Bloggasm

Jeffrey Rosen has been facing heavy criticism for his petty hit piece on Sonia Sotomayor, an article sprinkled with anonymous quotes cruelly attacking her intelligence and accomplishments. Rosen was interviewed recently on NPR about the story and defended himself in this way:

But its author, the noted legal writer Jeffrey Rosen, says he’s been burned by the episode, too — enough that he’s swearing off blogging for good.

“It was a short Web piece,” Rosen says now, sounding a little shell-shocked. “I basically thought of it as a blog entry“. . . .

Above all, Rosen says he’s drawn a lesson from how his initial essay was treated by people of both ideological stripes. He won’t be blogging any more. He wants to spend more time with the material before hitting “send.”

But as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald points out, this entire claim is absurd. There is no ambiguity over whether that article was a blog post:

Moreover, the excuse that Rosen was merely “blogging” is, just as a factual matter, so obviously false: his Sotomayor piece wasn’t on any of the TNR “blogs” (as happens when Rosen is actually “blogging”) but instead was presented as a stand-alone article; it was, as NPR notes, “more than 1,000 words”; and TNR touted it as “the first in a series of reports by TNR legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen about the strengths and weaknesses of the leading candidates.” Does that remotely sound as though they intended it to be a “mere blog post”?

1. Feel free to send me any news tips or correspondence to simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

2. If you’re looking for more blogging from me, follow me on Twitter.

Steve Weber, a writer who self-publishes how-to marketing books, logged onto his AmazonConnect account recently only to find that he couldn’t publish anything on it until he accepted a new user agreement from the online retail giant. Curious as to why he needed to agree to this new contract, he began to read through the extensive legalese that most internet users scroll through and ignore. Near the end, he came across the line “We … have no obligation to use, post or distribute your Submitted Materials. We may monitor and, in our discretion, remove your Submitted Materials at any time.” This rhetoric suggested that Amazon reserved the right to censor any blog posts published through AmazonConnect.

Weber doesn’t know whether this is a new addition to the user agreement, but he said that within the past year he has certainly experienced multiple instances in which Amazon has placed more stringent restrictions on his blogging at the site.

“When Amazon launched its Connect author-blog feature in 2006, chief executive Jeff Bezos hailed it as a new opportunity for authors to talk directly with readers,” Weber wrote recently on his blog. “Now, after a few million unfiltered blog posts, Amazon wishes authors would just shut up.”

Weber became a regular contributor to AmazonConnect almost from its inception, publishing his first posts there in February 2006. Over the next few years he found it incredibly helpful in marketing his books. “It’s so hard to tell exactly where your sales come from,” he explained. “But I could always tell that after I posted something, I could see my Amazon rank go way up. I could tell that people were reading it because I’d get emails from people saying, ‘Hey I saw this on your Amazon blog.’ A lot of people didn’t even know what a blog was, but they’d see it pop up somewhere on Amazon. It might be when they went to the home page; they didn’t necessarily have to go to one of my books, but the first line of the post would surface in all these different places, and now they’re kind of segregating it off, because I guess they’re tired of policiing it, or they don’t want to police it.”

To his dismay, Weber began noticing a series of changes to its blogger platform about a year ago, all of which seemed to place restrictions on his blogging. First, Amazon began truncating his posts. Before, he could publish up to 3,000 words per post and place it on a book’s products page, which came in handy when Amazon was slow to update a product description if the book had been revised or changed in some way.

“I think part of it was their realization that pages were just getting way too long,” he said. “So they just started truncating the posts, which people like me didn’t like because you know that 99% of the people just look at what’s right in front of them, they don’t click through to see the remainder. So they just started showing the first five lines or so of a post.”

The next change came a few months ago. When Weber first began blogging on AmazonConnect, he could choose which of his books’ pages he wanted a post to appear on. Given that some of his books focus on widely different topics, this allowed him to post on subjects that only pertained to a certain book. But now, Amazon has changed the platform so that a post appears on all the books by a particular author.

“That took away almost all the utility right there,” Weber said. “If you have to speak to all those different people at the same time, it’s just not worth it. And those people are going to get irritated because they don’t want to see stuff that’s off topic on the product page.”

There have been other subtle changes; I haven’t verified this independently, but Weber claimed that a few weeks ago Amazon stopped allowing new users to set up AmazonConnect blogs, and instead has rolled blogs into something called Author Pages. And earlier this month, Weber accused Amazon of censoring a customer review of one of his books simply because it mentioned a URL where it could be downloaded for free.

