Bloggasm

Over the past year or so there has been no shortage of media critics who have theorized on how to save the floundering newspaper industry. Though many of these ideas focus on utilizing the web and Web 2.0 technology, there has also been a few of what I’ll call “no more free meal ticket” schemes.

Basically, the person tries to find some organization or company that has been benefiting from newspapers and journalism for free all these years and announces that it may be time for it to pay up.

Case in point: A writer for the Columbia Journalism Review recently penned a piece arguing that since the public benefits from the watchdog nature of journalism, then it’s time for the government to begin subsidizing news organizations — an idea that wasn’t exactly enthusiastically embraced by editors and publishers.

Today, I came across an article published by the Century Foundation that has supposedly pinpointed another group that has gotten off Scott free: internet providers and cell phone companies, among others:

Consider that the consumers are paying for broadband, cell phone service, and satellites, plus the cost of the lap-tops, PDAs, televisions, and iPods. The monthly bill for all the delivery is easily a couple of hundred dollars. Mac laptops start at $1,099. Good Dell laptops start at $999. There are cheap cell phones but the kind that offer news and entertainment are still pricey as is the service that supports them. My household monthly tab for two cell phones (a Blackberry and an iPhone), a premium cable package, broadband, and two desktops computers, is about $675. Obviously, we use these devices for a great many things and, in today’s world, they are probably indispensable.

He says that, by contrast, “the New York Times subscription delivered to our door by hand is $5.10 per week. Around the country, the Orlando Sentinel is $19.50 for thirteen weeks; Atlanta Journal-Constitution is $10.99 a month; the Minneapolis Star Tribune is $42.25 for thirteen weeks.”

He concludes that the “Googles” and “Verizons” should therefore start paying for the content that has helped make their companies so popular in the first place.

The author fails to understand, however, that he would have to compare the costs of subscriptions of every newspaper available on the web to really begin to compare it to the internet’s offerings. Simply adding up your subscription costs for the NY Times and a few others just doesn’t cut it.

Adding in both an Iphone and a Blackberry doesn’t necessarily reflect the gadgets found in most households — he’s artificially inflating the cost of all this gadgetry to try and make it seem like these companies are making a killing off your content.

It should be noted that at least one cable/internet company is already subsidizing the news business — Comcast. After all, they are offering wire stories on their website. I think we’ll see similar instances of this kind of online syndication of content from major corporations.

However silly his idea is, at least it’s better than accusing God of having a free meal ticket. Mike Koehler, deputy sports editor at The Oklahoman, has started a new website called prayerforpapers.com, in which he enlists the help of invisible sky fairies to save the industry. Talk about last resort.

Well, I got linked to today by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin and never have I seen such vitriolic hateful email. I feel sorry for political bloggers who get linked by her regularly.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. A sports blogger who up until recently used a pseudonym outed himself as a Washington Post reporter. He was promptly fired.

2. Here’s a step by step list on how to make your own Judd Apatow movie. If this formula is correct, then he only has about five more movies left before he has run out of Freaks and Geeks cast members to star in his films.

3. While much of the news coverage of Craigslist has focused on the damage it has caused to the newspaper industry, another competitor has decided that it won’t take it sitting down — Ebay has filed a lawsuit against the free classifieds site.

4. Every time you think cable news couldn’t get any worse, you come across a news clip like this one and realize that there is no limit to its vapidity.

Anybody who has spent considerable time on the internet knows that one downside to online life is how easy it is to get caught up reading (and possibly participating in) an internet flame war. What’s most frustrating about this tendency is the fact that once you snap out of it and force yourself to stop, you come to this self-realization that you’ve just completely wasted an hour of your life performing an utterly inconsequential task. Despite the fact that you’ve spent the entire time reading, you haven’t learned anything new and chances are you’ve managed to get yourself annoyed with anonymous people, most of whom never even bothered giving their real names.

So the reason I’m telling you all this is because that’s my excuse for why I have so few links for you today. So here are (a small number) of media-related links for your amusement.

