blogads for the opinion makers

Thank you for rocking the SUXORZ last night at the Roger Smith Hotel as part of Social Media Week NYC!

For those of you who didn’t make it, you can rewind the tape here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=suxorz

Here’s the current map of the SUXORZ mob, attendees, panelists and alumni. The house was packed from screen to bar, and I apologize to folks in the back for the early amplification problems.

Thank you BL Ochman, Steve Hall, Ian Schafer and Caroline McCarthy for presenting so eloquently. And thank you Jon Accarrino for powering the deck.

To recap: By a landslide, the winner of last night’s SUXORZ was Ian’s “unmoderated Tweets” nominee. Winners of individual rounds were: BL’s nominee “Old Spice’s Crusty armpit” (I’m still traumatized), Steve’s “Ryan Air’s abusive response to customer feedback” and BL’s “TimeWarnerUnCares.”

Comparing last night with the SUXORZ we did in ‘08 and ‘09 at the wonderful SXSW festival in Austin, I think everyone’s expectations for the industry went up this year. Surreptitiously paying bloggers to flatter your brand, a major theme in past SUXORZ, has either stopped or gone underground. But fully disclosed stupidity still abounds, as we saw with Charmin, InsidetheBCS, Old Spice, Habitat, Ricola and Mars Candy. We saw that a social media campaign isn’t a date, it’s a marriage, when Agent Provacateur got dinged for its campaign hiatus. And we saw that experimentation can bring acclaim — Ford City Keys — or concerted kvetching, as with Gawker BloodCopy, PETA and Current TV’s twitter bid. We agreed, yet again, that you should NEVER underestimate the social media urge to f*ck you if your back is turned, as demonstrated by the profanely Tweeting billboard and NFL livetweets.

Most importantly, we saw last night that social media is now understood by any sentient media professional to be an essential part of any company’s relationship with its customers. In prior years, we focused on sins of commission. Now sins of omission in social media — Toyota, Comcast — can earn major SUXORZ. As Ian put it, “how is Toyota putting a full page ad in the New York Times ‘talking with your customers?’”

Looking through the lens of this year’s SUXORZ panel, I think 2009 was the year that social media advertising and marketing grew up. Or at least stopped wetting the bed.

Don’t let the dream die. Our mission never sleeps. SUXORZ are being perpetrated around us daily. While the average bozo dozes, we must remain vigilant. A young professional in the next cubicle over is right NOW scheming to screw up a profoundly beautiful social experience (aka the social web) with some $150,000 scheme to pay 250 tweeps to wear pantyhose while swimming in Lake Erie and drinking your client’s grape juice.

Walk over to that cubicle and say “SUXORZ 2011!” Then ask: how can we celebrate people’s interactions rather than polluting them?

Meanwhile, it’s your duty to chronicle travesties you witness in the SUXORZ Facebook group.

(A nice visual summation of the evening: an even mix of learning, laughing and libating.)

Is a man with a 4.0 GPA and a masters degree in education likely to be better at teaching in an inner city school than a woman with a BA in history who had a 2.5 GPA in her first two years of college and a 4.0 her junior and senior year?

All other things being equal, the slacker-turned-star history major is probably the better teacher.

Teach for America, which last year sent 4,100 recent college graduates to teach at schools in lower-income neighborhoods, has turned hiring great teachers into a science. In this month’s Atlantic magazine, Amanda Ripley does a tremendous job profiling TFA and what it has learned about what makes a great teacher.

Each year TFA evaluates 35,000 applicants on 30 different datapoints. After their hires have taught for a year, TFA cross-references these characteristics against how much each teacher’s students have advanced during the year.

What to look for in hiring an aspiring teacher? According to Ripley, TFA looked at the data it’s been gathering on job candidates since 1990 and identified these qualities as correlating strongly with a recruit’s success:

Grit: “those who initially scored high for ‘grit’ — defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and measured using a short multiple-chosce test– were 31% more likely than their less gritty peers to spur academic growth in their students.”

Happiness: Teachers who reported they were very content with their lives were 43% more likely to achieve great results in the classroom.

Achievement: “Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teacher. And the two best metric of previous success tend to be grade-point average and ‘leadership achievement’ — a record of running something and showing tangible results.” But a 4.0 isn’t essential: “an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college.”

