Why Not A (Fair & Balanced) Webby?

Why not a Webby for this blog? The image of the Webby itself brought back memories of a childhood toy: the Slinky. That rhymes with the most prominent feature of this blog: it's stinky (most of the time). If this is (fair & balanced) self-promotion, so be it.

[x Slate]
What? You've Not Been Honored by the Webbys?
By Jack Shafer

Boinggggg!
The Webby

Entering your Web site in the Webby Awards is a little like buying a box of Cracker Jack—everybody wins a prize.

That's only a slight exaggeration. The 2008 contest—the 12th annual—will dispense awards in 119 categories next month, honoring Web sites, interactive advertising, film and video sites and teams, and mobile Web sites. The organization will announce winners May 6, but it has already designated "honorees" in each category, more than a dozen in some cases. The organization has also selected five different "nominees" in each category from which it will ultimately pick winners. But not just one winner—the group will bestow two top prizes in each category. There's the "Webby Award," selected by the group's judges, and the "People's Voice Award," chosen by online voters.

A "star-studded" ceremony is scheduled for June 9 in New York City, where Webbys, hand-cast thingamajigs that look like chromed bedsprings, will be passed out.

There's so much excellence being honored on the Webby Awards site that you need a mainframe to tote it up. I count nearly 600 nominees and upward of 1,100 honorees. The group would have you believe that it's a tough competition, boasting that of the nearly 10,000 contestants this year, fewer than 15 percent were official honorees. Please. I've heard of mail-order diploma mills that are more exclusive than the Webbys.

It's with great shame that I confess that Slate is a nominee in both the "Best Copy/Writing" slot and the "Best Editing" video category. I'm equally shamed by the fact that Slate isn't the only big-shot media entity whoring for a Webby. The New York Times, CondéNet, DDB Chicago, Disney Channel, MIT Media Lab, MLB, NPR, Wieden + Kennedy, MTV, Gannett, NBC, and practically every major Web presence you can think of has gathered the nominee or honoree accolade.

So, if everybody who plays is a winner, who really ends up winning?

The Webby Awards, of course. The group charges a fee of $275 for Web sites and up to $475 for each advertising-campaign entry. (If I knew Slate was spending money like this, I would have asked for a bigger raise in December.) Even after allowing for discounted entry fees, the back of the envelope says the Webbys could be taking in more than $2 million from its contestants. Then there's an undetermined amount of loot collected from corporate sponsors and partners (Adobe, Nokia, Getty Images, Reuters, Variety, Wired, Pequot Ventures, Brightcove, et al.) and tickets for the awards gala. The Webbys don't mind nickel-and-diming applicants for cash, either, selling "custom framed certificates to commemorate" nominees and honorees, says its Web site.

Again, I exaggerate. The Webby Awards aren't the only winners. The winners of the prizes, the nominees, and the honorees also benefit from exercising their bragging rights to clients and competitors who aren't smart enough to know a Webby Award is worthless. Some sites are already boasting about being picked on their own pages or in e-mail to me. The winning editors, publishers, designers, and ad jockeys also gain if they can convince their bosses to throw good money after bad by sending them to attend the Webby Awards events, which last year ran for three days in New York.

Clearly, the only way for Slate to reclaim its stupid Webby investment is to send me to New York for three days in June if we're fortunate enough to win.

******

Show how much you despise the Webby Awards by voting for Slate in the "People's Voice" contest. If we win, I'll denounce the rip-off from the podium provided Slate sends me. If you love the Webby Awards, send e-mail to slate.pressbox@gmail.com and show me the error of my ways. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. Jack teed off on the Pulitzers in 2004. Last year, he ridiculed the Emery Reves Award given to Chris Matthews for lifetime achievement in journalism.]

Copyright © 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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Gerontology Chronicles

The Krait (a NY Fishwrap teammate of The Cobra) examines the varieties of ageism in contemporary public life. (Full disclosure: The Krait is 62 years old; the hip view of her age is that today's 60 is the same as her parents' 40.) The foibles of age will become the topic of the first half of this century because there will be more "seniors" clumping around in their velcro-secured sensible footware than ever before. If this is the dawning of the (fair & balanced) Geezer Age, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Revenge of Lacey Davenport
By Gail Collins

Millicent Fenwick, the late Congresswoman from New Jersey who everyone connected with the “Doonesbury” character Lacey Davenport, was 64 when she was first elected to the House. That was in 1974, and her victory was referred to as “a geriatric triumph.”

