Recent quotes:

Bill Moyers and Heather Cox Richardson on Her Daily Letters – BillMoyers.com

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: The newsletter was completely an accident, and I have my readers to thank for it. I had on Facebook a professional page that I posted on about once a week. And I hadn’t written on it in a while in the summer last year because I was actually busy moving. And I was all set to get in the car and drive from my home in Maine to teach in Boston. And I happened to be stung by a yellow-jacket, and I’m allergic to them. And I didn’t have my EpiPen nearby. So I didn’t dare get on the road until I knew how badly I would react. And I thought, “Well, I haven’t written in a while on my Facebook page.” And I know that on Friday, Friday the 13th, September 13th, Adam Schiff wrote a letter to the acting director of national intelligence at the time saying, “We know there’s a whistleblower complaint out there. And we know that you have it, and we know that you’re supposed to give it to us, and you’re not. And that means that we have to assume it’s a really big deal. Hand the stupid thing over.” And of course, I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it. And I recognized because I’m a political historian, that this was the first time that a member of Congress had found a specific law that they were accusing a specific member of the executive branch of violating. So I thought, you know, I oughta put that down, ’cause this is a really important moment. If you knew what you were looking for, it was a big moment. So I wrote it down, and then got myself back to Boston and got home and there were a ton of questions about what I’d written. And it was clear that the readers wanted to know more. They seemed to want to know the answers, so I wrote again, I think it was two nights later on the 17th. And I’ve written every night since because questions just poured in, and people flooded me with questions about what was going on, and who were the players, and how was this going to play out? And what were the laws, and why should I have any hope that this was gonna turn out in a good way? And this was just something that really was sort of reader-driven, not driven by me at all. And I think that’s probably why it’s had such staying power.

Center for American Progress Puts ThinkProgress Up for Sale

“Unfortunately, like so many other news outlets that have relied on advertising to fund its work, ThinkProgress has seen a significant drop in revenue in recent years, along with other financial strains. In addition, events over the last few years have underscored the divergent missions of American Progress and ThinkProgress,” said Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

I Have a James Beard Award and I Think You Are So Great. – The Everywhereist

I published my essay about Mario Batali and his shitty cinnamon roll apology on this site because I assumed that no publication would want it. It ended up getting a James Beard nomination for Journalism in the Personal Essay category. And then it won. This doesn’t fall into the schema of dreams coming true, because this was never a dream I’d had. It’s not something I thought was in the realm of possibility. […]My blog was up against publications whose editors don’t even reply to my emails.

How the Mom Internet became a spotless, sponsored void - The Washington Post

The death of the mom blog has something to do with shifts in how people consume and create on the Internet. Blogging on the whole has fizzled as audiences and writers have moved to other platforms. And parents with young children have made the transition along with everyone else — although their hours are somewhat more erratic. In 2016, Facebook (which owns Instagram) reported that new parents are especially active “in the wee hours,” starting their first mobile visits as early as 4 a.m. By 7 a.m., 56 percent of new parents have visited Facebook on their mobile devices.

Civil, the blockchain-based journalism marketplace, is building its first batch of publications » Nieman Journalism Lab

Built on top of blockchain (the same technology that underpins bitcoin), Civil promises to use the technology to build decentralized marketplaces for readers and journalists to work together to fund coverage of topics that interest them, or for those in the public interest. Readers will support reporters using “CVL” tokens, Civil’s cryptocurrency, giving them a speculative stake in the currency that will — hopefully — increase in value as more people buy in over time. This, Civil, hopes will encourage more people to invest in the marketplaces, creating a self-sustaining system that will help fund more reporting.

Exclamation marks!!!

Why do you put exclamation points after every fucking sentence!? Why is this a thing?? I get it, you want to be seen as positive and really excited about a brand or product or experience or whatever the hell you’re writing about. But nobody talks like that in real life. If you do, nobody actually likes being around you. Love my hubby, love my life, love my kiddos, love jesus, love cupcakes, love it all! No. You are not that happy in your every day life. Nobody buys it. And if they do, you’re just making them feel bad about themselves. You’re watering down all the rest of your content because every single subject cannot possibly be that exciting. People are not idiots. As a reader, I cannot connect to someone who writes like they are hard-selling broccoli to kindergarteners.

