Layne's on Denton's payroll

Layne's on Denton's payroll

My friend Ken Layne is mightily involved in the latest Nick Denton project. It's called Sploid, a tabloid-style news wrapup that looks an awful lot like an earlier Ken Layne project called Tabloid.

Layne, for those of you New Yorkers -- and for the Observer reporter who today refers to "a blogger named Ken Lane on the West Coast" -- is indeed a legit reporter, editor, novelist, and musician with several records and CDs to his credit. Plus, he probably knows more about the Internet than you do. I've worked with him on an ill-fated newspaper in Czechoslovakia in the early-'90s, as well as the ill-fated LAExaminer.com, which he founded with Matt Welch.

Sploid, according to Jeff Jarvis, should go live sometime today. For enthusiasts, you can get a taste of the original Tabloid (which Ken ran with Charlie Hornberger,) as well as the original inspiration for Tabloid. Ouch! The archives are gone. I did find Vodka City, a great fictional thing Ken wrote for Tabloid, which included the infamous talking ham sandwich. But I digress.

Here's something from Salon about the old Tabloid:

Tabloid.net likes to provoke people. The San Francisco-based site, run by two self-described burned-out newspapermen and a handful of freelancers around the world, has a unique formula: It combines the screaming headlines of the New York Post, a little HTML code and the adjective-packed prose of a century's worth of journalism's cynical bad boys.

Provocation, though, sometimes has unpredictable consequences. After Tabloid.net ran a story calling an obese subway conductor who'd won a lawsuit against the New York Transit Authority a "big fat pig" and "circus freak," activists complained to the site's advertising network, Flycast -- and Flycast promptly dropped Tabloid.net.

Of course, it's not exactly a surprise that an edgy site like Tabloid might run afoul of advertisers. But the incident is one sign that feisty, independent journalism is even more vulnerable to the whims of the ad industry on the Web than it is in print.

According to the site's mission statement, Tabloid labors to be "the daily news service for readers weary of boring journalism. We put action back into the coverage of world events, strange news and the high-tech land of business and money."

Also still online is Barney Greinke's Cold War Tourist story -- the very true story of how the FBI trailed him for days of his vacation because well, Barney's weird. I lived next door to him in the freshmen dorms. While I highly encourage you to read "Vodka City" and "Cold War Tourist" at some point, the "Subway Whale" thing is far more indicative of what Tabloid was doing day in and day out. It started right after the nut-jobs in San Diego killed themselves in 1997 in order to ride Hale-Bopp Comet. Layne finally pulled the plug on Tabloid in 1999.

And why don't I just shut up and direct you to: Who the hell is Ken Layne?

Corrected: Um, that was Hale-Bopp, not Haley's Comet. Done fixed.
- posted by Amy @ 4/06/2005 11:23:00 AM