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.

• The new medium could rot people's brains and erode cultural standards: "What you'll be seeing: [Ventriloquist dummy] Charlie McCarthy or the [intellectual radio broadcast] Chicago Roundtable?"
  
• The government is making huge new media decisions with far-reaching implications for the future: "Battle in the spectrum... Uncle Sam Looks at Television."
  
• The new medium will impact this old medium: Title: "Movies and Television" Article: "Film companies are watching television development with a careful eye."
  
• The elite first adopters will be overrun by the masses: Title: "Is Television Ready for the Public?" Article "Before the war about 7,000 television sets had been sold... the purcahses were all in or near a handful of cities. among them New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Schenectady, and Los Angeles" Those big-city bastards of Schenectady were liberal elitists even back in the day!
  
• The new medium will usher in a new crop of media lords: "Who Are the Leaders in the Fight?"
  
• The new medium means fun new gadgets (which could get us loads of advertising): Title: "What Kind of Television? War improvements cut costs / Look before you buy / Network possibilities / Buy wisely / Color television"
  
  
  
  Article (emphasis added): "Before you start looking for a receiver, check up on the television station in your area and find out whether its programs interest you...Don't let the salesman double talk you into buying one before it is demonstrated in your home. Who knows, you may be living in a "dead spot" where it is not possible to pick up television pictures. [AT&T has apparently been in the wireless business a long time.]

Somehow we still have movie theaters, radio, books and newspapers decades later. And every one of those sectors is still fabulously profitable and growing. (*Cough*)

[via Brendan Koerner]

NYT editor Bill Keller told Clark Hoyt that the paper is "within weeks of a decision" on the long-discussed question of whether, and how, to charge for its online news.

So here is what their decision will be: You will have to pay for their online news. One way or another! Maybe you will pay a $5 per month subscription fee, or maybe you will pay micropayments for every story, or maybe they will roll out tiered membership packages with fancy extras designed to get hardcore fans to pay more in exchange for more access. Probably a certain level of news will be free, and a better level of news will not be free. Or maybe someone there has actually come up with an elegant solution to this mess! Though we doubt it.

But somehow we will all have to pay something, because if we don't, the New York Times is totally going to go broke, bit by bit, by giving its product away for free. Which is something that it and every other newspaper have now come to realize. A more interesting question: Will any of the NYT's star columnists flee the paper if they're shoved behind a pay wall, like Newsday's Saul Friedman just did?

They might! These same NYT columnists sat through the Times Select fiasco and watched their readership drop precipitously. Things are different now though! Because somebody like, say, Thomas Friedman, or David Pogue, or Maureen Dowd, could legitimately decide that their own BRAND would gain more by going off on their own than by sitting behind a paywall at the NYT. Thanks for the help with everything, Times, but we're off to be A Brand Called Me-s! Fewer readers could hurt their speaking fees. Can't have that.

This result would bring in some much-needed fresh blood and get rid of Thomas Fucking Friedman, so let's all pray it goes down exactly like that. We have our (employer's) credit card ready, Bill Keller.

Rowland apparently started something called Project Migration this past summer. The organization sells products "made by single mothers in Africa;" proceeds ostensibly help improve their water supply and health care. And, what do you know, this effort just happens to require a professional photo shoot starring one Hilary Rowland (see attached video), which the sometime model just happened promote to her public Facebook wall:

(We're not sure what the reference to Rowland being "haunted by" porn purveyor Vivid Entertinament is about, though that comment makes us especially curious about her past.)

This isn't Rowland's first brush with chairty; though she is best known for posting pictures of herself with various celebrities on Facebook, and for being the rumored girlfriend of celebrity actors like Adrian Gernier and James Woods, she's long participated in various charity events, emphasis on "events" (one "Mexico Summit" observer: "they handed shoes out to little brown kids...in between cocktails"). Her day job consists of repurposing Glamour and MSN articles for her fake fashion magazine, "Hilary." Perhaps an article about Project Migration is in order. Don't forget the photos!

"Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery," declares a Chicago Tribune headline [via PRNewser]. What is this amazing mystery that has been unlocked? For Edelman—the world's largest independent PR firm, and one that loves to market itself as a "digital" expert that will help you, the corporation, navigate the wilds of the internet for a large, large fee—the mystery is, "How can we get people to pay us so much for this shit?"