Mommy Blogging jumped the shark

I hosted dozens of giveaways sponsored by brands wanting me to promote their products. I gained hundreds and then thousands of email subscribers, and social media followers, by requiring a follow in exchange for a giveaway entry. I used social media management services to connect with similar bloggers on twitter and instagram, and then unfollow those who didn’t return the follow. I paid a virtual assistant to post my links in round ups all over the internet, for back links and extra traffic. I joined blog directory sites, where asking readers for clicks sends you to the top of the list, and some PR intern googling “mom blogs” then finds you when they want someone to review their product. I sent out my media kit with embellished stats and highlights about my ‘targeted audience of mothers who make purchasing decisions for their household’ and negotiated my rates for free products and paid reviews. I made thousands of dollars during months I was focusing and working hard to dig through box after box of shitty as-seen-on-tv like products and share “my 100% honest opinion” about them, that weren’t at all influenced by the page after page of “key messages” the brand requested that I include in my review. You won’t find most of those posts on this blog today. They aren’t gone forever, and I do plan to revive some of them. But for the most part, they are dead and I want them to stay buried forever. Because, like 90% of the fake nonsense I used to share on the internet as a mommy blogger writing about my fake life and oh-so-happy marriage, they are pure bullshit.

Salon's enduring losses

in the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2015 (the most recent quarter for which data is publicly available), Salon had $1.95 million in revenue and $2.19 million in expenses, for a net loss of about $250,000. That’s better than the year before — in the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2014, Salon had $1.47 million in revenue and $2.27 million in expenses, for a net loss of about $800,000 — but it’s still a net loss.

Publicists and their lies

Levin also disapproved of the way that publicists leveraged access to celebrities in order to control the media coverage of their clients. “The stories that were being told weren’t real,” he said, in a 2009 interview. “Producers knew that they weren’t real, but they played ball to get interviews with the stars.” Most journalism about stars, he said, was “built on a lie.”

the history of gossip

Thirty-five hundred years ago, Mesopotamian scribes used cuneiform to record the impeachment hearings of a mayor who had been accused of corruption, kidnapping, adultery, and the theft of manure. In 1709, the first modern gossip magazine, The Tatler, started publication, in London. The medium arrived in America in the late nineteenth century, when a weekly named Town Topics began publishing blind items, in a section called “Saunterings.” (In 1905, the section’s editor attempted to blackmail Emily Post’s husband after learning of his infidelity.) Tycoons and politicians were the initial focus of the gossip trade; one British photographer bribed a gardener to gain entrance to Winston Churchill’s house, where he hid, waiting for the perfect shot, until Churchill spotted him and chased him away. With the rise of Hollywood, actors became gossip’s prime quarry; the magazine Confidential courted lawsuits by printing stories with titles like “Mae West’s Open Door Policy.”

Inside Harvey Levin’s TMZ

TMZ resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization, and it has turned its domain, Los Angeles, into a city of stool pigeons.

Emily Gould - Exposed - Blog-Post Confidential - Gawker - NYTimes.com

In October, New York magazine published a cover article about Gawker’s business model and cultural relevance. I took the magazine from my therapist’s waiting room into her office and read aloud from the article because, I figured, why waste any of my 45 minutes by struggling to summarize it? The article painted Gawker as a clearinghouse for vitriol and me as a semisympathetic naïf who half-loved and half-loathed what her job was forcing her to become. That week, when I walked around at parties, trying to elicit funny quotes from whatever quasi-famous people were there, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was Gawker. How could I sleep at night? someone wondered. I was getting tired of justifying my job to strangers, trotting out truisms about the public’s right to know and the Internet’s changing the rules of privacy. And I was getting tired of writing the same handful of posts over and over again. At the end of November, I announced my resignation via a post on Gawker.

Where we are now

Blogging has never been easier but getting read has never been harder.

The TVification of the Internet

The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking.

Dooce burns out

Bloggers are on a hamster wheel which is going faster and faster and faster. I don’t know a single blogger who even enjoys it any more. There was a time when we loved every minute of it, we would gush and say oh my god, we love it. Now we say there’s times when we still love parts of it, but nobody sits down at the end of the day and pours a drink and says “Oh I had the most glorious day”. There are only now parts of it we still enjoy but there’s not that enthusiasm for the whole thing any more.

