Photo-essayist and bon vivant Tony Pierce spent yesterday trying to track down the text of a $56,000 Sean Penn anti-war ad in the Washington Post. Problem: the WPost doesn’t cover its own ads; the NYTimes certainly doesn’t cover the Post’s ads; A-bloggers and e-Pundits are watching foliage or baseball. Tony writes “bloggers are missing their windows of opportunity. people have plenty of ways to get to their news and columns from more famous writers who editoralize. what the kids want today are links to things that no one else is linking to. tell them something they dont know.” And “im trying to make this glorified science fair project actually provide a freaking service.”

Alan Feuer: “At least one Chinese restaurant in Manhattan is sending out delivery orders in cartons adorned not with the traditional “Thank You, Enjoy,” but with something a bit more jarring: an advertisement for Cingular Wireless, a purveyor of cellular phone service.”

Erik D’Amato writes Glenn Reynolds: “For most people, news is primarily about sights and sounds: 9/11, men walking on the moon, the white Bronco inching down the freeway, the white van circling DC. And in the background, a bit of yakking, a lot of it unscripted. Why should we think Big Video Media will be able to compete with cheap video over the wire any better than Big Print Media have have been able to keep up with cheap written oped over the wire?” Erik, who once edited me and later succeeded me as editor of the Budapest Business Journal, better start blogging soon.

Commenting on a spate of magazine launches, Tina Brown says: “If I was to do Talk again, I would do it on the Web.” (Via Nick Denton.)

Revenues for eBay increased 73% in Q3 2002 versus Q3 2001. Total transaction volume increased 93%. Five categories exceed $1 billion in volume in 2002.

Excerpts from eBay’s press release:

Online net transaction revenues in Q3-02 increased 73% year over year to a record $263.6 million, driven by 52% year-over-year transaction revenue growth in the U.S. and 163% year-over-year transaction growth internationally. On an overall consolidated basis, Q3-02 net revenues increased 49% over the $194.4 million generated in Q3-01, reflecting the expected 40% year-over-year decrease in third party advertising revenues.”

Listings ‘ eBay hosted a record 160 million listings during the quarter, representing a 47% year-over-year increase from the 109 million reported in Q3-01.

Registered Users ‘ Cumulative confirmed registered users at the end of Q3-02 totaled a record 54.9 million, a sequential increase of 5.2 million users and a 46% increase over the 37.6 million users reported at the end of Q3-01.

Based on Q3-02 annualized GMS, eBay now has five categories that generate more than $1 billion in worldwide GMS: eBay Motors at $3.8 billion, Computers at $1.6 billion, Consumer Electronics at $1.4 billion, Books/Movies/Music at $1.2 billion and Sports at $1.0 billion.

Nearly 37,000 sellers on eBay.com and 14,000 sellers internationally, are currently taking advantage of the enhanced merchandising capabilities of eBay Stores.

During Q3-02, PayPal users generated $1.79 billion in Total Payment Volume, representing a 93% increase from the $925 million generated in Q3-01. PayPal net revenues totaled $59.3 million, representing a 98% increase from Q3-01.

The release can be accessed from this page.

“Revenues for New York Times Digital increased 26.8 percent in the third quarter to $18.2 million from $14.4 million in the year-ago quarter. Revenues improved as a result of stronger online advertising, especially in the technology, finance and travel categories. Advertising renewal rates were strong and new advertising formats continued to attract increasing advertiser interest. Overall online classified advertising rose with particular strength in real estate and autos. Operating profit was $2.8 million in the third quarter compared with $0.8 million in the year-ago quarter, primarily resulting from an increase in revenues.” Also, see color here.

And at Tribune Company, parent to the LATimes, Chicago Tribune and others, digital revenues were up 32% over the same quarter last year. “Third quarter revenue growth was due primarily to higher classified revenues: recruitment was up 31 percent, auto rose 30 percent and real estate increased 37 percent,” the company said in a press release. Print classifieds continued to slump, down 3 percent versus last year. “Help wanted revenue for the group was down 20 percent.” (Via LAExaminer.)

Andrea Orr: “Take out the contribution from Overture and Yahoo’s other advertising revenue was flat to down. Yahoo said that the addition of paid listings helped it attract a host of small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the budget to buy expensive banner ads. Even as the rates go up, paid listings remain comparatively cheap.”

“CNN shares the building with the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, and the handful of other news organizations that have a permanent presence in Baghdad. But there’s an uncomfortable fact about this building to which these tenants don’t often call attention: It’s the Iraqi Ministry of Information.” (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Glenn Reyonlds suggests that Traditional Media’s “news analysis” centurians will be overrun by hordes of barbarian pundits slinging their views for free. But, he adds, reporting news “is still mostly the province of professional journalism, and that’s less likely to change.”

I’m more pessimistic for traditional media’s news gathering functions and, surprise, more optimistic for news entrepreneurs. OK, so I thought this six years ago too. But times are changing fast.

