Alan Meckler, the CEO of atNewYork's parent company, INT Media Group, recently began writing a weekly column at the invite of atNewYork, which runs on Fridays. On Wednesdays, we publish some of the feedback and Meckler's responses.

Meckler's recent column, which addressed the Web site Inside.com, drew a response from one of the site's founders.

From Kurt Andersen: kandersen@inside.com

Dear Editor:

Given that his own Internet media company has declined 94 percent in value during the last 18 months, and lost more than $1 million a week during the first quarter of this year, Alan Meckler's gloating, know-it-all hubris about how to create profitable Internet media companies seems odd.

And I know he's not an actual journalist, but essentially all his "facts" in his column about Inside were wrong.

1) Inside did not, of course, "go bankrupt," as Meckler implies. The company was sold in April with $8.5 million still in the bank.

2) He says that "Andersen was anti-Internet when he wrote for The New Yorker in the mid-1990s. In fact, he wrote a scathing piece about the Internet in 1996."

The specific New Yorker piece to which I think he's referring is a not-particularly-scathing column called "The Digital Bubble," in which I acknowledged the transformative wonder of the Internet but suggested that companies like Yahoo had become overvalued as a result of the Internet euphoria. It was published not in 1996 but in 1998 -- which may explain why Meckler remembers it uncomfortably as "anti-Internet" and "scathing," since he was then preparing to unload Mecklermedia, his Internet-media-and-trade-show company, for $274 million.

3) Meckler says Inside spent "$28 million in less than one year," which overstates the company's actual burn rate by about 70 percent. In fact, we spent a total of $26 million over more than a year and a half to launch the web site and a biweekly magazine.

4) "Not only was the paid model a failure for the Web site portion of Inside.com," he says, "but the concept also failed for the magazine." Inside.com has not yet tested "the paid model" in any real sense, since it has been, during its first year of existence, a free news site -- subscriptions have been required only to get e-mail newsletters and access to several databases. As for the magazine, he's absolutely wrong: its circulation of 90,000 was almost entirely controlled -- that is, free, not paid.

5) "And ironies of ironies," Meckler says, "The Industry Standard folks...were major investors in the magazine...." Not true: The Industry Standard managed the production and distribution of the magazine in exchange for a relatively small amount of stock in the company.

Sincerely,

Kurt Andersen

Meckler Responds

Kurt,

Many thanks for the response. I am honored. Of course your response relating to our financials illustrates why you should be a journalist and not a businessman. And by the same token, I should be a businessman and not a journalist.

The difference is that I do not get paid to be a journalist but, you were being paid to be a businessman. Also, as a journalist, I did not lose any money for my company, and you lost your entire company as a businessman. And finally, I am still in business and will be in business for many years to come.

As for the facts, I probably got some wrong, but the essence is that the whole model was wrong and that if your name had been Harvey Jones, you would not have been able to raise a nickel. Lucky for you that the boys at Flatiron were so generous. I guess it pays to be a great journalist.

Regarding the specific points:

1. The $8.5 million was the only asset that had value.

2. Every facet of Mecklermedia is still operating and in fact the old Mecklermedia assets are extremely valuable today as they were in 1998. The new owner, Penton Media, has a greater value today than it did in 1998 and much of this is due to the aforementioned Mecklermedia properties. But then again, Kurt, you are clueless about the media business so I would not expect you to understand this.

3. What a shocking amount of money to lose in 12 months or even 18 months.

4. So where is the magazine today? It must have been a valuable read!

5. Well Kurt, you scored big on this one --- I apologize, I was wrong. But you can bet that The Standard still lost a tidy sum of money in turn for the "valuable" stock that they received.