A Hewlett Packard service called MagCloud lets you create and print a magazine online over the internet for about 20 cents per page. Powazek, Time magazine reports, made innovative use of the service, publishing a photo magazine about the storm within 48 hours of the event. Powazek drew on the work of about 70 Flickr photographers from whom he obtained permission via email. Despite a price north of $7 with shipping, Powzek has not turned a profit, but people clearly get a kick out of his product; one Australian even put in a special bulk order to redistribute back home (MagCloud doesn't ship there).

Issues commemorating the election and inauguration of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson have likewise been rare bright spots for print publications. But it remains tough to make money from one-off print runs. If only there were some sort of large, internet enabled device with a display large and high-resolution enough to get people to buy these sorts of albums over the internet.

[via Daring Fireball]

Arianna Huffington is famously aggressive about plucking bloggers from her personal life; in 48 hours last year she invited "someone at a book signing... a fifteen-year-old lecture attendee; a bookstore owner; the Asperger's-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j.; a woman... who was trying to stop insecticide spraying."

But the internet mogul doesn't pay the vast majority of her contributors; they must make the work pay elsewhere, and this is where HuffPo gets itself into trouble. Kim Evans, who wrote about treating swine flu with enemas, just happens to be the flacking author of a book called Cleaning Up! The Ultimate Body Cleanse. New York City's comptroller, William Thompson Jr., has used his HuffPo blog as an extension of his mayoral campaign. And so on

More alarming is the site's relationship with Russell Bishop, like Arianna Huffington a disciple of the culty Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness and its worshipped leader John-Roger. Bishop co-founded the employee development firm Insight Seminars with John-Roger; Insight shares a "Spiritual Director," John Morton, with the religious group and at one point its headquarters was monitored by John-Roger via widespread listening devices, according to a Los Angeles Times exposé.

Arianna Huffington has forced her staff to attend Insight retreats, according to insiders.

She's also installed Bishop as HuffPo "Senior Editor at Large." Bishop's role, an insider tells us, is mainly to recruit bloggers to the Living section and shape its tone; it's this same Living section that contains the pseudo-medical articles Salon's doctor, and a great many science bloggers, complain about. This, perhaps, explains why the section has so many MSIA true believers.

Indeed, Huffington's relationship with MSIA — she is an ordained "Minister of Light" in the group and loads her iPod with guided MSIA meditations — might also give a clue as to why her website has such a heavy focus on alternative treatments.

According to Life 102, a memoir by disaffected ex MSIA member Peter McWilliams, John-Roger discouraged traditional medical treatments, often "healing" people with his own spiritual powers. After McWilliams got sick in Africa, apparently from parasites, the guru advised him to go to a self-described "nutritionist" rather than a real doctor. When he did visit a real doctor, John-Roger admonished him:

When I told J-R about my rapid healing thanks to Western medicine... he told me it was just "a coincidence" that I started getting better within twenty-four hours of taking the prescription. "The natural way was working, and you would have gotten better at exactly the same time because what cured you was the natural medication. The prescription drug just polluted your system, now I've got to work on taking all the toxicity of it out of your system."

Now, thanks to the Huffington Post, we can all question Western medicine in this manner.

(Pic: Huffington and John-Roger at a 2004 book party.)

Zivity made several big mistakes:

• No hardcore: Zivity clung to artistic pretensions, screening pictures for "tastefulness," "respect," and "promoting female beauty." Which is morally commendable, but proved disastrous from a business perspective; free tasteful nude pictures are chock a block on the internet; as even Arianna Huffington knows, people only pay for the fetish stuff.
  
• Suicide Girls: As Fleshbot noted when Zivity launched (NSFW link), amateur-y SuicideGirls.com already had a large online adult community when Zivity entered the fray. Suicide Girls also had a large user base of people interested in amateur, or at least amateur-looking, porn.
  
• It cost money: Really good amateur content has proven it can attract readers; really good professional content can make people pay. Zivity tried to combine amateur content with a $10/month subscription model — before it even had any breakout hits.

One thing you can't blame for Zivity's crumble: Brain-dead, sexually repressed male patriarchy. The site was started by Cyan Banister, a seasoned tech exec and sysadmin — and one of her site's first models (see picture at top). And its early investors included none another than Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley's most prominent gay venture capitalist.