XX chromosomes: It turns out “women are more likely to be effective in Teach for America.”

TFA also discovered that two factors that were expected to predict successful teaching — prior experience working in poor neighborhoods or a masters in education — had no correlation with classroom success.

All these characteristics are hard for a teacher to change post-facto. But it turns out there are a bunch of strategies that teachers can learn. These are detailed in a new book called Teaching as Leadership by Steven Farr, a former TFA teacher who now studies exceptionally effective TFA teachers. If the book is as good as Ripley’s article, my bet is that before long its a best seller among not only teachers and school administrators but biz execs and HR folks.

According to Ripley, in studying TFA’s best teachers, Farr found that “great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness…. Great teachers, he concluded, constantly re-evaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully — for the next day or the year ahead — by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

Does all this work? By refining its hiring and teacher training, TFA has nearly doubled the number of its teachers who advance their students more than 1.5 educational years in a single school year.

One last resource: TFA’s strategies for teachers are promoted at teachingasleadership.org.

This weekend ornery web entrepreneur and visionary Jason Calacanis blasted Comscore, the web analytics firm, calling for a boycott of its data and products.

Jason says he hates Comscore not only because its data is fundamentally wrong, but because the company asks web publishers to pay to “correct” its data.

According to these folks it was an unspoken truth for years that if you paid Comscore they fixed your numbers, and if you were a small company and didn’t, well, you suffered. Comscore would probably deny this, but their recent “pay to play” product shows their true stripes.

For the record, my colleagues and I have always found Comscore’s data to be hilariously inaccurate. As I recall, for a long while Comscore showed PerezHilton.com to have a predominantly male readership, even when our multiple different surveys and data-sources showed his readers to be 88-90% women.

I don’t know what Comscore’s data shows today, because frankly, I gave up caring about Comscore years ago. But if Jason wants to rumble with them, I’ll give a damn again.

As Jason says, Quantcast and Google do a much better job.

Here are some old links that speak to both Comscore’s power and inaccuracies: Hulu miscount; IAB calls for auditing ; Comscore kills Canadian site.

(For the record, while I’ve considered shorting Comscore’s stock in the past, I’m going to take no position while I’m complaining about their services.)

“The way to kill a newspaper is to ask more for less.”

That’s how legendary newsman Sir Harold Evans’ sums up publishing economics in his autobiography My Paper Chase.

The New York Times should remember Sir Harold’s rule as it builds a paywall around its online content.

The paywall will mean not only that readers pay more, but that they’ll get less. Why? As the newspaper of record, The New York Times currently is a must-read for any card-carrying member of the commercial, media, educational, or government elite. The paper is read, in part, because everyone reads it.

With fewer post-paywall readers, the paper will become less relevant, less essential. Which means the NYT will be charging more for less.

So how might NYT add value for its online patrons even as it raises prices?

The paper should spend the next year ramping the social network, currently nascent, among its readers, writers, editors and partners. Some of these social functions could be built in-house, others should be bolted on from LinkedIn and Facebook Connect.

Under this scenario, the newspaper’s prodigious reporting and analysis becomes the excuse for people to come to NYT.com, but the people themselves and the insights they swap are the essential reason for staying.

In a world deluged with opinions, rumors, and billions pixels pumped out by anybody with a cellphone, smart Times readers might pay to hobnob with a self-selected elite community.

As with the Times’ planned content paywall, drive-by readers would be able to sample and peek inside the social network, but could not get inside the site’s functionality to really participate in the social hubbub.

Turning its paywall into a velvet rope might raise the value of NYT.com’s product enough to justify raising prices.

Sir Harold, hater of class snobbery and champion of the newspaper’s roll as spokesman for the non-elite, might well hate my idea. And I don’t don’t find the idea entirely palatable either. But I’d certainly prefer this solution to watching NYT.com disappear into penury and irrelevance behind a paywall.

Do I think the Club NYT idea would work? I’d say its odds of working well are only 50/50. But those odds are fifty times better than NYT’s current plan to charge for online content plan, which, with apologies to Sir Harold, seems like the way to kill a website.

All of us are still puzzling over the implications (and ambit) of NYT’s move to a paywall for its online content, announced this week for implementation in January 2011.

The initial announcement suggested each visitor would get a certain number of free visits — a teaser or sampler — after which they would have to start paying. Print subscribers (me!) would get free access.

