Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails. They picked up Bill Kristol after the Times dumped him for being not just wrong but boring and lazy. They openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections, because we all know reality is open to different "interpretations" and if a prominent columnist writes something patently untrue the best response is to then publish a "true" column by someone else as a counterpoint, because that doesn't just represent everything misleading and terrible about the moden political press. They still publish Richard Cohen. The regular columnists are, for the most part, interchangeable ancient "moderate" liberals who haven't written or thought anything vaguely interesting since 1974. Anne Applebaum was allowed to publish a blog post in support of Roman Polanski without disclosing that her husband is Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who opposes extradition. Richard Cohen, again.

And on October 10, the Post published an insane editorial on how the Nobel Prize should've been awarded to a murdered Iranian protester. This suggests that either the entire editorial board doesn't know that Nobel Peace Prizes are never awarded posthumously or they simply don't give a shit. The piece is still not corrected, because presumably any "correction" would have to read "the entire premise of this editorial is bullshit, sorry."

So how do you follow that up? How about by running an op-ed by a law professor and a right-wing think tank goon about how Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was... unconstitutional, maybe? Who knows! Who cares! They acknowledge that two other sitting presidents have received the award, but they do not even do the meaningless-but-intellectually defensible thing of arguing that those awards were also unconstitutional, they just say this time it's different because Obama got it so therefore Congress should forbid him from accepting it, because of the House of Saud.

In conclusion, blogs are killing newspapers by being irresponsible and not caring about "the truth."

Thomas, who recently published his novel Love & Money, originally wrote about his decision to leave for his personal site.

Sunday I sent around an e-message to friends telling them that I felt it was time to leave the NY Observer. As I usually am, I was candid about my reasons. I have no intellectual or ideological connection to the new regime there. Tom McGeveran, the new editor, seems like a very nice guy, but we've never worked together, and since I have some idea what Peter Kaplan endured over the last couple of years, I can only imagine that Tom must feel, some mornings, that he's woken up in the journalistic equivalent of the trenches at Verdun.

My e-circulation list included a few people in what we broadly call media." Friends who happen to be journalists, people for whom I've written. Page Six wasn't on the list, not that I don't like Richard Johnson, and enjoy what he does, because I do - emphatically - but I simply didn't think the departure of an old guy of 73 after a gig that ran 22 years from first word to last was very gossipworthy. I lawyer friend of mine is fond of saying, "In e-mail, the e' stands for 'evidence'" - advice that I've taken to heart, but - to repeat myself - I really didn't think there was any evidentiary interest in my having decided to go in the direction I have. That I used to refer to Donald Trump as "the Prince of Swine" is a matter of record; in my NYO column I took a view of the way people exhibited themselves in public (their private lives were off the record) and got themselves written about. Nicknames and sobriquets were a neat way of sticking a pin in; I was particularly fond of my coinage for Ralph Lauren: "the Wee Haberdasher." There were risks in this; having referred once to a fashion personality as "a shirtlifter," I found myself essentially blacklisted with regard to freelance assignments for a major publishing company. Anyway, public is as public does, and private is something else. I know Donald Trump's dirty secret, going back some 40 years, when we were both on the board of the much-missed Le Club. It is this: when he shrugs off the public persona that sells books and buildings and TV bullying, he's a very nice guy. But don't tell anyone!

Anyway, someone on my list obviously forwarded the e-mail to Page Six. I'm pretty certain I know who it is, because there are only one or two people on my circulation list to whose lives publicity — the trade-off of someone else's info for future mention of oneself — is as vital and essential a force as gravity is to the solar system. Not that it matters.