Thiel has said there are "only a handful" of companies "truly innovating" in tech today; perhaps he can show Zivity how to unlock its inhibitions and push the envelope while there's still a little time left for the vastly reduced site.

(Top pic via Fleshbot, NSFW link)

Someone decided to document said phenomenon on Craigslist for us! The poster in question is clearly a well-to-do Brooklyn philanthropy oriented type. She offers to help the man get his penis back in his pants, with her friends! And maybe a photograph of him on the internet might help it stay there, no? Here's the post:

After only one stop I looked up from a rousing game on my phone to see that you appeared to be in great pain because your face was contorted. Upon second glance I noticed the problem..Your penis was trying to escape from your pants!

Clearly it had found its' way through your zipper (I can only imagine the pain that caused) and wiggled away from your grasp. In fact, it was already making a break for it! I saw it hiding behind your man-purse where no one could see but me. You struggled to grip it in your hand very tightly in what must have been a valiant effort to contain the beast, every time you pulled it back a little it would escape further and with more force. I admire you, it's not easy - I'm a woman and I know those things can be hard to handle. Still, I was shocked. The penises I've come in contact with were always much more domesticated and happy with their owners - is yours unhappy with you?

Maybe you were pleading with me for help, because you were staring at me quite intently. I met your eyes and while I wanted to speak - to cry out and tell everyone of the trouble you were having - I had no words. However, a picture is worth a thousand words and so I thought I would snap one on my phone so I could warn the world of your unruly penis.

Your penis must be camera shy because once it realized a picture had been taken it receded to the safety of your slacks once again and you quickly ran off the train at Atlantic Street/Pacific Ave- no doubt to go discipline it - or maybe to go to a hospital and have it drugged. I don't really know.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

While the Craigslist poster nor the man in the picture have been identified, we'd like both to come forward if they wish, certainly one more than the other. Craigslist poster: you're a wonderful, fun writer! And it was so kind of you to charitably offer to help that nice man on the subway.

Other person: you're a fucking dirtbag, and I can assure you that if I or my friends see you on the subway, your penis will be kicked very hard to ensure that it stays where it belongs, or at the very least, someone's gonna call an MTA cop. Also, girls don't give a fuck about your peen; it's old and disgusting and you're certainly not going to help its cause by doing this. But you'll give us great material! So: carry on, I guess!

You dropped your penis, I snapped a picture [Craigslist]

Ad Age's Simon Dumenco is shuddering:

Really, the school — which exists to train journalists — should know better than to honor a woman who thinks journalists should work for free!

...Now please excuse me as I crawl under my desk and curl into the fetal position.

It's true that there's something awkward about Huffington's award; we said so last month.

But if it's Huffington's volunteer model that makes you feel queasy, it's time to get over the feeling, because the internet mogul is hardly alone in exploiting unpaid contributors. Just this morning, the New York Times' David Carr wrote about a group of laid-off New Jersey journalists whose independent website, it turns out, earns enough to pay them all of $42 per week.

And the Times itself is experimenting with citizen journalism, on its Brooklyn blog "The Local." In fact, newspapers across the country have been tinkering with unpaid online contributors for years now.

If you're going to cower in fear of Huffington, it should be because you have to work for her. It's far too late to fret over her successful — and widely copied — business model.

According to a Google Trend count taken about 45 minutes ago, six of the top fifty Google searches have to do with Old Navy and these goddamn flip-flops. The cheapest iteration of The Gap (and the Mormon Mommy approved "angel-wear" to American Apparel's "satanist chic") is having some kind of sale today only. These things are a dollar each, there's a five-pair per-person limit on them (and apparently, seven colors. Ouch). Naturally, people are Twittering this kind of thing, because it's BREAKING NEWS.

One Twitterite ominously warns: "Do not attempt old navy today." Another citizen-journalist and avid Batman fan reports brawls! "It was crazy!!! People fighting over $1 flip flops!!!" Yet another one notes an hour-long wait in New Jersey.

There's actually an Old Navy ten minutes down the street from Gawker's satellite location, but seeing as how I have yet to get a smoke in this morning, you're not getting any on-the-ground reportage from me. I imagine the scene is (mostly) the same all over America: hungry, rabid masses, chewing on coca leaves, bayoneting each other for the final pair of sky-blue, flimsy rubber footwear.

