Alec Baldwin's podcast is the best, wisest thing I've heard in years

I've spent the last few days listening to Alec Baldwin's "Here's The Thing" podcast. It's the best thing I've heard in years.

I've heard him talking to David Letterman, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Lawrence Wright, Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Chris Rock and Lorne Michaels and others. In the course of that I feel I've had more genuine insight into how people operate and are motivated at the very top of the show business tree than I would have picked up in years of listening to the standard celebrity interview. That's the one where the interviewee condescends to the interviewer who in turn condescends to the listener.

Instead here you get Jerry Seinfeld actually saying the great truth that nobody ever says:

"My life in comedy is a life of sacrifice that I am only too happy to make. All my relationships were as disposable as a dixie cup next to my career."

Here you get Gay Talese, who wrote the classic story "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold", talking about why people at the top of the tree are so often unhappy.

"If you're extraordinarily talented you're living up to expectations that can not long be met."

Here you get David Remnick talking about meeting Bob Dylan:

"He looks like Vincent Price playing a cowboy."

I really haven't got time to tell you any more. Here's the archive. Dive in.

The people at Gawker don't seem to like the world they've built

There’s a big to-do at the U.S. website Gawker over a story being withdrawn, apparently in order to placate advertisers.

A number of senior people have noisily resigned, claiming the independence of editorial has been fatally undermined. 

The new generation of digital journalists working in U.S. media don’t stop at giving themselves the rather inflated job titles favoured by their eyeshade-wearing predecessors; they also seem to think they can hold the same line between “church and state” once so dear to Time magazine and the New York Times.

But that was in the days when news media was a two-revenue stream business. The old position wasn't a principled stand - it was just common sense. Some of the money came from advertisers; the rest came from readers. The job of the editor was to hold the line between the two streams. You couldn’t lean too far in the direction of one for fear of making the other, to use one of the most popular weasel words in the contemporary lexicon, uncomfortable.

If on the other hand you’re an internet media business like Gawker (where readers don’t pay) you only have one revenue stream. That’s the advertiser. Or sponsor or commercial partner or whatever you call them. In this new dispensation, where the advertising is the only source of cash, the advertising will always win. A child could tell you that.

This is the new Jerusalem the Gawker people eagerly built. Now they’ve got it, they don’t seem to like it.

On May 12th I'm talking to Mark Ellen about rock stars and life. Come along

A friend found this picture of me and Mark Ellen in the BBC archive. It was taken in Golden Square. Mark says it was autumn 1982. That's one of the reasons he's written his memoir Rock Stars Stole My Life! He remembers things and, despite appearances, he's very organised when it comes to keeping a record.

The book comes out on May 12th and on that evening I'm going to be talking to him about it at a Word In Your Ear Event at the Slaughtered Lamb. Tickets are on sale here. You'd better hurry. They seem to be going quickly.

Old hacks keep asking me if I've read any of it. I haven't yet. I will of course.

P.S. In another Word In Your Ear event at the Slaughtered Lamb I'll be talking to Ben Watt about his sensational memoir Romany and Tom on Friday, March 28th. This will be an early evening show which also features music from Vinny Peculiar and the fabulous My Darling Clementine. Tickets for that one here.

Publishers should stop promising things they can't deliver

Trinity Mirror have announced the closure of their People.co.uk website and the departure of Sue Douglas who oversaw it. That's sad for her and anyone who worked on it.

I don't care whether it was a good, bad or indifferent idea. The way they went about it was wrong in one key respect.

In November, which was when it launched, Sue Douglas was on The Media Show talking it up. The interview, which starts here at 2:56, reminded me of Siobhan Sharpe's flights of fingers-crossed positivity in the Olympic comedy Twenty Twelve. Steve Hewlett didn't have to be particularly tough to expose the fact that she seemed to be making it up as she went along.

And that shouldn't matter because in the world of the internet that's what people do - they start with a small idea, look at how people use it and then build it up from there. They literally make it up as they go along. What Sue Douglas was doing on the The Media Show was not demonstrating something, which might have been powerful. Instead she was promising something, which was what people used to do in the old media world.

The worst thing you can do nowadays is promise something. Nobody believes you. As my friends in the music business say, you can't hype people any more. You can't predict something is going to be the case. The only thing you can do is point out what is already the position and build from there. The only hype that matters is the hype the users provide themselves.

Large companies with web initiatives should rejoice in the fact that they don't have to get the permission of advertisers or distributors before they start. In the words of that well-known manufacturer of gym pumps, Just Do It.

Why musicians are always bitter

Reviewing DUKE: A Life of Duke Ellington in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik recognises that Ellington took tunes invented by his famous sidemen and called them his own, but also makes the following good point about someone like Billy Strayhorn:

"Would he have had the energy and mastery to form a band, sustain it, recruit the right musicians, survive their eccentricities and addictions, give them music they could play, record it, and keep enough of a popular audience alive to justify the expense of the rest?"

He probably wouldn't. Ellington's genius was for getting the most out of other people and that will probably involve exploiting them. The tragedy is that music publishing is a winner-takes-all game that over-compensates the person who gets their name in the credits and under-compensates the Billy Strayhorns of this world.  It also explains why musicians over the age of forty are always bitter.