Today, Jay Rosen read the NYT-leaves and highlighted statements suggesting that NYT plans NOT to charge people who are referred to an article via a link on another site. This is Rosen’s summary of the meaning of this loophole:

for those people who get their news from the web itself, using search, aggregators social media and blogs to find the stuff they want, the stuff they find from the New York Times will always be available, free of charge. That looks a lot less like a pay wall to me. It isn’t a metered system if I can access the Times via the link economy without limit. This scrambles a lot of what’s been written on the subject.

One reading is that this is a loophole big enough to drive (or steal) a newspaper through.

The outcome could be perverse: loyal patrons, the people deserving the newspaper’s best service and pricing, will pay extravagantly. Drive-by users, without any loyalty or long-term commitment, will be treated royally.

The net result: loyal customers are punished and the best and most relevant info, curated by the social media machine, will be free.

(Sent by a blogger friend. Write us if you’d like a t-shirt for your own mini Jedi.)

As you’ve probably already noticed, we’ve launched a redesign of the site. (This morning at 7am, in fact.) If you’re reading on an RSS reader, hustle on over and take a look at our masterpiece.

Here’s an overview of the changes:

In the words of one staffer deeply involved in the process, we are officially “pushing out of the 1970s feel and into the web2.0 feel… haha ”

To which I can only say this…

Many thanks to Orsi, Megan, Kate, Peter, Vega and Zsolt for inspiring the rethink and grinding out the project’s many details.

Next week we’ll announce some changes in our commission structure — more money for bloggers — with other good news later in the spring.

For all the history majors (what, just me?) here’s a screengrab of our original site in the fall of 2002.

And, for those of you who’ve already forgotten, here’s what Blogads.com looked like yesterday.

To the many bloggers and advertisers who have been with us since the early days — some of you even stretch back to 2002 — thank you again for all your support and inspiration. We all remain incredibly proud to serve America’s greatest bloggers in their quest to carve out a viable new space for independent thought and creativity.

I guess this isn’t news, but its worth noting that we reached a new low today, with fully 87% of Huffingandpuffing.com’s most popular stories being either skin or rumors or both.

With America deciding to send 30k new troops to Aphganistan and historic health-care legislation being hotly debated, the only headline of semi-national import that fascinates Huffpo readers is “Palin’s Father: She Left Hawaii Because Asians Made Her Uncomfortable.” That “story” is actually a link and 80 word rehash of a point in a recent article in the New Yorker magazine, with no new reporting or insight added by Huffpo.

For the record:

Thank you Google ad relevance algorithms! You’ve got a weird sense of humor.

Even though the lead story today on Huffpo is “U.S. MILITARY CHIEF: ‘2010 WILL BE A PRETTY VIOLENT YEAR’” it nearly all the top stories are rumor and raunch. Six of eight top stories, in fact.

Ms. Huffington isn’t joking when she says “Huffpo isn’t just about politics any more.”

Want to help test a new service we’re coding? Drop me a line and I’ll get you a beta code for Twiangulate.

The service is simple, something we originally designed for staff use. Exhausted by plowing through lists of hundreds of people who our favorite tweeters follow, we rigged Twiangulate to (you guessed it) triangulate: create a short list of interesting people by comparing two or three target Tweeters’ followees. The process combines the robustness of code with the discernment of hand-sorting.

Here are a few pre-baked lists:
Politicos: @benpolitico + @jmartpolitico + @AriMelber
Open gov geeks: @cjoh + @ellnmllr + @bill_allison
Reason editors, past and present: @nickgillespie + @mleewelch + @vpostrel

Turns out that AriMelber, benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow 34 people in common. AriMelber and benpolitico follow another 24 in common. AriMelber and jmartpolitico follow another 47. And benpolitico and jmartpolitico follow a separate set of 53. If you’re a DC-news geek, charting who is on one list but not the others is fascinating.

Twiangulate’s ambitions aren’t huge. We’re just trying to help people more efficiently figure out who their friends, enemies and peers are following. Twiangulate augments Twitter’s SUL and its new “user generated” Lists, which offer essentially monocular snapshots of a dynamic, multi-dimensional world. Taking a more social approach, Twiangulate aggregates the wisdom of small crowds.