But that's really neither here nor there. It does prompt one or two reflections about my former employer. Some dozen years ago, it must have been, Conrad Black briefly flirted with the idea of buying the NYO. A mutual friend, the late, beloved Arthur Ross, called me up and invited me - then a NYO headliner - to meet Conrad for an exchange of views. After the usual pleasantries, I asked Conrad what he thought of NYO as a newspaper. I've never forgotten his answer: "The NYO isn't a newspaper," he said, "it's a mascot."
I think Conrad had a point. Long, long ago the paper hit a circulation wall at around the 50,000 mark - a level it's never surmounted since to any meaningful degree. This suggests that people grow into the paper and later grow out of it. In the past six months, I can't count how many times someone's come up to me and said "I see you're back in the NYO. I gave up my subscription but now I'll start reading it again."

Here's the thing. When you're young, at least until the recent economic mess, life is a lark, to be lived in and of the moment. You want to be hip, current, a la mode. You don't want serious - which is why most young people don't read newspapers, because the NYT et al traffic in the serious. But as you grow older, life starts to get more serious. Policy begins to matter more than personality. The latest fashion no longer matters, the latest scandal, the latest nightclub. They no longer make movies that anyone with an IQ over the national speed limit can suffer through, and hip-hop is unspeakable, so you quickly stop knowing exactly what the latest celebrity is famous for. You're no longer the person the NYO is written and published for. You give it up.

Most people won't believe this, but the NYO started life as a serious paper. The city already had enough of those, however, and Graydon Carter came along and created the editorial enlivenment that got the paper talked about. I stopped writing thinkpieces about capitalism and started calling people funny names, and Women's Wear Daily sent someone to interview me and take my picture. Pretty heady stuff.
The trick is, however, to hold your original audience while adding new readers. Twenty years ago, I pleaded with Arthur Carter to start a Medicine page, on the theory that of the straws that stir the New York drink, medicine is right up there with media and finance, and an aging readership, naturally more mindful of its health, of what are called "wellness issues," would stay with us. Just look at how New York does with its annual "Best Doctors" issue. Arthur didn't buy the idea. I tried again with the new publisher. He didn't answer my e-mail. I still think the idea's a good one.

In my demographic, no day begins without a lament for the late Sun. In culture, arts, sports - and in coverage of the city, which was NYO's original stakeout - it quickly rose right to the top. Made chopped liver of the NYT, with its pathetic, alienating effort to be groovy. Early on, Seth Lipsky asked me to write for his fledgling paper. I was also being importuned to return to the NYO. Here's what I told Seth: "I'm on the horns of a dilemma. Either I can be a juvenile on a grownup paper, or a grownup on a juvenile paper."

I think that says it all.

I am genuinely baffled by the journalistic ethics debate over TechCrunch's decision to publish Twitter corporate documents that were apparently obtained through "hacking" and then forwarded to the Silicon Valley business blog.

TechCrunch appears to have played no role whatsoever in the alleged hacking. According to TechCrunch, it was simply sent 310 documents, unsolicited. It then decided to print "financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings," as well as "the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May." Why? "[M]ostly because it's awesome." TechCrunch voluntarily refrained from publishing other information contained in the documents, including "floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices." According to the NY Times, TechCrunch's founder Michael Arrington (a fellow OMM alum) "is working closely with Twitter as it determines which pieces of information to publish," though "[h]e is protecting the identity of his source."

Here's what I don't get: why the ethical hand-wringing here? Why was TechCrunch's decision to publish some of the hacked documents any different from what mainstream publications like the Times and Wall Street Journal do countless times every day: print information and documents leaked from employees to reporters, without company permission? Every company I've ever heard of prefers to keep its business information confidential. Often, they have formal confidentiality policies, or even require employees (and contractors) to enter into strict nondisclosure agreements. Of course business reporters know this. And yet, without giving it a second thought, they ask employees to violate their duties to their employers, and leak confidential documents and spill the beans on company secrets. And their editors don't wring their hands; they praise their reporters for their scoops.