1. This year’s Pulitzers have been announced. Given that these link lists always result in me having to post news a day or two late and just about every media blog out there has already reported this news, I’m boring myself right now just by linking to it. Okay okay, here’s a link to Gawker trashing the Pulitzers and calling them worthless. You didn’t think I’d let you leave without a little red meat, did you?

2. Now here’s the real news. It turns out that the Huffington Post has surpassed The Drudge Report in unique visitors. I have long despised Drudge, not for his politics but because I could never for the life of me understand why he became so popular. He had an absolutely ugly site and most of the links he posts are to mainstream news sources. I could easily do his job for him by just subscribing to the RSS feeds of all the major news sites. Every now and then he publishes his own scoop, but they’re usually factually inaccurate and relatively rare. In fact, the only time I ever visited his website was when I was reading some news feature about how Drudge rules our world. Then I almost had to visit the site just to confirm, in my head, “You mean that Drudge?”

3. A new study released recently shows that news readers and newspaper editors widely disagree on how comments should be moderated on news websites. It brings up the good point that if editors are expected to avoid anonymous sources unless absolutely necessary, then anonymous commenting should be similarly shunned. I’m not necessarily against anonymous commenting, but I rarely, if ever, engage in it myself.

4. Will Feminism and porn ever be compatible? I explored this issue a long time ago over here. I think the problem with trying to remain PC when making porn is the fact that a lot of sexual turn-ons are non-PC. I’m not an expert on sexual theory, but I would think there’s some (dark) correlation between what is forbidden and what turns us on. This provides a dilemma for pornographers.

Not a day goes by when you don’t read an article bemoaning how Craigslist, the free classifieds site, is swiftly wiping out paid advertising in newspapers (it’s poised to bring in $81 million in revenue in 2008). Publishers groan at the realization that consumers will never pay for a product when they can get it for free. In newspaper board rooms the company’s name is no-doubt uttered in lowered, ominous tones.

But more and more we’re also reading articles about the dark side of Craigslist and what happens when you set the bar so low that there’s no cost for entry. Just recently, two hoaxers posted a fake advertisement that resulted in an Oregon man’s home being looted, most of his worldly possession taken away. In 2006, a man named Jason Fortuny posted a fake sex ad on Craigslist pretending to be a woman wanting some BDSM sex. After several men responded, sending their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and even nude pictures, he then placed all their information on the web so that these people were damned to a life of embarrassment and humiliation, their emails forever just a Google search away. That same year I performed my own (now-famous) Craigslist experiment where I created fake no-strings-attached ads for different sexual orientations and found out that straight women receive so many replies to advertisements that it’s virtually impossible for a straight male to get sex through Craigslist.

But these are just the more radical examples. To understand what I mean, look no further than the job listings at the Richmond Virginia Craigslist. If you comb through those listings you’ll find out that only a tiny percentage of them are legitimate. Most don’t even list the name of the company to which you’re applying. That’s because many of the advertisements are placed there by job recruiting agencies, basically urban cockroaches that try to gather resumes and place you in an admin job while scraping away a commission. To test out how easy it was, I just placed a fake job advertisement and it took less than three minutes.

That’s what happens when you offer a service for nothing. You have such an overloading avalanche of those trying to utilize a free service that the more legitimate advertisements are drowned out. Don’t believe me? Try replying to a female-for-male ad in the “no strings attached” section. I guarantee you that you’ll get a response asking you to visit a woman’s webcam or a dating website. In fact I’d be surprised if more than a single female in the “no strings attached” section is posting a legitimate ad.

So what happens when you charge money for the advertising, as is done in newspapers? Suddenly, the cost for placing illegitimate and spammy advertisements is much, much higher. A job recruiter agency can’t go in and place dozens of fake ads in a day because it would cost thousands of dollars. The profit margin for landing a commission quickly heads south, probably into the negatives.

But that’s the cost of free. Even if every advertisement were legitimate on Craigslist, the rush of those trying to cash in on the free service diminishes the effects of each individual advertisement. As classified ads in newspapers lessen, each individual ad becomes more powerful. You get more bang — i.e. more responses — for your buck.

The only question is how long it will take the consumer to realize this. How many lackluster responses does a person need to get before he decides to try the paid route and cash in on the benefits of doing so?

