Think of this as Volume 14, Number 4 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
One of my great annoyances in life is reading anything Ken Auletta writes in The New Yorker.
The man is an idiot. He's a stenographer for conventional wisdom. He never asks anyone -- least of all himself -- any hard questions. Yet New York loves him.
Take his latest, which the magazine was wise to keep behind the firewall except for paying customers. (More on that later.)
In it reporters like Chuck Todd (right), who actually built careers in this medium, complain that with all the stand-up and tweeting and blogging they have to do on their White House beats there is no time for reporting.
One of the quieter revolutions of the last half-decade has been the discovery, by journalism companies, that you can make money on this medium. I'm proud to say ZDNet (for whom I write two blogs) has been among the leaders in this new revolution.
It's all about the business model, which compensates writers based solely on how many page views their work receives. This means writer and publisher share in the upside and the downside.
It can use tweaking. Depth and interviews don't make as much money as comments and snark. Stories that make the readers mad also make me big money. All ZDNet has to protect itself is its writers' sense of ethics. I know my interviews usually don't draw flies but I do them anyway, for my own knowledge and because I think I should.
Sometimes I think the site should raise its teers -- pay out less per page-view -- and use that extra money to compensate what the editors think is quality. Weekly or monthly awards for good stuff which took time to put together.
But that's a tweak. The point is the business model works.
Now let me demonstrate how it can work to get the "mainstream media" out of its current muddle.
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