About that time I went to the Nerd Prom

The 1997 White House Correspondents Dinner

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Four, Issue 4

When you're out late at night
And you're dancin' just for spite
Only one dance will suffice
The Devil's Swing

The dance that I propose
Well it starts down at your toes
And only Satan knows
The Devil's Swing

And when he comes for you
There's nothin' you can do
It's time to dance with death
And this you can't deny
No it's no good just to try
Oh it's do or die
The Devil's Swing

The Sunday Reader, May 4, 2025

The limo pulled up as the sun slid down behind the Blue Ridge. We were waiting on the raw concrete front steps of The American Press Institute in our evening gowns and our tuxes for the limo – loaded with chilled champagne, natch – to whisk us to the 1998 White House Correspondents Dinner to hang out with comedian Ray Romano and President Bill Clinton, riding high after his landslide re-election.

It was my first Correspondents Dinner, as I was just finishing up my first year at API founding The Media Center to help newspapers get some insight into this new whacky thing called the World Wide Web. The API Directors went every year; we weren’t part of the White House Press corps, but were regarded as akin to high priests of journalism.

The other Directors were, anyway. They were thought leaders in newspaper design and editorial writing and political reporting. Meanwhile I was explaining why newspapers should care about new media when they were producing gushers of cash. After each API event the executive director would troop down to my office to recite the number one complaint about me: Why can’t Feola be more positive about the future of newspapers?

If the Directors were the high priests in the API temple of journalism, I was the weird guy in the canvas wall tent out back with a sign saying The Church Of What’s Happenin’ Now! And a brazier that smelled suspiciously like peyote.

Founders Conference, The Media Center at the American Press Institute

The limo whisked us from Reston, Virginia to the Arlington Hotel in Washington, DC, where we were directed to a table that was roughly several miles across the Potomac River back in Virginia. No matter. We could hear the President’s jokes, and (sort of) see him. A good time was had by all.

What a difference a year makes.

Clinton showed up late to the 1999 White House Correspondents Dinner to avoid the prizes awarded for coverage of the Monica Lewinski scandal. The New York Times was so mad about things that they refused to buy their usual table that year. But went to the after party, natch.

And I was gone.

I was small f famous by then because of that very same scandal. Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr had released his report on the scandal, riddled with salacious details, directly to the public on the Internet. And for the first time in memory, journalism’s gatekeepers stood helplessly at the gate while the public stampeded by directly to the news and drew their own conclusions.

The gate is irrelevant when the fence has fallen down.

Bewildered journalists looked for an explanation and found...me. So I appeared on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and explained what the Internet was, and how it worked, and how millions of people could download a single document simultaneously, and draw their own conclusions, and whether all this was A Good Thing.

And then I appeared on the Public Broadcasting System’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and explained what the Internet was, and how it worked, and how millions of people could download a single document simultaneously, and draw their own conclusions, and whether all this was A Good Thing. And proved that my looks were best suited for radio. Indeed I was so freaked out that I would do the Full Feola on camera – wildly gesticulating with my hands in the spirit of my Sicilian ancestors, sliding down in my chair during questions until you can only see my hair, standing on the furniture for the really important bits – that I sat rigidly motionless through the entire segment. The number one question from friends and fam afterwards was whether Jim Lehrer had duck-taped me to the chair.

And then I left. For two reasons.

First, I was beyond frustrated at API. There were increasing complaints that my warnings that newspapers needed to take the Web seriously were useless negativity about the future of print. Worse – and I Am Still Not Making This Up Or Exaggerating Even A Little Bit – the main controversy over new media that year was under what circumstances was under what circumstances this new Web product should be allowed to “scoop” the print publication.

The number one with a bullet answer? Never.

That’s correct: the majority of journalists at API argued that if a major news event happened at noon, the story should be held until the print paper came out the next morning before putting it on the web.

The fence had fallen, but those journalists were still arguing about how to operate the gate.

Which leads to the second reason I left: when Belo – then the eighth largest media company – called and asked whether I’d like to stop talking about new media and instead go to Texas and build it, all I could say is Yes, Please.

I know holding stories until a newspaper prints seems like a fairy tale in these smartphone times, but it’s impossible to overstate the resistance to the Internet by the powers that be of those days. Here’s an example that gives you the scale of the problem: There was a very senior newspaper exec during that time who had four secretaries in his waiting room and no computer in his office. When you sent him an email, one of those secretaries would open it, copy it into a memo form, print it out, and then place it in the exec’s inbox. He would mark it up with a response, and a secretary would then type up a memo for his signature. After it was signed, a secretary would then transfer it to email and reply to the original missive.

No, I Am Still Not Making That Up.

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The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. And if the high of the 1998 White House Correspondents Dinner was followed by the anger of 1999, 2025’s sad affair was marked by that indifference. There was no president, and there was no comedian.

The release of the Starr report shocked journalists because suddenly the general public had direct access to news events anywhere in the world. Journalists had become gatekeepers because for decades they had been the only reliable conduits of news and information world-wide. Gatekeeping – deciding what to share over those conduits – was a basic part of the job. During the Clinton administration the average daily newspaper received between 6,000 and 8,000 wire stories a day, and generated another few dozen pieces locally. Editors – gatekeepers – then winnowed that down to the 200 or so stories that fit in that day’s edition. Newsprint was expensive, so there was a limit to how much you could print. TV and radio newscasts were even tighter.

