John Koblin puts a number on the Wall Street Journal's recently announced plans to move into New York City metro coverage: $15 million. "You could drive a truck through the space between the wonderfully titillating tabloids and the perceived self-seriousness of The Times," says one PR man in the NYO. It's a big enough budget to help fill that gap. Although Rupert would prefer to just drive that truck directly over the Times.

And that's his smallest ongoing fight! Much bigger, in the grand scheme of things, is Rupert's willingness to be the media mogul who shouts out loud the thing that all the other media moguls grumble under their breath: Google is stealing from us! Why just yesterday, Rupert said:

"There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite — at times without attribution — the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks, or even months on their stories — all under the tattered veil of fair use."

He has (some of) a point! And even more remarkably, Google knows it. The Googleplex announced that they're going to (somewhat) close the technological loophole that allowed you to use Google News to jump over pay walls and read stories for free. Instead of being able to go to Google News, type in a headline from, say, the WSJ, and read as many stories as you want without subscribing, now Google "will allow publishers to limit non-subscribers to five free articles a day."

Rupert gets results. The New York Times is probably offering him a free Weekender subscription right now, to try to soften him up. But don't get it twisted: He's just begun to fight. He likes this stuff!

AOL's dynamic vision of the future: Flood the web with content designed to pop up high in Google search results, with editorial ideas generated by an algorithm based on what stupid people are looking for, on the internet. In our business we call this "stealing post ideas from Google Trends." Getcher Tiger Woods Mistress Pictures here! Tell us, WSJ, how will AOL improve the life of me, an average Park Slope Parent?

AOL says its new system determined that the most popular topic on the Web last Tuesday was "crib recalls," following news of a massive recall by Stork Craft Manufacturing of Canada. AOL had only one story on its sites on the recall. But, if the new system had been live, editors would have geared up to supply stories on the subject from a number of angles, the company says.

So not only is AOL basing its entire dismal future on the most base sort of styrofoam traffic-whoring; it's not even whoring in a new way. Demand Media, for one, has long been doing the exact same thing, with an algorithm-plus-sweatshop editorial production line that makes Gawker Media look like Aristotle's School of Taking Your Sweet Time Thinking About Things.

Ah well. Neither useless crap on the internet nor AOL sucking is anything new.

The most popular story on WSJ.com today has been their semi-exclusive about Joe Lieberman saying he's never going to vote for a health care bill with the public option. If you heard about Lieberman making news on health care today and went to Google "lieberman public option," you'd get these results. The shaded red boxes are the News Corp. properties: WSJ.com and Foxnews.com. Those would disappear, but there would be no shortage of results showing you what Lieberman told the WSJ in the top results.

But let's say you were really motivated to find the specific Wall Street Journal story about Joe Lieberman derailing health care and you searched "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal." That would currently bring up the story in question, as well as the Fox News result and an old WSJ blog post. But it would also bring up plenty of other sites that can tell you what was in the WSJ story. Those all likely will also provide a link to the WSJ story, but if they put up the pay wall Murdoch has promised, why would you bother to click through?

Lastly, here's a search for "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal," but with results from WSJ.com and FoxNews.com filtered out—in other words, what Google would return if they weren't allowed to index News Corp. pages.

All but the top two results — irrelevant HuffPo stories — show you exactly what Lieberman said in the Wall Street Journal. And would conceivably show you a link to the WSJ. So, no big loss.

For years, newspapers and other media companies have complained about Google reaping profits by indexing media content for free. Google has responded that media companies are free to remove themselves from Google's search engines if they wish. But media companies never actually did it, because the hit to their traffic would be too big. They'd prefer to just get paid by the search engines. Which is what Rupert Murdoch may now do.

Business Insider estimates that the Wall Street Journal, News Corp's most prized media property, would lose about $15 million by pulling out of Google—meaning that Bing could theoretically secure exclusive search engine rights for that price. The money is almost too small to matter. But this could be a trigger for much bigger things. Namely, the Great Search Engine Wars for media content.

Brian Lam argues that this move would hurt consumers. Instead of being able to go to Google to find everything, consumers would have to know which specific media outlets had exclusive deals with which search engines in order to track down their content.

