As editor of the late Time Inc. title Business 2.0, Quittner once employed Valleywag emeritus Owen Thomas (as well as your current Valleywag). But somewhere along the way, Quittner soured on Thomas.

Thomas jumped to Valleywag and Business 2.0 folded. When Quittner landed at Fortune, Thomas wrote about Quittner's inflated title, covered Fortune's suspension of his blogging privileges, and quoted the Scrabulous-playing columnist saying he had "too much time on my hands."

Quittner seemed to take it personally. After jumping to Time, he used the magazine as his personal burn book, noting in January that a Sony virtual world wouldn't create an avatar "as fat as your average tech-gossip blogger."

Now Quittner's at it again, with a Sims 3 review in which he creates a "Loser" character named "Thomas Woodchuck" and burns him alive (see clip above). As several tipsters have noted, the resemblance between Woodchuck and Thomas can't be missed — nor can the creepiness of teaching his daughter to drown an enemy in the pool.

It seems early to get too alarmed; there are worse things than being called an "unredoubtable... woodchuck" in an anonymous comments, or killed virtually in a videogame. We're just a little surprised Time indulges Quittner's grudge — or that the reporter, after all this time, still holds it.

In Time's latest cover story — which you can read without charge on the World Wide Web — Isaacson writes that publications cannot rely on advertising revenues alone, and should get their readers to pay per article instead:

A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment.

We ought to cheer the notion that publications will try to start charging for content online. Writers at ad-supported publications will pay the fees and deliver crisp summaries and analysis for free. Outlets which charge will end up reduced to the business of trade publications, which only manage to extract money from people who need the information for their job.

That's pretty much what Time did in its early years, when it was a fancy printed blog. Editors there subscribed to the New York Times and other papers, and wrote up a weekly digest, which Time's founder, Henry Luce, then sold for rather less money than one would pay at the newsstand for all their sources.

But we have to wonder where Isaacson got this idea? Here's a hint: In 1995, Josh Quittner, whom Isaacson had hired the year before, wrote an essay about "Way New Journalism" for the online arm of Wired. Quittner wrote:

Nearly two-thirds of the cost of putting out a newspaper or magazine is the cost of printing it (paper, ink, printing presses) and distributing it (trucks, delivery folks, mail). Uncouple the content from the production and distribution costs, and you see the kind of cash we're dealing with here. Introduce the possibility that by the end of the decade, 100 million people will be on the Net. Now, give those people the technical ability to pay 3 cents for each and every story they read. If only 1 million people read, say, one Time story on O.J. Simpson, that's US$30,000. Pretty soon, you're talking about real money.

When Quittner noted that the technical infrastructure for such micropayments was missing in 1995, it was true. When Wired repeated the claim a year later, it was still true. But when Isaacson mouths the verity in 2009, he makes a fool of himself. He writes that PayPal does not accept micropayments; in fact, it does. Amazon.com lets anyone build their own micropayments service using its billing engine. The existence of 99-cent iTunes songs and 10-cent text messages show that consumers are willing to pay small amounts for digital content.

The problem with micropayments is not technology. It's that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of "mental transaction costs," but it's quite real. It's almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we're talking about — 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? — aren't worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.

The advocates of micropayments also forget the basic law of supply and demand. Editors today increasingly talk about "commodity news" — the numbingly same mass of articles written about the same news event, adding nothing to the reader's knowledge. Why would anyone pay for those? The snobs of print media also forget that they have long competed with free radio and television news broadcasts. The news will come out, one way or another. It's the classic vanity of writers to think that they have created the one perfect story that exceeds all others. The clear-minded statistics of Web usage quickly reveal this as a delusion.

Quittner (who, full disclosure, was my boss for six years at Time and Business 2.0 and talked about micopayments incessantly) was right to note the liberating effect of getting rid of the costs of print media. But he was wrong about how we'd pay for it.

