The cobbler’s kids never have shoes, and our blog has been without comments for months, with the fix always in a queue behind more lucrative work.

Welcome back, commenters!

Excellent analysis but grim news for print-lovers from Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic:

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news­paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”

…

Most likely, the interim step for The Times and other newspapers will be to move to digital-only distribution (perhaps preserving the more profitable Sunday editions). Already, most readers of The Times are consuming it online. The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still …) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it’s intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times’ reach many times over.

The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers, who pay actual cash money for the privilege of consuming the paper, and who are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who don’t and aren’t. Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

Over vacation, Sophie stumbled on this long WPost magazine article about Joshua Bell’s adventure as a panhandler in the DC metro station. There are three great videos embedded in the article.

Some bloggers are riled by Huffpos copy/paste “journalism.” (Thank you Amy!)

“Because in the time when companies can plant jobs whereever there’s an internet connection, and two thirds of all new jobs require a higher education, or advanced training, if we want to out-compete the world tomorrow, we’re going to have to out-educate today.”

Bloomberg: “There are roughly three funds-of-funds for every single hedge fund, up from one to seven in 2001, according HFR.”

FAIL.

Right now it seems there are no photos to commemorate our best party ever.

Seems everyone had too many glasses and bottles in their hands to take photos. A sign of a great party.

But also an unpleasant surprise, since I promised photos in this morning’s Blogads payout.

Update: A photo of the “blogle your mind” trivia game, designed by Megan and Kate, and played by sundry staff. Our guests weren’t so intrigued and huddled by the drinks and food until we were done.

Wow, bad, bad, bad.

Ian Schafer pansPizza Hut’s new viral video:

Lets see…anger mom & pop pizza places (yes, in this economy), and bring in the mass-produced bastardization of their bread and butter to rub in their face. Yeah. That makes me feel better about Pizza Hut. It’s one thing to call out your competition if they are another chain. It’s another to insult small businesses.

My advice? Next time, stop trying to make a ‘viral’ with the goal of getting views, and instead, focus on creating content that actually builds your brand — or at least makes it look good.

This one is made for the Suxorz at SXSW 09. Posting now to the Suxorz Facebook group.

…was to forget a few code words?

Let’s pause this morning to wallow in the irony of the juxtaposition of articles on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times (I’m going to miss her!) excoriating Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for attempting to trade the Obama Senatorial seat for campaign contributions versus an article about how much campaign cash New York Senator Chuck Schumer raises from the businesses he helps to regulate.

The next day, Mr. Schumer appeared at a breakfast fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan for Senate Democrats. Addressing Henry R. Kravis, the buyout billionaire, and about 20 other finance industry executives, he warned that a bailout would be a hard sell on Capitol Hill. Then he offered some reassurance: The businessmen could count on the Democrats to help steer the nation through the financial turmoil.

“We are not going to be a bunch of crazy, anti-business liberals,” one executive said, summarizing Mr. Schumer’s remarks. “We are going to be effective, moderate advocates for sound economic policies, good responsible stewards you can trust.”

The message clearly resonated. The next week, executives at firms represented at the breakfast sent in more than $135,000 in campaign donations.

The article went on to detail the millions that Schumer has raised from Wall Street and included a useful table of Schumer’s influence on regulation relating to Wall Street. Schumer sure looks “bought” by security industry interests.

Blagojevich’s chief mistake was to articulate the quid pro quo to urgently and loudly, rather than letting politics take its natural course.

Arguably, Schumer’s campaign-cash-smudged vision has cost the American people far more than any Senate seat Blogojevich wanted to peddle.

“He is serving the parochial interest of a very small group of financial people, bankers, investment bankers, fund managers, private equity firms, rather than serving the general public,” said John C. Bogle, the founder and former chairman of the Vanguard Group, the giant mutual fund house. “It has hurt the American investor first and the average American taxpayer.”

Has anyone considered taping Schumer’s phone? I guess we don’t need to bother, when it’s on the front page of the New York Times.