How today’s Web journalism world still makes no financial sense

Ted Rall sis right as usual. Double of nothing (doubling your online visitors even as Internet ad rates stay near zero) doesn’t make sense.

And, it’s “liberal” blogs as well as “conservative” traditional media that aren’t getting it.

Wanna blog for Huffington Post? As Rall points out, they’ll pay you plenty of prestige, but zero dollars.

And, as long as you the publicity-hungry blogger make that sucker’s bet, Huff Post, including its charming Dragon First Lady, Ms. Arianna herself, will continue to double down on you. Like Rall says, try using "prestige" to pay the mortgage.

End result, says Rall:

Print media is dragging content providers into the abyss. First comes downsizing. Writers, cartoonists, and photographers are losing their jobs to peers willing to do the work for less or, in the case of readers invited to submit their comments and images for the thrill of appearing in the local rag, nothing. Then they squeeze those who remain for pay cuts. A cartoon that runs today in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times or The Washington Post — the most prestigious and widely disseminated forums in the United States — brings its creator less than The Village Voice would have paid for it in the 1980s. Some print venues offer no payment at all.

What happens if we don’t do anything?

Unless something changes soon, deprofessionalization will further erode journalistic quality. The resulting dumbing down of our politics and culture will accelerate. We can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube. The Internet is here to stay. Unfortunately, the best way to make it more profitable — to stimulate all e-commerce, not just journalism--will require us to give up something dear to our rugged individualist American hearts: the illusion of Internet privacy.

Yes, it is an eye-opener, if disconcerting in a way, to hear Rall, an ardent civil libertarian, say that. But, between spyware that is logging keystrokes on infected computers to ISP providers being leaky sieves to the government even before 9/11, Net privacy, in many ways, went the way of the dodo long ago. Besides, your financial information went even more the way of the dodo even earlier, every time you zipped a debit card at the grocery store.

This is the first of a three-part series by Rall. I’m interested in hearing what he offers in the way of a solution.

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Another Domestic Spying Program?

We are all familiar with the famous hospital confrontation between Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft. Like everybody else who heard that story I thought it referred to the well known terrorist surveillance program. Alberto testified in 2006 that there hadn't been any controversy about that program within the DoJ. Last week the the Justice Department said it wouldn't retract or revise that testimony. So what gives. Well Monday the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Gonzales a letter demanding all correspondence pertaining to the hospital room confrontation. The last paragraph of that letter says

If you do not consider the surveillance program that was the subject of discussion during the hospital visit and other events that former Deputy Attorney General James Comey described in his May 15, 2007 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee to be covered by the requests made above, please provide all documents described in those requests relevant to that program, as well.

In other words, there might be another, completely unknown surveillance program out there. Gonzales and the highly politicized Republican DoJ is in charge of certifying that program. Feel safe? Me neither.

I am not sure loyal Bushies know the difference between al Qaeda, an editorial cartoonist or the Democratic party. Nor am I sure they care. For future reference only one of the three (al Qaeda) is an enemy of the state. Regardless of what Tom Delay or Karl Rove say the others are loyal Americans.

Laura McGann speculates over at TPMMuckraker. One of her readers who sounds pretty knowledgeable opines that the program is aimed at Internet traffic. He guesses the NSA can and does "read" every single email sent any where, by anybody, all of the time. Maybe they can find Karl Rove's missing emails?

We don't know, but it is interesting that George Bush who has proven himself utterly incompetent in every other respect, always gets his way with the Democratic Congressional leadership. It's like he reads their mail. Hummmmmmmm. I wonder.

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The Hunters v. The Herd

A few days ago I wrote a short note entitled "Is American empire the end of American Democracy?" That note was really intended to point readers to a longer and much better essay by Chalmers Johnson entitled Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us? In preparing that note, I actually read Johnson's article. In reading the article I learned some things. I had to interact with the written word. I had to think.