And that's absolutely true! This trend, if it becomes widespread—every big media company hunting for the richest deal it can get from a search engine—would make life more inconvenient for media consumers like you and me. Which doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad. The fact is that the current situation cannot stand. Have you read our #layoffs tag lately? Rupert Murdoch—and other media owners—are tired of Google making money off their content, for free. The original idea was that the traffic driven to media sites by Google would provide enough revenue, through ads, to make everyone happy. That hasn't turned out to be the case. Online ad revenue is not doing the trick.

So media companies will need new revenue streams to survive. A big one will be paid content; i.e., if you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay some sort of subscription fee. But search engine deals like this—in which media companies make search engines pay for exclusive rights to access their content—are another online revenue stream that could become significant. News Corp's deal isn't big money, yet. But presumably if Google and its competitors realize they will have to engage in bidding wars to lock in rights to good media content, the value of those deals would increase considerably.

The bigger picture is this: Yes, the "journalism" industry will shrink. That's part of the future. Fine. But even with the wondrous world of blogs and nonprofit journalism foundations and every other new permutation of creating content, the fact remains that if people want to enjoy a fundamental baseline of serious news media in this country, they will have to pay for it, somehow. Yes, it's more inconvenient to have search engines with exclusive content deals. It's also inconvenient to have to pay to read online news. But these and other new revenue streams will have to come into place if we don't want to keep griping forever about journalists being laid off and news quality getting shittier. Everything cannot always be free and delivered directly to us on a platter when it costs money to make, okay! So try not to fear the portentous coming of the Search Engine Bidding Wars. We're just going through the bumpy phase of things now. You'll get used to it. And the annoying kid you sent to J-school might actually be able to land a job one day, too.

[My colleagues do not necessarily agree with me!]

The WSJ reports that the number of Wikipedia editors (real editors—not you) declined by nearly 50,000 in the first three months of this year alone. The trend is attributed to the fact that whereas in the past you used to be able to just hop in and edit shit, now you have to have your work "approved" by some superlayer of supereditors, many of whom take joy in shooting down the Wikipedia aspirations of the unapproved masses. Horror stories abound. So who are these Gatekeepers to all the internet's knowledge?

A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

As you suspected: nerds.

UPDATE: Official response from Esquire's PR firm, Dan Klores Communications:

Hi Hamilton,
I saw your post on our December issue. I just wanted to note that the address label is in fact peelable, and if it gets stuck, there is an additional cover marker on page 8.
Just letting you know in case you want to correct your post.

There is no "peel" in the word "FUTURE."

With the December issue of Esquire, all you do is fire up your computer, turn on the webcam, turn to the part of the magazine with those strange little black-and-white box-looking things, in ads or whatever, and point it at the webcam, and you will witness, right there on your screen, an uninteresting video. Says the WSJ:

A fashion spread about dressing in layers, for example, shows actor Jeremy Renner shedding a coat and sweater as the weather turns from rainy to sunny. Turning the magazine triggers a snow flurry, and Mr. Renner puts on more clothes and throws snowballs. Esquire says there are several minutes of video footage in the magazine

The ability to watch a moving-picture on your computer? The future is now. George Lois would be proud.

HOLY GRAIL ALERT: Computer nerds at Northwestern University have created a computer program that, all you do is plug in the stats from a baseball game and it will write an entire news story about that baseball game, and the news story is not even bad. The computer program's name: Jay Mariotti.


A tipster tells us that in addition to the previously reported layoffs at Vanity Fair last Friday, W Magazine also laid off 8-10 employees that day. ALSO: Another tipster tells us there were at least four layoffs at Lucky today, including a few editors.
If you know more about the endless magazine layoffs, email us.


Who says the media business is grim? A TV station in Saginaw, Michigan "is generating revenue by running on-air and online obituary ads after three of the region's four daily newspapers reduced publication to three days a week." This works especially well in Saginaw, Michigan, where everyone would rather be dead.


HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman has figured out how to save the book publishing industry: Hire cheap, out-of-work editors to repackage old classics into E-books. Uh, hooray?

So, rather than joining themselves, this group often enlists friends and relatives to be their reluctant online couriers:

Anne Kott said she is happily married to the man she met at Bucknell University, where she first joined Facebook. However, she cannot help but feel as though she in his employ.