In some ways, what typical reporters do in soliciting confidential documents is ethically worse than what TechCrunch did. Reporters typically ask sources to give them confidential documents knowing full well that the employee is breaking company policy, and possibly civil or even criminal laws (e.g., conversion or theft of trade secrets). But TechCrunch did no such thing; by its account, the hacked documents just showed up unsolicited in its inbox. And assuming that's accurate, I think TechCrunch faces no significant legal risk from publishing the material. See Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001) (radio host not liable under wiretapping statutes for broadcasting illegally intercepted conversations, where he played no role in illegal interception).

The hand-wringers can't have it both ways. Either TechCrunch's decision to print was perfectly legitimate journalism — or what business reporters do every single day is even more unethical. Am I missing some distinction?

No, of course not! It's because Anthony Weiner can better serve New York in the House of Representatives. You know, the place where progressive legislation basically passes without much trouble. He wouldn't want to give up his important seat to some other Democrat who would vote the same way!

Here are two randomly selected sentences that sum up why Anthony Weiner bugs the shit out of us:

• "I WAS the kind of New York kid who played stickball in the street, made pocket change working at the local bagel store and handed out leaflets on Election Day."
• "As a native of Brooklyn, I'd be lying if I said I didn't savor a good scrap."

WE GET IT WEINER YOU GREW UP WITH THE FUCKING DEAD END KIDS.

I worked at Portfolio for the first 17 issues of its 21 issue run, first as a fact checker and then as a staff writer. I was there for four months before the debut issue came out—four months characterized by sparse work and ample free food and beverage. After that issue came out, we sat around for another three months as we took the summer off, waiting to start our monthly publishing schedule in September 2007. Well, I'm sure market research, advertiser meetings and focus groups were all being conducted, and we had office supplies to order, but the vast majority of the nearly triple digit staff mostly sat around and waited for September.

I was a computer geek for several long years after college, and though I enjoyed it, it wasn't my calling. So I moved to New York and decided to become a journalist. (For anyone whose jaw drops at my insouciance here, may I remind you, journalism schools were quite laughable for much of this century, and many graduates of them still say their main value was to network and learn the business, not the craft.) After writing some freelance articles and getting a foot in the door at another Condé Nast magazine, I found my way to Portfolio.

Knowing little about the media world, I was suitably impressed with the pedigrees of everyone I worked with. Their resumes were dotted with long-term assignments from Time, The New Yorker, Fortune, The New York Times and other A-list publications. The most popular being the Wall Street Journal, the former home of editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman and much of her top staff. I never questioned why anyone would leave those places for something new. It's in a writer's ethos to create—who would choose to to keep cranking out story widgets at a dying gray broadsheet over the chance to sketch the lines of a new magazine funded by the glossiest media company in the world?

In the early days, there was a torrent of optimism in the still spacious halls of the 17th floor. But almost from the beginning, there were undercurrents of dissent. From what I knew of media, maybe from what I imagined of media, or saw in the movies, dissent was good, or at least not bad. It helped sharpen the premise and focus of an editorial product, helped those in charge of creating it to beta test it (to borrow a phrase) before it met public scrutiny. Would there ever be scrutiny. But if you have to say one thing about the failure of Lipman to create a successful magazine, it would be that dissent was not brooked by her. Not ever.

First, let me amplify, the magazine was a failure. It was not market conditions or the general economic meltdown that forced Si's hand, it was a failure to create something that people wanted to read. I harbor no personal ill will towards her or anyone I worked with, but Si's best editors-in-chief all have one thing in common, which is they know how to channel and predict the predilections of their readers and turn at least a couple issues a year into can't miss propositions. Lipman, a reporter from middle class suburban New Jersey, like me, who was savvy enough to climb to the top circle of the Wall Street Journal hierarchy, and did a good enough job there to be poached for millions by Si Newhouse, did not have this particular talent.

