Bloggasm

The unfortunate thing about Bloggasm is that whenever my life gets the slightest bit hectic the website is the first to suffer. For instance, I’ll get some momentum going with quality posts that pull in quite a good bit of traffic, only to then go weeks or months without posting when my life suddenly becomes busy. Bloggasm was on hiatus the entire month of January before it finally got going again, and then it took a nose dive again in August when I started looking for a new job. Once I did find a new job, I was then bogged down with trying to finish up my old one while getting ready to move to a new city. All together, there was virtually no posting for about four months of this year.

2007 wasn’t a complete failure, however. If you’ll remember, most of my content used to be Q and A interviews with other bloggers. And though some of them were interesting, most of them weren’t. They were too all over the place. They lacked depth and research. This year marked the first time I started doing some original, in-depth feature articles, and they’ve gone incredibly well. I pick a topic and a thesis and then begin interviewing experts — and after a few weeks of research I churn out a polished piece. Most of these articles have accumulated a ton of links and traffic, and I loved doing them a lot more than the Q and As.

So, that being said, here are some resolutions for 2008. I plan on posting a minimum of five times a week. This isn’t to say that they will all be lengthy posts — I have a full-time day job as a newspaper journalist and I refuse to work on Bloggasm while I’m at work, which only leaves me with my nights to work on the site. So at least some of those posts will just be quick links to other websites. I also plan on doing at least one in-depth feature article a month, so there will be a minimum of 12.

I also plan on bringing back Q and A interviews, only not as they were before. Instead, I’ll have two separate interview series on very specific subjects. I’ll go into more detail about this in the new year.

I’m hoping that if I can get on a regular posting schedule and continue to turn out quality content, then one day bloggasm will be a go-to place for media and journalism industry news.

Anyway, to conclude this year in review, I’ll post links to the six feature articles I wrote this year, starting with the earliest. Enjoy, and have a happy New Year.

1. The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales: In this article I try to determine whether releasing your book for free online will help boost your print sales.

2. When “webscabs” unite: Celebrating International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day: The vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America accused writers who released their work for free online of being “web scabs.” I decided to write an article about the controversy.

3. The Sideways offensive: Will Merlot sales ever recover?: Who knew that one movie could hurt the Merlot industry so badly?

4. The Million Writers Award: raising the profile of online literary journals: A profile on an award geared toward giving recognition to fiction published in online magazines.

5. Harriet Klausner: the publishing industry’s secret weapon?: A write-around profile of Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s number one customer reviewer. There’s lots of speculation as to whether she actually reads the books she reviews.

6. The Dawkins Effect: How The God Delusion mainstreamed atheism: Easily my best article of the year. In it, I argue that The God Delusion has thrust non-belief out of the closet and into mainstream debate.

Some assorted media and journalism links for your amusement:

1.This legal case has some people worried that foreign governments with oppressive free speech laws will be able to successfully sue US bloggers for libel.

2. Reasonable conservative Jon Swift has a round-up of the best blog posts of 2007, as chosen by bloggers.

3. Is Digg.com looking for a big media buy-out?

4. The New York Times found the wrong candidate to piss off by publishing factually incorrect information.

4. CNN, Yahoo, and MSNBC duke it out for most popular news website.

5. I’ve seen this ad system used before with American blogs, and believe me, it just pisses readers off.

6. Polls continue to show that people distrust the media. However, when you poll them on specific newspapers or news organizations, their opinions become more positive, which simply means that Republicans have been successful in attaching a negative connotation to the word “media.”

Hey, does anyone out there know how to do a screen grab? For instance, if I want to take out a slice of something that I see in my browser window from a website and save it as an image, how do I do this? What if I don’t want to grab the whole screen but a very specified part of the screen?

I currently use Firefox. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Just leave the answer in my comments section.

Most journalists are contacted by nutballs on a regular basis. You’ll be sitting at your desk working on an article when your phone rings and the person on the other end tries to feed you the most filthy slime available with the hopes that you’ll write a story about it. Just the other week, I received a bizarre call from a professional body builder who’s suing both Pat Robertson and Jon Stewart (don’t ask, long story). He also happened to be suing a political candidate I had written a story on (that’s how the guy knew to contact me). Naturally, he wanted me to write a scathing article on the candidate and use him (the bodybuilder) as the source.

I gave the crazy guy lip service and promised to look into it and then hung up the phone with no intention of doing so. Because that’s what most journalists do with nutballs: we ignore them.

But every now and then one of these people somehow rises through the ether and gets covered by journalists for pretty much the sole reason that he or she is a nutball. Ann Coulter is, to me, the most notable example of this. Coulter receives media coverage almost entirely because she says hateful, controversial things. It can be argued that nearly all her income is the result of the free media coverage she gets when she says something crazy.