"I am so all over this Delish thing," Cabot bubbled, punching up delish.com on her computer in her office at Edelman, a Chicago-based public relations firm.

"Oh, you're doing so well!" Spohn said delightedly, counting the recipes Cabot had collected on the food lovers' Web site. "Look, you've got so much!"

Her pride was as evident as the exchange was notable. Though Cabot, 56, is Edelman's central region president with more than 30 years in the business, she is the student. Spohn, a 23-year-old account executive on the firm's digital team, is the teacher.

Hahaha. Do you see what is going on here? Edelman, like many of its peers, is a PR firm that will charge your company a hefty fee for all the digital insight that its 23-year-old account executives can deliver. Because the people in charge aren't really so good on this "internet" thing. Which would be fine if they were not the same people in charge of convincing you, the client, to spend tens (or hundreds!) of thousands of dollars with Edelman for their expert strategic online influencing services. Their mentoring program for the olds is called "Rotnem" because that's "mentor" backwards and you must be a backwards-ass fool to pay money to a bunch of 23-year-olds to teach you how to make a Facebook page and shit at an Edelman markup, when you could get them off Craigslist for much, much cheaper.

"Edelman strongly advocates that companies participate with and engage online influencers." Did you know that Edelman, a massive corporate PR firm, started a blog called "Authenticities"? Edelman, how much do people pay you for your services? Because I am totally going to undercut your prices by one dollar, once the last media outlet finally stops paying employees. Please engage.

[Pic of Edelman's Global Head of Digital Strategy via Flickr]

Are these the "Free Love Cookies" in question? Or is that some sort of romantic literary reference that sailed over our heads? In any case: As you would expect, Min and Salman's modern friendship blossomed on the Facebook.

Llongots? We don't even know! And what else of Min herself—one doesn't get into Harvard just by loving models and going out with models and being way attractive, you know. It turns out she wrote quite a readable blog! It was called "Mongol Whored." Its most recent entry is from January of 2008, and it's now set to private, but the Google caches everything, you know.

"How do we know this is really Min's blog?" we asked ourselves. Well: "Here's how I roll: me: half Chinese, half Hungarian." And also, for example:

To: Hot Babe
From: Min
Subject: last night
Text: lovely to meet you last night—i had such a wonderful time. though am being punished for our revelry with a merciless hangover. totally worth it, though :) oh my god, smileys are so not my style (incredibly cheesy, no?), but i can't help smiling at some of the shit we pulled last night. we're quite a pair, don't you think?
love to see you again,
xoxo,
m

Steamy! We are fanning ourself—as, we expect, is Salman—over things like, for example:

In the graph of my (ineffectual) picking up men with lascivious intent, it's plotted with desire as the constant, and availability as the variable. There's no fucking mention of time, which I suppose is tied to ideas of decorum and the other things I missed when being raised at wolf-tit. I've had mixed success with my all-hours tactics...

I don't begrudge odd-hour requests of me, either. 19, taking the Greyhound back from Nova Scotia through New Hampshire I was stretched long in my seat, feet dangling in front of me. I woke, shoes and socks off, to the warm lapping on my toes. There was a guilty smile on the man sitting ahead of me, and I sized him up sleepily, not nasty. I thought briefly of the ripeness of my feet, nasty. And I mumbled, "do them evenly, yo."

We too would like 2 B Facebook friends 2 get 2 no U, gurl. Let's have one more.

I was writing, if you remember, about songs that make me wish I was in college again. The song of my senior year, of course, was Nelly's "Hot in Herre." The next year, the first year of my nostalgia, was "Hey Ya," and this year it's "Promiscuous" and "Buttons." I speak of this with my old college roommates, and we wistfully speak of the days where we mixed Red Bull, vodka, and champagne, and called it a cocktail, of dragging ourselves into an 11am sections and thinking it was early, of when scabies and self-loathing were the most serious STDs floating around campus. My musical tastes usually run to the more, well, good, but not in the case of these particular songs, these songs of if not love, then youthful experimentation and inexperience. And the rare moment when I'm walking past a homeless dude selling some acrylic gloves and pleather cellphone holders and I hear "Promiscuous," I think, damn, wish I were in college. But that I'm moved to undulate, grinding with an imagined partner on W 23rd street, reminds me, hey, maybe it's a good thing you're not in college anymore, maybe it's some sort of silver lining blessing kinda thing, maybe college Min couldn't have handled this kinda shit. Now I hear "Promiscuous," and think, damn, shame that I'm missing making out with 20 year olds to this song, but I probably saved myself an abortion or ten.

