Some good news on this Monday afternoon- Roy Edroso is back at the Village Voice with Rightbloggers!
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
“woke” is the new caravan.
Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.
I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.
Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.
We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.
He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.
Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard
The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.
Fear or fury? The choice is ours.
Democracy cannot function without a free press.
“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”
Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.
Fight them, without becoming them!
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.
Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.
People are complicated. Love is not.
Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.
Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.
The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.
“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly
When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.
Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
Gin & Tonic
Do people still read the Voice?
Big Picture Pathologist
Whatever they pay him to wade through those pits of lunacy just can’t be enough…
Germy Shoemangler
@Gin & Tonic: I used to read it back in the ’70s. I saw an issue recently (didn’t pick it up) and was shocked at how… tiny it was.
I used to read it for the music reviews, Jules Feiffer cartoons, Stamaty cartoons, the comeeks, and their political investigations. I haven’t read an issue since 1988 or so.
Trollhattan
Great, and not a moment too soon.
Edroso even tops TBogg in the service he provides wading regularly though those swamps. I dunna how he does it, frankly.
Cervantes
@Trollhattan:
Could not agree more. Glad he’s getting paid for it again.
Brachiator
@Gin & Tonic:
I was just about to ask the same question.
To be honest, I will sometimes listen to their film review podcast, but the Voice and its sister paper The LA Weekly are largely irrelevant. They purged some of their best political writers years ago after one of the paper’s ownership/leadership changes.
Germy Shoemangler
@Brachiator: Did they also dump a bunch of cartoonists?
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Brachiator:
The same problems with advertising revenue and consolidation that the paid dailies experienced plagued the free weeklies as well. I preferred the LA Reader to the LA Weekly and was very sad when it was swallowed up by the Weekly’s Borg. The Reader had better film reviewers, among other things.
redshirt
Reading right wings nutjob sites can be lots of fun entertainment if you don’t let it get to you. That’s the hard part, of course.
You know, Rome fell not by foreign invasion, but rather through internal dissension as leaders fought each other for profits. That seems to be the reason for the fall of all Empires – not external destruction (though this is often the final blow), but rather internal rot.
And look at America today – literally poisoning itself via domestic politics. We can’t keep this up for long without it ending this nation.
redshirt
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I would assume all the alternative papers are in dire straights. I know the Boston Phoenix is. And it’s not just the devastation of the print media nationwide, but think of how they can actually keep talent on board offering the pittance of wages available to them.
Ads paid for all the alternative papers. Who’s buying print ads these days? Even the escort services would rather go online.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Even worse, LA Weekly lost Jonathan Gold to the LA Times.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@redshirt:
And you can’t have a great, self-supporting movie review site online, as the sad demise of The Dissolve just showed. Online ad revenue just isn’t robust enough to pay actual salaries to good writers.
Mandalay
This video of Trump getting blessed by Christians and a rabbi is most astounding thing I have seen in the campaign so far. Trump is absolutely shameless.
Especially the part (around 2:15) where the rabbi says “The only two nations that have ever been in a relationship with God are Israel and the United States of America”.
There was so much shit on display that even Trump must have been gagging a little.
redshirt
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
Yep. And internet ads are easy to block if you’re so inclined.
The only formula that will work is paid subscriptions, and I assume this will eventually work, but now there’s a strong mindset against paying for online content. I know I’m guilty of it – my local paper went subscription with 10 free stories per month. I can’t get myself to pay the relatively small fee, even though I know I should.
redshirt
I’ve said this many times before, but I encourage all of you to check out a right wing site directly. There’s plenty to choose from, but I prefer Freerepublic.com. Purestrain crazy, and just a massive scam. They do quarterly fund raisers and raise about 50-75K per quarter, most of which goes to the site founder and his family, all to pay for running a server (proven that its a single server housed in California) and their hosting fees. They make it seem like it costs a lot to run, and the generally elderly user base buys it completely.
catclub
@Mandalay:
wow.
Schmuley Boteach?
Calouste
@Mandalay: Well, only Israel and the United States and about every nation that existed in Europe or the Middle East between Byzantium and Tsarist Russia. But other than that…
JPL
@Mandalay: There’s not enough water to wash that shit off of me.
Lurking Canadian
@Calouste: none of them count, obviously.
kdaug
@Mandalay: Rome on line one…
mai naem mobile
Anybody see the clip of Air France employees literally ripping off the shirts of two HR guys after they announced layoffs of 3K. Pity Mittens and Jack Welch didn’t get that response here in the U.S. when they laid off people trying to maximize their personal gain.
redshirt
@efgoldman: Dang! There’s a Portland Phoenix still out there, and I thought it was part of the same group as the Boston Phoenix. Thanks for the info.
Mandalay
@catclub:
I suspect Boteach disapproves of Trump.
Right to Rise
Jen up three in latest NH poll, back to double digits, Kasich down by half.
The ad surge is working, and Jeb may soon Be joined on the trail by none other than George W.
