Light at end of tunnel for papers, and more new ideas for smart paywalls

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Earlier this week, I blogged about how Matthew Ingram at GigaOm appears to have a Jeff Jarvis/Clay Shirky/Jay Rosen paywall-hating burr up his ass.

Well, per Ken Doctor at Nieman Labs, that’s a good description, because Ingram, a blind follower of the Three Musketeers of Gnu Journalism (deliberately ripped off, with same snarky intent, from Gnu Atheism) details several specific ways in which he and they are wrong.

First, especially at non-daily papers, the light is not only apparently at the end of the tunnel, but profits may actually pick up next year. As a result of that, newspaper stock prices (albeit from in-the-toilet lows) are soaring.

And, yes, even some non-dailies have paywalls. The light for dailies, definitely for smaller ones, and possibly for mid-sized ones, is at least probably getting near to a flattening out point.

Second, and directly related, Doctor details the economics of paywalls. There’s a variety of ways to skin the paywall cat. Most new adopters are going with fewer freebie reads than, say, the New York Times, and also a lot less leakiness. That includes not just small companies but as big a boy as Gannett. Doctor says opt-out provisions, in which hardcopy subscribers are automatically charged at least a nominal fee for digital access, are also growing. (I hate opt-out provisions in general, including this one, but … the idea is, nonetheless, growing.)

Third, the truth is what the Three Musketeers and hangers-on won’t tell you: paywalls are growing internationally, too.

But, even there, Doctor starts with the US side of the equation:

By the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid (in March), more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites.

But, that’s his takeoff point to note that (as of March) more than a dozen European dailies also had paywalls.

That, then, leads to the more significant issue. Doctor notes most paywalls are neither flaming successes nor flaming failures. So, why?

So if charging for digital access — a too long phrase, but one that’s most accurate than paywall — is neither a panacea nor a tombstone on the way to the inevitable, what is it? It’s a building block, and it’s a way to re-envision the business.

And, that’s a good point. 

Isn’t that type of creative thinking and re-envisioning what the Three Musketeers laud?

Short answer? Yes, as long as it’s done for free online.

That’s because they deliberately practice a selective quoting of only one of two sentences from Stewart Brand’s famous “Information wants to be free” comment:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Note carefully that first sentence.

Then, also per Wiki, and partially reflected on its original link, there’s the question about whether Brand meant free in terms of cost, or free in terms of access.

That, then, gets back to many critics of the Three Musketeers noting that two (Jarvis and Rosen) are paid academics, and at public, taxpayer-funded universities, no less, and therefore can easily afford to tell newspapers to let people be online leeches. Until 2010, Shirky was at the public Hunter University, so ditto on him. Let’s also not forget Shirky’s consulting for Libya’s former strongman Moammar Gadhafi, and his naivete about how autocrats could use social media to their own ends when queried about that consulting.

Update, Feb. 22, 2013: Massimo Pigliucci weighs in well on this issue. 

(Brand himself claims he's blamed for a lot of tech-neoliberalism stuff that is not his fault. The rest of that interview indicates he's lying to himself if he really believes that and lying to the rest of us anyway.)

Smarter ideas for newspaper paywalls

Matthew Ingram at GigaOm appears to have a Jeff Jarvis/Clay Shirky/Jay Rosen paywall-hating burr up his ass.

But, as I told him, his anti-paywall complaint is too narrowly focused.

One could charge a minimal general rate, plus have a freemium on top of that. Or have a metered paywall, that works like cell phones, with a minimal rate to read anything, rather than the NYT (which is so leaky as to not have a paywall) and start the meter at 0, not 10, 20 or whatever, and then ramp up rates from there. Or to be more creative, to charge more for looking at videos and stuff, take a page directly from cell phones and charge by the time spent on a page. I’m assuming that that would be easy for newspaper IT staffs to set up.

Beyond that, the real problem, of course, is that the Associated Press, largely under the leadership of the idiotic Dean Singleton, didn’t have a clue about the Internet and undercharged news aggregators for running AP material.

Since this isn’t Matt’s first anti-paywall post, in a separate comment, I said:

What’s obvious is that you, like Shirky, Rosen and other new media “gurus,” simply hate paywalls.

As for Jeff Jarvis? My left butt cheek knows more. Serious(ly), as for any specific ideas (h)e discusses, I’d Google Evgeny Morozov to see if he has some sarcastic takedown, first.

And, that’s the bottom line.

Beyond that, this is a “framing issue.” A metered paywall, a freemium wall, or anything other than a straight paywall can always be reverse-framed as a “membership” program. Hell, you can even give away PBS/NPR-type tchotchkes, if you want.

Update: Columbia Journalism Review totally agrees with me.

New media fluffers profit from dissing old media?

Just wow .... Columbia Journalism Review takes Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, et al, to the cleaners. And, the article is very good overall, not just in the claim that these and other new media fluffer leaders, through consulting fees, teaching at public universities, etc., profit, and perhaps hypocritically, by being old media dissers.

And, it's one thing to disagree on what the future of media should be. It's another to profit off of saying what the media SHOULD be, while pretending to be disinterested. And, it's yet another to ignore "concentration" in social media, ethics issues at some social media, and other factors.

Item No. 2 in the paragraph above is why I largely not just mistrust but actually dislike new media fluffers, at least the new media fluffing part of their personalities. Hey, I'm not denying the right to make a buck. BUT, be honest that your new media fluffing is anything but disinterested.

Anway, let's take a look at CJR.

I'm going to run a string of a few quotes, then start commenting;

The establishment is gloomy and old; the (Future Of Newspapers) consensus is hopeful and young (or purports to represent youth). The establishment has no plan. The FON consensus says no plan is the plan. The establishment drones on about rules and standards; the FON thinkers talk about freedom and informality. FON says “cheap” and “free”; the establishment asks for your credit card number. FON talks about “networks,” “communities,” and “love”; the establishment mutters about “institutions,” like The New York Times or mental hospitals....

The problem is that journalism’s true value-creating work, the keystone of American journalism, the principle around which it is organized, is public-interest reporting; the kind that is usually expensive, risky, stressful, and time-consuming. ...


Not only does the FON consensus have little to say about public-service journalism, it is in many ways antithetical to it. For one thing, its anti-institutionalism would disempower journalism. Jarvis and Shirky in particular have reveled in the role of intellectual undertakers/grief counselors to the newspaper industry, which, for all its many failings, has traditionally carried the public-service load.

So far, I'm in total agreement. The FON crowd largely ignores costs and overheads, as do many of their fellow travelers. And, by over-touting social media, etc., can trivialize news. (See below.)

And, is there a solution? Solutions?

Many of Shirky’s prescriptions for the economics of journalism are commonsensical and even wise. A point I find inarguable is that while some news models have been found to work in some contexts-—The Wall Street Journal’s pay wall, ProPublica’s fund-raising model (basically, one big donor), Talking Points Memo’s online ad-based system—nothing to date is scalable. There is no news business “model” at all. And who can argue with his call for constant experimentation?

I would tend to agree. And, that's why I'm not always as hard on this aspect of Shirky's thought as on Rosen's or Jarvis'.


Meanwhile, is the FON crowd counter-cultural? The story suggests so:

If some aspects of peer-production theory and its FON offshoot sound familiar—anti-institutionalism; communitarianism laced with libertarianism; a millennial, Age-of-Aquarius vibe; a certain militancy—some scholars have traced its roots to 1960s counterculture.

I'd say look to today, instead; Shirky, et al, sound like the utopian wing of Occupy Wall Street.

Meanwhile, CJR gets to "throwing under the bus" time, saying Jarvis, as example, and most the FON crowd are ... hypocritical leeches:

Like other FON thinkers, he lives the contradiction of extolling peer production and volunteerism from the security of an institution. It is doubly jarring in Jarvis’s case; an opponent of publicly funded journalism, his journalistic entrepreneurialism is, in fact, publicly subsidized. The “C” in CUNY stands for “City.”

CJR then raises a related issue: the claim that news is a commodity. Of course, the FON crowd starts with one half of Steward Brand's famous quote:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

And, of course, the FON crowd is coming down emphatically, and simplistically, IMO, on the "free" side. That's why they fight paywalls, diss micropayments and other things.  But, as the CJR story notes, paywalls are working, and getting adopted by more and more dailies.

Meanwhile, here's more of that intellectual dishonesty:

I would note that there’s a point at which predicting institutional decline blurs into rooting for it, and then morphs into hastening it along, as the anti-pay wall debate shows. ... “We need the new news environment to be chaotic” to facilitate experimentation, Shirky writes. In fact, though, only consultants “need” the news environment to be chaotic.

CJN's Starkman goes on to say he expects some "media establishment" to remain in place for quite some time.

I’m going to make a bold leap and predict—eenie meenie chili beanie—that for a long time the Future of News is going to look unnervingly like the Present of News: hobbled news organizations, limping along, supplemented by swarms of new media outlets doing their best. It’s not sexy, but that’s journalism for you. 

And, here's why he's at least halfway comfortable with that statement:

It pays to remember that the most triumphalist FON works were written in 2008 and 2009, during journalism’s time of maximum panic. But now, panic time is over.

It is ... and as he says, "muddling" time continues. And, that is no thanks to the FON crowd:

The cruel truth of the emerging networked news environment is that reporters are as disempowered as they have ever been, writing more often, under more pressure, with less autonomy, about more trivial things than under the previous monopolistic regime. Indeed, if one were looking for ways to undermine reporters in their work, FON ideas would be a good place to start.

Indeed, especially about the trivialization. Working at a newspaper that thinks Facebook and Twitter posting will magically fix things seems to illustrate that. When everything is news, nothing is.

Finally, Starkman says that what he calls "Neo-institutional journalism" can be rebuilt, but that it will take work.

Shirky responds, but, IMO, as a kinder, gentler Jarvis more than anything else.

Beyond that, the new media fluffers fail to address how social media, Internet 2.0, etc. threaten us all, not just journalists, with being crushed beneath the wheel, whether like in Hesse's novel of that name or some other way.

Finally, related to this discussion, check out my  "dark side of the Internet" series of posts. None of the "new media fluffers" will fully and seriously engage with a Evgeny Morozov, Nicholas Carr or Jarod Lanier.

#JeffJarvis gets his teeth kicked in, and whines

Jeff Jarvis, new media hypnotist

Call this the latest installment in my "Dark Side of the Internet" series.

Evgeny Morozov has a deliciously over-the-top-crushing review of Jeff Jarvis' new book, "Public Parts." 


Jarvis, whose obsession for linking puts him in the same class of Internet myopics as Robert Scoble, with whom I fortunately have had less interaction, makes a tepid defense of the need for maximum publicness on the Internet, sounding like an older, but no less self-infatuated, Mark Zuckerberg. 


Yes, I think that's just about the right description.


Here's a few outtakes:

Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates—“there is money to be made in privacy”—who are paid to mislead the “netizens,” that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. ...

In one respect—his unrivaled ability to attract attention to his diva-like self—Jarvis has outdone even the fictional Dr. Kirk. Jarvis’s public parts are truly public: his recent battle with prostate cancer has become something of an online Super Bowl, with Jarvis tweeting from the operating table and blogging about the diaper problems that followed.  ...


Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody—as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison—it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

My takeaway from this, since Morozov mentions Hannah Arendt early in his review, is YES ... Jarvis epitomizes the "banality of Internet publicness."

Fortunately, though, Morozov doesn't fire a single bullet at just Jarvis.

Instead, he rightfully gets out the blunderbuss and targets new media fluffers in general:

It is not surprising that the two books feature almost identical casts. The list of fellow Internet gurus and believers who make appearances in both books, repeating what they say in every other Internet book, is too long to give in full, but here are Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, Don Tapscott, Jay Rosen, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, Nick Denton, Umair Haque, Arianna Huffington, Doc Searls, John Perry Barlow, Steven Johnson.

I don't waste time following all of those, but I feel about Shirky, Rosen, Huffington, and the degree I have followed Scoble, him, the same way Morozov does.

Morozov then goes on to list specific reasons why these people are part of the banal dark side, but, banality aside, need our watchful attention:

Our Internet intellectuals lack the intellectual ambition, and the basic erudition, to connect their thinking with earlier traditions of social and technological criticism. They desperately need to believe that their every thought is unprecedented. ...

As Chuck Klosterman has observed, “the degree to which anyone values the Internet is proportional to how valuable the Internet makes that person.” Internet intellectuals like to tell companies and governments what they like to hear-including the kind of bad news that is really good news in disguise (you are in terrible shape, but if you only embrace the Internet, all your problems will be gone forever!). Occasionally their gigs are embarrassing—Clay Shirky’s name turned up on the despicable roster of consultants to Qaddafi’s government—but they will take that risk. And the technology companies return the favor: the opening pages of Macrowikinomics—another recent best-seller in the sprawling library of techno-punditry—is peppered with laudatory quotes from the CEOs of Dell, Best Buy, Accenture, Dupont, Nike, Google, and a dozen other companies.

It would be easy to ignore people like Jarvis, but, as Morozov points out, Jarvis (and his ilk) regularly attend the playgrounds of the rich, famous and world leaders like Davos -- and pretend to know what's "right" for the future of the Internet.

And, as that second paragraph notes, the likes of Jarvis are sellouts to rich CEOs on issues like "branding." In short, the Jeff Jarvises of the world are bad in part because they give a pseudo-intellectual cover to the Steve Jobs of the world.

Finally, although addressed at Jarvis, this riff hits most the new media fluffers:

Most Internet intellectuals simply choose a random point in the distant past—the honor almost invariably goes to the invention of the printing press—and proceed to draw a straight line from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, as if the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Reign of Terror, two world wars—and everything else—never happened.

The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring.

Many technological advances have gone almost nowhere, such as the printing press and paper money in China. Others literally get forgotten, such as the Romans inventing portland cement for underwater construction, only to see its knowledge later forgotten for more than a millennium,

And, you want fun? Here's Jarvis boo-hooing about the review.

I wish Morozov had tackled issues and ideas to show how it’s done. He wants an intellectual examination of the topic — accusing me of not providing it — but then he doesn’t offer one himself.

Uhh, you HAVE no ideas; that's the whole point of the mocking tone of the review. Either Jarvis is being even more of a diva than normal, or he's that dense. Of course, they're not mutually exclusive; it could be both.

Beyond that, my last quote from Morozov alone shows that he's talking about ideas all the way down.

From my own blogging and reading, some about Jarvis in particular and some about new media fluffers in general, I can say the following.

1. On new vs. old media, they simply ignore financial constraints, and other ones, on much serious journalism, as this book notes.

2. As an exchange from that book notes, they ignore the capitalism, even hypercapitalism, that drives much of the Net's dark side:

Thomas Frank, among other things, eviscerates New Media fluffer Jay Rosen with an anecdote from when Rosen interviewed Roger Rosenblatt, CEO of New Media writing serf farm Demand Media (eHow and other sites).

And the hardest-hitting interrogation Rosen could do was ask, "If you love the Web, then why are you doing this, running these content farms?" And, Frank indirectly lets us understand that that attitude toward the financial side of how most New Media can't be financially supported well, unless run on a hypercapitalist model, and the refusal of Rosen, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis and others to address this, is the problem with most New Media fluffers.

3. As I've blogged elsewhere, they miss that this hypercapitalism is ultimately driven by "infowars" which people like Jarvis unwittingly, or half-wittingly, abet.

4. And, speaking of ideas, they also ignore (or in Huffington's case, welcome) the fact that the Net has led to the hollowing out of the creative class.

So, Morozov is right, right, right. Despite, or rather, perhaps, because of their banality (a banality that fits well with modern America), Jarvis and people like him are dangerous indeed.

They encourage a modern bread-and-circuses attitude, if you will; let's say, to riff on Jobs, an iGeneration. They encourage the same breathless wonder at their own thoughts to spread to other people and their own thoughts.

Oh, I can be in love with my own thoughts, too. But, I don't think they're earthshaking, even though I do believe they're usually less banal, shallow and trite than the likes of Jarvis.

Of course, this is a guy who wrote for TV Guide and People. What else would we expect but "look at me" writing? I'm sure that he will next raise the jealousy card; others who have gotten lucky via the Internet often do, precisely because it's yet another easy way to avoid the real issues. But, the criticism is true. Again, going beyond Morozov, he's trying to tell everybody that you, too, can have your 15 minutes of cyberfame.

Well, if the worldwide content of "information" from 2003-2008 was as much as in the entire previous history of the world ... no you can't. Not in the U.S., you can't.

Is #OccupyWallStreet REALLY like Tahrir Square?

It claims it is, per this story in The Nation which describes one of the leading ... er ... organizational ... groups.

Get ready for jargon: the General Assembly is a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought, and it’s akin to the assemblies that have been driving recent social movements around the world, in places like Argentina, Egypt’s Tahrir Square, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and so on.

Let's compare reality.

If, by "anarchist," OccupyWallStreet claims to be in a line with the Seattle 1998 WTO protests, etc. (which I think it is to at least some degree), then it's NOT like Tahrir Square, at least. Anarchy was neither a strategic device, nor a goal, nor "part of the process," nor an end in itself.

Leaderless? Bullshit. The story says the protest was organized. That involves leadership. Truly leaderless movements become amorphous mobs, truly leaderless true anarchist actions, or else get leadership. Beyond that high-level thought, the setting of dates, the decision on the site to make "ground zero," etc., all involved ... leadership!

Nearly 50 years ago, folks from Tom Hayden through Martin Luther King Jr. understood that.

Next, the size of the movement, versus the MSM's alleged conspiracy in "ignoring" it at first, etc.:

The original Adbusters call envisioned 20,000 people flooding the Financial District on September 17. A tenth of that probably ended up being there that day. Despite a massive Anonymous-powered online social media blitz, lots of people simply didn’t know about it, and traditional progressive organizations like labor unions and peace groups were uncomfortable signing on to so amorphous an action.

"A tenth" is probably generous by twice. Uhh, if the younger generation is so "connected," too, lots of people knew about it, too. Some of them may have written it off as kabuki-like, especially if they were half as skeptical and one-quarter as cynical as I am, and have been for 15 years, about Adbusters.

Oh, and the claim, per a person in my Google Plus circles, that Occupy Wall Street must be leaderless because of the example of "Spartacus"? Well, Rome killed everybody after everybody said he was Spartacus. So, first of all, you might want to rethink that example. Second, continuing the true parallelism, Rome probably would have killed everybody anyway. Third, Spartacus was the leader of the revolt; just because others tried to protect him doesn't change that fact. Beyond that, I stand by what I've said on this blog post already about issues and leaders.

Finally, if Jeff Jarvis thinks the myth of a leadership, self-organized Occupy Wall Street is great, that:
1. Shows just how wrong the myth likely is;
2. Is another good reason to be skeptical of the myth;
3. Is probably another good reason to be skeptical of the reality, too.

As for the "what can I do," how many of the people already there are overloaded with Apple "devices" and other consumer tech? What the people who organized this can do is what they should have been doing years ago, if they're really that concerned.

Stop buying so much. Given that most of it's made in China, anyway, it wouldn't cost that many American jobs. Those that were threatened, in the ever-narrowing middle of the middle class, would either recognize the issues sooner ... or not.

Wall Street's excesses are, in part, a symptom of larger consumer excesses. Branding. Hyper-individuality. And more.

Update: This story about the formation of A(( is making the rounds as allegedly being further proof of determination, dedication, etc., as well as leaderlessness. Rather, I saw it as being as much about egotism and Americo-centrism as anything.

#JeffJarvis craps out another book - of crap

Mr. Google fluffer and new media fluffer is now saying don't worry about privacy online in his latest book, reviewed by CNN.

Well, Jeff Jarvis is about as insightful, and right, on new media, as Jay Rosen, which is to say bupkis. And, his head is buried so far up Google I've rhetorically asked before if Larry Paige and/or Sergey Brin actually pay him.

Jarvis then apparently excuses the privacy fears of our brave new online world, the book notes, by way of a bad analogy:

At best, Public Parts is a reminder that when any new technology is introduced -- be it the growing social capabilities of the Internet or the movable type of the printing press -- the immediate reaction is often fear. Jarvis points out that the earliest books were riddled with errors. These printed mistakes could suddenly spread widely and therefore they were considered to be more dangerous to society.

Jarvis' claim that errors are OK because "early books were riddled with errors"? What bullshit. Errors improved. People came to expect better.

Let's try this at the Challenger hearings.

Well, Dr. Feynmann, it's OK for O-rings today to be brittle in cold weather because early ones were.

Now, that said, Jarvis is actually apparently analogizing from errors in early books to worries about any new technology. And, it's a crappy analogy. For one thing, errors had little to do with the "fear" of the new technology. Second, books didn't affect privacy circa 1500.

Those of us concerned about privacy expect it to get better in the future. We don't expect excuse-making instead, or claims we should flaunt ourselves online.

And that's key to the "meat" of the book, per CNN. If you're in a "secure" place financially and socially, like Jarvis, you can be more of an online "exhibitionist" than otherwise.

If you're a person worried about what your employer might see you writing on Facebook or Google+, or blogging, you'd like more privacy. If you're a person worried about telecommunications laws and the government forcing such private entities to turn over information, you'd definitely like more privacy. (Maybe TSA, reading about Jarvis, will give his cancer-treatment-treated prostate an extra fondling next time he flies.)

Anyway, I read one Jarvis book; that's enough to last me three or four lifetimes.

Tom Freidman, flat-Twitter asshat

Teapot Tommy Friedman, Mr. Earth is Flat, in talking about Twitter, Egypt and related issues, is even dumber, more uninformed, and more American-exceptionalist chauvinistic than usual, and that's hard to imagine!

Here's the nut graf on his stupidity:

The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29, many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very powerful change engine.

Just one problem. There IS no "diffusion of Twitter." The reality of Iran's failed Green Revolution showed that, as did the reality of Egypt's protests becoming stronger after President Mubarak shut down the country's ISPs.

Fortunately, Friedman's colleague, Frank Rich, knows the truth.

The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/01/how-wired-are-egyptians.html of those masses have Internet access.

Rich also implies that American teevee, as opposed to the effectively banned-from-America Al Jazeera, relies on foreign Tweeters out of collective corporate laziness:

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

He's not the only person writing for the NYT to know the truth about Twitter, too.

Lee Siegel immediately notes one issue:

Just a few years ago, all anyone could talk about was how to make the Internet more free. Now all anyone can talk about is how to control it.

it's a good start to his review of Evgeny Morozov's “The Net Delusion.”

He shows how American naivete and chauvinism have mixed to worship at the altar of Twitter:

He quotes the political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who proclaimed after protesters took to the streets in Tehran that “the revolution will be Twittered.” The revolution never happened, and the futilely tweeting protesters were broken with an iron hand. But Sullivan was hardly the only one to ignore the Iranian context. Clay Shirky, the media’s favorite quotable expert on all things Internet-related, effused: “This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

The more I read out of Shirky's mouth, the less and less intellectual capacity I will give him credit. It's like he is a fellator of anything called "New Media." But, that's pretty much the case with his whole tribe of Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen types.