The gurus over at influence mapping firm Morningside Analytics recently built this map that illustrates the central of blogs in our liberal and conservative networks in the healthcare and energy policy debates.

Here’s the healthcare map, with our blogs highlighted.

And here’s their map for energy blogs with Blogads.

Here’s the post with more context.

Here’s my minutely edited version of a brilliant “quick review” guide to saving the media, originally inMetafilter:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avariciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
( ) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Print readers will not put up with it
( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business
( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt
( ) [Assumes you'll get very lucky]

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Readers’ unwillingness to pay for just news
( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
( ) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
( ) Sources’ proven unwillingness to “go direct”
( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
( ) The high cost of investigative journalism
( ) Unpopularity of weird [any] new taxes
( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
( ) Legal liability of “citizen journalism”
( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
( ) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
( ) The necessity of the editing process
( ) Americans’ huge distrust of professional journalism
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
( ) Technically illiterate politicians [anybody]
( ) The tragedy of the commons
( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites
( ) Google is happy to give the click revenue to somebody else for a penny less

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) That the US press dropped the ball on Iraq is a symptom, not a cause
( ) Print advertising pays so well because advertisers *can’t* work out the return they’re getting.
( ) Information does not want to be free
( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few readers are actually all that interested in, quite honestly
( ) That your friend was misquoted once in a paper does not mean journalism is bunk
( ) Everybody reading the same story is a feature, not a bug
( ) Having a free online “printing press” doesn’t turn you into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
( ) Wall Street won’t allow newspaper groups to back off from 20% profit margins
( ) Newspaper executives are second only to record industry executives for short-sighted idiocy
( ) E-paper still doesn’t give publishers back their ad monopoly and hence its revenue
( ) You can’t charge for online content unless all your competitors do it too, all at once.
( ) Ethics are hard to hold up when your bills are due
( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
( ) “Gatekeepers” can help keep out undesirable things
( ) Publishing less often makes you even less relevant
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Free society depends upon a free press
( ) Democracy is bad enough with the press we’ve already got
( ) You think print is bad? Imagine Fox News, as a blog. That’s what your idea will turn into.
( ) Reader-generated content is to professional news what YouTube is to big-studio movies.
( ) Have you read the comments on news websites? They make YouTubers look like geniuses.
( ) You are Jeff Jarvis
( ) Or Dave Winer

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

(via BoingBoing.)

If you head over to DailyKos, you can see the newest twist the SEIU is putting on their Tweet ads.

The recommended tweets, which appear on posts about healthcare like this one, include not only the SEIU, but peer organizations and even individuals like @owillis and @punditmom playing on the true potlatch spirit of Twitter and Follow-Fridays. You can see 3 variations below.

When are people going to get serious about Huffpo’s unseriousness?

Every day brings another round of accolades for Huffpo’s contributions to journalism. Maybe a Pulitzer, pant pant.

But beneath the skin (of buxom beauties) on Huffpo, there’s less beef than many (and Huffpo’s PR machine) give Huffpo credit for.

Take this post titled “Huffington Post Traffic Blows Past LA Times, Washington Post” from the Silicon Valley Insider, for example:

The Huffington Post has now blown past the sites of both the LA Times and the Washington Post, says Compete.com.

Huffington Post had 8.4 million uniques in September, up from 7 million in August. The LA Times site had 8.3 million uniques in September, versus 8.2 in August. The Washington Post took the hardest fall, going to 8.1 million uniques in September from 9.3 million in August.

The post ends by asking “What was that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was just saying about how print publications aren’t writing stuff people want to read?”

Read?

Maybe if the LA Times and Washington Post included lots of “content” like “Shauna Sand’s SEX TAPE: Lorenzo Lamas’ Ex’s Explicit VIDEO ONLINE” and “The 10 Creepiest Unintentionally-Sexual Ads Of All Time (VIDEO PHOTOS)” and “January Jones Drinks Beer, Dons Leather, Says Ex-Boyfriend Ashton Thought She’d Fail” their readership (or viewership) would be higher.

And BTW, those happen to be posts 2, 3 and 4 on Huffpo’s list of most popular stories today.

And here’s another recent set of Huffpo’s stunning contributions to journalism. As folks used to say about Playboy, no doubt lots of people read Huffpo “for the stories.”

