More hot gossip from Ned Brainard's poison pen
The Easter Massacre at NetGuide Live may soon claim another victim. As readers of Wired News learned recently, the corporate managers at CMP Media shut down NetGuide Live's San Francisco operation last Thursday. Along the way, 22 or more employees (CMP says 22, employees say more) lost their jobs in mean-spirited summary dismissals that included offers of a single week's severance. In CMP's last layoff round, way back in January, even temps got two weeks' severance packages.
The mass firings weren't the only interesting incident in the latest installment of The Great Web Wipeout. At the same time it closed the NetGuide Live office, CMP announced it was merging its ad sales team, and indeed all of its Web operations, under the umbrella of a new management structure, to be called CMPNet. CMP also announced that Beth Haggerty, previously the publishing director of both NetGuide Live and its sister print publication, NetGuide magazine, had been named publishing director of CMPNet - which would include not only NetGuide Live and the company's other consumer web sites, but the enormously popular (at least in CMP terms) TechWeb service. Curiously missing in the press release about all this reshuffling was the name of Drake Lundell, the group vice president whose fingers had once been all over the NetGuide Live project. Lundell may be the fall guy for a disaster that has cost CMP more than US$10 million in losses, according to one informed source. Lundell's travails echo the fate of his former underling, Don Tydeman, the founding publisher of NetGuide magazine, who was "promoted" to corporate director of business development only months after NetGuide's launch, to be replaced by Haggerty. In the latest shuffle, Haggerty has risen to the top.
Our friends in Redmond at MSNBC's Web site are still very much the second banana in the TV-Web partnership - and all their Web savviness hasn't leaked over to their big brothers on the TV side at MSNBC's Fort Lee, New Jersey, studios. In the 24 hours after the Heaven's Gate suicide story broke last week, MSNBC-TV talking heads, apparently working off a script cooked up by their hysteria-seeking producers, were doing all they could to make the nefarious Net the villain in the tragedy near San Diego. Nearly every interview we watched during the network's prime-time news hours included at least one brain-dead question.
Our favorite blow-dried bonehead was Internight anchor John Seigenthaler, who was seen on Thursday interviewing a cult expert and an astronomy professor about the dark assistance the Net gave to cult recruiting. Seigenthaler's leading questions included this stunner: People who use computers spend "a lot of time alone" in front of a screen - "are 'techies' more vulnerable" to being recruited by cults? Well maybe, John - about as vulnerable as couch potatoes who spend a lot of time alone in front of the TV screen. Then again, it's easy to see how Siegenthaler might have missed the obvious comparison - judging from the ratings, MSNBC doesn't know much about the latter audience, either.
