Hodinkee Drama Strikes Again

To be fair, they're every #instaboss's dream case. Start a small blog and turn it into $$$$. The people who like this news are the people who are in it for the money, not the watches

Did someone mention my favorite lifestyle brand and purveyor of hideous writing?

I really do see everyone's point about Ben Clymer and Hodinkee. He certainly did manage to turn his interest in watches into a huge money-making enterprise, which is no small feat. Who among us would not trade middling writing ability for a gigantic pile of money? I would happily promise never to write another coherent sentence for the rest of my life in return for an increasingly shrinking amount of the stuff.

I don't think it's fair to be critical of Ben and his success, but we have to be honest with what the brand once was and has now become. He did what most business people would and his accomplishments deserve praise. People shouldn't fool themselves about the vested interest LVMH now has, and will no doubt pursue profit over journalism. Anyone who says otherwise is either dishonest or ignorant.

There are other ways to put food on the table besides pandering to and manipulating the idle well-heeled.

Oh I enjoy some of the interview videos too. Some of the guests are very interesting and have eclectic collections. The rest of the stuff I skip over.

Yep the John Goldberger piece really exposed the beauty of those Longines chronographs. That interview is one of my favorites. 👍

This.

I’m no expert but I’ve read a fair few watch publications over the years. Some of them were good; a lot of them weren’t. Some of the best articles were by Hodinkee; a lot of them weren’t. Enough glitter amongst the chicken-feed to keep me interested, to paraphrase Tinker Tailor.

I have to say I think a lot of the people who get so wound-up by Clymer’s perceived success are just seething that they didn’t think of doing the same thing in the first place.

Two defenses of Hodinkee that I see a lot are "they have some good stuff, too" and "you're just jealous." I haven't really noticed many commenters declaring that the site is devoid of anything worthwhile—is this a thing? On the contrary, I and seemingly everyone who complains about Hodinkee points out that it's gotten a lot of people interested in watches and has brought attention to good things.

The second idea, that critics are motivated by envy, isn't exactly wrong. Maybe it's not fair to criticize Ben Clymer or his business for his success or out of a dislike for his imagined readership of 30-year-olds who make $400K per year. However, a lot of the criticism of Hodinkee concerns serious issues and is made by people who know what they're talking about.

What I know about is writing and editing, and my problem with Hodinkee is the absolutely terrible writing that abounds on the site. The smug laziness that characterizes Hodinkee's and Clymer's writing reflects serious problems that others have noted about the company's watch expertise, journalistic ethics, and business practices. It is not sour grapes that is motivating this criticism.

So you don't like them - it's OK - don't go. WWW it's a big place. Room for more pages of some rant. 🍿

Further, once an entity reaches a certain amount of commercial success, they are seen as "experts" in the subject upon which others begin to rely for information. When the NYT or some other credentialed news organization uses them as the go-to on a story, the misinformation persists and opinion is adopted as fact.

I'm thrilled for Mr Clymer+Co for their success. I found myself headed to Hodinkee more often when the terrain of vintage watches was less clearly known+demarcated, but there's still plenty good there. Eric Wind's early articles remain worth returning to; Jack Forster's articles almost always offer illumination, ditto those from Jason Heaton.

My reticence stems from a sense that what H is fundamentally about has shifted in ways that personally don't resonate as much. Their earliest stories seemed rooted in scholarship/discovery, reporting on auctions, and/or keeping up with modern pieces as they were released (maybe that's just the stuff I paid the most attention to). In that old universe, further coverage of small movement makers, or considerations of broader watch developments (something on the pros+cons of modular movements for instance, or the mindbogglingly internecine moves of the AWCI), would've been logical and welcome. Over time, however, their sort of bro-ey language (their overuse of insane as an adjective is embarrassing, and writing about small, precise feats of engineering using the language of fratboys will always be tired and tiring) seemingly became something of an attitude, and their coverage (I'd argue) narrowed as a result. That's crappy, and H could/should have been doing *tons* more. The folks whose interest in watches BC+co have kickstarted could be having interesting conversations about actual matters of horology; instead, it's largely fashion and surface-level stuff, distinctions of fonts and dots and serial numbers.

And what that's ended up doing, I'd argue, is that they've seemingly helped or encouraged the commodification not just of watches as assets, but a sort of style/pattern of watch, too. They've (I'd argue) made a sort of Path To Get Into Watches, a blueprint (we could all name what we believe H would recommend to folks with means buying their first watches: everyone needs a Rolex 5512/5513/1680/6263, a cal 321 Speedy, a PP 3700, at least one old Heuer, etc). Which is fine! Everyone does this, all fields do this to some extent (if you're into, I don't know, stereo stuff, there's a sort of thru-line there, too, with markers for JBL and Marantz or whatever). And maybe this is what they wanted to do+become from the start: essentially another GQ. No shade/shame on them for it, I'd just thought (foolishly, perhaps) that they had a broader agenda earlier.