First, thin media’s competitive advantages — low overheads, deep commitment to the beat and personal rapport with readers — are finally being unleashed by fissioning weblog networks. The distribution dam has broken; news can flood anywhere gravity takes it.

Second, margins in traditional media’s core businesses are collapsing. Subscriptions aren’t being cannibalized by the web, but gravy-slathered classified ad revenues are, as these two posts document.

Third, squeezed media margins mean that large swathes of news demand increasingly go unserved. Think of the dozen or more tech publications that have disappeared in the last six months; this isn’t because technology is less important today or people are less transfixed by the subject matter … it’s just that their ad revenue wasn’t big enough to support big staffs and printing and distribution.

All this invites, no instead let’s say demands, news entrepreneurs. What is to be done? Obviously, I’m betting news entrepreneurs can make money selling ads, since that is the market we support with Blogads. Sure it will take a while for people to develop the lingo and metrics to fire weblog advertisers’ imaginations. But the convergence of high-audience commitment and low overheads make Blogad ignition inevitable.

Other pieces may be needed to complete the ecosystem. For example, the Blogging Network postulates that audiences will subscribe to access weblog content. But padlocking content seems to toss grit into networking, thin media’s essential engine for propagation.

There may be another way to fund news entrepreneurs without killing the free-for-all, though. Matt Welch pushed forward a great idea today, and I’ll try to nudge it further. He suggests that bloggers solicit funding for specific projects. “If you actually put a set price on something that would guarantee to produce sweet & relevant content for readers, well, wouldn’t that be interesting?”

If you’ve ever wondered why writers at the New Yorker or the Atlantic or the New York Times can churn out amazing reporting, analysis and prose, it’s partly because they get paid darn well for doing it and don’t have to worry about much else. What’s the going rate? Must be $2 or $3 a word for mags and a little less for newspapers. You can do a lot of fine thinking for that price.

Yes, just as editors commission articles, groups of bloggers might commission freelance thinkers to spend a few days or a month focused on a project… without having to sweat bills or rent. Let’s raise $4750 to send Matt to Baghdad or Tehran for two weeks, paying him half up front and half when he delivers five 2000-word articles on specified subjects. Send Andrew Sullivan to North Korea to blog from another evil axis angle. Or pay Ken Layne $200 for attending some school board meetings in LA and turning in a 1000-word ramble. Commission David Gallagher to dig out the daily user tally for major news sites. Or buy Tony Pierce a plane ticket to Washington for a photo-essay on the sniper(s). Or pay Amy Langfield $375 to badger some congressmen about the health insurance options for the self-employed and report on what she hears. Send to interview Bill O’Reilly’s first girl-friend. Pay [url=http://80211b.weblogger.com/]Glenn Fleishman $750 to write the definitive layman’s guide to WiFi. Pay Bill Quick $1000 to report on a few nights in a San Francisco homeless shelter. Pay Emmaneulle Richard to ask French expats why they love LA. Pay Olivier Travers to spend two days in Paris interviewing his compatriots about the coming war on Iraq. Let Megan McArdle pop the housing bubble (or its myth) once and for all. Put Eric Olsen on the road with the Stones or Dylan.

Of course, the second component of great journalism is outstanding editing. Editors assign gently, question persistently, cut confidently, clarify murky prose and disentangle biases. But perhaps the instant feedback from readers and peers can compensate for the editorless blog’s weaknesses. We’ll see.

(10/17/02: I’ve come across some fun anti-blogonomics posts this morning. For example a) “No money in blogging. Yes, I’m biased. I like to point to articles that support my opinions.” b) “Sponsorship of content inevitably ends in tears, because it requires the content producer to be incorruptible.” c) “I don’t think I would mind a grant to fund my blogging, provided it wasn’t dictated to me what I could and couldn’t write. I might even be willing to accept sponsorship from , say, the Audobon Society, since I already write about birds and the AS isn’t really selling anything.” I wonder: why the religiously fervent belief that writers can’t profit online? Don’t miss this fine spoof of some anti-blogonomics rhetoric: “There is absolutely no way that I would violate the trust of my readers by blogging for money. My readers know that I’ll always be honest with them, and would never sell out for filthy lucre. (By the way, while we’re on the subject of readers, I would like to recommend to you the ultimate in RSS feeds — the Userland RSS feed. It dices, it slices, it purée, why it can even clean Windows.”)

Thinking about blogonomics, Andrew Sullivan writes: “I wonder if there’s ever been a technological innovation that has combined such extraordinary new power with such dramatically poor financial rewards.” (Via Nick Denton.)

Hang in there Andrew. There were only 160 years between the invention of the movable type printing press and the genesis of the newspaper. Actually, our early experience suggests www.andrewsullivan.com should make $500-1500 a month selling Blogads.

Sullivan notes that the NYTimes.com’s readership has leapfrogged over print circulation and credits this interview. (I’ll confess that this is my first appearance in The Sunday Times of London.)

It is interesting to note that even with the NYTimes.com traffic factoid’s appearance in the Sunday Times, the information still doesn’t show up in Noogle. OK, another search suggests that the Sunday Times is not indexed in Noogle.