Meanwhile, back on Google Trends, the search query "land of make believe" sits all lonely-like at 98, away from all the cool kids/searches in the front. Believe us, "land of make believe," we always - especially on occasions like this - wish we could be with you. One day, you'll be a "volcanic" search. One day, you'll be a fully grown Google Trend.

The Wire creator, David Simon, was a cops reporter at the Baltimore Sun for 12 years, ending in 1995. He then made a lucrative second career in fiction and Hollywood before detouring into a sideline as a cranky, reactionary media pundit this past year.

Simon told the Senate Commerce Committee today bloggers don't go to city council meetings, or know what the hell is going on if they do — a clichéd, out of touch refrain common among newspapermen who can't be bothered to do any reporting on the assertion. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from a Newark Star-Ledger columnist to this effect:

Don't expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings... a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

New York Times media columnist David Carr often capitalizes on the idea that bloggers don't do government in his repeated columns about how newspapers must restrict their websites:

The capacity to produce accountability reporting... and robust coverage of public officials is not sustainable under current revenue models.

And here's Simon, right before winding up to his punch line about "relaxing certain anti-trust prohibitions:"

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

And they weren't exactly a big secret. Here's a year-old San Francisco Chronicle article that Simon apparently missed about some of this motley crew; here's a report in Oakland's alt-weekly recounting one Oakland blogger's post on a politically-rigged block-grant meeting in West Oakland (nitty gritty enough for you, Simon?); Here's the Oakland Tribune quoting various bloggers on an intricate city council debate involving cabaret permits.

Collectively, these bloggers are doing just what Simon suggests: attending meetings, developing sources and holding government accountable every day.

And the best of the crop are doing so individually, on their own and, somehow, basically for free. Simon should spend as much time as he can on A Better Oakland (original posts down the center column), a thoroughly reported blog on the nitty-gritty of Oakland politics, complete with key video moments from government meetings, illuminating crime analysis, skillful fact-checking of political puffery, transit coverage, development coverage, thorough meeting recaps, spicy guest posts, and, yes, the occasional media criticism (along with support for the press against government stonewalling).

(Disclosure: The writer of A Better Oakland is among the bloggers I turned to as knowledgeable sources when covering Oakland, and I now count her as a friend. But you don't have to take my word about her; read the Chronicle and Express links above.)

You'll find communities of civic-minded bloggers in all sorts of places. The New York Times recently profiled the Brooklyn blog Gowanus Lounge, described elsewhere as a publication of "hard news scoops and opinionated rants" with "influence into City Hall and the executive suites of the city's biggest developers." The site was part of an ecosystem of any number of other local news blogs.

Even the mayor of the tiny city of Salisbury, Maryland claims to be "under siege" from bloggers.

With so much quality civic reporting already being done online for little or no pay, it stands to reason we could eventually get quality government reporting entirely from bloggers, both professional and amateur, rather than depending on a federally-coddled cabal of conspiring nonprofit newspapers, as Simon envisions.

And there are reasons to think the quality would actually be better, since so many of the writers are deeply invested residents, rather than the sort of superficially-engaged, careerist professional journalists portrayed so well by Simon in The Wire and all too common in American newsrooms.

Arianna Huffington may not be the ideal mogul to lead journalism into the future, but her own senate testimony offered an impressively rational and articulate vision of what's to come, at least next to Simon's:

For too long, traditional media have been afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder — they are far too quick to drop a story — even a good one, in their eagerness to move on to the Next Big Thing. Online journalists, meanwhile, tend to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder… they chomp down on a story and stay with it, refusing to move off it until they've gotten down to the marrow.



In the future, these two traits will come together and create a much healthier kind of journalism.



...We must never forget that our current media culture led to the widespread failure (with a few honorable exceptions) to serve the public interest by accurately covering two of the biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown.



That's why, as journalism transitions to a new and different place, the emphasis should not be on subsidizing what exists now but on how to rededicate ourselves to the highest calling of journalists — which is to ferret out the truth, wherever it leads. Even if it means losing our all-access-pass to the halls of power.

[Senate Testimony]

(Last image from the New Yorker.)