We totally like that song, too—and its message. Salman Rushdie, you are one charismatic fella.

Sure, you could just read any of the many other superior sites covering New York metro news, national news, political news, sports news, and/ or business news. But yo: Do you really want to miss stories like these, all in one place, with the option of a "quick read?" Sign up today.

By Mediaite's tally, 32% of the more than 500 commenters on the story said they'd pay to read the NYT online. Let's call that one-third!

Now let's make some generous assumptions. Quantcast estimates that NYtimes.com gets about 15 million monthly US readers. (We asked the company how many comments they get; they haven't gotten back to us yet). Their weekday circulation is around 650k. So the question becomes: How many of those online users who currently pay nothing would pay, say, $5 per month (a number the NYT was floating in a survey earlier this year) to read the website?

Since one-third of the commenters on a story about the paper's staffing issues said they would, does that mean one-third of the total would? We are currently laughing derisively at that assertion! These commenters are people who not only are interested enough in the inner workings of the paper to read a story about its staffing issues—already a small minority—but also interested enough to comment on the story, which takes a certain level of commitment at the NYT's website. So we have a small subset of a small subset of the paper's online readers; namely, those readers most interested in the financial fate of the NYT. Of those, one-third say they're willing to pay.

Let's very generously say a quarter of online readers fall into the first subset, and a quarter of those fall into the second subset. Therefore, the number of online readers willing to pay would be 1/4 times 1/4 times 1/3 times 15 million, or 312,500 readers. If they all paid $5 per month, the NYT would make an extra $18.75 million per year. Which is nice and all, but would not even cover the interest payments on their subprime Mexican loan.

The NYT may in fact get more online readers worldwide, but then again, our assumptions here were already overly generous. In other words, the company's salvation will not be found in the comments section.

EXAMPLE ONE: Gatecrasher reports that "There was no official word on why Reichl failed to show up at a fete hosted by Alan Batt in honor of Gourmet [yesterday], but her absence sure fueled the dish among the city's top foodies." That would be this one. Apparently, notes on Craigslist aren't the best way to get in touch with Ruth Reichl. Live and learn.

EXAMPLE TWO: Deborah Solomon interviewed Reichl for the NYT magazine this weekend. Look at this outrage:

Did you see Jon Stewart the other night, when he made a Gourmet joke?
I did not. What did he say?

[Explanation of his joke]
That's great! I'm amazed no one has told me that.

No one except us, Ruth Reichl. Why do you ignore us so, Ruth Reichl? Hey, your picture is real nice.

Via NY Mag's Vulture:

I met this guy who was creating software where you could watch Mad Men and you could chat with your friend while you're watching it, and things would pop up, and facts would pop up, and I said, "You're a human battery. Turn the fucking thing off! You're not allowed to watch the show anymore. You're missing the idea of sitting in a dark place and having an experience. Are you just like sitting with your phone and you're kissing your girlfriend and saying, 'I'm kissing my girlfriend! This is so great, we're having sex!'" EXPERIENCE THINGS!"

Yes, like a television show where something actually happens. Or, you know, not watching TV.

There's more where that came from. EXPERIENCE IT!

[Photo via Mark J. Terrill/AP]

On Monday, Lucinda's advice column featured a letter from a girl who said that someone slipped her a roofie at a club; she had to be taken to the hospital, and when she called two of her friends in the middle of the night to "beg them to join me while I was recovering," they didn't want to come until the morning. And she was upset about that. And Lucinda was like, well, who the fuck wants to go drive to the hospital at 4 a.m. for something that is not a life-threatening incident and, indeed, may have sounded at the time like something that was your own doing, crazy girl? Your family or your boyfriend would be obligated to come, but your friends probably thought you were just way drunk or took too many drugs or whatever and they were pissed at you a little bit. So, don't sweat it too much. Chalk it up to miscommunication.

