released films on May 3, and both films are pretty much as you would expect them to be: the former a big-budget action spectacular, the latter a low-budget comedy.

I was more disappointed in Spider-Man, if only because it's been so successful that I thought that maybe there might be something to it beyond the standard action-hero caper.

Why, then, the success? Well, Spider-Man is a much-loved cartoon character, both in comic-book and cartoon form. A lot has been made of the way in which he's one of us: an adolescent boy, rather than a reclusive multi-millionaire (Batman) or an extraterrestrial refugee (Superman). I think the reason is more basic still: the idea of swinging on spider-ropes from building to building, once implanted in the brain, is impossible to remove. I should imagine that pretty much every kid who's ever been exposed to the Spider-Man concept has looked up at his or her city at many points in his or her childhood and fantasised about what it would be like to be up there, among the skyscrapers, freed from terrestrial limitations.

Both theories of Spider-Man's success correspond to weaknesses in Sam Raimi's movie.There's a cute bit where Spidey is learning the ropes, as it were, and crashes into a wall, and there's even a great half-second or so when we realise along with him that the way to do it is to fire off a second rope in the opposite direction and let go of the first. But after that, it's all jumps and blurs: no Spider-cams, or feelings of what it's like to swing around the rooftops.

More problematic for the movie is the very fact that it's grounded in some kind of recognisable reality, where Peter Parker is bullied at a New York City school, lives in a loft on Broadway and Bond, and bumps into his love interest at the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue. That's all well and good, but it makes our suspension of disbelief a lot more difficult: it serves to make the slavishly-followed comic-book conventions look as ridiculous as they are when you stop to think about them. The cigar-chomping newspaper editor; the girl who somehow never cottons on to Spider-Man's identity; the villain who, even after he's decided to kill his nemesis, decides to construct a dastardly plan involving torn loyalties despite the fact that it serves no purpose whatsoever: switching back and forth between reality and ultrafantasy can be a bit tiring after a while.

The biggest switch of all happens halfway through the film. It's fun to watch Peter Parker coming to grips with his spider-powers; it's boring to see him use them. The minute he appears in his full-blown spider costume, ready to save the world from evildoers, is the minute that you can safely walk out of the cinema. After all, you know the ending already: Spider-Man vanquishes the Green Goblin, while leaving lots of room for a sequel.

Also confusing is the fact that the movie doesn't seem entirely sure where it's set: it's New York, to be sure, but when? The street criminals are straight out of Taxi Driver, but the Macy Gray appearance in Times Square is post-Disneyfication. I last got this feeling in Eyes Wide Shut, weirdly enough, in the scene where Tom Cruise is jeered at by Greenwich Village hoodlums accusing him of being gay. But if Eyes Wide Shut is hurt by the disconnect between the real and the portrayed New York, Spider-Man suffers more, because the portrayed New York is so central to the film. Maybe this is a criticism only a New Yorker could make, but what's the point of setting your movie here, of having Spider-Man introspect from the vantage point of a Chrysler Building gargoyle, if you're just going to turn NYC into Batman's Gotham? In Batman, Tim Burton got to spend a fortune on a slick dystopian production design which looked gorgeous; in Spider-Man, Sam Raimi's constrained by the fact that New York City is a real place, and then denies himself any of the upside.

Woody Allen, of course, is virtually New York incarnate, and any time he makes a film without some kind of heartfelt expression of love to our city we feel that something's missing. His latest effort, Hollywood Ending, comes sans any kind of New York flavour, and one gets the impression that Woody didn't really invest any emotional equity in it. It's a throwaway Allen film: very funny, yet even more lightweight than Small Time Crooks. Good comedy is hard work, and although there are some great lines and fabulously inventive writing in this film, most of it seems rushed, as though Allen couldn't be bothered to put in the extra effort.

Take just about any scene between two characters: you'll see one of them say a line, then there'll be a slightly-too-long pause, and then you'll cut to a shot of the second responding, back and forth any number of times. No fluid cameras, no flavour; it's as though he's decided that the writing is funny enough that he doesn't need to bother directing or editing.

There's also really only one joke in the film: the film director who can't see. Woody Allen makes sure it's a funny one, but I'm not sure it's really capable of sustaining a full-length feature. Bring back the inventiveness of Deconstructing Harry, please!