When others at the magazine tried to inject their talents into the dialogue by questioning the wisdom of certain articles, certain cover choices, word choices, headlines, etc., Lipman was not interested in hearing from them if their ideas about those things differed from hers. Editorial meetings evolved from an initially respectful differing of opinions among equals into contentious, adversarial affairs. When Lipman took any advice at all, it usually came from the top deputies she brought with her from the Journal. Yet despite her tight grip on the magazine's editorial content, there was the obvious scattershot, disconnected mix of stories and covers, and the pendulum swung wildly from issue to issue. Lipman's means of survival and ascension at the Journal soon became clear with firings and departures and freeze outs at Portfolio: they had less to do with editorial acumen and more to do with knowing how to squash revolutions and power plays.

A fine way to run an empire, and clearly a page from the cutthroat world of high finance that every Journal staffer knows intimately. But it was never her empire to run, nor was it really an empire at all. The rulers were ultimately the readers, because readership leads to advertisers. And readers were given short shrift at Portfolio. Fine, they got a bound magazine each month, with elegant covershots of hideous men, pretty and expensive photography inside, and very beautiful design. It looked pretty important, except maybe the one with Dov Charney on the cover. But its beauty was, at its best, skin deep.

When readers opened to the articles in Portfolio, they got a cruel shock. They got stories by the biggest names in the industry, but they got their leftovers. I ask you, if you were Michael Lewis (until his last, best piece for the mag before going to Vanity Fair) or Roger Lowenstein, would you submit your best stories to Portfolio, or to the much bigger and more important Times Magazine? Readers got some articles written by really good writers who could've become A-listers, had their articles not been edited within an inch of their lives and rewritten mercilessly, as if not by magazine editors but rewrite men at the New York Post City Desk. They got some articles chock full of good raw reporting that should've been re-worked into something readable by those same rewrite happy editors. And they got some utter crap, written by hacks that should've never been there to begin with.

As for me, like a lot of the younger writers there, I was never really able to do much damage, or earn much praise. There were easily half a dozen writers under 30 there whose role was to be seen and not heard. Despite our hustling and trying to curry favor with our editors, in the hopes they could sell us to Lipman, we were up against the faceless contract contributors for space, and we — especially me — usually lost that battle.

When I was laid off, I couldn't feel too bad about it right then, because the writing had been on the wall. I surely took the prize for the least output by a salaried staff writer, ever, due to a variety of faults, many my own, some not. (Well there were those legendary New Yorker writers who kept offices for decades after their one and only contribution to the magazine was published, but that's a different era.) But I did feel bad about the past. About watching scads of competent people get frustrated and leave, or get fired, about watching new people come in and quickly find they were expected to butt their heads against a brick wall all day for every original idea they hoped to contribute, and mostly about the promise that was completely unfulfilled thanks to the way the magazine was run. That day, when I polled some of the remaining staff, no one gave the place more than a year to live.

It was an insane idea to launch a print magazine in 2007, one so crazy it just might've worked. We were given everything we needed to succeed— late deadlines, a bottomless (well, maybe not) pile of cash, and a mandate to get the best people in the business on our team. A website that started out wobbly became relevant. Yes, the economy exploded, but Fortune launched in the Great Depression. The economy falling out should've been a new business magazine's Pearl Harbor, not its Waterloo.

It was a peculiar thing to run out the string at a magazine destined for the scrap heap, even if I ultimately got my release before it tanked, as did, of all the deserving people there, most of the ace website staff. It was at that point that I knew Portfolio would go down with Lipman at the helm. Her reign was as tumultuous as, I'm sad to say, Gawker made it sound. You need a certain insulation from things like Gawker, I think, to keep your eye on the ball, especially when we stumbled so badly so early. But Gawker's observation of the spectacle did not create it. I wonder, though, if hubris mixed with defiance may have led the company to prolong Lipman's reign, in hopes of vindication, far past the point of reason. Yet in too many ways to enumerate here, we did not operate in what I fondly call a reality-based environment. In Lipman's meetings, firings were never firings, stories were never bad or ill timed, mistakes were never made. The air had long been sucked out of that room, and few staffers seemed to believe anymore in the mission of the place, despite a collective desire, and I mean this, to do as good a job as they could do, given the circumstances.

