Bloggasm

I’ve long wondered why the NY Times and other newspapers don’t regularly engage in affiliate links — turning book review sections into potential money makers, and this Vanity Fair profile of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. finally answers that question for me:

Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”

When the term “crowdsourcing” is used it’s often referring to how media companies can utilize it for journalistic purposes, but other industries have been using it for years — most notably software companies. This week for PBS’s MediaShift I profile a new company called Article One Partners, which uses the wisdom of crowds to try to validate or invalidate patents by offering up awards of $50,000 for those who can find prior art.

The Twitter account for pollster Frank Luntz launched over a year ago and in that time period managed to gain 2,000 followers — a list that includes several politicians (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vern Buchanan, Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich) and major media figures (Howard Kurtz, George Stephanopoulos). It was also quoted in a Howard Kurtz Washington Post media column about Twitter (“Not surprisingly, I got plenty of reaction on the site. Pollster Frank Luntz said Twitter is ‘no gimmick, it’s the future.’”) As of this writing it has issued 111 tweets.

The only thing is, the account is a fake. It was launched and maintained by Brian Devine, an employee of New Media Strategies (where I also work). The account likely remained unnoticed by Luntz until just recently, when he was apparently contacted by Heritage Foundation employee Robert Bluey

“I was surprised that so many people thought it was real for a ridiculous amount of time,” Devine told me in an interview. “I was really surprised that so many people would take it authoritatively without any verification whatsoever.”

Devine said that he usually stayed away from publishing outrageous tweets, which may have contributed to the fact that the account remained intact for so long.

Devine is a former employee of Luntz — he worked as an associate project director for Luntz’s company for almost two years.

“I’m still friends with Frank, I still communicate with him occasionally,” he told me. “If he wants the Twitter account I’ll gladly hand it over. It was never meant to be malicious.”

Joining a growing list of politicians who have attacked the blogging medium, a Maryland mayor identified local political bloggers as a danger to society in her final State of the City address last week.

“While we face the same challenges that other cities and towns are facing, our biggest challenge by far is a small element within the city that consistently seeks to find ‘smoking guns’ and conspiracies within the ranks of the city workforce,” Salisbury Mayor Barrie Parsons Tilghman reportedly said. “Daily, I run into citizens who are wary of the constant ‘gotcha’ mentality on the part of a few citizens and City Council members. Citizens fear standing up and serving because it is simply not worth the vilification they chance at the hands of blogs and with threatening phone calls.”

Later in the speech she said, “This is not about differences of opinion and policy questions. This is quite simply mean-spirited ugly constant intimidation. Combined with the lies and innuendo of several bloggers this city is under siege.”

I spoke to Joe Albero, who said he is likely the sole blogger she’s referring to (“I am the main target. I’m the only target.”) The blogger told me he launched his site Salisbury News three and a half years ago after he personally met with Tilghman to try to inform her about concerns he had about the local zoo. When she failed to address the issue in what he considered a timely fashion, he decided to take his complaints to the internet and has been aggressively covering local issues ever since.

“Her remark is absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “To try to reach out to the public, and blame Salisbury News for the blight, for the graffiti, for the lack of business, for the real estate market taking a dive. It’s just absolutely crazy, if anything; unfortunately for her, we’re here to expose all the things that she had 12 years to cover up.”

Albero said that he and other bloggers have been more aggressive than traditional media in that area, and that local officials are not used to such close scrutiny. “We have an election coming up, she’s not running again. The press said directly to her, ‘do the blogs have anything with your decision not to run again?’ She said absolutely not. Then she does her State of the City address and blames everything on the blogs. It’s just incredible.”

Kenneth Burns echoed the idea that these remarks are a direct result of Salisbury being such a small news market. Burns works as a producer for a DC-area radio station and runs the blog Maryland Politics Today, which he launched a few years ago.

“If she had pulled this in either DC or Baltimore, she would have been laughed out of the room,” Burns told me in a phone interview last night. “Because [in those areas] there are blogs, there are radio commentators, there are newspaper columnists that will criticize you at the drop of a hat if you do something wrong, good, bad, or indifferent. The only reason she’s going to get away with it is because Salisbury’s a much smaller market where they only have one newspaper, a couple television stations down there, and a couple of talk radio stations.”

While he agreed that some of the online coverage of the mayor has been “outright ugly,” he said much of the criticism from blogs has been constructive. “This isn’t the first time she called out bloggers,” he said. “There was a press conference — I believe in early 2007 — where she said these blogs are mean spirited, they’re evil, and they don’t put the city in a positive light. But really they didn’t put her in a positive light because there are not too many people who approve of the job that she’s doing.”

But most importantly, Burns said, the mayor shouldn’t have said these things because she’s essentially attacking her own constituency. “Obviously she has a lot of guts criticizing not only people who are bloggers, but some of those bloggers might be citizens of her city, so she’s basically saying that some of your fellow citizens are dangerous to your city, and that’s not a good thing to say in any respect.”

I count five exclamation marks in this Gawker post:

This thing is big!

And secret!

We kid!

Ha, around here we do the exact opposite!

Carry on!

In the three months following the November 08 election, political blog traffic has dropped significantly. I surveyed the traffic stats of 20 major political blogs — split evenly between liberal and conservative — and compared the number of page views for the three months leading up to the election to the three months after. In that time period liberal blogs dropped from 302,711,611 total page views to 126,502,281 (58%) while conservative sites dropped from 233,950,986 to 149,744,909 (36%).

Of all the blogs I surveyed, Instapundit experienced the smallest drop, with only 5% less page views. Mydd experienced the sharpest drop (65%) and Daily Kos, Andrew Sullivan, and Hugh Hewitt all saw a decrease of more than 60% of their page views during this time period.

For consistency, only blogs that openly displayed their traffic statistics through Sitemeter were surveyed. The number of page views does not represent the number of unique visitors to a site, but rather the number of times a page was loaded.

Complete traffic stats are after the jump.
(more…)

I’m guessing that the Daily Beast doesn’t have a copy editor, otherwise this wouldn’t be noteworthy, not that it is anyway.

From Meghan McCain’s recent column:

Everyone from Jessica Simpson to Tyra Banks, Oprah and Hillary Clinton has fallen victim to this type of image-oriented bullying.

UPDATE: In case it isn’t clear, I’m giving McCain kudos for correct grammar, not saying that it’s incorrect.

Which reminds me of this tshirt I’ve been meaning to buy: