Sometimes I read something online that is so mind numbingly stupid that I can’t even conceive how someone reached that conclusion. Yep… this is one of those times.

Over the weekend, Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch wrote up a post about how Judge Richard Posner wrote up a blog about the death of newspapers, and he had one of the craziest ideas I’ve ever heard of for saving them from the worsening economy:

Imagine if the New York Times migrated entirely to the World Wide Web. Could it support, out of advertising and subscriber revenues, as large a news-gathering apparatus as it does today? This seems unlikely, because it is much easier to create a web site and free ride on other sites than to create a print newspaper and free ride on other print newspapers, in part because of the lag in print publication; what is staler than last week’s news. Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

For those of you unfamiliar with the theory of linking and how it works, it’s a fairly simple concept.  Take me linking the word “TechCrunch” above.  I chose to link to the actual story Ms. Schonfeld wrote, so now when this post is published he will receive a notice called a “trackback” that allows him to know that I referenced his article in my post.  This will also be used by search engines to see how relevant his post is and how much credence they should give it.  The more links a site or story receives, the more importance a search engine puts on it, and the more chance of people searching on the appropriate terms will see it.

Essentially, links are the life’s blood of blogging.

Now, what Judge Posner is suggesting that linking to copyrighted material, or using a portion of it as a quote (like I did with his blog post above), should be illegal under copyright law , you have to wonder how he thinks this will save the the newspaper industry.  I’m not sure where to even start with just how wrong he has gotten this, but lets give it a go anyway:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking…

Okay, lets say you want to link to NYTimes.com, that would probably be fine, but if you want to link to a specific story, say Karl Malden, Everyman Actor, Dies at 97, the link would look like this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/movies/02malden.html?_r=1&hp

This is known as “deep linking”, and I have a feeling this is what Judge Posner is talking about as this is actual copyrighted material.  The problem is that without deep linking you could never share a story with any one.  Are you going to link to the main page and then tell them “Okay, click here… and then here… and then do this…”, no, you aren’t.

Deep linking is also essential to how search engines index the importance of a specific page so that it knows how much priority to gie it when people search on a term.  The more links a page has to it, the more important it is, the higher up in search results it appears.  Deep linking is a very, very good thing in the Internet business.

…paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent

What he is talking about here is block quotes like I did above.  The problem with this is that it would make it impossible for anyone to write a rebuttal to anything as you would have to do a long, drawn out, explanation of what the original article said.  You would have to make sure the wording was different enough so as not to be accused of plagiarism, but then balance making sure you got the original tone of the article.  That is essentially impossible.

Quoting stories is as old as journalism and is essential to editorials as well as stories.  So long as you only quote a small portion of the story it falls under Fair Use, and I don’t really see that ever being written out of copyright law.

It all comes down to “consent”

Judge Posner does stipulate that people could get the copyright holder’s consent and do the linking and quoting, but due to time constraints, and the timeliness of stories, would any newspaper want a dedicated person sitting around 24/7 just to approve requests?  Of course they wouldn’t,  so the solution would be giving people carte blanche to link and quote.  Those papars that wouldn’t do it would quickly see themselves losing popularity due to a lack of links, and… in short, everyone would have to give blanket permission and we would be back to where we started.  Everyone would have permission, and those that didn’t grant it would get zero traffic because of how far behind they are.

So, basically I am saying that Judge Posner’s solution is flawed beyond belief and that he shows a total lack of understanding for how the Internet actually operates.  His ’solutions’ will do nothing but create grief for bloggers and newspapers alike  It would take no time for workarounds to be found, and in the meantime it would end up costing those papers money as they try to handle all of the increased number of requests for permission.

Try to save old media if you want, but at least have a working knowledge of your “solution” before you suggest it.

It’s times like this that I think back to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“Don’t Panic”.

I won’t bother explaining the quote.  If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, you get it.  If you haven’t done either, you still get it… it’s like a universal quote.

The insanity that is circulating around the recent outbreak of swine flu is staggering.  You couldn’t bat an eye on Twitter this weekend without someone talking about it.  Blogs are writing endless posts about what to do.  Television shows are being interrupted to bring you the latest news when an a confirmed case is reported…

ENOUGH ALREADY!

We get it, there is a flu going around… it is transmitted via human-to-human contact… people have died.

You know what this reminds me of?

THE FLU!

Yes, it is a bit worse because this one came out of the blue, and we do not currently have a vaccine for it, but, then again, sometimes the vaccaine is worse than the flu for those who remember what happened in 1976.  In short, the vaccaine ended up killing a lot of people, and the pandemic like spread of the virus they predicted never materialized.

I do think it is wise to inform the public, “Hey, this is going on, you need to be careful, wash your hands, don’t go to work if you’re sick”, etc, but these are common sense rules everyone should follow.  Course, if they did, then I wouldn’t have had to write a post like Social Etiquette While You’re Sick just last month.  Do make sure you go back and read that because it is filled with basic tips that may keep you healthy during any flu outbreak.

What gets me is how the media is just making this worse.  They are acting as if no one has ever died from the flu before.  So, I went and looked up the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports on flu mortality rates.  Here is the excerpt for just the 2007-2008 flu season.

As of June 19, 2008, 83 deaths associated with laboratory-confirmed influenza infections have occurred among children aged < 18 years during the 2007–08 influenza season that were reported to CDC. These deaths were reported from 33 states (Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin). Among the 83 cases, the mean and median age was 6.4 years and 5.0 years, respectively; seven children were aged < 6 months, 16 were aged 6–23 months, 18 were aged 2–4 years, and 42 were aged 5–17 years. Of the 79 cases for which the influenza virus type was known, 51 were influenza A viruses, 27 were influenza B viruses, and one had co-infection with influenza A and B viruses. Of the 63 cases aged 6 months and older for whom vaccination status was known, 58 (92%) had not been vaccinated against influenza according to the 2007 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations. These data are provisional and subject to change as more information becomes available.

83 deaths in the United States alone. Where were the experts on TV to tell us how we should protect ourselves? Where were the flashy graphics? Where were the news conferences by elected officials? What about the travel warnings by other countries? Oh, that’s right, it’s because this happens every year.

There is an old saying in journalism, “if it bleeds, it leads.” Here you have a pre-packaged story for lazy reporters. You have deaths… in an exotic locale… a snazzy, brandable name (go and try to find a Swine Flu related domain name that isn’t taken… I dare ya) that is easy to say and can invoke fear because it’s short and weird sounding… hey, wait a minute, didn’t we play this exact same scenario out with Avian flu? Oh, and wasn’t it SARS a few years before that was going to kill us all?

Again, I am not saying you should be cavalier about this, do take precautions, I’m just saying they should be no different than the ones you should take every flu season.  And as for the people in the media… stop being lazy.

Isn’t it amazing what a year, and an economic crisis, can do to change the perception of an industry?

It was just last April that I wrote up a post about how some news sources were talking about how professional bloggers work under harsh conditions, and now I get to tell you how we’re America’s newest profession, and some of us are rolling in money!  Well, that is at least what one reporter at the Wall Street Journal is telling the world.

According to Mark Penn, there are now over 20 million people in the United States who are blogging, of those numbers, 1.7 million are profiting from it, and another 452.000 are using it as their primary source of income.  He got those numbers from a poll on Technorati, and he’s sticking to them.

He then went to a post on ReadWriteWeb where they talked about 20 of the top-tier bloggers who shared that they are earning between $45,000 to $90,000 a year.  This is also his source of information that sites that generate around 100,000 unique visitors a month can expect to earn around $75,000 a year.

While I certainly don’t know every blogger out there, I have been in the professional tech blogging field now for close to 22-months, and I can assure you I am not earning $45,000 a year.  I can also say, with a fair degree of certainty, that I only know of one of my fellow bloggers in that pay range, and right now there are rumblings of him receiving a pay cut.

Sure it is nice to a see more positive piece about one my current professions, but I also think that Mr. Penn is painting a far rosier picture about the industry than it deserves.  Revenue from blogging is almost 100% dependent on advertising, and companies are currently cutting their advertising budgets to the bone.  I have already seen bloggers receiving tremendous pay cuts due to the downturn in ad dollars, and I have seen others completely lose their jobs.  Right now is not the time for anyone with even an inkling of how this business works to be saying, “wow, look at how much bloggers are making!”, because, quite frankly, we’re not.

My biggest concern out of a piece like this is that it is going to give false hope to people who have recently lost their jobs that they may be able to replace some of that income with trying their hand in the field, or even launching their own blogs.  Mr. Penn writes in fairly cheery tones how the barrier to entry is so low to start your own blog, saying that it is around $80, which is actually high, and how you can work your way up to earning a few hundred dollars a month.  Again, speaking as someone who has run this blog for 49 months, I can assure you it is not making a few hundred dollars a month.  If I manage to cover my hosting fees each month, I call it a good month.

So, how far off is Mr. Penn from reality?

Professional Blogging

He waxes on poetically about how much the top bloggers earn, and how you can expect some single pieces to pay you $200 a pop and so on.  Course he doesn’t tell you about how to find these jobs, how long those people have been in the field, how some blogs find sneaky ways to not pay you and so on, but hey, you can say in theory you were supposed to earn $200!

The field is currently choked with seasoned writers, and it is a buyer’s market out there.  We, the writers, are all scrambling to find work to make up for jobs we’ve lost, or ones where we have had our pay cut.  We are all competing for the same handful of positions, and we don’t need a publication like the Wall Street Journal working off of pre-economic crisis blog posts to tell a whole new group of people, “Hey, come over here, there’s ‘easy money’ over here!”

Running Your Own Blog

I speak to this from the perspective of running several blogs.  While my mother and I started StarterTech.com over a year ago, its numbers are still low.  As for ad revenue, it doesn’t even cover its portion of the hosting fees, but we’re fine with that, we see it as a long term project, and we’re dedicated to it, but it is also not expected to be our primary source of income like some of the neophytes reading that original article might look upon any blog they start.

As for this blog, it has taken me years to get it up to decent traffic.  2008 was my best year ever, doubling the traffic of 2007.  This year is shaping up even better with me having surpassed the traffic for all 12 months of 2008 on April 19th.  It has taken a lot of time and effort this year to get my numbers up like that, and I am still not near those magical numbers Mr. Penn mentions.

He really makes it sound so easy to do, but he doesn’t go into things like how these bloggers would have to learn about SEO (search engine optimization), meta tags, setting up site maps for search engine crawls, submitting to the engines and on and on and on.  Nope, just throw $80 at someone and you have a blog that will be making you money!  Running a site is as hard as any other desk job, and in some ways even harder if you have no clue some of the technical aspects even exist.  There are millions of blogs out there, and you have to jump through hoops to make sure you even get noticed.

Is This The Next eBay Gold Rush?

This article reminds me so much of the ones you saw around the time everyone was discovering eBay for the first time.  “Did you know there’s money to be made out there?!?”, and people who had no clue what they were doing, all ran out to their garages, took pictures of their junk, and tried selling it via auctions.  Sure, some good sellers came out of that, and I am sure we could gain some good bloggers, but it’s the initial onslaught of everyone with a keyboard trying to be a blogger that worries me.  More people fighting for the limited jobs, more blogs to help muddy up the search engines and just more drivel in general making it onto the Interwebs.

I don’t think this will happen unless more articles like this begin to appear, and seeing as how journalists are already fearing they may lose their jobs to bloggers, something Mr. Penn oddly does address, we won’t see an onslaught of new people in the blogosphere.  I do think his article does point out, one again, that unless you understand all the facets of a subject, perhaps you shouldn’t be writing an opinion piece on it.

