The Smoking Gun
Nails a Millionaire
By James Ledbetter And Kenneth Li
February 24, 2000
A tiny Web zine dug up the dirt and
got Fox's multi-millionaire-marriage annulled. But is it
a business?
Already, it's a landmark moment in TV
history: actor-turned-real estate developer Rick
Rockwell marrying a woman he'd never met – after
eliminating 49 other strangers – with 23 million
people watching, slack-jawed.
The Fox special Who Wants to Marry a
Multimillionaire? was an amazingly successful spectacle
– for a few days, until the entire project came
crashing down. After court documents surfaced in the
press indicating that Rockwell might have a history of
domestic violence (which he denied), Fox canceled
Multimillionaire last week. Which press outlet brought
down this TV juggernaut? A venerable daily like the New
York Times? A wily trade like Variety?
Nope. A Web zine so small that it
doesn't have an office: The Smoking Gun. With more than
2 million page views on both Feb. 21 and 22, the New
York-based Smoking Gun received about 20 times the
traffic of an average day, outpacing even the Web's most
celebrated do-it-yourself publisher, Matt Drudge.
"We thought the server was going to melt,"
editor William Bastone says.
At a time when Internet media
increasingly get gobbled up by corporate conglomerates,
The Smoking Gun is a throwback to the early '90s age of
Web publishing. Editors Bastone and Daniel Green do just
about everything themselves – reporting, writing and
publishing. It's essentially a hobby, as both men have
full-time jobs. Site designers Mike Essl and Barbara
Glauber, who is Bastone's wife, round out the team.
"We're doing this on the side," Bastone
admits. "We're not even doing this with our
minds."
They are an unlikely pair of Web
moguls. When they started The Smoking Gun in 1997, they
were not exactly masters of the medium. "We didn't
have a 28.8 modem between us," Bastone recalls.
They did have reporting skills – and connections.
Bastone has been a staff writer at the Village Voice
since 1985; he is widely regarded as the best
organized-crime reporter in New York City. Green, a
former editor at now-defunct POV who will be features
editor at Xseeksy.com starting next month, is also the
nephew of Mark Green, who is New York's public advocate
and stands next in line to the mayor's office if its
current occupant, Rudolph Giuliani, wins the New York
senatorial race in November.
The duo's specialty is trolling
courthouses for quirky legal documents and making
diligent use of the Freedom of Information Act. The
unearthed documents are sometimes funny, such as police
reports on celebrity busts, and sometimes grisly: The
site scored a scoop last year when it discovered that
Malcolm X's bullet-riddled pocket diary had disappeared
from prosecutorial evidence and ended up for auction at
Butterfield & Butterfield.
Despite the traffic bonanza the
Millionaire outing has generated, it's difficult for The
Smoking Gun to turn that stampede into a significant
business. The site sells advertising space through the
AdForce network and operates a small online boutique
selling T-shirts with Bill Gates' mug shot, and
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's signature. And though Bastone
says there are plans for streaming video, so far the
site is strictly low-tech. All told, The Smoking Gun
generated about $70,000 in revenues last year -- just
enough to pay expenses.
That might be about to change. The
Smoking Gun was intended to be part of a
soon-to-be-announced group of cultural Web sites
including Suck, Feed and alt.culture. That network,
originally to be called the Pop network, was largely the
brainchild of Bo Peabody, Tripod founder and now a VP at
Lycos.
The funding for the network, to be
announced in coming weeks, includes $1 million from
Lycos and $2 million from Advance Communications, the
privately held newspaper and communications conglomerate
owned by the Newhouse family, say sources involved in
its planning. A spokesman for Advance would not comment
on the investment.
The idea behind the group, these
sources say, is to link the sites into an
alternative-media network, and drive readers to them via
Lycos' formidable search engine traffic. Each
participating site will have equity in the company as a
whole, they add.
But The Smoking Gun's recent success
might cause it to go a different way. Bastone confirms
that he has had discussions with the Feed network, but
he declined to divulge the current state of those talks;
a knowledgeable source said that The Smoking Gun is
entertaining another offer. Lee deBoer, who's heading
the Feed network project, acknowledged the Smoking Gun
"is not currently a participant."
For the moment, Bastone is playing it
cool. "We're not a real business yet," he
admits. But so long as the Fox networks of the world
keep serving up irresistible targets, The Smoking Gun
will happily shoot them down. Says Bastone: "All we
do is think about content."
Related Links:
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Smoking Gun