Liberals: He’s <embaaaaaaaaack
Origuy
@redshirt:
In San Jose, it seems to be the medical marijuana clinics. The Metro always has about six pages of them.
dmsilev
@Right to Rise: You’re late, numbnuts. We’re going to have to dock your pay for not showing up one thread ago.
Peale
@redshirt: The market for the voice is also not reproducing itself. There isn’t a sense that one needs to cultivate an audience for the novel or AG or much of an appreciation for that culture. There probably weren’t ever all that many who wanted to find out what was going on downtown to begin with. Now I think that minority has almost completely evaporated.
Right to Rise
The ad surge is working, numbers are rising and those of opponent’s falling.
Only a matter of time until Kasich goes the way of Walker and his donors come into the fold. That means more ads, moving the numbers.
Cold, hard, campaign cash : accept no substitutes!
Mandalay
@kdaug:
They put out that disgusting shitshow the day after The Pope left. It would have been mega-ballsy to do it while he was here.
Schlemazel
@Right to Retch:
Jen? Jen who?
ThresherK
Society surprises me: I was looking up “reverse sear” to make a nice steak even better, and among the first ten autosuggests after typing “reverse” was not “cowgirl”. Just to see what would happen, even “reverse co…” didn’t bring it up in the ten.
Does that mean everyone who uses Google and has heard the term knows what it means?
PS I’m not doing this at work, nor at the library.
? Martin
@redshirt:
Ad blocking isn’t really a problem. The real problem is that the price of ads is driving to zero because there is infinite supply of ad slots and because ad networks and tracking has commoditized the content. You don’t need to publish in the local paper to only reach people in Des Moines – you can target Des Moines on CNN or NYTimes. Through an ad network, you can target Des Moines across almost every site on the internet. It’s simply a really fast race to the bottom.
Paid subs generally doesn’t work either. You need to have a very loyal sub base for that to work, and most publications won’t have that because there won’t be enough distinct value to deliver. Probably why you haven’t subscribed to your local. It works for the top publications – NYT, etc. and for some really distinct individual writers, and almost nobody inbetween. Most publications are being filled via AP anyway, so why pay for the LA Times when 50 other publications will be carrying the same story and you can just as easily hit them in your 10 free reads just by clicking a different link in Google.
Native ads are the best bet – where the readership is well aligned with the advertising target audience and where it’s effectively impossible to differentiate between content and advertising. There are reasons why Buzzfeed is just about the only publisher making money, and while its easy to bash them for listicles and the like, they’re also the only publication that is opening bureaus overseas. They’re putting reporters on the ground ahead of NYTimes and WaPo.
Hooking up with Facebook Instant Articles will probably work pretty well also. Facebook has kept their ad network well under control so it actually works both for users and publishers.
FlipYrWhig
@Schlemazel: The “n” is for “unlimited campaigN cash”!
shell
Bob Forehead!
That was m y favorite Friday reading.
The Voice also had the best classifieds:
“Jesus was a carpenter. So is Brother Dave. Righteous prices! Call…”
redshirt
@? Martin: Your points are well made, but the real content my local paper via their website offers is local news. I don’t care about their AP written national and international stories, but I am interested in reading about a new type of seaweed that is infesting local beaches, for example. That’s valuable, and you won’t find that content anywhere else. But how valuable?
I’m used to getting it for free, and paying for it seems…. onerous. I need to get over it, as I suspect do most folks.
sharl
@Trollhattan: Yes, definitely agreed on just how welcome Roy Edroso’s return to his old VV column is, though I’m happiest about seeing him get a well deserved paid writing gig, even if it is with the folks who once dumped him.
It kinda broke my heart to see someone who seems to be such a tried-and-true NYC dude move here to the DC area to take a shitty job with an unreliable commute (boooo Red Line), at least as indicated by occasional tweets. I cannot remember why he did that, although I seem to recall it was some combination of increasing cost-of-living in NYC* and his getting married. [*It sounds like NYC is continuing on the fast track to becoming an urban Disneyworld for billionaires.]
If you like Edroso’s aesthetic sensibilities, his tumblr account http://edroso.tumblr.com/ offers up quite a variety that’s fun to peruse, at least for me. His twitter is @edroso, as anyone already there probably already knows.
Roger Moore
@ThresherK:
Google does customize searches, including search suggestions. It’s possible that Google doesn’t think you’re interested in reverse cowgirl, even though somebody else might get that suggestion.
PurpleGirl
I remember when you had to buy the Village Voice, before it became a free weekly.
I’ve used AdBlock or Flashbock because of animated ads, especially ones that just start out being animated. The movement catches my eyes and is very distracting. I’ve had to blocks such ads for self-preservation.
Schlemazel
@FlipYrWhig:
uNlimited campaigN ca$h!!!
ThresherK
@Roger Moore: I forget what settings I have set on Google, but I’m a bit paranoid about Google anyway, as in “I clear my cookies immediately after searching with Google and never use the search engine while I’m logged into GMail”.