Posted below is a screen shot for today’s most popular technology stories (linked to by bloggers) at The New York Times. As you can see, nearly all of them center around online media rather than offline gadgetry (the only one not about online media focuses on a new kind of camera). That’s not surprising, since bloggers tend to link to articles about the media in which they work. This trend could possibly explain the “blogger” stories like the one I wrote about earlier today.

Of course the newspaper can’t ignore the traffic numbers. And the editor of the paper has already said that one day, in the not so distant future, the New York Times will be an online-only news source. Given this, will more and more of its focus shift away from the real world to this virtual one? Will they just start churning out ego-boosting profiles on bloggers knowing that they’ll reward them with lots of links?

Here’s the screen shot:

I actually got a chance today to comb through my RSS feeds at length, so for once you might find some of these links to not be a week out of date. Either way, here are some media-related links for your amusement.

1. I’ve long said that the reporting on the demise of the newspaper industry rarely contains any real context because it tends to ignore the journalism industry as a whole. Though newspapers are laying off reporters, we’re seeing an increase in the number of journalists who either blog full-time or write for other online venues for a living. Gawker has published a chart of newspaper revenue over the last few decades and as you’ll see it adds even more context to the equation. Chris Anderson explains the chart at length.

2. Here is a brilliant account of the tension and parasitic relationship that website owners have with Google. Considering I’m experiencing my own falling out period with Google right now, the piece rang especially true for me. I’ll probably have a longer post on this later.

3. I’ve noticed that hard-core Digg users have formed odd, cyclical alliances with certain political figures or themes. At first, you couldn’t visit the social bookmarking site without coming across a pro- Ron Paul story. Then it was nonstop pro- Obama articles. Now, on a slightly related and perhaps more bizarre note, we’re seeing intense anti-Clinton articles making it to the front page. Here is a good example. How do these trends begin, and why do they suddenly end for a new tide of political stories?

4. I don’t find Maureen Dowd funny at all, but this post explaining her writing sure made me laugh.

5. It’s kind of neat when every now and then we get to see a Gawker Media blogger go and bite the hand that feeds him by attacking his own boss on the blog. You don’t see things like that in traditional media outlets. Look here to see a Valleywag contributor complain and viciously attack his boss for a new round of pay cuts.

6. There have been a number of news stories showing that CNN has been winning the ratings game against Fox News, something that would have been unthinkable two years ago. I have a love/hate relationship with cable news, but when I do tune in I usually stick with MSNBC.

7. A South Carolina senator is proposing a tax surcharge on purchased pornography, saying that the money should go toward managing sex offenders. Because we all know the completely made up connections between looking at porn and going on to become a sex offender.

I’ve been on a much-needed mini vacation for the last four days and this is my first time on the internet since Wednesday. If you’ve commented on one of my posts in that time period and the comment got eaten, I apologize. I moderate all comments and whenever I’m gone for an extended period of time I’m unable to gather the motivation to read through 800 spam comments to pick out a few legitimate ones.

Anyway, here are some media-related links

1. This is pretty scary. Someone placed a hoax craigslist ad announcing an everything-must-go giveaway at a house. The only problem? It wasn’t placed by the owner — and he returned to his house to find people literally looting it. And when he tried to stop them from taking his possessions, the people showed him print-outs from the craiglist ad and refused to give anything back. I smell a pending sociological experiment that could come out of this; something based on the effects of advertising and a level of entitlement that accompanies any sort of ad.

2. We’ve seen a number of incidents recently in which some brutal crime or tragedy occurred that involved a social networking site in some way. The most recent example is a teen male who killed his father because his Myspace account had been deleted.

3. The New Yorker has a long feature article about the demise of the print newspaper industry and what its online future may entail. Scarily enough, the reporter picked The Huffington Post as the example of the future of newspapers. Why is this scary? Because The Huffington Post doesn’t pay many of its star writers. I’m not talking about user-generated content, I’m talking about professional writers who write for the site for free while it soaks of millions in advertising dollars.

4. Ever wonder what bloggers who write for Gawker websites pull in for salaries? We’ve known for some time that they’re paid in part based on the number of page views they attract. Now we have some sense of the actual figures in their pay checks.