Did you catch Paul Carr’s latest piece on Techcrunch?
In it, he mocks New York for being a “content town”. What does Carr do for a living again?
Oh, that’s right… he’s a writer.
On top of that, he writes for the company who took it’s latest conference, Disrupt, to a town trying to “stay relevant” as he puts it as the west coast internet companies are “bleeding it try”.
“…The fact is that billions of advertising and investment dollars continue to flood west, never to return,” he writes.
That’s an interesting perspective. Another way to put it would be that a lot of west coast companies, in efforts to become real businesses, have had to come to New York to get in the flow of our ad dollars. Do those dollars flood west, never to return? Not really an econ major, were you Paul? If you wanted to actually trace the dollars directly, given that Facebook’s cash reserves are probably increasing, you could say that they actually do return to NYC—assuming that money is sitting in a money market account or t-bills or something. What city do you think is getting the biggest cut of that investment transaction?
Or, given our overall national trade deficit, you could say that all of our dollars are flowing way way west… to China, in which case the Valley isn’t getting any of it either.
As for the investment dollars directly into startups, sure the Valley is a bigger market for venture capital. That’s not news. What *is* news is the heavy competition to put west coast money into east coast companies like Foursquare, Double Verify, Chartbeat, and Demdex.
Is the media business getting disrupted? Sure…but then again, so is just about every other business. They just weren’t used to that happening nearly as much as, let’s say, the chip manufacturers were. Will we still likely be watching TV and consuming media 20 years from now? Certainly. Will their be someone paying for that to happen? Undoubtedly. Just because the New York Times might be a fraction of the size it is at that time, doesn’t mean the business of media is dead, or that New York will die with it.
For your sake, as a blogger, let’s hope not.
You should heed the words of Brad Hargeaves:
“But — in Paul’s defense — the media world has used its superior resources to more or less occupy “high profile” NYC tech. If you go to a “tech” or “internet” event in the Valley, you’ll meet tech people. If you go to a similarly branded event in NYC, you’ll meet media people. And you’ll think there’s nothing to New York tech beyond hipsters and old media dreamers.
Want to meet New York tech? Head over to Hackers and Founders or the Y+30 or NextNY.You’ll meet awesome people there, but they won’t fly you out. If you insist on having your ticket paid for, you’ll end up in the same media bubble-world you unfortunately fell into this time around.”