Wishing (again) that Carr2n was around to write about this one

Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection.

Gawker finances

Profits at the privately held Gawker Media Group grew 9.5 percent last year, to $6,529,821, from the previous year. While most private companies closely guard their financial info, Denton, anticipating being forced to make the numbers public at the Hogan trial, released certain figures on Thursday. Revenue over the period was up 26.6 percent, to $44.3 million, Denton said. But expenses rose at an even faster clip, up more than 30 percent, to $37.8 million in 2014 — and they appear to be accelerating this year. The rise in costs is being fueled by a move the company is making — from modest Soho digs into new offices later this year on West 17th Street that will eat up some $3 million a year in rent.

Frank Fairfield bows out on Facebook

One also gets pretty sick of being as mediocre a musician as I under the diligent scrutiny of all the banjo hangout bloggers in the blogosphere multiverse.

8 Types of Social Media and How Each Can Benefit Your Business

When Seymour Hersh first pitched Bin Laden story to David Remnick

I tell him about the story, and his initial approach was to say do a blog item. Go fuck yourself! A blog? I have done a couple blogs when it is 1,000 words but this is worth more.

Pizza FTW

Now, here are the particulars of Kuban’s pies: They are perfectly round and saturated with color like a particularly sweet memory, or a cartoon. Their structure, in profile, is lifting slightly away from the pan as if encouraging you to go ahead, pick us up. They are thin and crisp, but pliable enough to fold a little when hot. You’ll notice some extra weight along the perimeter where Kuban, who builds each pizza himself, has tapped the dough into the edge of the pan with his fingertips, then sprinkled over some extra cheese. This fuses in the hot oven, developing into a deep golden lace of caramelized cheese and pizza crust that mimics the best bits on a grilled cheese sandwich. It’s totally delicious.

Dooce® signs off with a non-sequitor

Thank you for being here on this journey with me, my girls and my dogs. I hope you’ll stick around for the next chapter which, let’s be honest.

As Sullivan bows out, two reasons blogging fails to scale: lack of social traffic and the frailty of solo voices

But blogging, for better or worse, is proving resistant to scale. And I think there are two reasons why. The first is that, at this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don't deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don't go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand. Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. "I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion." The other reason is that the bigger the site gets, and the bigger the business gets, the harder it is to retain the original voice. Dave Winer, a blogging pioneer, once defined a blog as "the unedited voice of a person." I think there's a lot of truth to that. But the more readers you have, the more need there is for editing. If I said something dumb in my Blogspot days — which I did, constantly — it hurt me. If I say something dumb today — which I do, but hopefully less constantly — it hurts my writers, and my editors, and my company. My voice needs editing. The cost of being unedited is too high.

Where the wonderful CGC revolution ends?

An unidentified individual or group responsible for uploading videos that simply show a woman opening Disney toys made an estimated $4.9 million last year, more than any other channel for 2014, according to OpenSlate, a video analytics platform that analyzes ad-supported content on YouTube.

Carr buries his interviewee with a teaspoon

In conversation, Mr. Johnson is prone to narcissism, not uncommon in media types, but he has his own special brand of it. He sees himself as a major character in a great unfolding epoch, dwelling on his school-age accomplishments and his journalism awards and vaguely suggesting that he has strong ties to many levels of law enforcement. Like what, I asked?“Have you ever read the book or heard of the book ‘Encyclopedia Brown’?” he asked, referring to a series about a boy detective. “That’s the capacity in which I help them. I don’t go out of my way to discuss the kind of, shall we say, clandestine work I do, because the nature of the work has to be clandestine in order for it be effective.”

Let's praise a new Facebook star by ignoring everything that went before!

Unlike other visionaries who have been celebrated as journalism’s self-made digital-era brands—I’m looking at you, Ezra Klein and Nate Silver—Andrew has built her brand entirely without the assistance of mainstream media. Klein and Silver are described as a new kind of journalist—entrepreneurs of new media—but both relied on traditional outlets to broaden their appeal and bolster their credibility, Klein at The Washington Post, Silver at The New York Times.