These days, of course, as the first baby boomers are pushing 64, it’s regarded as part of the prime of life. Long, long ago, Mick Jagger used to say that he couldn’t picture singing rock ’n’ roll when he was 40. His message, obviously, was not that the Stones planned to retire, but that Mick planned on remaining in his 30s forever. That which we cannot change, we ignore.

When Fenwick ran for the Senate in 1982 at 72, her opponent, 58-year-old Frank Lautenberg, used the code word “fitness” to suggest, over and over, that she was too old for the job. Pause here to consider the deep, deep irony of the fact that Lautenberg, who won, is now asking the public to re-elect him again so he can stay in office until he’s 90.

“Age is not the factor. The question is effectiveness,” the currently 84-year-old Lautenberg said.

There are several fascinating-to-bizarre aspects to this race. Lautenberg is being challenged in a primary by Representative Robert Andrews, 50. Andrews’s wife, a law professor, is running for his House seat. However, if she wins in the June primary, Camille Andrews has promised to let the party leaders decide who should be the actual candidate. If they choose someone else, she’ll resign as nominee and let them appoint whoever.

“She’s committed to a fair process,” said her husband.

Meanwhile, the Republicans were desperately searching for a self-financing — i.e., really, really rich — Senate candidate. As the deadline loomed, they zeroed in on Andrew Unanue, a 40-year-old nightclub owner who had been chief operating officer of his family’s company, Goya Foods. “Unanue could spark a potential rebirth of the Republican Party in New Jersey. His potential is that great,” a Republican consultant told The Times’s David Chen.

It turned out that Unanue had left Goya in 2004 under less than ideal circumstances — i.e., pushed out by relatives. He denied that he had been guilty of going to work drunk and explained that he had just been going to work hung over. There were apparently problems in getting him to cut short his skiing vacation to come back and announce his candidacy. Scrambling again, the leaders dropped the really-rich requirement and settled on a basic former-Congressman-turned-lobbyist.

The age question is of particular interest this year since John McCain, at 71, is going to try to break the record for oldest newly elected commander in chief. And Bill Clinton did not do his wife any huge favors — as Hillary herself pointed out — when he attacked critics of Hillary’s Bosnia blunder by saying: “Some of them, when they’re 60, they’ll forget something when they’re tired at 11 at night, too.”

Beyond the fact that Hillary had told the Bosnia story in the morning, we have that red phone advertisement. Do we want the president picking it up at 3 a.m. and not being able to remember whether it’s Pakistan or Turkmenistan that has the nuclear weapons?

Representative Andrews says he is absolutely not going to make Lautenberg’s age a campaign issue, and that “the question is: who has plans and energy and focus to get things done.” He is demanding seven debates during the seven weeks between now and the primary, possibly because Lautenberg is not a great extemporaneous speaker. Or then again, it could be a subtle attempt to inflict death by debating.

Lautenberg is actually not really, really old by Senate standards, which are even more generous than baby-boomer standards. Another 84-year-old, Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska, is also running for re-election this year, but there are so many terrible things about Stevens that voters are really not going to have to think about the age thing at all.

Robert Byrd of West Virginia was re-elected in 2006 at 88. “I’m told that 90 is the new 80,” he said. He is now 90 and, as president pro tem of the Senate, is third in line to the presidency. (Let’s take a minute out and try to imagine what would happen if a series of crises struck the country so that we ran through the line of succession in rather short order. Governed by Dick Cheney. Then Nancy Pelosi. Then Robert Byrd. Then Condoleezza Rice. It sounds like the kind of experiment they perform on lab rats.)

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills. For the U.S. Senate, this is not really a concern since doing the same thing over and over is pretty much the name of the game.

[Gail Collins was the Editorial Page Editor of The New York Times from 2001 to January 1, 2007. She was the first woman Editorial Page Editor at the Times. Before the Editorial Page, Collins was an editorial board member and columnist on the op-ed page. On October 12, 2006, she announced that she would step down as Editorial Page Editor, effective this year. Collins took the year off to write a book, and returned to the Times as a columnist starting in July 2007. Her column appears on Thursdays and Saturdays.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, as Gail Gleason, Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to The New York Times, Collins wrote for the New York Daily News, Newsday, Connecticut Business Journal, United Press International, and the Associated Press in New York City.

Collins also founded the Connecticut State News Bureau which operated from 1972 to 1977 and provided coverage of the state capital and Connecticut politics. When it was sold, the company served more than thirty weekly and daily newspaper clients.

Beyond her work as a journalist, Collins has published several books; Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, America's Woman: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, and The Millennium Book which she co-authored with her husband Dan Collins.

She was also a journalism instructor at Southern Connecticut State University.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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