Mark Cuban calls Google a 'vampire' – and he's right

He's also right that newspapers — and, even more, press organizations like AP — largely continue to be run by people who are too inept, timid, and "old thinking" as well as old media in dealing with this.

Cuban has cojones, if nothing else. He made his comments at an online media conference, and as the keynoter, no less.

Not just that, he called newspapers cowards for being afraid to let go of Google traffic even as they remain clueless, in his words, about how to monetize said traffic.

Salon, as part of its own take on his comments, highlights the pull quote:

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

The problem lies not so much with individual papers (though those with their own news services, like NYT, McClatchy, etc., fall under the following finger-pointing) as it does with AP (and Reuters and AFP, to the degree my solution could dodge collusion issues).

AP is not charging Google, MSNBC et al enough.

Pure and simple. If AP would increase its contract charges about six-fold — YES, as in 600 percent — and could do a work-around on the collusion stuff, not only with Reuters, but NYT News Service, MCT, etc., it might be enough to force Google to paywall.

And, yes, I think AP could write its contracts in a way as to do a work-around on the collusion issue while leaving the door open for Reuters et al to cut similar deals.

That said, AP's chairman of the board, Dean Singleton, is so effing clueless about this that he ran his own newspaper company, MediaNews, into the ground of Chapter 11, so what should we really expect?

If nothing else, maybe more newspaper chains will reverse cutting back on DC bureaus, and rebuild them — with money they save from canceling AP contracts.

Calling Jay Rosen and Google's chief ass-kisser Jeff Jarvis. Have you already started attacking Cuban?

Jeff Jarvis sucks part 2

To refute some of Jarvis’ nonsense:

The “50 of 300” that produce content in the newsroom only includes writers, but not copy editors, proofreaders, fact checkers, among others. So, if you want drivel, or perhaps libel, fine, get rid of all the other 250. Blogs don’t get sued not so much because blogging is considered opinion but because most of them aren’t financially worth suing.

Google sells making money, not “performance,” just like any other big biz.

Per the “Dell sucks” line from Jeff Jarvis’ “What Would Google Do” ass-kissing of Page and Brin, “Jeff Jarvis sucks.”

“Think like capitalists”? God, if this isn’t stupid. Since, until a decade ago, newspapers had the highest profit margin of about any business in the country, they’ve long been thinking like capitalists. Sure, they need to think like capitalists in new ways, but that’s entirely different.

As for thinking like capitalists, if Jarvis weren’t:
A. A university prof;
B. Probably paid for his jet-setting to Davos, etc.;
C. Possibly paid for “What Would Google Do”; he wouldn’t be writing this blog.

What effing bullshit.

Newspapers can’t be about control? That’s why you’ve had alt-weeklies, minority/ethnic weeklies, etc. for decades. The seven-day daily, outside official chattering classes (of whom Jarvis is simply part of the online equivalent) have long not been about control.

Jeff Jarvis sucks

Since Amazon won't let me type that as a book review title, I'll do it here, taking a page from his "Dell sucks" blog post that he mentions in his new book, "What Would Google Do"?

Here's the deal with the book, a one-star turkey.

This books is basically nothing but uncritical Google-olotry, as shown by the errors Jarvis makes in just his seven introduction pages.

1. Google's alleged customer service? Google's Blogger blogs get no more customer service than Microslob offers on Outlook/Outlook Express.

2. Related to that, through things such as Chrome, Google Docs, cloud computing, Google IS the new Microslob in many ways. Jarvis completely ignores that.

3. Related to THAT, Jarvis laughably claims that Google AdSense lets you be "part of Google." Jeez, just how much has Google brainwashed him? Instead, Google's ever more closely monitoring his Google searches, etc., and targeting ads to that end. (Do a fake Google search at least once a week to screw Google up, is my suggestion.)

4. Jarvis ignores the multiplicity of Google business flops of the past, which are well-documented elsewhere.

Beyond that, Jarvis is a name-dropper, etc. Read other one- and two-star reviewers for more.