It would seem Marvel Comics really doesn’t like you to talk about them… unless they tell you what to say.

The Inquisitr and Newsarama are both talking about Marvel Comics seeming hatred of the comic industry press and Twitter.  While using Twitter comments (also known as “Tweets”) in reporting is considered lazy by some, I don’t see it as any different than quoting something printed elsewhere such as in a magazine or newspaper.  I honestly think it is a littler stronger than that because you are 100% sure the person (or their paid representative in the case of some celebrities) actually said it.  However, some of the exectutives at Marvel are taking offense at their Tweets being reprinted elsewhere and are launching a war of words with bloggers, and even going so far as to suggest they are owed payment for their use.

Are they out of their freaking minds?

Oh wait, this is the comic book industry… they ARE out of their freaking minds.

From August 1986 to December 2001 I ran a comic book store.  During that time I worked for a comic book company on the side, consulted with companies, and even worked inside the comic book & toy press industries.  As much as I love comic books as an art medium, it was sort of like the old saying about loving sausage doesn’t mean you want to see how it is made.  I have only recently returned to reading comics, something I used to have a die hard passion for, because it took me over seven years to try to forget just how messed up of an industry it is.

I have still been involved with it slightly over the past few years, and I have grown amazed by seeing an average comic book rise in price to $2.99 a month, with others hitting the $3.99 and $4.99 mark; the days of the entry level pricing are gone.  I have also seen the number of venues where comics are sold dwindle to near non-existence, all but assuring that the industry is surviving only on those that have been it for years already, and no new blood is coming into it.

With all of this in mind, don’t you think they may want to have the word spread as far and wide as they can about what is going on in the business?  Don’t you think that they should welcome every mention of their names and brands in the hopes it might bring in more readers?

Apparently if your name is “Marvel”, you don’t.

Tom Brevoort, Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada, all employed by Marvel, and they decided to launch arguments with the comic press about their, publicly available mind you, Tweets being used as quotes in articles.  This has begun happening in the mainstream press on a regular basis, and even Ashton Kutcher said in the Oprah episode about Twitter that he likes the fact that he can diffuse some stories about himself in the press because he can refute them quickly on the site.  Here is someone who is virtually a household name, and he encourages people to use his Twitter stream as a source of information about him.

Not in the comic book industry though.  Oh no, we can’t have you using something they made public themselves without first asking their permission to do it.  Apparently they have missed the fact that you can lock a Twitter stream which means that no one is allowed to republish your Tweets.  No, they’ll just go on saying things that anyone can see and then get angry when people actually quote them on it.

In Lucas Siegel’s rebuttal piece to all this (Newsarama link above), he points out that due to the walled garden type situation in the comics industry, the comic book companies enjoy an unprecedented control over their industry press.  If you print something before THEY say you can, they can simply cut you off from any future information.  So, in general, the comics press does nothing that could potentially anger the comic book companies.  This has left them with a feeling of omnipotence that they can somehow control everything that happens, but they have forgotten that once something is on the Internet, you generally lost all control of it.  It takes on a life of its own, and the possibility of controlling the ways it is consumed are completely lost. As someone who has also worked inside the comic book press, I can tell you that Mr. Siegel is 100% accurate in his portrayal of how things work. No matter when or how you learn about an upcoming project, you could not run the news until the company said you could for fear of having all of your in roads to that company quickly severed.

I can almost understand their anger over the Tweets because they simply aren’t used to not having complete control over a press situation.  However, to suggest that they should get paid for their Tweets, let alone the asking for permission to reprint something that was made available to the public, is just disgusting at its core.  If you don’t want it done, don’t Tweet or lock the stream.  Two very easy solutions, but solutions they are choosing not to take.  It is far easier, it would seem, to whine and cry about it and make the press look the proverbial comic book bad guys, and the bad PR they garner over this be damned.