When I worked for Quittner at Business 2.0, he talked constantly about his long-held dream of going to a startup or launching a blog. That he's now choosing to stay at magazine publisher Time Inc. is useful as an economic indicator. Quittner boosted the Valley's comeback, and the business of blogging, long before other mainstream journalists. That he's turned bearish on both now could be a sign of personal cowardice. Or keen prescience.

April 16, 2008

To: TIME Staff
From: Rick Stengel

I'm delighted to announce that Josh Quittner is coming back to TIME to cover consumer technology with a regular column in the magazine and a daily blog on TIME.com. In his new role as editor-at-large, Josh will apply his singular voice to technology, writing both reviews of new products and features that explain what's most important to consumers in Techland.

Most recently, Josh was the managing editor of Business 2.0 and a writer for FORTUNE. He first had a byline in TIME in 1994 as a staff writer covering technology, back at the very beginning of the internet. He went on to launch "The Netly News," first as a website on Pathfinder and later as a column in the magazine. He subsequently served as editor of TIME.com—twice—as well as tech editor of TIME before moving to San Francisco in 2002 to work for Business 2.0. Prior to coming to Time Inc., Josh worked at Newsday in the early 90s, where he wrote a pioneering column called "Life in Cyberspace."

Josh will continue to work from San Francisco where he lives with his wife, journalist Michelle Slatalla (with whom he has co-written five books) and their three daughters, but I expect he'll be in the New York offices regularly. Josh is a great mind and a great brand to have back at TIME. We're fortunate to have him.

R.S.

The domain name now points to a blog that's been active since March 10. The writers are "Slatalla" — almost certainly Michelle Slatalla, Quittner's wife — and "Roofie" — presumably Quittner. The prose matches his voice, and the subject fits, since Quittner took an active interest in real estate while at Business 2.0. But real estate is a bread-and-butter subject for Time Inc.'s finance magazines. Josh, rather than starting your own blog, why don't you just apply for a job at Money, run by your former deputy Eric Schurenberg? That seems easier.

None of them want to say anything, though. Why? By playing the house sycophant, Kirkpatrick takes the pressure off the rest of Fortune's staff to write the bootlicking tech-CEO profiles he's known for — like his recent mash note to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Kirkpatrick's probing analysis of Zuckerberg? He's "nice."

The protests over Beacon, a program which reports users' activities on other websites to their friends on Facebook, have been compared to last year's fuss over news feed. In fact, there's no comparison: Actual complaints from users about Beacon have been far, far fewer. The introduction of a news feed was a radical change to Facebook's behavior. Beacon, which merely extends Facebook's reporting of activity on its site to others, does not change users' experience of the site in a dramatic way.

Facebook has been its own worst enemy — doing far more damage than any underemployed blogger could. The company made just about every conceivable mistake in the marketing of Beacon — from overhyping it to Madison Avenue, misleading advertisers about how optional it was for users, and failing to consider the consequences of reporting users' purchases to friends and family over the holiday shopping season.

Someone should take the fall for this. Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, in charge of marketing, has likened the introduction of Beacon to an experiment. "We want people to try it, to see it in action," he told the New York Times. "Our point of view is, let's give people the ability to sample it."

A sensible laboratory trial. But let's run a different experiment. Why did Beacon draw such a critical reaction from the press, while the news feed, a year ago, a much larger user revolt, make less of a splash? We can control for several variables.

Mark Zuckerberg, then as now, was CEO. PR head Brandee Barker, excoriated by Quittner and blogger Robert Scoble for the company's media relations, joined Facebook shortly before the news feed fuss. (It turns out that Scoble, who accused Barker of being unresponsive, never even even bothered to ask for an interview.) Owen Van Natta, then COO, now the company's chief revenue officer, was equally involved in both incidents, from what we hear.

The new variable in the Beacon trial is Palihapitiya himself, who joined the company just a few months ago after a long career at AOL. He's clearly a talented executive, trained in the new school of marketing through scientific thinking and quantitative analysis. Try something, and if it fails, discard it and move on. Perhaps that's what Zuckerberg should do with Palihapitiya.