Two decades later no one cared about the gatekeepers at all. Because no one remembered that there had once been a gate.

Or if they did, it was in a sort of mockery. The Free Press staff wasn’t invited to the Correspondents Dinner. Or maybe they were. In either case, they couldn’t go.

Because they had their own party, in DC, at the same time, and partied down with a bunch of the journalists and government types who used to go to the Correspondents Dinner.

The Free Press is a new media news organization with more than a million subscribers on Substack alone. (Editors Note: This is, Technically Speaking, a metric crap ton more than the readership of Perfecting Equilibrium.) And in many ways it is indicative of the media’s journey from before the Starr report to now. The Free Press was founded by Bari Weiss after she quit the New York Times in spectacular fashion with a public resignation letter: …standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.

All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.

Weiss started a Substack newsletter after leaving the Times; soon it included stories from a wide range of journalists looking for a new home for their work, which eventually grew into the Free Press.

While the Free Pressers were partying, the Correspondents were self-flagellating. Axios National Political Correspondent Alex Thompson won the Breaking News award, and said this in his acceptance speech: President Biden's decline and its coverup by the people around him is a reminder that every White House regardless of party is capable of deception...We, myself included, missed a lot of this story and some people trust us less because of it.

Actually, Thompson was entirely missing the point. Whether or not the readers and viewers left to the legacy media trust the correspondents is irrelevant when the vast majority of Americans simply don’t think about the old media at all. Because the greatest lie journalists ever told was when they told themselves they weren’t in business. It was a constant refrain at API: there was a wall separating the newsroom from the business, allowing the journalists to remain unsoiled by commerce. What it did instead was separate journalists from their audience; a thing the journalists did not notice until the audience was largely gone, faded away to other outlets.

I was deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. I’ve come up through a party that clings to TV ads and news releases… holding onto a media environment that stopped existing a decade ago, Rob Flaherty wrote in the New York Times.

The wall shielded journalists from their audience, and prevented them from understanding which things they were providing that were valuable, and which things are not.

That point was driven home to the staff of Quartz business magazine earlier in the month when they were all laid off and replaced with AI-generated content.

And it’s not just journalists. Pirate Wires reported this week panic among junior consultants over an AI PowerPoint creation tool called Deckster launched at the Boston Consulting Group.

My two cents (and this might be harsh but): they should be worried. Junior consultants just show “proof of work” to clients — essentially, busywork that demonstrates the firm is incurring cost (in a kind of perverse labor theory-of-value way). But AI upends this dynamic and will forcibly deflate the exorbitant consulting fees by making junior consultant “proof of work” meaningless. So do us a favor, consulting firms, and dispense with the theater. I promise you, the world will be just fine with fewer junior consultants in it — and soon enough, you won’t even have a choice.

What is the value of what you do?

You can see this problem occurring on the tech side, too. Consider this preposterous Wall Street Journal story this week: Do you actually know anyone with the job title "Prompt Engineer"? I don't. And neither did a number of tech execs I talked to, inspiring me to look into why the buzziest AI job of 2023 already seems obsolete. “Two years ago, everybody said, ‘Oh, I think prompt engineer is going to be the hot job.’” said Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work at Microsoft. “It’s not turning out to be true at all.”

Of course not, because that is completely idiotic. It’s like that old joke about the guy who asks Michaelangelo how to sculpt a horse, and the master replies Simple! Just get a big block of marble and chop off everything that’s not part of the horse!

The point isn’t, and never will be, prompt engineering by super techs, because the point of Information Technology is not technology, but information. The point is engineering prompts to produce fast, excellent results inside a discipline.

So the best prompt engineering for law offices will be done by those intimately familiar with the relevant law. And the best prompt engineering for investment firms will be done by those intimately familiar with the relevant investments.

That intimate familiarity also requires understanding the value of each thing that you do, what people are willing to pay for, and what won’t prompt them to part with their hard-earned cash. That’s the fatal error journalists made – customers were paying them to deliver the news. When faster, cheaper means of delivery appeared, journalists tried to rely on strategies like arguing people would prefer to pay for their work because of its “quality.”

They were wrong.

Understanding where the value is located is the key no matter whether it’s AI or another technology that threatens your job. Take our deep dive into the Virtual Newsroom project.

The prompt engineering we do here powers an AI that will be faster and more accurate at breaking down What is in a budget than any human journalist. But Journalism 101 starts with five Ws and an H: Who; What; Why; Where; When; and How. And while What is in the wheelhouse for an AI driven by an engineered prompt, several of those other Ws and the H will remain out of AI reach for the foreseeable future.

Sure, the AI can break down the budget line by line, showing winners and losers. But Who really made those decisions? Politicians? Aides? Special interests? Cui bono? Who benefits?

This is work for human journalists.

That’s one reason we’re building Virtual Newsroom. Another is that the economic law of supply and demand applies to journalism as it does to everything else. Local news is important, scarce, and therefore valuable. There’s more value to users in the only available analysis of a local town or school budget than in 1,000 opinion pieces on Middle Eastern conflict written by people who have never been east of Cape Cod.