Early in my time there, I saw a Deputy Editor I learned from and respected be run out on a rail for his insouciance, his belief that the magazine could be a great thing. I wondered, as those early undercurrents of dissent began to swell, why no one was pointing out the empress had no clothes. Wasn't this journalism, capital J? Didn't it matter when seasoned vets thought we were going about things in a haphazard, disjointed, unfocused and fundamentally wrong way? Yes, but. These were also jobs, capital J. And as is now clear, no one, inside or out, was ever going to save Lipman from herself.

And who knows, as her faltering became apparent, what kind of pressures Lipman faced from her boss, and his boss, and Newhouse himself, that further distorted the title? Essentially, it's hard to take principled stands when you work pretty much at the beneficence of a billionaire. And if you're wondering what's wrong with journalism these days, that's pretty much it.

Paul Smalera is a freelance writer at work on a book.

If you're a former Portfolio staffer and you'd like to give your take, we'll print it here. Just email me.

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry's popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry's work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of "When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem." I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The problem newspapers face isn't that they didn't see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn't we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn't get much discussion in the nation's newsrooms, for the obvious reason.

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn't shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM's requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven't been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

* * *

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the '90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: "Here's how we're going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!" The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

"The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!" (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don't want to share.) "Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!" (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) "The New York Times should charge for content!" (They've tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) "Cook's Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!" (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) "We'll form a cartel!" (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem.

* * *

Elizabeth Eisenstein's magisterial treatment of Gutenberg's invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg's invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther's use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.

What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the effects of the press circa 1500. To describe life before or after the spread of print was child's play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change - take a book and shrink it - was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

* * *

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage - a breaking story, a key interview - at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.

For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn't because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L'Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn't make it any less accidental.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They'd never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

* * *

Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone - covering every angle of a huge story - to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; "You're gonna miss us when we're gone!" has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don't know. Nobody knows. We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen.

Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you'd almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: "Mailing lists can be powerful tools", "Social effects are intertwining with digital networks", "This points to future ways of managing local information", and so on. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.

In craigslist's gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor' to ‘essential and transformative', there is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it's been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it's been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it's you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can't be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That's been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we're going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society', the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions' to ‘do whatever works.' And what works today isn't the same as what used to work.

We don't know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won't recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program and writes on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.

Jon Voight: "is a frightened little girl in a pink ballet tutu, who acts like Obama just wandered in from the rain forest with a bone thru his nose and a communist pamphlet in his loincloth. The neocons who own jon voight and make him dance on the chabad telethons are the worst most elitist people on earth. glen beck and jon voight are their bitches... both of them are used tampons who must be flushed down the toilet immediately!"

Bush/Edwards/Hunter: "john edwards is an asshole but bush stole all of our money and killed innocent babies and children and women with it...there's a frickin scandal for ya! and he doesn't even have to answer for it one one hundredth as much as edwards is being assailed for fucking one slutty coke whore. The media cares more about sneaky sex than about torture death and holocaust." [RoseanneWorld via OhNoTheyDidn't]

A permanent end to the Olympics might actually not be that difficult. All it would really take is a single act of courage and morality by the United States to pull out of the Games forever on the basis that the mission is not coming close to being served. An American departure would severely dilute the Games since it would no longer be a world competition of anything.

But a far stronger factor in the exit of the American team would be the likelihood that American corporations would stop backing the Olympics with their megamillions. It would also severely diminish the willingness of American networks to continue to pay mind-boggling sums for the broadcast rights to the Olympics, which in the case of NBC was about $2.2 billion for the Games in 2010 and 2012. If Americans aren’t playing, Americans won’t watch.

In place of the Olympics, world championships would still be held in individual sports as they are now, but perhaps at permanent venues designed for optimum performance. This would be a good thing for athletes. For all the hype, the Games often don’t provide the greatest performances.