At best, it's careless; at worst, a deliberate slap. Add it to the list of ways Quittner, a difficult, mischievous, but endlessly creative personality who arguably saved the magazine (and, with it, my career) from a much-earlier death, has been treated disgracefully by his employer. The only mystery: Why is he sticking around, save for the New-York-media-level salary?

Former B2 editor Josh Quittner, left, will get the title of executive editor, and Squires gives props to his tech chops in the memo. But Squires doesn't mention that as such, Quittner will be effectively outranked by his predecessor, Jim Aley, right, who departed B2 abruptly in 2002 to rejoin Fortune after Quittner arrived to take over the magazine. From what we hear, Aley, an assistant managing editor and the director of Fortune's technology coverage, will be the de facto boss of the tech-focused bureau, not Quittner. (Full disclosure: Before joining Valleywag, I worked for both Aley and Quittner at Business 2.0.)

Visits To Doctors Who Are Not In, Ever [NYT]

They have three children, one named Clementine, and they live in Mill Valley, California now. She used to blog but gave that up. Also they are unafraid to lay out in print some of the more disturbing issues in their relationship.

A successful marriage requires compromise. Or put another way, when it comes to breakfast rituals, sometimes it is necessary to relentlessly pester your spouse until, finally, you wear him down.

For years, I have tried finding the middle ground (and by "finding the middle ground," I mean converting him to English muffins). I have offered many brands and flavors ... No luck.

The next days found me frying bacon, poaching eggs and whipping pancake batter. I was becoming desperate.

"Boy shorts?" my husband asked. "Have you lost your mind?"

I sent him by e-mail a picture of Cosabella's understated soire ultra smooth bra ($60 at Neimanmarcus.com). He countered with the black La Perla sky doll lace slip ($340) at Saksfifthavenue.com. Saks sells that stuff? Shocked, I referred him to another item on the site, a white lace trim chemise from Joelle ($314). In response, he sent me a picture of, oh, never mind.

No Nook Unbuttered, No Slice Unturned [NYT]

Josh Quittner's alt.bio

• Early 1994: Pens classic early Wired tale, The War Between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats.

  It takes a particular kind of genius ... to shock people who have devoted a lifetime to collecting revolting facts, disgusting jokes, and synonyms for the word "penis."

• Late 1994: Registers mcdonalds.com after the company repeatedly ignores his warnings.

  
  $whois mcdonalds.com
  Domain Name: MCDONALDS.COM
  Administrative Contact: Quittner, Josh quit@newsday.com

• May 1995: Overblown Tom Wolfe 2.0 essay, The Birth of Way New Journalism, nonetheless shows that Quittner understood a dozen years ago how Web journalism would eventually differ from its print and broadcast predecessors.
• Oct 1995: During the launch of TIME's official online experiment, The Netly News, Quittner gets into a food fight with Wired's unofficial online experiment, Suck.

  

  So we yanked out Noah's QuickCam, took a picture of the three of us giving a one-finger salute to the Duke, and uploaded it to the URL to which Suck pointed. Now, when anyone clicked on a Netly link, they'd be greeted with the rude image of us and the exhortation, "Dear Duke: Suck on this!"

• 1996-2001: TIME stuff no one remembers now.
• January 2002: Not only does Quittner get an exclusive cover story on the new flat-panel iMacs for TIME, not only does he get Jobs to reschedule the launch event to fit TIME's onstand schedule, but thanks to an inattentive Canadian sysadmin Quittner actually breaks the story before Jobs takes the stage! This, people, is the stuff j-schoolers dream about pulling off.

  

• October 2006: Issues Business 2.0 requirement that all reporters must blog. The move is mind-numbingly dull to bloggers and Web surfers, but to print reporters he's as crazy as that guy who translated the Bible into English. It's just not done!