The other question is online publishers' business model -- not just can they get the traffic but can they make a profit in any way that isn't sleazy or doesn't breach the church-state wall.

You look at the New York Times-Barnes & Noble relationship. [The Times, like Salon, has a sales-referral partnership with bn.com.] The cynics are saying that's why they've been going after Amazon.com [for selling favorable placement on the site]. [The Times] can argue all they want and say they have this separation, but the perception is there. The journalistic codes of ethics used to say, "Even avoid the perception [of conflict of interest]." But apparently that's been scratched off the list. Certainly the cozy New York Times-Barnes & Noble relationship wasn't even disclosed in the early stories about Amazon. It's going to be tough ... The Pioneer-Press [online] is partnering with a local TV station. Well, what position does that put the TV critic in?

At your own site, you're soliciting advertising or sponsorships. Any nibbles?

Just over the weekend I had an inquiry about sponsorship -- I have to send something off this week. Frankly, I haven't pursued it very diligently. I sell some fanzines on the site -- I'm perhaps the first and only e-commerce weblog.

Would you accept ads or sponsorship from a publication you link to? Would that present a conflict?

If a publication sponsored the site, I would offer it a small logo placement, say on the left of the site, and put two or three daily story links below the logo -- making it clear to readers they are sponsored links.

You mentioned when you linked to Scott Rosenberg's column on weblogs [see here for a related letter] that news webmasters realize the power of these sites. Do people pimp stories to you a lot?

Yeah, that's just started happening in the last five months. That's pretty much when my traffic increased. The first came from a New York publication I won't name; they said, "Can we send some stories your way?" I said, "Look, I look at your site all the time." They're noticing on their [referrer] logs that traffic is starting to come their way from my site ... That's one of the things that I look at in the long term; if I can drive thousands of readers in one day, maybe people will notice and say, "Hey, maybe we should advertiser-sponsor this." I have also received more than a few e-mails from individual writers suggesting their pieces be highlighted on the site -- I just got one this morning from an alternative newspaper writer -- which is fine, because more often than not they're worth posting.

That's the aspect of Drudge's influence that people don't talk about much. He generates huge traffic to things like entertainment news.

And there's the Slashdot effect [in which sites play up certain tech stories in the hope that slashdot.org will direct its obedient geek army their way]. That's the power of indie sites.

Speaking of which, do you think that the Web is actually democratizing people's access to news?

Yeah, I think it is. As more individuals start doing logs, it'll increase.

But professional sites are adding their own weblog-type features ...

Salon's Alt column is sort of an example.

... and search engines and portals have been around -- and have been offering more and more-specialized content -- for years now. Do you think indie weblogs will have more or less influence as time goes on?

The thing is, if you go into those portals, they have links to the same stories that I see in my morning newspaper, stories I've heard on the radio in the morning. They don't offer anything fresh. They don't offer anything different. That's the secret to weblogs' growth and survival.

My site had the story about the millionaire dog buying [Sylvester] Stallone's home before the wires got it. It turned out to be bogus, but I had it. You remember that? I remember clearly: It was Monday morning -- Monday's a tough day for me, because nobody works Sundays, so I have to work harder to find stuff. Well, I check the Miami Herald, and there's a story about a millionaire dog buying Stallone's home. It was a weird story I found in the local section. It was my lead story; I had a picture of the dog. The next day it hit the wires. And then the next day they found out it was bogus.

In a sense, you're creating your own newspaper, like a wire editor. Newspapers pay people full-time salaries to do that sort of thing.

Well, there's a certain talent to finding the most interesting links out there, as opposed to just arbitrarily picking 20 links and saying, "Go for it."

With a weblog you get someone's personal perspective.

With a good log, you get to know the person behind it a little bit, the person's taste, the person's attitude toward society.

You've been in newspapers since the '70s. Have you found media writing or people's attention to the media to have changed much?

The one thing I've found, and maybe it's because I've changed markets, is that people are less engaged with their daily newspapers and more engaged with broadcasting. I mentioned in Milwaukee the VCR repairman would recognize my byline. Well, now my face is on my column once a week, and I've only been recognized three times [in more than three years].

People spend less time with their newspapers, it's less a part of their lives. The impact is diminished. People just scan stories; they haven't read stories that you think they would. There's more of a "Just give me the lede" mentality ... In the late '70s, we used to write 50-inch stories on county meetings and people actually read them. Now meetings aren't even covered.

But couldn't you say a site like yours contributes to that attitude? You give short little blurbs for the stories, you put key phrases in boldface ...

Yeah! [Laughs.] I guess I'm catering to today's media customer.
salon.com | June 10, 1999

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