Notes From the Epicenter: The Webbys Play on
It’s that time of year again, and I don’t mean the holiday buying season: It’s awards-show season. The Golden Globes are just around the corner, and entertainment pundits are already making their Oscar predictions. “For your consideration” ads began appearing in Variety months ago, and awards show geeks like me are busy taking in all the movies that might score nominations. Awards show season is a time I am particularly fond of as it involves not only lots of movie-going, but also lots of wine drinking and brie tasting while lounging about in sweat pants critiquing other people’s designer gowns and hairstyles.
Award-Show Fever
In the wide world of the Internet, awards show season means the Webbys, scheduled to appear this summer. The so-called Oscars of the Internet were an event and a half last year, disrupting the tony San Francisco neighborhood of Nob Hill and flooding a massive tent outside the city’s Grace Cathedral (the very place where Courtney Cox and David Arquette tied the knot, for the show-biz trivia-mongers among you) with Web-sters both geeky and hip. The VIP cocktail party that preceded the show (and which I was lucky enough to attend) boasted Talk editrix Tina Brown, and actor Alan Cumming (who also hosted the show).
So as award show season rolls around again, I’ve been doing some thinking, and opining, about the Webby Awards and the sort of event it is likely to be this year, its fifth. I’ve been thinking that the show is likely to be a bit more mellow this year, what with the Internet bubble bursting and all. And I recently heard a rumor that the Webbys, although based here in San Francisco, have merged with another event producer owned by the same parent company, IDG . So I called Webby founder and director Tiffany Shlain to get the scoop.
Merger Mania
Sure enough, Shlain says, the Webbys have been folded further into the Boston-based IDG. “We’re trying to grow just like everyone else and we want to grow the right way,” Shlain explains. Does this merger mean the event might move to the other side of the country? New York mayor Rudy Giuliani did offer the Webbys the use of Radio City Music Hall last year. But Shlain, who decided to keep the Webbys in San Francisco in 2000, will only say that “We’re looking at all the elements we can leverage with the new business unit.”
Defending the merger, Shlain says that the Webbys have always had a small staff, relying heavily on contractors and outside workers as the event draws closer. Still, when I talked to her a year ago, she was touting the recent expansion of her full-time staff from three people to fifteen. And though she said yesterday that the core staff members are still there, rumor has it that a good number of those fifteen are now at home scouring want ads.
As for the event itself, Shlain says it won’t look that different to the outside world (and I hope she’s right, because she had some considerable talent in her employ before the merger), and that the awards themselves “will only mean more now that all the hype and money has gone away [from the Internet]”.
“We always awarded based on creativity and not on stock price,” she says, and an examination of past Webby winners proves her point. One of the hallmarks of the past four Webby Awards has been an emphasis on the original and well-executed, and a refusal to get caught up in the site-of-the-moment craze. While Time magazine is eating crow for having named Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos person of the year just one year ago, the Webbys has relegated Bezos’ site to only one of twenty-seven awards categories.
Survivor
Still, the Internet is experiencing not only a downturn in the availability of venture capital, but also a downturn in hype. What this means for the Webby Awards, one of the most hyped awards shows of last year (lifestyle magazines from Wired to Nylon ran articles on Shlain before the 2000 event) remains to be seen. “The Webby Awards always try to reflect what’s going on in the industry,” Shlain says. “We may add a new awards category for people who survive all of this.” Maybe that award should go to the Webbys itself if the event is still here in 2002.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on January 22, 2001
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