… have I mentioned how glad I am to be away from this industry?

Be sure to listen to this week’s Scattercast, which comes out tomorrow, where I will continue stories of my life in the comic industry, and how one big name creator once called and cursed me out for 90 minutes for daring to express my opinion about his work ethic on a CLOSED forum.

It would seem that the Associated Press (AP) is insanely short sighted.

At a meeting of the AP, which encompasses approximately 1500 member publications, AP Chairman Dean Singleton talked to the audience about the increasing evils of the Internet, and how their content was being abused by blogs and news aggregation sites.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more. AP and its member newspapers must be paid fully and fairly.

While they certainly have every right to protect their intellectual properties, but they are talking about even going after sites like Google News that aggregate multiple news sources into one centralized location.    They are saying that even these types of sites are profiteering off of their copyrighted works, and if they are to continue, they must pay for the use of AP content just as any other news source that reprints their content with permission.

The problem with this whole theory is that sites like Google News simply provide the headline, maybe an image, and usually around one sentence of the story to give you and idea of what it is about.  If you choose to read more of the story, you then click on the link are taking to the original page that presents the story.  Due to the limited amount of the story that ir reprinted, this falls well within the terms of “fair use“, or, as the AP calls it, “misguided legal theories.”

Essentially fair use is the concept that you can reprint things in an article so long as you limit how much of it you copy, and you site the source of the information.  Copying an entire piece, even with a link to the original source would fall outside of the fair use guidelines.  As anyone familiar with Google News knows, they show you a headline, maybe an image and one to two introductory lines from the article. Then, if you are interested in it, you click on it and go to the original piece. Well, it seems the AP no longer wants this to happen unless sites like Google pay them a fee for running those brief intros.

Here’s the back-asswards part of this whole thing. Someone like me has no time to read news unless they go through an aggregator. I don’t have time to go to multiple sources, and by using a service by Google News I do visit a lot of local television sites, smaller town newspapers and so on. In other words, these sites are getting traffic they never would have if it wasn’t for Google doing what they do.  In the AP’s amazing lack of wisdom, they see this as a horrible thing that Google is slapping some ads on those results pages, and that is where their problem is.  It’s a chick and the egg type scenario… I wouldn’t be seeing those ads on Google if I wasn’t coming to their site to look for the news stories that I can then go and read, and, in turn, see the ads of those original sites.

Old media, which the AP is a glowing example of, is in desperate need of money, and they are trying to get it from anywhere they can, even if it means cutting off their nose to spite their face.  Charge Google… Google may drop you… you just lost thousands, if not millions, of potential readers.  Is there not a time where you have to skip making money from a venue to make other money because of that same venue?  Yes, there is, and this is one of those times.

The even sadder part is that it isn’t just Google they want to go after, but also bloggers for quoting their articles.  Well, quoting articles is an age old tradition in journalism, which blogging is an off shoot of.  Sure some bloggers take it too far, but the vast majority don’t.  So why not leave us alone and les us spread your work for even more people to see?  I have no desire to quote entire articles, that would be pointless for someone like me.  I actually already stopped using AP stories due to their plan a few months ago to start charging something like a $1.50 per word for every word you quoted.  I didn’t feel like seeing what their limit would be, so I always look for on-AP stories to quote, and apparently I am going to have to keep that policy in place.

It is time for the AP to grow up and accept the 21st century or this truly will be the end of newspapers as we know it.  So go ahead, AP, keep annoying the people who might be your only salvation and see how far you get.

Actress Natasha Richardson was involved in a life threatening skiing accident yesterday.

Ms. Richardson was involved in a skiing accident on Monday in Montreal while taking a beginners lesson at Mont Tremblant. She was reported to have gotten up and walked away under her own power, but was accompanied by two members of the ski patrol to her hotel room. An hour later, though reports claim she hit no objects during her accident and showed no obvious injuries,  she started having severe headaches and was admitted to Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal.  Her condition was quickly elevated to critical, and her husband, actor Liam Nesson, left the set of the film he was working on in Toronto to be with his wife.