Which was our reaction too, exactly! Tough to judge the friends in this case without knowing what the drugged friend was actually doing and saying at the time. (Although we are neither women, nor the type of person who has "friends"). But the internet commenters were basically like: Lucinda, you are a horrible person, I have gotten up in the middle of the night 43 times to visit my roofied friends, plus this girl was probably sexually assaulted, did you even think of that, you awful, awful internet advice columnist? And Lucinda replied no, she didn't really think of that, since there's nothing in the letter about it, but really, come on, people. It's not that big a deal. But there's that "Remove Lucinda Rosenfeld" petition, still there, on the internet!

Shit. You internet commenters are putting all this effort into firing an online advice columnist who's not Cary Tennis? You people need help.

McCain last night tweeted about how she was spending her evening eating takeout and reading an Andy Warhol biography. To accompany this radical take on an evening in, McCain uploaded a picture of her in her usual home alone outfit of sweat pants and a tank top. And apparently this set of shitstorm of conservative condemnation — apparently young women should not be encouraged by their role model Meghan McCain to expose any part of their breasts, ever — and fat jokes.

So then McCain says she's quitting this awful Twitter place forever, except maybe not really, because she wanted to "sleep on it" and probably woke up this morning realizing she now has the moral high ground again and fodder for a whole slew of new outraged Daily Beast columns:

There's another thing Meghan McCain has that she didn't have "about 16 hours ago," which will keep her on Twitter forever: lots and lots of fresh new attention. For her perky and hugely well articulated political positions, of course. Both of them.

Then again, they knew who they were hiring: A man who, as Gaunabee's Cindy Casares notes, has never been one to subsume his own professional impulses, masturbatory or not, to those of his colleagues. Gaunabee recorded copious footage from the event, some of which is excerpted above.

Although repeated in a number of colorful permutations, Stone's point was fairly straightforward: most consumers are tasteless boors; the internet allows these morons to upload video; therefore internet video is shit and will never be "Fine Art." That an overwhelming number of these vulgarians failed to go and see Stone's last movie, making it a surprise box office failure despite such memorable lines as "don't get cute Turdblossom," only further establishes Stone's credibility as an arbiter of good taste and Fine Art.

One of the internet's most important legacies is its absolute destruction of credentialism. So who better to explain it to the world than New York Times TV-watcher-and-internet-looker-and-writer-about Virginia Heffernan, the one person that every American too old to figure out how to get onto the internet turns to to tell them about said internet, in a magazine column? And tell us, Leon Neyfakh, could the book have a name and theme commensurate to the preposterousness of its ambition?

In the proposal [for the book, tentatively titled The Pleasures of the Internet: How to Live in the New Online Civilization], a copy of which was obtained by the Transom, Ms. Heffernan's book is described as "a complete aesthetics of the Internet" that will treat the Web as a complex work of representational art, complete with "a poetics, a scale, a palette, a rhythm, a sensibility, a set of rituals and spectacles, a system of metaphors and an emotional range."

Haha yes. Very good. A good book to give to, say, your grandmother who retired as a college literature professor a long, long time ago. Explaining the entire internet in a book: Actually a very internetty type of thing to do!
[NYO]

The NYT reports that ASME is "adding 12 new categories [to the Magazine Awards] covering online media." But! Rather than present these awards at the already-interminable fancy magazine awards ceremony in May, they "will be handed out at a lunch during a March online magazine conference." At lunch!

In fact, that real magazine awards used to be a modest affair like that, before they started taking that "The Oscars of the Magazine Industry" thing too seriously and inviting random wack people like Jimmy Fallon to present awards (suck it, Jimmy Fallon). Now, the Ellies get to siphon the nerdy, unglamorous online media reporters such as ourselves off into a preliminary affair, saving the real awards ceremony for the Beautiful People. It's genius, really. But what do these categories even mean?

"The Huffington Post, if it defines itself as a magazine, we would accept the entry. If it defines itself as a newspaper, then of course it should enter the Pulitzers," he said.

Haha! But what if it defines itself as the most specialest Magazinemediainternet Thingamajig in the whole wide world? Will there be a special category for that? And what are we supposed to enter? I assume there will be several categories dedicated to fameball coverage? And make sure there's something for Julia Allison!

We're not really winning any awards. But we are going and eating a free lunch, so SCORE. The internet continues to suck the magazine industry dry, one way or another.