I mention all this because like a lot of folks, including Blue Girl, I have been wondering why the left is winning the Internet revolution? Why are the conservatives generally struggling with the Internet?

First of all, I am not at all sure all conservatives are struggling with the Internet. As I point out a couple of posts below, Ron Paul isn't having much trouble with the Internet. Steve Jeffery is accurate when he says:

In the past week, Ron Paul's website received more traffic than those of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards (Obama only recently took the lead by a hair). His videos are among the most-viewed on YouTube and popular social news site Digg.com is literally choked with Ron Paul-themed articles and comments.

The conservatives who are struggling are the movement conservatives currently in power--The Karl Rove/American Enterprise Institute/William Kristol/Fox News conservatives (lets call them neo-cons.) To understand why they are struggling we have to examine why they were so successful. It has been argued many, many times that they are successful because they pioneered and mastered talk radio. That's partly true, but what they really mastered was the "sound bite" and the 10 second "video clip." They learned far better than their counterparts on the left just how to use the medium of television advertising. Nothing more than 30 seconds. The shorter the better. A quick hit, then move on.

Above all else they learned message control--how to keep repeating the sound bites over and over again. They gained control of television, playing the same video over and over again. They ruined Howard Dean's 2004 run by playing "the scream" over and over again without context. Conservatives are still doing well with people who gain most of their news via television and talk radio.

Where the neo-cons are failing is with the growing percentage of the population that is no longer satisfied with sound bites. Many of those people learn most of their news reading it on the Internet. The neo-cons are struggling with the Internet.

How is the Internet different? The principal difference is the difference between hunting and grazing. Every year people go deer hunting. Every year to be successful deer hunters have to carefully watch for signs. They hunt for subtle movements. Moments are spent contemplating this movement or that. Some things are dismissed. Even though many hunters don't move for hours, hunting is very active.

Grazing is different. When I look out my window, or at a television, I am just grazing. Information is passively entering my brain. I might have an emotional reaction to a sunset or I might see a car turn the corner. I might react to something I see, but like a herd animal reacting to a running lion, my reaction is thoughtless. In no way am I hunting. Ever try remembering any of Jay Leno's jokes 5 minutes after his monologue. Me neither. The joke comes in to my brain, before I have time to really think, I laugh and he moves to the next joke. Listening to his monologue is very passive. It is brain candy.

The user of the Internet has to read. Reading is a powerful form (maybe the most powerful form) of active watching. It is a form of hunting. It invites thought. It is done at the pace of the reader. He can read fast or slow depending on his mood or needs. The Internet reader expects footnotes. He can follow links to back-up material.

The sound bite on the other hand is totally controlled. A quick hit and then move along to the next "sound bite." It is completely passive. You are not invited to reflect--to think. Like Leno's joke it is here one second and gone. Ever see references to supporting material in an advertisement. Even if they exist they go so fast you can't catch them.

This brings this long post back to Ron Paul. In particular it brings us back to the reaction Rudy Guiliani and Fox News are receiving among Internet readers to their response to Ron Paul's "controversial" comment. During and after the last debate Guiliani, Fox News and the Republican establishment essentially called Paul a traitor for making the comment that we really ought to look at what America has done in the middle east to encourage attacks like 9/11. Over the past few days, people on the Internet are asking what is wrong with looking back and learning? That idea is gaining traction among Internet readers. Paul is winning on the Internet front. This morning Ben Schwartz went so far as to turn Guiliani's comments back on him. Schwartz called him a professional victim just like cable news's Nancy Grace. He chided Guiliani for knowing so little about his signature issue-9/11. We on the Internet are readers. We are hunters. We don't like victims, and we think that people who can't learn from the past are losers.

Before you get too smug just remember, human beings are omnivores (both hunters and grazers.) You and I are little different from any other member of our herd.

Please post your comments on this issue. I would love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Both bmaz and Jo Etta at Change for Missouri make some great points. You might want to take a look at their comments.

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