[NYT ]

"One Obama adviser moaned that the race was 'beginning to feel like a hostage crisis' and would probably go on for another month to six weeks. And Obama said that the 'God, when will this be over?' primary season was like 'a good movie that lasted about a half an hour too long.' Hillary sunnily riposted that she likes long movies. Her favorite as a girl was 'The Wizard of Oz,' so surely she spots the 'Surrender Dorothy' sign in the sky and the bad portent of the ladies of 'The View' burbling to Obama about how sexy he is." Okay, case closed.

"But who knows? Obama and Bob Casey talking March Madness to the patrons of Sharky’s sports cafe in Latrobe, Pa., on Friday night seemed demographically clever. But it is always when Hillary is pushed back by the boys that women help hoist her up." Note to all you young journos eager to someday be this relevant: Cover all bases. [NYT]

Let's put the numbers in perspective. The New York Times is worth one-fiftieth (oops) the value of Google. The predators have accumulated their holdings at a cost of less than $600m, which would buy Larry Ellison about three yachts. The Sulzbergers should not be lauded for their stewardship of the Times' great journalistic tradition; but damned for leaving the Gray Lady in the stockmarket's bargain bin.

Media conglomerates such as Time Warner, which went through its own disastrous mega-merger with AOL in 2000, seemed finally to be recognizing that size wasn't everything. “Whether [Time Warner] is the biggest is not the main thing," said Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's incoming chief executive. "It needs to be the most profitable." Sumner Redstone last year spun out Viacom's traditional media businesses such as TV network, CBS. And Barry Diller's IAC is, even if only after pressure from disgruntled shareholders, being broken up.

Now one can be sure every media company chief executive is running around like a headless chicken. They know that their future depends on internet advertising. For the moment, the bulk of the growth appears to be going to those properties with the biggest audience reach, which scares smaller media companies. Add in a mega-merger they don't understand: it's the perfect environment for media bankers to present consolidation as inevitable and their hair-brained schemes as urgent.

Most of these ideas will come to nothing. But someone who understands the web just enough to be dangerous, will be panicked into a moronic deal. (Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times, maybe, though he's hampered by the family legacy). Microsoft will survive the hugely expensive and wearying combination it is now proposing. Traditional media companies which follow its example don't have the luxury of making the same mistakes.

• Ask. Diller said he planned to spend $100m developing and promoting IAC's flagship search engine. After an impenetrable advertising campaign, touting Ask's New Jersey algorithm, what's the impact on the search engine's market share? Nothing measurable. The chief executive, a Diller favorite, is out.
• Vimeo. Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen's College Humor remains popular among college students and those whose humor remains frozen in sophomore year. But IAC's bigger interest was the online video site, a precursor to Youtube, which the College Humor techies set up in the spare time. Vimeo creator and Julia Allison cheater, Jakob Lodwick, was fired late last year. Vimeo's traffic is hardly measurable beside Youtube.
• VSL (a highbrow email newsletter of cultural recommendations dreamed up by Kurt Andersen and Diller's content guru, Michael Jackson) is close to Diller's heart. "Without Very Short List, I would be much diminished," said Diller. Unfortunately, the internet as a whole would not be. Last time I checked, the subscription list was only some 20,000 people. (I'm told the base has grown several hundred percent since then.) Culturally-literate email-reading billionaires are in short supply.
• 23/6, IAC's stab at political humor with the help of the Huffington Post, is stillborn. Michael Jackson's other joint venture, a business site done in collaboration with Dow Jones, may never even get off the ground. Says one insider: "It's obvious it won't work somewhat from the outside but the inside scoop is zero progression/movement. As Sanchez (IAC's foul-mouthed head of corporate communications) might have said, just a lot of wanking."
• Lending Tree will be spun off for less than half the price Diller paid for it. This is not the best moment in the cycle to sell a mortgage broker. And the mogul did himself no favors by alienating Rich Barton, an IAC board member, who left aggrieved after Diller spun out Expedia, his online travel agent. Barton founded a competitor, Zillow.