Pulitzer, anyone?

If you’re a DailyKos reader, you’ve probably seen some new ads by the SEIU today appearing at the bottom of posts about health-care.

The ads look like this…

The images I’ve posted here aren’t actionable, but if you were looking at the real thing as a reader on DailyKos, you’d be able to edit the tweet and post it.

The ads offer a nimble advertiser a quick and easy way to fan the flames of a hot topic, co-joining blog reader passion and a timely topic to trigger a bonfire of tweets. Shazam!

More fun stuff on the way…

Update: PC Magazine chimes in: “If you’re like me, you’ve been losing sleep at night, worrying that third-party companies haven’t been able to effectively leverage the Twitter platform for their advertising benefit. Have no fear! Check out the admittedly clever ad above from the Service Employees International Union.”

A new survey seems to undermine reports of Twitter’s impact on movies by looking at the decision-making of individual users. Unfortunately, focusing on individual relationships, the analysis doesn’t take into account the structure of the network that actually generates the stimuli that individuals receive. First, the survey:

“Our research found a significant overestimation of the Twitter Effect,” Kevin Goetz, the president of OTX’s worldwide motion picture group, told me. “The number of people who use Twitter are only about 10% to 12% of all moviegoers. And when we asked people what was the most influential source of moviegoing word of mouth, Twitter finished last, at the bottom of the list.”

OTX did an online survey of nearly 1,500 moviegoers in mid- September, the bulk of the sample being moviegoers from age 13 to 49, the key moviegoing demographic group. When asked what was the most influential source for word of mouth, most respondents picked “family and friends and coworkers,” which scored 40%, followed by Facebook (31%), MySpace (9%), IMDB (8%), with Twitter and online message boards bringing up the rear with 6% each.

“The data suggests that all the media play for the Twitter Effect is really jumping the gun,” says Vinnie Bruzzese, the exec VP of OTX’s motion picture group. “It has an impact, but it’s coming much later on, not as initial reaction. There may be people with a lot of followers on Twitter, but the most influential people in terms of word of mouth are still the people you’re talking to every day — your friends and co-workers.”

But the science of networks dictates that the etiology of infection/influence for individual final users/consumers isn’t as important as the influence on the people in the center of the network, the hub.

As the great new book “Connected” explains, most natural human networks aren’t shaped like this:

But this:

In short, all nodes (aka consumers) are not created equally. As the caption notes, “even though C and D both have six friends, they have very different locations in the social network. C is much more central, and D is more peripheral; C’s friends have many friends themselves, whereas D’s friends tend to have few or no friends.”

Twitter users are, by definition, like person C in this graph — they’re hyper-communicators who are highly networked both online and off.

In a brilliant piece of arm-chair reportage, Clay Shirky dissects (literally and literarily) his local paper and discovers that out of an editorial staff of 59, only 6 folks actually report on local news.

Shirky concludes:

There are dozen or so reporters and editors in Columbia, Missouri, whose daily and public work is critical to the orderly functioning of that town, and those people are trapped inside a burning business model.

Shirky’s entire analysis, like just about everything else he does, is brilliant.

But logically flawed? We’d like to believe that local papers make a difference. But has anyone proven that they do? Do towns with newspapers function better? As Shirky himself notes, “Ann Arbor, another midwestern college town and just a bit larger than Columbia, doesn’t have a newspaper at all.” Is corruption or mayhem rampant in Ann Arbor?

Health Care for America Now (HCAN) launched a bunch of cool blogads this morning promoting their “sick of it” campaign.

The best, in my opinion, does the very clever trick of pulling into the ads recent tweets that use the #sickofit tag.

If you look closely, you can see that all the clickable elements — tweeter’s nickname, hashtags, any URLs — are visible within the ad.

And if you go look at the ad live on Talkleft (or 100+ other blogs) you can see that each of those elements is separately clickable. This ad has not only the virtue of providing users with more information, timely information, but making the community part of the message. And isn’t that what social media is all about? Maybe we should start a #socialads4socialmedia tag?

Here are a couple of other ad versions running at the same time:

Working with Dynamic Logic, Doubleclick finds:

When you add up performance across all the brand metrics studied, simple Flash ads provide less brand impact than any other format – even GIFs and JPEGs. It turns out all those advertisers who served simple Flash ads through DoubleClick last year could’ve saved themselves some time and hassle by simply producing animated GIFs.