"I am his Facebook secretary," she complained. "His friends will send me a Facebook message, 'Do you have Tomek's number?' And, 'What's Tomek doing?' He occasionally looks over my shoulder to see what photos are up, but he has never shown interest in starting his own account."

Kott has resorted to starting a "Tomek must join Facebook" page — clearly a sign of aggression as tensions grow on both sides.

But not all users support Kott's brand of crusading. Georgetown junior Kiran Gandhi insists it's offensive to even ask a refusenik: When someone tells you that they don't have Facebook, it's untouchable. It's a sign of disrespect to try to convince them." So now the refuseniks have sympathizers on the other side. This will get ugly.

Image via nixc.co.uk's flickr.

Realizing that they've lost their edge as the world's great evil empire, Disney has called on Apple overlord Jobs, who joined the board back in 2006, to help them steer a new path toward consumerist greatness. And, to that end, Jobs gave Disney access to his Apple Store blueprints and encouraged engineers to "think bigger," which means stores are no longer retail centers, but "Imagination Centers" that bubble with "Pixar-esque winks and nods."

Yes, gone are the days of plush toy displays and in are the days of video clips on demand, fake trees that sing happy birthday and, while they're at it, olfactory experimentation:

There will be a scent component; if a clip from Disney's coming "A Christmas Carol" is playing in the theater, the whole store might suddenly be made to smell like a Christmas tree.

Wow! This all sounds totally necessary!

Taken with Disney's plans for a brand-centric Comic-Con, it seems the company's poised to recreate the broken world in its own nightmarish image. And, in a move that would finally validate all those "Disneyfication" critiques of New York, Disney may open a new flagship store in Times Square. Sigh.

And a new report out of Britain makes clear just how far today's tots are from the innocent, carefree, ensconced days of yore:

One in five children aged five to seven are accessing the internet without supervision from a parent, it has been revealed, raising concerns about access to adult material and grooming by paedophiles.

One in ten has a mobile phone despite a series of health warnings, and half have a TV in their bedroom, according to research by media regulator OfCom.

Some 85 per cent have access to a games console as children's lives are increasingly dominated by gadgets rather than physical play.

This data makes me want to cry, wretch and find religion. I've said it before and I'll say it again: fuck the war on drugs, let's target technology (except for the websites for which I work, of course).

Image via Vanderlin's flickr.

Yesterday news came that 10,000 Hotmail accounts had been compromised, but all of you internet snobs were like, "Hotmail? Haha, (some sort of internet snob joke about varieties of email, and which are cool and which are not)."

Well now your precious Gmail has also been compromised, the BBC reports. But, sayeth Google:

The firm stressed that the scam was "not a breach of Gmail security" but rather "a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers".

Stop being so dumb and you won't get "compromised," like that! Same advice dads have been giving to their daughters for years.
[Want more expert insight on this issue? Sorry, Ryan Tate's not awake yet.]

Dunkin Brands trust you and they're sure your store is just fine and everything, but if you don't meet their "standards" you will have to install a security camera system in your store. Headquarters might just peek in, from time to time! The NYP reports:

According to one Dunkin' letter, the franchisee was required either to allow Dunkin' to monitor the stores "24 hours a day, 7 days a week [on video]" or pay to have each store inspected every other week at a cost of $350 a visit.

The real reason: trying to crack down on robberies by cops.

[Alternate headline: "1984 Frosted." Pic via]

Sorry Starbucks but we're pretty sure the Olsen twins and Anna Wintour are not gonna be too enthusiastic about drinking some Sanka type shit, what are they, auto repairpersons???

Starbucks' whole sales pitch here: It tastes the same as our regular coffee, but it's way cheaper and you don't have to go to a Starbucks for it. Bad move.

"We're convinced a majority of people won't be able to tell the difference," said Mr. Schultz, who explained that he has secretly been serving Via to people at his office and home for months and that they haven't realized they were drinking instant coffee.

1. Well, no reason to pay Starbucks prices now, hmm? Why don't we all just carry our personal hobo cups, fished out of the trash, and heat water in a sardine tin, with a Bic lighter, and mix it with our Starbucks Hobo Coffee Crystals? Sounds good? God.

2.Physical danger.

[Pic: Flickr, Flickr]