Okay, it’s time to try that on DuckDuckGo. And I sorta like that Google hasn’t (yet) drillled down into my digital life in order to determine that “reverse cowgirl” is a phrase for me.
Regnad Kcin
@Germy Shoemangler: Stamaty for the win!
Regnad Kcin
@efgoldman: But it had stopped publishing anything worth reading a long time prior…
Scamp Dog
@redshirt: Denver’s weekly, Westword, seems to be fine. A good chunk of the advertising is for marijuana stores, an angle that won’t work in most states.
redshirt
@Scamp Dog: A new ad market! Makes sense too.
redshirt
Here’s a fun Freerepublic.com thread for you to get your feet wet:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3345054/posts
Chris
@redshirt:
I used to skim right wing media blogs (PJMedia was my particular poison) during the early years of the Obama administration, when the last vestiges of my inner centrist still thought there was value in seeing what the other side was saying.
Yes, it’ll get to you, but that’s not why I ultimately stopped. After a year or two, it just became… boring. Once you’ve read enough of it, it finally just becomes background noise, butthurt ramblings too uninteresting even to hate-read.
This is actually a point that the right wing will hammer on again and again and again. It’s just that the domestic enemy to them is socialist usurpers stabbing our soldiers in the back, throwing our gates open to the immigrant barbarian-hordes, politically correct intellectuals trying to make us feel bad about America so we’ll let it die and turn the world over to the Chinese or the Caliphate.
Mandalay
@ThresherK:
No matter what you do, Google always knows all about your searches, and retains the details. You only control what is held on your computer. Google decides what is held on their computers.
The main issue is whether the searches could be traced to you personally (via your Google user ID), or simply to your computer (via its IP address). But if the feds have a valid reason for knowing about all google searches made from your computer last November then Google will probably tell them.
Of course DuckDuckGo would never comply, because they couldn’t – they wouldn’t have any data to hand over.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I barely remember the LA Reader, nor can I recall who any of the film reviewers were.
True. Also, weeklies have a hard time justifying their continued existence in the age of the Internet.
Yes. Also, everybody and his mother is his own film reviewer. And social media and the techo geek worldview has “democratized” or demolished the perceived value of all arts criticism. So you have people saying, “I want to eat at a restaurant that my friends and other people like me eat at,” not “let me see what the Village Voice or LA Weekly critic says about this restaurant.”
And coming back to other problems, I have heard of “hot web sites” expecting good writers to contribute material for free.
The demise of The Dissolve is sad. Didn’t some of these people come from the AV Club? I am seeing other online sites shut down or “streamline.” And the irony is that some of the people losing jobs here are going to the last remaining newspapers.
BTW, I think next we will see the decline of public TV and radio stations. The slow descent of LA public TV station KCET is a sad precursor of what is to come. This will ultimately wipe out many arts and news people, including documentary film makers.
Brachiator
@redshirt:
Interestingly enough, there is a big debate among tech people about the ethics of ad blockers.
Unfortunately, there seem to be developing a rough consensus among people who use the Internet that stuff should just be free (Jeb Bush needs to look into this), and that any advertising degrades the user’s experience. So, people use the shit out of Twitter, but give no consideration to how Twitter can continue to exist without charging people or without resorting to an ad based model.
The other rough consensus developing is that once a person has agreed to pay some nominal amount fro something, then they should be able to get an infinite amount of content without being shown ads. So, people are willing to pay $9 a month for Spotify, but then think that this entitles them to all the music in the universe forever, and no ads, please.
People who hate ads sometimes claim that they would be willing to see targeted ads that only showed what they were interested in buying, but this kind of pseudo-libertarian thinking ignores the reality that advertising seeks to create desire and make you want to buy things.
This doesn’t appear to be true. The subscription model, the freemium model, is failing to stick for news and arts sites, and for services.
The reasonable theory is that if you could get millions of people to pay even a small amount, then news and arts sites could thrive. But people seem to prefer free to even paying a nominal amount. Even sites that use the Patreon model find that fewer than 30 percent max of people are willing to donate anything.
Advertising was a way of democratizing access to news and arts information. Paid models in the past appealed more to elites. The Internet promises greater democratization, but the challenge of finding a workable monetization model remains.
redshirt
@Brachiator: Maybe one day it will be possible to charge by usage. Use a site 2 minutes a week? 10 cents. Use a site 5 hours a day? 5 dollars.
Anoniminous
@Brachiator:
BlockChain tech looks like a way to get there.
Brachiator
@redshirt:
Usage metering, like paying a gas or electric bill, seems like a really old fashioned solution to new problems. I guess it is better than a fixed number of free stories per month, but would there be a maximum monthly charge? And if you are charging by time, you can get around this by utility programs that will capture content for later reading.
@Anoniminous
Isn’t this like bitcoin and such? New currencies don’t seem to be the problem. The problem is that people want content for free. But even if this were available and used, what about people who are poor?