Taking this a step further, don’t forget, we’ve found animation usually reduces clicks.

Congratulations to HCAN for kicking off the autumn ad season with a genius ad.

The ad, placed on the the epic FAILBLOG, touts a Twitter hashtag campaign (#failephant) attacking GOP healthcare policies. Here’s a copy of the current ad.

Now if we can just get HCAN to feature a feed of the #failephant tweets in their ad, this will be an unFAIL home-run. (See example at left.)

A colleague just saw this ad on Facebook promoting an SXSW panel. Clever.

There seems to be something of a cover-up going on at the HuffingtonPost.

Apparently embarrassed by the importance of sex-driven stories in powering its traffic, Huffpo has recently changed its “most popular stories” feature to obscure how many page impressions each story gets.

The stories now seem to be ranked according to # of comments (see example of the new format at the bottom of the post) but earlier this summer, you could see the number of raw impressions each story was getting.

While serious policy-related “politics” stories, which Huffpo pretends are its bread and butter, got 50k impressions, stories like “When your Boob tape is showing” and “Women’s Iconic Swimsuit movie moments” got millions.

For the record, here are screen grabs of the most popular Huffpo stories, as ranked by page views, for three different days earlier this summer, just before Huffpo decided to hide its skin-fixation:

And here the new format, which obscures but not entirely hides, the Huffpo readers’ hormonal urges:

Check out what Huffpo’s readers are excited about today.

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with any of this stuff… it’s just that this bonfire of skin is a long way from the highbrow content that Arianna claims to be championing:

On Tuesday, the day when the HuffingtonPost’s headline story was “SOTOMAYOR UNDER THE GUN” these were the site’s most popular stories:

Huffpo bills itself as a serious forum for liberal thinkers… I wonder what percentage of its clicks are purely skin? Huffpo’s always-sober lead story is a thin veneer of high-brow atop a smorgasbord of breasts, butts and assorted salaciousness.

Many nuggets in Clay Shirky’s essay about the death of publishing:

The hard truth about the future of journalism is that nobody knows for sure what will happen; the current system is so brittle, and the alternatives are so speculative, that there’s no hope for a simple and orderly transition from State A to State B. Chaos is our lot; the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures. Two of the most important are the changing natures of the public, and of subsidy.

As Paul Starr, the great sociologist of media, has often noted, journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience. For a TV show with an audience of a million, no one cares whether it’s the same million every week — head count rules. A public, by contrast, is a group of people who not only know things, but know other members of the public know those things as well. Both persistence and synchrony matter, because journalism is about more than dissemination of news; it’s about the creation of shared awareness.

Consider, as an illustration, the difference between assembling a public for a newspaper, and for stories on that paper’s website. The publisher assembled the public for the paper, maintaining subscribers lists and distribution chains, and got to decide what front-page news was for those readers. This was a bottleneck of value that used to be enforced by the limitations of print and distribution, and by lack of competition for sources of written news.

On the website, however, the stories are the same, but assembling various publics is different. The home page doesn’t serve the function the front page used to; for many papers, less than half the traffic even sees the home page. Instead, people who care about gay marriage, say, will pass around the relevant articles in email, IM, or twitter, whether those stories are on page A1 or B17, whether the paper is published in Anchorage or Miami. Online, it is the relevant networked publics, not the editorial board, who determine much of what gets read.

The logic of the Internet, a medium that is natively good at helping groups communicate at vanishingly low cost, is that the act of forming a public has become something the public is increasingly doing for itself, rather than needing to wait for a publication (note the root) to do it for them. More publics will form, they will be smaller, shorter-lived, and less geographically contiguous, and they will overlap more than the previous era’s larger, more rooted, more stable publics.

Which brings us to the changes in subsidy. Journalism written for that fraction of the population that follows the news closely has always been subsidized. For the last century, newspaper journalism had direct subsidy from advertisement and cross-subsidy from sports fans and coupon clippers who never really cared about the city council or the coup in Madagascar. The packages containing news have been so bundled and cross-funded that we’ve never really known precisely the size of the audience for actual civic-minded reporting, or how much direct fees from that audience would amount to. We do know, however, that the rough answers are “Small” and “Not much,” answers that suggest radical transformation, now that the media environment in which those subsidies flourished is gone.

