Peter Krupa

(via BoingBoing)

If you travel to Uganda, throw a big conference, and present yourself as an expert on homosexuality; and if you tell a bunch of religious and political leaders that homosexuals are a “movement” that is part of an “evil institution” that involves “sodomizing” teens, stalking and “recruiting” children, and destroying families; that homosexuals can turn the gay off if they choose, and when they don’t it’s because they probably like being a threat to decent heterosexual civilization; if you do all this, and then your conference attendees believe you so thoroughly that they go home and pass a law that punishes homosexual behavior with hanging, and you say, “That wasn’t my intention…”

Then what was your intention, exactly?

During the last 50 years, the ratio of the highest-paid employee’s compensation to that of the lowest paid rose from 24:1 to 275:1. From the New York Times Magazine:

Indeed, what has happened with executive compensation … is that a culture of entitlement has apparently become the norm. It’s not a matter of how much anyone in particular makes, and certainly not a question of an innovator like a Steve Jobs hitting the jackpot. The problem is that so many now seem automatically to receive so much (the chief executives in the Fortune 500 averaged $11 million in 2008) despite average or poor performance — or, in the case of the TARP companies, performance that was so colossally bad that it almost brought down the financial system.

I’ve often wondered if that CEO who makes $11 million a year really adds $30,000 per day of value to the company, or if it’s just some kind of office politics jackpot. Leaning towards jackpot.

By now, it’s a given that in a short amount of time (if not already) people in industrialized nations will get most of their information through electronic devices, much of it by way of the Internet. It’s a fact that news “papers” are obsolete as a means of delivering content. At one time they were the most efficient and cost-effective method. They no longer are.

In time, new businesses will pop up based exclusively upon the creation and delivery of content to people electronically, whether through Web browsers or by some other means. I had hoped that newspapers and the people who worked at them would lead the charge. Upon reflection and observation, however, I seriously doubt it.

During their several-decades-long tenure as pseudo-monopolies, newspapers developed a culture based on very strong traditions. The AP Style Manual was their Bible. Ledes were sacrosanct. Headline-writing was an art. Terms like “above the fold,” “cutline,” and “news hook” were the insider currency of the newsroom.

In some cases, the rules and traditions were good. Fact-checking standards, libel precautions, and interview etiquette, for example. In other ways, traditions were wasteful, dull, and not particularly useful to the reader. Foreign correspondents enjoyed huge expense accounts to produce mediocre, little-read content. Reporting and news judgment were subservient to story-telling formulas. Layers and layers of editors turned safeguard into bureaucracy.

Worst of all, much of the content in newspapers is there because it’s always been there. While I might be wrong, I doubt most newspaper editors ever pause to wonder if anyone reads “Fred Basset” or the weather page. They’ve just always been there, and were they to be cut, a handful of octogenarians would write letters. Best leave them alone.

In sum, newspapers and the people who made their careers with them are fundamentally creatures of tradition.

Unfortunately, the news (or rather, content) business is entering an era when traditions will get you killed. The business has gone from zero competition to intense, global, and extremely fast-paced competition. I just don’t think people who’ve made their careers in the warm cocoon of traditional newspaper monopolies are going to survive out here on the cold, hard Internet. They will not be able to turn away from their traditions long enough to visualize something fresh

Enough rhetoric. How about an example?

Take GlobalPost.com. I like this site, I really do. And a good friend of mine works for it. But the entire concept is wrong. Basically, it’s a Web site dedicated to traditional feature articles written by foreign correspondents posted around the world. I would like to see this site succeed, and I’m sure they did their market research and will make some money.

But all the power of the Internet and the backing of a billionaire, and that’s the best they could come up with? The content isn’t nearly rich or varied enough to gain the attention of someone who follows news from a particular country avidly. Neither is it quirky enough to draw in the casual Web surfer. The reporter “notebooks” are updated rarely and are too formal to be interesting.

The sky was the limit, and they decided to focus their resources on safe, predictable, long-form, 800-word, perspectiveless feature stories, of the kind favored by Reuters. This is what you get when a team of former newspaper people launches a Web product.

