What to make of Bill Cohan’s big Vanity Fair piece on a slightly skeevy lawsuit where a pair of Democratic party operatives are trying to pull a Winklevoss on Arianna Huffington? Arianna’s flack, Mario Ruiz, is clearly enjoying being asked to comment on it:

It’s a great story — if you read it backwards. At the end of the article, the writer takes apart Boyce and Daou’s case piece by piece, leaving it in tatters — and rendering everything that has come before it pointless.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs’ attorney seems much more well-disposed towards the story, despite the fact that — as Ruiz says — it’s almost impossible to read the whole thing and think that they have any case at all.

The question of who’s got the stronger moral and legal case is pretty clear, from Cohan’s reporting: it’s Arianna. As Jay Yarow says about the Winklevii, “ideas are a dime-a-dozen. It’s execution that counts. Mark Zuckerberg executed. The Winklevosses didn’t.” Similarly here: Peter Daou and James Boyce had an idea for a “liberal Drudge Report” in late 2004, at much the same time as about a million other people had exactly the same idea. (Even Gawker launched one such site, Sploid, in April 2005; it closed in August 2006.)

The idea was, as Larry David says in the piece, “terrible”: the site was to be called fourteensixty.com, after the number of days between presidential elections. It had hypocrisy baked in to its business plan:

www.fourteensixty.com will be a Democratic-leaning site with enough non-partisan news so as to appear more mainstream than it truly is; this is critical for credibility and for advertising revenue.

And rather than build one big site, the idea was to build lots of little ones, including (I’m not making this up) mamadonkey.com, “a blog aimed at Democratic supporters over the age of forty”.

On top of that, the site was envisaged as a way to sell the services of political operatives:

1460’s staff technical and web-communication strengths will enable 1460 to offer candidates a full range of strategic and technological tools…

1460 will also help shape a candidate’s overall communication strategy, develop television and radio communications and coordinate that strategy through the Internet. Utilizing Peter’s extensive knowledge of online political communication, 1460 will develop and manage a candidate’s web site, email acquisition and communication strategy, blog communication strategy, volunteer acquisition and deployment, and more.

The plan goes on to detail all the different ways this would make money for the site, including taking “a percentage of monies raised, online and off”, as well as a percentage of all media buys.

No wonder that, when he saw the plan, Kenny Lerer told Arianna that “this doesn’t work for me on many levels”; the two of them went on to do something much smarter, much more innovative and, as befits a news site, much less beholden to party-political interests. And, I daresay, much less likely to ever dream of writing the words “blog communication strategy”.

But what of Cohan’s story? Given that this entire lawsuit seems to be a nonevent, is it reasonable for the Huffington Post to criticize Vanity Fair for printing it in the first place?

There are certainly good reasons why VF might have spiked the story, or buried it on VF.com somewhere. Rich and successful people get sued opportunistically all the time. There’s little new news in the piece. And the conflicts are enormous: not only has VF’s editor hosted Arianna’s book party, one of the plaintiffs has actually worked as a consultant for the magazine.

On top of that, Cohan overstretches in his attempt to demonstrate that there even might be a real story in the lawsuit:

The questions raised are profound: Did Huffington and Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer take ideas from Daou and Boyce—ideas the two men call “groundbreaking”—without properly compensating or acknowledging them? Or is this just a case of sour grapes, with Daou and Boyce looking to cash in on the hard work of Huffington and Lerer now that the site is successful and valuable?

Er, no, those aren’t profound questions at all. Even if Arianna and Lerer did take an idea or two, it’s hard to see that the plaintiffs would have any claim to compensation — and indeed neither of them asked for compensation or even the opportunity to invest in Huffington Post for six years, before they suddenly decided that they had been so egregiously wronged that they had no choice but to sue.

But the fact is that Vanity Fair loves nothing more than a gossipy tale of celebrity entanglements and the name-dropping in this piece is truly something to behold: Larry David, David Geffen, Brian Grazer, Aaron Sorkin, Meg Ryan, Tom Freston. Graydon Carter simply isn’t capable of passing up a story which includes a sentence like this one:

On Election Day 2004, after attending a Bruce Springsteen concert for Kerry the night before, he, the Davids, and Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow and political activist, were visiting polling places in Ohio before boarding a private jet to fly to Boston.

The biggest celebrity of all in this piece, is Arianna herself, a blow-dried visionary in a glamorous large-format portrait by Robyn Twomey. The picture speaks much more loudly than the words: she’s clearly the winner, not the men wearing suits lent to them for the duration of the photoshoot by VF staffer Peter Holleran.

This story isn’t bad publicity for Arianna then — the vast majority of VF readers will look at her picture but not read the article. And most of the ones who do read the article will come to the obvious conclusion. My guess is that when Arianna next bumps into Graydon, it’ll be kisses all round, like nothing happened. Especially if he agrees to write something for her website.

(Cross-posted at CJR)

Tumblr Is Sending A Bunch Of Bloggers To Fashion Week

by Justin Fenner | 12:58 pm, January 6th, 2011

As fashion bloggers, we tend to brake for other fashion bloggers, especially because we know how hard it can be to 1) get started, 2) build an audience 3) make people think and 4) cover fashion week, a task to which we could devote entire terrabytes of information. But this morning’s news that Tumblr, the photocentric blogging platform beloved by people everywhere, is sending 20 fashion bloggers to New York Fashion Week has us scratching our heads. Also puzzling: to manage it all, the company has recently hired a fashion director.

Fashionista reports that Richard Tong will oversee the coverage, which will be generated by eight New York-based bloggers and 12 from other areas of the country. What I Wore, Peace Love Chanel and SaraZucker.com (helmed by a blogger who’s helped us here at Styleite with some awesome fashion DIYs) are among the representatives. It’s not clear yet which shows they’ll attend, but they’re getting a pretty lush deal in exchange for the hard work they’ll have to do at Lincoln Center:

They’ll receive complimentary flights, accommodation, and will be whisked off to lunches, dinners, and cocktails with a roster of to-be-confirmed brands and designers.

But Tumblr isn’t just showering the bloggers with money and expecting for the reblogs to just happen. They’re also going to set up a live feed of the group’s content at tumblr.com/nyfw. That, of course, will be mixed in with stuff from a select group of media partners.

All of which are good things — it’s great to see hardworking bloggers get a little corporate love. We just hope that corporate love doesn’t turn into a bunch of sponsored content aimed at exposing brands that wouldn’t normally merit coverage on the beauty-obsessed blogs that are going to cover fashion week.

Other than that, it certainly sounds like a good idea — one more step in the democratization of fashion! Zucker herself once said the front row of fashion shows is where bloggers belong. We just hope this experiment is more about giving these bloggers an opportunity they wouldn’t have otherwise than it is about making paper.

Tumblr is Sending 20+ Bloggers to New York Fashion Week [Fashionista]

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Tumblr Is Sending A Bunch Of Bloggers To Fashion Week

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