We learned from the AmazonFail fiasco that we should be cautious when making unsubstantiated claims about Amazon’s business practices, but either way it’s becoming clear that the retail giant is placing at least some new restrictions on its bloggers, moves that may result in non-relevant content being published on books’ product pages. Does this mean that frustrated authors will abandon their AmazonConnect blogs and return exclusively to their own websites? Or are the promotion opportunities too great to pass up? Based on the company’s dominance in the online bookselling market, I suspect that book publicists are not ready to give up AmazonConnect just yet.

Just as book authors participate in book signings, a group of book and lit bloggers will take part in a “blogger signing” at this year’s Book Expo America

This Sunday, Edward Champion will sit behind a table with two other people at the Book Expo America, the largest annual book trade fair in the country, which this year takes place in New York City from May 28 to May 31. Champion will have a pen in hand, ready to greet any fans or wayward BEA attendees that make their way to his booth. If they place something in front of him, he’ll gladly sign it. The scene will be similar to the hundreds of other author book signings that will occur at the Book Expo that weekend, with only one difference: Champion doesn’t have a book to promote.

In addition to his freelance book reviewing and journalism, he has spent years recording podcasts and blogging, and he’ll be joining approximately 40 other book and lit bloggers for what may be the BEA’s first ever “blogger signing.” The event is sponsored and organized by NetGalley, a company that specializes in ebook versions of book galleys.

Kat Meyer, who was hired a few months ago to blog for NetGalley, had joked with Fran Toolan, the company’s owner, about the possibility of such an endeavor. But what was first a tongue-in-cheek suggestion quickly turned into a serious idea for how to connect bloggers with not only their avid readers, but also the publishing industry whose books they constantly promote.

“So we just floated the idea out there and got a tremendous response,” Meyer said. “[Toolan] tried to include everyone who showed an interest and I think he’s got about 42 people now stretched out over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the Book Expo. The bloggers will be paired up or on their own for half hour slots. And it is actually good timing because Melissa Klug from Glatfelter Paper is going to create little trading cards for us.”

These trading cards, presumably, are what attendees will be able to get signed, considering that most of the bloggers, by definition, have nothing physical to promote. Meyer explained that the bloggers will have a table within the NetGalley booth and Toolan will act as sort of an unofficial MC while a screen displays Twitter feeds and pictures of the bloggers and their blog logos.

“The way that a lot of the publishing industry has treated the bloggers from the onset was that they’re the red-headed stepchild, they seem to have different roles, and maybe they shouldn’t have special access to the book and the author,” Meyer said. “This event is both representative that the bloggers have gotten more respect from the industry, and that the bloggers themselves have high standards. I don’t know if this attitude [from publishers] has changed so much, but bloggers have definitely become more visible. And I think that for the bloggers having their name out there, being seen, they’re going to get more attention from the publishers that prior to this haven’t paid much attention, or haven’t felt comfortable working with them. I think overall it’s great for everybody, not just bloggers, not just the publishers, but across the board. Every person who works in the industry is going to come to terms that there needs to be a new protocol for how to deal with new media in terms of bridging that gap. There’s not going to be a PR person in the middle anymore, and bloggers can go straight to authors, bloggers can go straight to whoever makes the product.”

Though Champion had heard that there may be blogger playing cards to sign, he said he’s up for putting his pen to anything. “I will happily sign The Catcher in the Rye,” he joked “Because JD Salinger isn’t going to sign it so I’ll happily put my name to it.”

The blogger said that he looks forward to the event, not because he expects a big turnout — he’d be happy if only two people showed up — but because it’s a departure from the corporate pretentiousness he has seen from many of the major publishers at the Book Expo. Champion said he feels much more at home with the small press authors with the titles often overlooked by book reviewers, and he thinks that the blogger signing will fit into this same kind of atmosphere.

“On a fundamental level, this is essentially a great way for bloggers to meet up,” Champion said. “And I actually think that I approve of the blogger signings because I hope it will bring a number of people together in a way that possibly, I suppose, combats the fragmented nature of the blogosphere right now. I have to sort of put my finger on what’s wrong with the blogger community right now and it’s kind of this sort of fractious ego we’re seeing. Twitter and things like the blogger signup are positively good ways of bringing the community together, however crazy it is.”

By the time I spoke on Friday with Nick Purdy, publisher of the music magazine Paste, the publication had received over $175,000 in donations from its devoted readers; less than 10 days had passed since the cash-strapped magazine had launched a campaign called “Save Paste,” in which it laid out in a letter to Paste readers the financial troubles that have plagued the company in recent months. “As the global recession has continued, many of you have written us (especially as ad pages shrunk) to say, ‘If you ever need help, let us know,’” the letter states. “That day has come.”

The magazine, launched in 2002, currently has about 200,000 subscribers (according to Purdy) and the publisher hopes that a significant portion of them, many of whom already pay $25 for an annual subscription, will cough up approximately $300,000 in donations, the amount Purdy says is needed to get the magazine through this rough patch.

