The page indeed was full of odds and ends about how to get Late Show tickets, Letterman’s upcoming guests, his top-ten lists (the one for the April 13th broadcast was on “Ways CBS Can Raise Money,” with number one being “A two-hour paycheck freeze on Letterman”), and the rest. But where were the connections with the rest of the Net, especially the many Letterman fans out there? How about the fans’ Letterman pages? Or relevant mailing lists or newsgroups? Perhaps they were there but hidden, but whatever the case the cyberspace Letterman was less hip than the one on The Box.
To Letterman’s credit, he didn’t fake things. He publicly confessed he was ignorant of data ways. But in my opinion, his Web people could have done better.
Moving on to the CBS home page, I saw an offer for me to “Join the EYE ON THE NET club. That way we can send you more information about CBS and its programs. You can also take part in special previews and other interactive events. Fill out the following registration form and we’ll give you a special CBS screen saver just for joining.” Oh, boy, that was just why I was on the Internet—to end up on marketers’ lists. I didn’t blame CBS for trying; some of Letterman’s fans would like the free software. But surely the network could have done better.
Aaron Barnhart, who put out a good little electronic fan newsletter called Late Show News, defended Dave’s people on the Net. “I think it’s great,” he said of the official Letterman area. “All of these large entities are trying their best to integrate with the interactive age. A lot of e-mail gets passed that you never see, so don’t assume that just because there aren’t any bulletin boards ... there is no interaction happening.”
Perhaps he was being kind to his sources for his newsletter—I hadn’t any idea. What was clear was that he’d made a second career of Lettermandom. He devoted twenty to thirty hours a week to Letterman-related activities. Much of his newsletter was a review of reviews (“Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote one of his standard pitiless columns last week on the Oscars broadcast, and we quote, ‘in which the belly-flopping David Letterman demonstrated just how large a bullet he dodged by not moving his own show to L.A.’”). Barnhart also served as owner of the Top 10 List (“60,000 subscribers and booming”).
So what was Barnhart in it for? He was freelancing for the Village Voice, and I could see where some attention might do any writer’s career good, but if Barnhart even wanted to be on The Late Show itself, he did a pretty good job of concealing that. “Attention is great,” he said, “but it doesn’t pay the rent.” Did he send stuff into the show? “No.” So why was Letterman so popular on the Net? “Demographics.” Well-off computer owners just liked that kind of program.
I checked out the Letterman page maintained by Jason A. Lindquist, an electronic engineering student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, a self-described “Statistician, Smart-Ass-for-Hire, and Mac Programmer.” I found references to newsgroup postings on such items as “Dave instigates the feud with Bryant Gumbel with these words,” “The great Stevie Nicks controversy of 1986,” “Madonna—Your first choice to date your son,” and “No inside stuff on the strong guy or the fat guy here.” And I saw mentions of the newsletter, the Frequently Asked Questions List, and at least two Letterman-related newsgroups. CBS ought to hire this guy.
It was time to move on to alt.fans.letterman. I did a search within Netscape for the word “Leno” in the subject header and found a post from an apparent Leno fan on the attack: “Everyone knows that Jay Leno is way better than ugly gap-tooth Dave!”
“Oh,” replied one of the faithful, “you say that Jay Leno is still on the air? Is it true that they use a wide-angle lens to photograph that lantern jaw of his? Just wondering.”
“Letterman has more comedy in his little pinkie toe than Leno will have in his wildest dreams,” said another Davite, “and if Letterman is so ugly, who has all the models and top actresses flirting with him and asking him to go out—it certainly isn’t Leno.”