When a bunch of programmers decide to deliver content, however, you get Patch.com. Funded by some ex-Google people, this site takes a stab at community journalism, I presume so they can sell ads to local businesses that otherwise aren’t interested in Internet marketing. There’s a Patch.com site for three New Jersey suburbs at the moment.

So far, it looks like they have an editor and two or three reporters, and about two-dozen engineers and designers. The news comes in short, significant bits, a sizable portion of it is opinion, and user-generated community announcements, business listings, and reviews play important roles.

This is different, useful, fresh… it just might work.

As more people get online and more money flows into Internet advertising, we’ll see more investment in Web enterprises that actually produce content, as opposed to aggregating (digg) or commenting on (Gawker) other people’s content. Those who figure out how to do this will get rich.

I doubt those people will come from traditional newspapers.

Everyone loves Twitter! Well, actually, only about 6 million people love Twitter, and most of them (from what I can tell) are journalists working on trend stories about how everyone loves Twitter. Since every media outlet in the world appears intent on assaulting me with Twitter stories, I’m finally inspired to ask, What Is The Big Deal?

I know I sound like an old man, or worse, a Luddite with a blog. But I really don’t get it. So I type 140 characters about what I’m doing! And people can read that, then type back 140 characters about what they’re doing!

And this is… fun?

Or is it supposed to be useful? People say Twitter is the future of journalism, which, you know, God help us all. Although I guess most stories are probably only worth no more than 140 characters. “PLANE CRASHES ON HOUSE, 50 DEAD.” That pretty much sums it up.

But do I need this? Do I need to know instantly, I mean now, that a plane just crashed on a house? Some things I do need to know instantly, for example, maybe something like, “PLANE CRASHING ON YOUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW,” but I doubt there’s a Twitter feed for that.

I guess I just can’t figure out what Twitter does that RSS feeds, away messages, instant messages, text messages, blogs, and e-mail don’t already do. Mass subscriber text message service? Is that a business model?

My gut (which admittedly doesn’t know much about social networks) tells me that the venture capitalists who are right now in the process of raising a quarter of a billion dollars in funding for this company – which, remember, has no revenue and only 6 million users – are going to be really, really sorry.

In all seriousness, however, I would be interested to know if any of you think Twitter is worth the trouble, and why.

Have you heard of micropayments? This idea that people would pay teeny-tiny bits of money for each individual piece of newspaper they consume? (0.05$/article, for example.) Michael Kinsley, the founder of Slate.com, weighs in today in an nytimes.com op-ed, with kind of an interesting point:

Micropayments are systems that make it easy to pay small amounts of money. (Your subway card is an example.) You could pay a nickel to read an article, or a dime for a whole day’s newspaper.

Well, maybe. But it would be a first. Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc. The Times is more svelte and more expensive. It might even have a viable business model if it could sell the paper with nothing written on it. A more promising idea is the opposite: give away the content without the paper. In theory, a reader who stops paying for the physical paper but continues to read the content online is doing the publisher a favor.

He goes on to point out that the real reason newspapers aren’t profitable online is (duh) competition. Newspapers aren’t used to competing with anything, so of course they’re getting absolutely killed.

I signed up for Facebook today. I did, I really tried, and I got past the part where they ask you what schools you went to, what year you graduated high school, what year you graduated college, then I clicked OK on a couple other things, and… holy shit.

Those two made a baby? And that douche-bag joined the Marines? And that passive-aggressive weirdo now thinks he’s Michael Jackson? And what’s with all the Hillsdale people who became fucking priests?

And after my brain sucked up all this juicy gossip, it descended into my stomach and congealed into a cold lump. Because I knew the only way I could get more of this gossip was to reciprocate – to volunteer information on My Life Since Graduation, what I look like, what I do, who I married, where I live.

And it hit me that really, that’s what Facebook is about – gossip.  “Social networking” is just this decade’s version of sour-faced Mrs. Fergueson and her telescope, and the really scary thing is not that people like to gossip and spy on each other, but that they like it enough that if it comes down to a “show me yours, I’ll show you mine” kind of a situation, most people do so.

My foray into Facebook lasted three minutes. Truth be told, I don’t really want to see most of you people again, unless we’re drinking.

Anyway, the Facebook server says my account is still there… should I ever wish to reactivate it.