Bloggasm

Andrew Sullivan has a built-in arsenal with his 100k+ readers a day on his blog, and last week he deployed it, arguing that The Atlantic had taken a risk by putting his open letter to George Bush on the cover.

“The MSM has largely moved on from this issue. The Atlantic hasn’t, because it’s one of the few magazines left that makes major editorial decisions that may not make sense commercially,” he wrote. “In this economic climate, especially with old media in crisis, a decision like that is understandably making some general interest magazines an endangered species.”

He made a plea for readers to reward the magazine by subscribing to its print edition, and the New York Times reports that it worked: “Within two days after last Monday’s post, Mr. Sullivan’s appeal pulled in 75 percent of the subscriptions that the Web site draws in a typical month, the magazine’s publisher, Jay Lauf, said. The Atlantic expects this month’s subscription orders to be double an average month’s.”

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Last year I reported on the break-neck competition that has emerged in film industry news because of reporting from independent blogs. Several of the bloggers even accused the big players like Variety of stealing their scoops without credit.

Paid Content is reporting that Variety will soon be retreating behind the pay wall, possibly leaving a vacuum that the independent blogs will be more than happy to fill.

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The premise of the article seemed provocative enough: despite convention wisdom, exercise does not do a whole lot to help people lose weight. Written by Time Magazine’s John Cloud, the article loosely strings together a series of anecdotes and studies to argue that exercise, in the end, isn’t worth all the hype. It even goes further to suggest that in addition to not causing weight loss, exercise can actually result in weight gain because of increase hunger after workouts.

Such health trend pieces are common in mainstream journalism — headlines that challenge whatever commonly-held health belief we’ve harbored over the last decade or so. The piece hit the web over a week ago and within days over a hundred blogs had linked to it, many of which reacted negatively to its premise. Dozens of health and fitness bloggers were not happy that the magazine was pushing a theory that exercise wasn’t very beneficial.

Mike Howard is a health and fitness consultant and has been blogging over at the popular Diet Blog for about two years. Over the weekend he joined his colleagues in attempting to “debunk” the Time piece in a long blog post.

“In summary, the article essentially claims that exercise won’t help you lose weight, and may in fact be responsible for people GAINING weight,” Howard wrote. “Hmmm… The author, John Cloud (ooh the irony in that surname) goes on an anecdotally-based tirade, side-stepping contradictory evidence and common sense on route to his perplexing hypothesis.”

Like many of the other bloggers who reacted to the piece, he noted that there is general truth in what the article is saying — that exercise alone would not cause weight loss. He then went on to differentiate between the various forms of exercise that were lumped into one category in the piece, explaining the long-term health benefits that would result from each.

“I wanted to basically take a step back, see what he was trying to say, and make sure I didn’t misinterpret it,” Howard told me in a phone interview. “And I just picked apart little things; I find generally speaking there are certain pitfalls that mainstream media journalists fall short when reporting on exercise and diet, so I decided that I need to set the record straight.”

Howard said that some online communities were receptive to the article; many took their own anecdotal experiences with exercise — and there lack of success doing it — and so they took the piece as confirmation of their own experiences.

The diet blogger explained that mainstream news often tries to offer provocative, black-and-white statements to grab reader eyeballs, rather than explaining the much more nuanced facts.

“It’s not a black or white issue,” he said. “The headline ‘Exercise does not help much when not combined with proper dietary compliance’ is not going to get many readers, so you have to be on the edge, you have to have a pull, or something like that, and that’s basically a trap that a lot of mainstream media falls into to grab our attention.”

I asked Howard about the blogosphere’s response to the article, and whether fitness experts were able to counter-balance Time Magazine’s coverage.

“I think [blogging] is a very important medium, because I think a lot of people will read this and say, ‘exercise doesn’t do anything for me at all, why bother?’ And I think it’s just a wrong message, so it’s great that we have the rallying cry, sort of that equalizer, where we have that voice that we put out there and at least give people a second opinion.”

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Gawker is reporting that Salon.com has announced layoffs for six staff members as it preps for a new design launch. This publication has weathered harsh storms for years; I still remember the article ages ago announcing it had finally turned a profit.

The site has a lot of quality reporting — and star blogger Glenn Greenwald — but coincidentally I was just complaining on Twitter the other day that it didn’t provide contact details for one of its main bloggers. Not to kick a publication when its down, but this flaw is a staple of so many news organizations as they practically turn away any semblance of crowd sourcing benefits. I could have provided valuable feedback to one of Salon’s bloggers over the weekend, and yet a publication that was net savvy didn’t even provide me the option.

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Gimmicky as hell.

Story That Takes 1,000 Years to Read Is Antidote to Media Whirlwind

The printing process in question is a simple but, as usual with Keats, pretty clever idea. The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.

“The precise quantity of ink covering each word is different, so that the words will appear one at a time,” Keats said. “Provided that your copy of Opium is kept out in the open, and regularly exposed to sunlight over 1,000 years to be read progressively by the next dozen or so generations. Or very, very slowly if you happen to be Ray Kurzweil.”

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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.

When the book on 21st century media is written, the day that a writer from the esteemable New Yorker, considered by many to be the most important magazine published, dipped her toes into the unchlorinated pool that is Gawker, will be noted as the day that old journalism was irrevocably adulterated. Not to issue a quote, mind you, but an entire 600-word guest post defending the labyrinthine, secretive modus operandi of the New Yorker institution.

What drew Susan Orlean — staff writer since 1986 and author of the excellent The Orchid Thief — into the welcoming arms of the media gossip site? It was Dan Baum, who decided over a week ago to tweet the story of his “firing” from the magazine.

What I’d really like to know is how this guest post came about. Surely Orlean would not have done this without a nod from those atop the invisible masthead (rumor has it that the New Yorker’s masthead exists between the 45th and 46th page of the magazine, just as John Cusack’s character in Being John Malkovich works on the 7 1/2 floor of an office building). Was this an approved hit job, signed off by David Remnick himself?