New York: Media, not Finance!

Paul Graham doesn’t understand the appeal of New York City to web nerds. He says “Cambridge… feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York’s is finance and Silicon Valley’s is startups.” Not so! New York, for me, is media. And I’m not alone.

I’ll take this point to introduce myself to this blog, Oddly Zen, as this is my first post, and my story informs my defense of New York against Cambridge and Silicon Valley. I do live in New York, and I work in media. I work for Observer Media Group as the technical team leader (head nerd), where I run Observer.com and Politicker.com.

I’m certainly not in New York for the money, and I’m not that envious of those who have more than me. I’m in New York because of the pace and excitement of my niche in software development. The problems in computing for news media are enormous for many reasons; managing web content in a clean and useful way is so much harder than most developers know (if you scoff at that claim, I’ll trade jobs with you for a day).

Anyhow, the bulk of the CMS-needing media companies of the world are in New York, and many of them employ nerds like me to whip their CMS into shape. And as media becomes more interactive and more (gasp) social, startups bubble up around the fringe. There are many such startups in New York City; in fact this is probably true for other industries, like advertising, textiles, and public relations. I just don’t know anything about these domains. The result is that there are a ton of software developers here. And most of us aren’t working in finance.

Still, we don’t have the research grants we’d need to really think like they do in Cambridge, or the venture capital to start as many companies as are started in Silicon Valley. Cambridge is about what’s best for the world, what could be possible given enough time. Silicon Valley produces Cambridge’s dreams, and New York takes what the Valley produces, adds the soul of a recent Ivy grad, and makes media. New York is about immediacy. Build this interactive feature today, because it won’t be news tomorrow. Scale your site up so Matt Drudge can crush it with traffic, and then scale back down quickly so you don’t bleed money, because after all, reporting the news is a low margin business and Manhattan is high rent.

Despite the classification of all meritorious work in New York as finance, Graham’s argument about ambition is sound and true for me and many who I know. “Some people know at 16 what sort of work they’re going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about” and advises these ambitious kids, “You’ll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.” I agree with this completely. I moved from Minneapolis, a high tech haven, a great community full of happy people–but one which moves slowly. Everyone is too busy skiing, going to free concerts, and jogging around lakes to pour their souls into their work. I didn’t move to New York because I knew I wanted the fast pace of a career in media, but that’s what I love about it now that I’m here. Maybe, as Graham suggests, I was gravitationally attracted by the lifestyle.

I love the fact that every day is different, that we have to constantly adapt to the changing landscape of news while planning long range development projects like any other software team would. But because we have to do such a tricky balancing act, the mental reward for success is that much greater. I want the same intellectual fulfillment that my peers in Cambridge want, and the same sense of accomplishment that those in the bay area want. I just want it right now, and again tomorrow.

So if Paul Graham says that Cambridge is ideas, Silicon Valley is startups, and New York is finance, I say that Cambridge is a decade out, Silicon Valley is three years out, and New York is tomorrow–losing sleep to push out this one last feature before the morning web edition goes live.