Agreed. I agree less with his remaining points.

There are many shifts coming, but three big ones are an increase in direct participation; an increase in the leverage of the professionals working alongside the amateurs; and a second great age of patronage.

Participation first. Various self-assembled publics can increasingly engage in acts of journalism on their own. The functions of gathering readers, and providing analysis and opinion, are already moving from professional organizations directly into these overlapping publics, and increasingly, the basic act of reporting — of observing and then relaying — is as well. All of this represents a massive supply-side subsidy to the volume and variety of raw reporting.

Though we do lots of writing about ourselves, there’s still very little “reporting” going on. Reporters, even when not brilliant themselves, do a great job of asking questions others aren’t asking.

Similarly, William Bastone and his staff at the Smoking Gun have moved from shoe leather to database queries in uncovering news; here the leverage is not professionals and amateurs but professionals and machines. The ability to get out of the “phone call” model of reporting — one paid journalist talking to one source at a time — and to instead bring in everything the internet has taught us about automation, syndication, parallel effort, and decentralization will increasingly characterize successful new models of journalism.

Agreed. This one I’m still chewing on:

Finally, there’s patronage, either of the “one rich person” model, as with Richard Mellon Scaife’s subsidy of conservative journals, or the NPR Fund Drive model, where the small core of highly involved users makes above-market-price donations to provision a universally accessible good run for revenue but not for profit. These models have always existed alongside the for-profit press, but they were always viewed as oddities, their ability to continue to function being regarded more as a kind of perverse outcome than evidence of continued viability.

In an age where the cost of making things public has fallen precipitously, patronage models suddenly look not just viable but eminently reproducible. The leverage to be gotten from motivations other than profit is now growing rather than shrinking; a poorly capitalized journalistic weblog is now likelier to reach a million readers than a well-funded but traditional journalistic outfit is.

Because journalism has always been subsidized, and because the public can increasingly get involved in activities too complex for loose groups to take on before the current era, journalism is seeping into the population at large, with the models of subsidy being altered to fit that shift. The transition here is like the spread of the ability to drive, from paid chauffeurs to the whole population. We still pay people to drive, from buses to race cars, and there are more paid drivers today than there were in the days of the chauffeur. Paid drivers are, however, no longer the majority of all drivers.

I guess the Sunlight Foundation qualifies as the latter. SEIU blog qualifies. What else?

This morning Perez Hilton launched the first major Twitterer’s ad campaign, for Sony Picture’s romantic comedy “The Ugly Truth.” As far as we know, Perez’s blast marks the first time a Twitter personality has leveraged his or her influence on behalf of an advertiser.

Readers will tweet their best dating advice to @uglytruthmovie. Their tweets will be featured on PerezHilton.com, where readers will rate the dating tips. The top 10 tips will be featured on the site this Friday. Perez is doing sponsored tweets (clearly marked) to promote the contest.

Perez began tweeting in early January 2009 and is currently the 20th most-followed Twitterer, with 1.2 million followers. Perez is the fourth most retweeted person on Twitter.

WaPo’s web columnist Dan Froomkin gets the ax because his online articles don’t get enough traffic.

Think about all the coverage that will disappear in coming years as this philosophy becomes standard.

Think about all the far away places about which the average person knows little and care less — Sudan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Pakistan, Ghana, Taiwan, South Korea, Peru — that won’t measure up to the web’s popularity standards and slowly disappear as take-it-or-leave-it bundle of The Newspaper is replaced by the “every word for itself” metrics of web publishing.

The HuffingtonPost has stepped up to hire Froomkin — no doubt garnering a nice little spike in page impressions and PR — but is itself on vanguard of the desperate commercial scramble to add frothy content to drive page impressions and revenues. (Right this second the most popular stories on Huffpo are #1 “Sarah Palin’s Most memorable style moments” #2 “Women’s iconic swimsuit movie moments” #3 “ADN confirms, Sarah Palin’s story doesn’t add up” and #4 “Emma Watson’s Wardrobe Malfunction.”)

I’m not arguing that Froomkin was a great journalist or deserved to stay at the Post. I’m just marking this small moment in the shifting climate of publishing, a moment in which web metrics nudge aside the editor’s judgement.