IAC holds some prospering and substantial businesses such as Ticketmaster, the online ticketing site, and Match, the online dating exchange. But even these have been forced uncomfortably to walk in lockstep with IAC's other businesses, even when the logic has been flimsy. The unvarnished truth is that Diller, who built up Fox into the fourth television network for Rupert Murdoch, has a dismal track record in running internet businesses. No amount of Diller's brutal charm can obscure that.

What the mogul does have is the contrarian courage of a great investor, and a mastery of the dark arts of corporate infighting. He acquired e-commerce assets during the downturn, when other investors had written off the internet as a blip. And he's playing hardball with as much skill and ruthlessness as his disgruntled shareholder, John 'Darth Vader' Malone.

That raises the question. Why does Diller, a 65-year-old who enjoys his yacht and parties he throws with his hostess, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg, even pretend to run these businesses? He should not be the plucky entrepreneur fighting off the evil corporate raider. Diller is on the wrong side of that eternal conflict. He has certain skills and the temperament, just none suited to a managerial role. The detached and machinating capitalist played in the current struggle by John Malone? That should be, in the next business life at least, Diller himself.

The Journal, officially, says only that there was a contretemps between Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal reporter working on a color piece on mogul real estate, and a construction crew working on his property. A spokesman for Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, said Pui-Wing was never charged. And Benioff isn't saying anything. But, the accounts of several Journal reporters describe a paranoid tech mogul, a massive over-reaction to an innocent article, and still chilly relations between the Journal and the Salesforce.com CEO.

Benioff's campaign against Pui-Wing began well before the article appeared in May this year. He wrote letters to Dow Jones management, including Karen House, the wife of the outgoing Dow Jones CEO. Benioff hired a crisis PR agency. He flew to New York to berate Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor. And the irony is that it was because of his complaints that the Journal felt obliged to get a first-hand account of the property, sending Pui-Wing to Hawaii, so that they could not be accused of reliance on second-hand information. Benioff brought the visit upon himself.

In Hawaii, Pui-Wing was first taken to a neighboring property by a real estate agent. Later, she returned alone, in order to take more photos. Inadvertently, according to her colleagues, she was on a stretch of road that was on Benioff's land. His construction crew, apparently alerted by Benioff to a possible intruder, detained her. They spoke with Benioff, and then the police.

The detention may have been illegal if, as Pui-Wing claimed, she was trying to leave the property. According to most trespass law, It is usually illegal to arrest a trespasser and hold them on the property until law enforcement arrives as this defeats the purpose of allowing them to cure the trespass by leaving.

After Pui-Wing was released, Benioff wrote another letter, to Paul Steiger, accusing Pui-Wing of stalking, with her incursion onto his property as new evidence. At this point, Steiger abandoned his usually emollient attitude toward complaining CEOs. The Journal wrote back what insiders describe as a fuck-you letter. Benioff told confidantes that he'd hired a private investigator to trail Pui-Wing, but Journal managers were not aware of any such threats.

The Journal shied away from mention of the contretemps in Pui-Wing's May 26 article on Benioff's Hawaii property. The reporter's detention was the juiciest angle to the story, certainly more interesting than a run-of-the-mill report on luxury second homes in Hawaii. The San Francisco bureau chief, Steve Yoder, told Pui-Wing to include a personal note about her detention. But it was deleted, after some debate, by Wall Street Journal management in New York.

It would be easy to conclude that the business newspaper had acted to save one of the Bay Area's most well-connected business figures from embarrassment. But it's probably more likely that they saw Pui-Wing's personal account as self-referential, and ultimately not relevant to the purpose of the item.

And that's an indictment, not of the craven business press, but of a tradition of dry and dispassionate reporting that often misses the big story. In this case, missing the open secret of Marc Benioff: that one of Silicon Valley's most prominent executives is in fact a petty tyrant, puffed up by IPO wealth and nauseatingly fawning profiles that he's grown to believe.

The Benioff story [Valleywag special]