I mean, can anyone argue that she adds anything meaningful to political discussion? Just look at the title of her books; they’re becoming increasingly unimaginative in their antagonism. If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, the title of her most recent book, is so bland that it could only cause the deepest apathy when I see it. She’s not even trying to pretend that she wants to be taken seriously anymore.

I’m not the first journalist to point out that Coulter thrives on free media coverage. And I’m not the first journalist to appreciate the irony that we give her free media coverage when we publish articles complaining about her free media coverage. It’s a win win situation for her.

This is why I have made it a New Year’s resolution to never mention Ann Coulter again. Starting on Jan. 1, 2008, you’ll will never see her name on this blog. Nor will I ever write about her in any future articles. I don’t care what batshit crazy thing she says — no matter how badly I want to take the time to easily debunk her, I’ll refrain from doing so.

I’m hoping other bloggers and journalists will join me in this endeavor. If we can cut down on her media coverage considerably, then she will receive less free promotion for her books and columns. She will just be another nutball starving for attention.

So will you join me?

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Related posts:
1. Wars between the White House press secretary and the media
2. Political blogs deflecting links? Sore-loser journalism

I’ve noticed for some time now that most media writers ignore the pornography industry completely, even though it makes up a sizable portion of most kinds of media — internet, film, DVD, magazines,television, books. I think that this is a mistake, since an industry that large probably has an influential effect on other kinds of media. Media writers simply pretend that it doesn’t exist.

So in 2008, I intend on covering the industry more often. Certainly not all the time, and this isn’t going to become an X-rated blog or anything…I’ll keep it tasteful. But I think it would be silly to focus so much on online media while simply ignoring all the sex-related google search terms that bring people to this blog.

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Related posts:
1. Lawmakers want to take porn away from sex offenders
2. Porn really does bring in more search engine traffic

Some links for your pleasure:

1. The Virginia Pilot publishedsome brilliant photojournalism recently.

2. This graphic novel predicts where citizen journalism will be in a few years. Oh, and apparently Dan Rather will still be alive and kicking then.

3. If you’re a newspaper sports writer who is worried about recent job cuts within the industry, there may be a lifeboat for you within ESPN. Quite a few journalists have jumped ship. (via Romenesko )

4. A really cute girl sings a song about Digg.com.

5. At the risk of being accused of hyperbole, if you were to describe these tactics to convict AP photojournalist Bilal Hussein to someone without mentioning the name of the government engaging in said tactics, that person would likely predict that the government in question was a dictatorship.

On that note, have a Merry godless Christmas!

The other day, I was standing in a line at the grocery store when I saw that some shopper had discarded an unsold copy of The New Yorker on top of the stand that sells candy (for those who don’t know, The New Yorker is my favorite magazine). At first, I was astonished to see that a grocery store was selling the magazine — it was the first time I’d ever spotted a copy in such a place — and after this shock wore off I decided that I’d take the magazine and stand it upright on the tabloid rack facing out. Obviously, the copy didn’t belong there — it was likely supposed to be buried in the large magazine rack somewhere within the store.

This is not an uncommon occurrence for me. I’ll be browsing in a bookstore and come across a favorite author or book of mine that is placed in such a way that the spine is facing out. I’ll pluck the book from the shelf and then rearrange it so that the cover is facing out and prominently displayed. This increases the level of the promotion for the book — a wandering book buyer is more likely to see it this way, and it increases the likelihood of purchase. Do you know how I know this? Because book publishers pay thousands of dollars to chain bookstores to have their books arranged in the exact same fashion.

By engaging in this level of promotion, I’m committing a mild version of “shopdropping” a growing trend for many writers and artists. Let’s say you’re someone who has a book that has been published by a small press. The publisher obviously doesn’t have the thousands of dollars needed to pay big box book stores to display your book prominently in the “new releases” section. So what do you do? You start visiting the stores yourself and moving your books to this section.

But writers aren’t the only ones engaging in this sort of behavior. According to an article in The New York Times just about every artist or political group can use this sort of reverse-shoplifting to his advantage.

So does this really work? I’m willing to bet that it does. How stores display their products has a huge impact on the sales of said products. I worked at a Walmart in college, and they had an entire computerized strategy of how they wanted to promote the products they sold, and this strategy relied heavily on placement.

For the artist looking to promote his work, the best tactic would be to go for efficiency. Think about your target audience and where it shops. Get your product into a highly-visible place and then hope that it catches eyes before the employees catch onto your game. But be aware that retailers are becoming increasingly wary of such shenanigans — make the swap when the cashier isn’t looking.

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Related posts:
1. Newspapers employed speed readers to review Harry Potter
2. Digg ditches Google ads in favor of Microsoft
3. Wired editor bans email addresses from PR companies