Various Fox News executives, clearly reading from the same Roger Ailes-issued talking points, described the site in the press today as Huffington Post + Drudge Report (see Washington Post, AP)

How does Fox Nation stack up to those and other aggregator sites?

Paucity of original content: Check. Rather than complain about online aggregators like other traditional media brands, Fox seems to have jumped into the game with both feet. The top five stories listed on Fox Nation right now are produced by KTAR TV, ABC News, Politico, the Porterville Recorder and the New York Post.

(The site's operators are promising to eventually recruit volunteer writers like those who contribute to the Huffington Post.)

Hysterical headlines: Check. E.g.: "Scary! Obama nominee wants one world order;" "Bill Maher smears U.S. troops;" and "GOP vows WWII over Stuart Smalley," where "Stuart Smalley" refers to would-be Minnesota senator Al Franken, depicted for some reason (see picture above) as a rabbit (the image rollover seems to be broken).

Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio found this gem: "Affirmative Action for Muslims in the White House?" Fox already yanked that one.

Brilliantly insane comments section: Check. Particularly fun was the populist story "GM CEO drives off with $22 million," which split the right-wing commenters into people who blamed the mess on recently-ousted General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner; those who blamed GM's main union, the United Auto Workers; and those who blamed Barack Hussein Obama, aka Hilter:

As you can see, the future of right-wing attack journalism is being born before our very eyes, right there on FoxNation.com. It's enough to make you choke up a little bit. Or just, you know, choke.

Following work as an internet organizer for two Democratic presidential candidates, Michel directed the Huffington Post's "Off The Bus" volunteer reporting on the 2008 presidential election. The effort produced two major, national scoops: Barack Obama's "Bittergate" comments about conservative working-class voters and Bill Clinton's rope-line slam of a Vanity Fair writer.

Success enough, perhaps. But as Michel writes in the new Columbia Journalism Review, there were other concrete news advances from the massive (12,000-volunteer) project, including:

• Quickly locating and dispatching (via a project database of volunteers) an amateur reporter to interview and exonerate a man Fox News had falsely named as having taken Hillary Clinton campaign staff hostage. (The interview was conducted at the man's apartment while he was supposedly elsewhere holding the hostages.)
  
• Correctly predicting several months before the traditional media that the 2008 election would hinge on domestic issues rather than Iraq, based on interviews by 24 reporters in 16 cities.
  
• Quantifying, with its own team of accountants, researchers and at least one former Clinton administration staffer, the precise level of support Hillary Clinton's campaign received from former Bill Clinton staff and Lincoln bedroom guests.
• Reporting on black women increasing their doses of anti-anxiety medication ahead of the presidential election (your lock on fluffy lifestyle trend stories is OVER, MSM).

Having led the most visibly successful citizen journalism initiative to date, Michel would no doubt be an attractive recruit to any number of newspapers; they still have the strong brands needed to attract free labor and, increasingly, the desperate finances to push old-fashioned editors to try and use it.

As of last week, Michel is already spoken for. She's been snapped up by ProPublica, the investigative journalism nonprofit run by former longtime Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger. (The Huffington Post rather bizarrely replaced her with its publisher's godson.)

More and more newspapers are now desperately trying to replace staff they can no longer afford with volunteers, as Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio points out. Even the New York Times!

Many will, of course, fail. But at least there's now one big, visible blueprint for success. And if a manager as erratic as Arianna Huffington can pull citizen journalism off, some ink-stained editors should be able to manage the same. They, like Huffington, just need to find the right sort of help.

(Michel pic via ny:mieg)

But you can't say it didn't generate any user dialogue:

Citizen journalism, ladies and gentlemen. [Ad Age]

Despite the fact that the basic facts of the evening seem to be proven, Wikipedia's power-mad power-users are immediately deleting any and all mention of the John Edwards lovechild scandal the second any other user adds it. You could go over there and add "In July of 2008, Edwards was confronted at a Beverly Hills hotel by National Enquirer reporters searching for evidence of his participation in an extra-martial affair"—all true and verified by more "reliable" sources!—and it wouldn't last two minutes. (Actually you couldn't add that. The entry has been locked.) It's not notable enough for them, apparently. Though this is. And hell, so is this!

But no, the details of the probable end of the political aspirations of one of the 2000s most visible Democratic politicians are just not as notable as the fictional history of the Wookee homeworld.

