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Andrew Sullivan goes indie

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:30:00 +0000

Extra! Extra! The Daily Dish is going independent. Andrew Sullivan, blogger extraordinaire, declared today that his venerable, high-profile, prolific blogging operation will no longer depend on the largess of corporate owners like Time, the Atlantic or the Daily Beast to operate. He's going indie, and depending on readers to pay up.

The announcement sent shock waves through Twitter. It's a risky, bold move. Very few people have figured out how to get readers to pay for content on the Web. Sullivan's model is innovative: He plans to eschew advertising altogether. Instead, we get what he has dubbed "freemium-based metering."

Our particular version will be a meter that will be counted every time you hit a "Read on" button to expand or contract a lengthy post. You'll have a limited number of free read-ons a month, before we hit you up for $19.99. Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter - so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall. It won't. Ever. There is no paywall. Just a freemium-based meter. We've tried to maximize what's freely available, while monetizing those parts of the Dish where true Dishheads reside. The only tough love we're offering is the answer to the View From Your Window Contest. You'll have to become a member to find where the place is. Ha!

Jobs truthers’ latest myth: Government doing all the hiring

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:20:00 +0000

Have you heard the news? While us workaday job-creating CEOs are about to get hit by Obama’s tax hike on the wealthiest 2 percent, those fat-cat municipal sanitation workers and public schoolteachers are adding to their ranks at an alarming rate. According to the latest meme ricocheting around the conservative blogosphere and Fox News, almost three-quarters of the new jobs created in the past five months have been government jobs.

The figure, first reported Friday by the social conservative news website CNS.com, has immediatly gained traction on the right. It hits all the right buttons of demonstrating out-of-control government spending while exposing the sham that is the supposedly improving economy. And it does it all in a nifty little eye-popping statistic: First there was the 1 percent, then the 53 percent, followed by the 47 percent, now we have the 73 percent. The one problem is that it's total baloney, but we'll get to that in a second.

Fox News spreads new Obama myths

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 17:47:00 +0000

In an attempt to paint President Obama as weak or even "dangerous" on foreign policy, as Rep. Michele Bachmann said this morning at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, conservative pundits have seized on two myths about Obama's handling of national security, which have spread like wildfire through the right-wing blogosphere and onto the airwaves at Fox News.

The first states that Obama, via his ambassador in Egypt, ordered Marine guards at the Cairo embassy to go without live ammunition. The meme started as a rumor on a Web forum for Marines, which was picked up by a defense blog and then the conservative Washington Free Beacon. From there it spread to dozens of other right-wing blogs before making it to Fox News last night.

Judy Blume has breast cancer

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 21:54:00 +0000

Beloved young-adult author Judy Blume went public today with her breast cancer diagnosis and blogged about her ensuing emotional journey in a poignant blog post called "!@#$% Happens."

The author of "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" and "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret" describes a situation that most post-menopausal women worry about -- a routine visit that ends with a biopsy:

The biopsy report came back a few days later while I was with my GYN in her office (a long standing appointment). It was good that I wasn't alone and that she, who has been my doctor for seventeen years, could explain it to me. Very early. Very small. Well differentiated. All good news.

But it was ductal carcinoma.

Wait – me? There’s no breast cancer in my family (recent extensive genetic testing shows no genetic connection). I haven’t eaten red meat in more than 30 years. I’ve never smoked, I exercise every day, forget alcohol -- it’s bad for my reflux -- I’ve been the same weight my whole adult life. How is this possible? Well, guess what – it’s possible.

The New York Times’ F-word problem

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:15:00 +0000

The New York Times prides itself on being one of the last, great bastions of clean language. It is a place where no F bombs drop, where dads do not say "shit." Yet in an increasingly bleepworthy world, the paper of record's profanity-avoidance tactics are beginning to look not just demure, but like poor journalism.

The paper's latest bout of primness came on Wednesday in a story about an app that enables Facebook users to "Unbaby Me." In the piece, writer Austin Considine notes that, "There are already blogs devoted to mocking over-sharing parents who, for example, post photos of their placentas. ('You used to be fun,' reads the tagline. 'Now you have a baby.')"

The quote is from B., as she's known online, the Brooklyn-based creator of STFU, Parents. Yet you wouldn't know that from The Times' story, which conspicuously didn't name or link to her blog. The Times had no such hesitation about naming an online store called AntiBaby or acknowledging the Stuff Hipsters Hate blog. This troubled B., who emailed The Times "in the hope that it will be credited."