Culture11

» see culture11.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Culture11 launched on 27 August 2008 with a simple and fairly unusual premise for American political media: a magazine written from the right that was mostly about culture rather than about politics. The shorthand everybody used, including the people running it, was "a center-right Slate". It carried film and book criticism alongside a set of group blogs, and it was notably uninterested in the daily outrage cycle that the conservative web was already built around.

The money came from William Bennett, who had been Reagan's education secretary and was by then a talk radio host with a large audience. The person actually running it was David Kuo, who had been a special assistant to George W. Bush and deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and who had written a book about how badly that office had been treated by the administration it served. Kuo was the chief executive. Internally the operation went by Liberty Wire, a name that survives only in the site's own file paths.

It hired young and it hired well. Conor Friedersdorf was features editor and Peter Suderman ran arts. The political editor was James Poulos, and all of them were early enough in their careers that the alumni list is now considerably more famous than the magazine ever was.

In 2008 I was 24, finishing up at university in Turkey on a TTNet line, and an argument inside American conservatism about whether the right needed better film criticism was not something I had any way of encountering. Culture11 existed for five months in a language I read and a conversation I was not in. I found it the way you find most things this old, by following a footnote backward from somebody's later career.

~ the record ~

~ the beta badge ~

The logo file the site was still using when it closed is called culture11logo_beta.png, and the word Beta is sitting right there in the wordmark, small and gray, above the "11". A magazine that launched in August and closed in January never got around to taking the training wheels off its own masthead. By June 2009, five months after the closure, culture11.com had been recycled into something called TweetTimes, an aggregator that scraped celebrity Twitter accounts into channels. The domain outlived the publication and immediately started doing something dumber.

~ the alumni ~

The reason anyone remembers Culture11 is the staff list. Friedersdorf went to The Atlantic and has been writing there ever since, while Suderman landed at Reason as its features editor. Poulos took the managing editor job at Ricochet, which was the next serious attempt at the same idea. For a publication with a five-month life, the hit rate on the hiring is remarkable, and the standard read on Culture11 now is that it was a good idea that met the worst possible quarter.

That is the actual cause of death, and it is duller than a media failure. There were rumors at launch that the site was funded into 2010. What happened instead is that the money had been promised by people whose assets were in the market in the autumn of 2008, and the autumn of 2008 did what it did. The magazine ran out of runway in January. David Kuo died four years later, in April 2013, at 44.

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