(Kudos, of course, to the enterprising editor who buried mention of this scandal in this unread entry on a book by Rielle Hunter's ex-boyfriend Jay McInerney.)

I was an intern for Charlie Rose back in '03, and at that time David Gregory was a frequent guest, usually on remote from Washington. I would watch the less-than-congenial, highly abusive, and generally abrasive Rose do the usual pre-show banter with Gregory; whereby they'd both bask in their own sense of self-satisfaction for a while, then make jokes about President Bush (not that everyone doesn't, but it did destroy the illusion of journalistic objectivity for me).

My best guess is Gregory is definitely taking 'star' lessons from the diva/mentor himself, Charlie.

The dude is a total jerk.

Once, I was hanging with some friends in DC and we decided to go to the Capitol. We agreed to meet at a certain point at the front steps when we were done. There were maybe 8 of us. Well it turns out that David Gregory was reporting from the lawn of the Capitol around the spot where we were meeting up. The guy did his report, turned around, and proceeded to berate us and curse at us for being fame seeking assholes for ruining his shot and then asked if we wanted his autograph.

Whiner, arrogant, pious, self centered puke - that's him!!

And Fitted Sweats asks the important question: what if you were stranded on a tropical island with him?

David Gregory would insist being stranded was all your fault in the first place. He'd make a weird headband from an old dress shirt. Go jogging. Then start asking about what Presidents you've met. "Come on," he'd say. "Has to be at least one, right?" You'd say no. Meekly. Then he'd say "What was your GPA in college?" And spend the whole time undermining you. And being his typically douchey prematurely gray self. If he dies, after writing some bad poetry on a cave wall with a rock, he's too pasty to cannibalize.

Gregory generally came off as awkward when trying to lighten up during his gig guest-hosting Today—he also did quite a bit of dancing. He also once called in to Don Imus either terribly jet-lagged or comically drunk. And some people claim he's hated by his staff and, uh, mouths off to the help.

He might well be hated by his staff and mean to wait-staff. He's smug, self-important, and largely humorless despite his on-air geniality (it's almost like he's in television!). But we bummed around DC for a little while doing not much of anything in particular and from what we heard at the time, from people who might happen to know him, he's not Chris Matthews bad.

We could be wrong. Anyone work with or for the man? Or served him dinner? tell us how it went.

The full headline is "BREAKING: Woodland creatures eat novice gardener's summer crop." Not actually from The Onion.

This story was actually just a link to another site. CNN is the new Netscape Propeller.

Finally, something newsy! For the CNN definition of news.

This post is not just a "Here's something you hadn't seen, but don't bother" — CNN had a chance to turn "citizen journalism" from local-news wankery into a well-funded section of the news industry. But instead it found a way to plug cheaper coverage into its 24-hour news hole at the expense of quality, filling the network with explosions and white whines that belong on YouTube. There is a right way to do this, isn't there?

At EveryBlock (now available for Chicago, San Francisco, and New York). I can get news from the whole city, a neighborhood, a zip code, or a specific block. I can see crime reports, Craigslist ads, zoning news, Yelp reviews, and Flickr photos.

I can see local news, which really should be the site's big draw, but I have a feeling there's much more out there than what EveryBlock aggregates. My neighborhood (SF's Mission District) has a local paper that doesn't show up, and I expected more info from the city's several alt weeklies. The promise of a site like EveryBlock is that it could win back the online readers who abandoned local papers for news sources like Drudge and blogs. This is the same problem others tried to solve with "citizen journalism" — but EveryBlock recognizes that the real journalists are still out there. They just need a modern delivery system.

• "The more people who visit the site the faster he bleeds."
• 
  
• "This website is like nothing we've ever seen before." And: "The public is tuning in at an alarming rate."
• 
  
• "OMG"
• 
  
• "At times his insults and his humor, in the language he imitated, were so subtly placed that they could be missed completely."
• 
  
• "Anything you say will only promote the site and kill him faster."
• 
  
• "You get the sense of a young woman who works very hard, whose friends think she's funny, and who's been tasked with impersonating an older, much worldlier gay man."
• 
  
• "Any American who visits the site is an accomplice to murder."

• Bonus video:

  Answers: Movie, Movie, Movie, N+1, Movie, N+1, Movie. BUT all apply to each equally! Right?