“We needed some cash,” Purdy told me. “So we had always known that if we ever had to, we could go to our readers. A lot of them tell us — especially in the last few months, because they’re not dumb, they know what’s going on in the economy — they’ve written us and said, ‘hey, if things ever get rough on Paste, make sure you ask us for help,’ and so we took them seriously. We have a special relationship with out readers. We have a brand they know is built off authentic passion. We’re not corporate owned, so for our readers we have a high level of trust and value to them. So we took this campaign to them, with obvious hesitation; you don’t know if this is going to work. It’s highly unusual for a for-profit company to do. Obviously if you tell the world your problems it’s fraught with risk. But for us the upside was that as soon as we went to our readers, the response was loud, and strong, and fast.”

But the donations to the magazine were twofold; not only did it receive an outpouring of donations from its readers, but dozens of artists and music labels gave the publication not-yet-released music tracks to include as thank-you gifts to donors.

“What we wanted to do here was to give donors a thank you so they weren’t just giving us money for nothing, and what better way than to make this campaign about the music?” Purdy said. “So we went to the music industry, the labels we’ve worked with over the years, the ones that we’ve championed, and we said, ‘hey, here’s what we’re doing, we really love your art, and if you have a way to support us by donating a song that hasn’t been released before, be it a live track or something that’s coming out in the next few months, whatever it is, we’d like to just offer it to our donors as a thank you for being a part of the campaign.’ We’d give them away to make it clear that the industry supports us too; we’re supported from two directions: the industry we’re in and the readers who enjoy it. And the response was overwhelming, and songs continue to come in up until the last few minutes … Yoko Ono decided to premier some music that’s coming out later this year but is being premiered through our campaign. Yoko Ono, that’s great. Like, who are we?”

This campaign occurs while the newspaper industry as a whole has been contemplating the so-called “PBS approach” to bringing in money — that is, to solicit donations from publications’ most devoted news consumers. This strategy has worked for a few non-profit media entities — Wikipedia, PBS, public radio — but it’s unclear whether for-profit companies could succeed at such a tactic. Given that Paste is one of the few for-profit news outlets to try the donation route, can its success be duplicated across the industry?

“There are a few things here,” Purdy said when I raised this issue. “Our research has shown that we do have an unusual level of loyalty from our subscribers, so that certainly has to be playing in. I can’t assume what brand loyalty other magazines have because I haven’t seen their research. So is it something other brands can do? I suppose it’s possible. I think it’s going to be exceptional when someone can successfully do this. But I will say this: we view this as something we will only do once. We don’t see this as a model that’s sustainable, we don’t see it as how a for-profit business should operate. For us it’s an extraordianry one-time circumstance where we can say to our readers with confidence that if they rise up and help us through this patch we see a bright future. In spite of everything with the economy, we know our way forward.”

In other words, Purdy views this as a way for Paste to deal with a cyclical downturn as a result of the current recession, not a long-term business model. Given that the downward spiral of newspapers is only exacerbated — not caused — by the recession, such a strategy would have to hold up year after year, which means that a newspaper’s brand will have to be particularly strong if it wants to come back to its readers, time and time again, with its hands outstretched, perpetually hungry, waiting for them to cough up their life-sustaining dollars so that future issues can be published.

The mini-bio that accompanies Truth/Slant’s blog posts written by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:

I’m a political reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, a sports columnist for Men’s Journal, and I also write books for a Random House imprint called Spiegel and Grau. My main ambition in life is to someday strangle that chick in the Progressive Insurance commercials who is always waving her hands back and forth and screaming, “Discount!!!” Anyone who has suggestions for how to dump her body without being caught is welcome to write to me. I already have plenty of plastic and a staple-gun.

This Gizmodo writer obviously doesn’t know his New Yorker history, otherwise he’d know that the magazine instituted a mandatory retirement age for editors decades ago (former editor William Shawn was the only one excluded from this rule):

Artist Jorge Colombo took about an hour to fingerpaint an intricate Times Square scene on his iPhone using Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone drawing app. Now, it’s the June 1st cover for The New Yorker.

I’m guessing the editors of the magazine saw some kind of weighty symbolism in such a stunt, but landing a New Yorker cover is the kind of honor that would define an entire career for many illustrators. That’s not to say this kind of thing isn’t impressive—it really, really is—but I can’t help imagining some dusty, 93-year-old editor at the top floor of the Conde Nast building seeing his first iPhone in the hands of an intern, losing his monocle over this amazing new tech-nol-o-gee, and impulsively ordering something, anything to do with this MAGICKAL DEE-VICE to be put on the cover, now.