Matt Welch pummels the press poobahs who are busily creating a “publishing mini-genre” lamenting the dire state of American Journalism.

Reviewing books by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel, Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, Matt is nauseated by the “factually uncluttered hyperbole,” unctuous “Statements of Concern,” and, most of all, the whiny poobahs’ self-congratulatory bias against other people mucking around in a business that THEY feel entitled to control by committee edict and academic fiat.

Written by people suckled on and situated in America’s news behemoths, the books fret that there aren’t enough behemoths and take this as a sign of impending doom. They either ignore the explosion of other news resources — niche magazines, blogs, cable channels, “fingertip access to 10,000 faraway newspapers” — or see these as negative.
Go read the whole review.

Riva Richmond highlights the renewed focus by Yahoo, MS and ALN on serving small businesses online. “An October study conducted for the U.S. Small Business Administration found that 57% of U.S. companies with 250 employees or less, which are estimated to number about 21.3 million, use the Internet. And 32% of those not online today expect to be within the next year. Some 60% of the companies with Internet access had a Web site, and 35% sold products and services online, overwhelmingly to consumers. According to the Yankee Group, 80% of companies with between two and 19 employees have Internet access and 28% have a Web site. Their top reasons for making these technology purchases are to reduce costs, generate more revenue and improve productivity, says analyst Helen Chan.” To reitterate, the smallest companies are the biggest users.

Geoffrey Fowler wrote a good overview of attempts to categorize blogs today for the WSJ. He doesn’t manage to crack the age-old riddle — how to explain blogging to someone whose never done it.

Testing Nick Denton’s new Vonage line, I called his number and got a crisp connection.

I asked Nick how the tech blog he publishes, Gizmodo, is doing. He said traffic is growing 50% a month and is currently at 6,000 page impressions a day… with no marketing expenditure.

“We’ve sold a ton of Samsung phones” recently through Amazon affiliate links, he said. There are good days but also “long dry spells,” he said. When page views get to 15,000 a day, the site will add banners, Nick said.

Nick thinks Gizmodo could do 100,000 page impressions a day in 12-18 months. At that point, relative to its cost “in the very low thousands per month,” Gizmodo will be a “remarkably profitable little media.” Nick figures that a blog publisher can buy 200 posts for $1000, whereas a print publisher might pay the same money for just three freelance articles.

Based on what he’s learned from Gizmodo, Nick is planning a blog focused on New York high society. Real estate ads will be a prime revenue source. “The advertisers target old money in the New York Observer. We’ll serve the advertisers targetting the young money,” he said.

“We’re getting the formula refined for thin media.” If he could identify the right niches and locales, Nick said, “I’d love to launch one of these a month.”