Details are still sparse on what exactly happened, but reports are now moving between that Ms. Richardson has died, may be brain dead or is just sufferening from swelling of the brain.

If my regular readers are curious as to why I am covering something like this, it’s because over the past hour I have seen this story evolve so quickly it is mind boggling, but it also speaks to the problems of “journalism” and blogging.

At 11:59 AM CST, I saw the tweet on Twitter pictured to the left from Perez Hilton come in.  It linked to this story on his site that Time Our New York was reporting that Ms. Richardson had passed away, with them citing a family friend as the source.

As I thought I would write something up on it, I decided to look for a corroborating source, you know, something journalists should actually do.  I was finding nothing, and the actual Time Out New York page was not responding.   By 12:37 PM CST, I found the following information on TMZ.com.

UPDATE: 1:37 PM ET – We’re told Richardson’s jet was scheduled to take off from Montreal-Trudeau Airport. A rep for the airport said the jet is either still there or has just taken off.

We’re told Natasha Richardson has been transported from the hospital in Canada via ambulance. CTV says she boarded a private jet — we do not know where the jet has gone, but we believe it’s New York City.

Richardson was accompanied by a medic team for the flight.

At almost the exact same moment, Perez Hilton came out with a note from Time Out New York that they got it wrong.

Okay —

Sorry about the confusion. We spoke to source, who confirms “brain dead and will not survive”, and therefore, her friends and family are mourning her unofficial death.

My apologies with the semantics issue.

Please let me know if you have more questions — I have copied Michael Freidson, TONY’s editor in chief.

Um… “semantics”?  I don’t think so folks.  There is a world of difference between “dead” and “brain dead”.

By 12:48 PM CST, Time Out New York released yet another statement via Perez Hilton.

Time Out New York sincerely apologizes for the confusion. We stand by our sources, and our friend of the family first confirmed “dead” and then called back to say “brain dead.” We find the situation incredibly tragic and obviously wish to only report the facts.

We stand by our new statement that she is brain dead and not expected to survive. Unfortunately, the article was not taken down — our website crashed from traffic. Time Out New York regrets the error.

Well, yes, you should regret the error! How much pain did you just cause a family over shoddy reporting?  Yes, I know this could just be labeled as “a celebrity story”, but we are talking about a wife here.  A wife with two children who has a family already enough pain to not have to deal with so-called “journalists” chomping at the bit to have the “exclusive” story first that they don’t bother to actually get around to vetting their stories or sources.  I mean, why should they?  This is the Web after all!  You hit publish, get out there first, and THEN you can worry about silly little things about getting the facts right.

This isn’t so much about Ms. Richardson, though my heart does go out to her and her family, but it is about how reporting is handled on the Web.  You want to be the first out there with a story so you can get all of that social bookmarking goodness, so you can be the one to be “retweeted” the most times.  And this isn’t just happening with stories such as this one, it happens everyday in every reporting field on the Web, this was just one of the easiest I have ever seen to track its exact evolution.

Sadly I think the time has come where every person out there who reads news on the Web has to do some double checking of their own.  Unless it comes from an untouchable source, you need to go to a search engine and see if anyone else is reporting the news that grabbed your attention, and then you have to see if they are citing the source you just came from or someone else.  It sucks that you have to do your own checking now, but if this whole debace proves anything, it’s that no one is looking at for your best journalistic interests except for yourself.

UPDATE 3/18: You can find out information about Natasha Richardson’s death here.

If you haven’t seen the Jim Cramer Vs Jon Stewart interview from The Daily Show, you need to. I am not a regular viewer of The Daily Show.  I have nothing against it, I enjoy it, I just don’t always have time for it.  I made sure I made time this past Thursday though when I heard about the impending talk with Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money show. Essentially Mr. Stewart had started to take the entire cable network to task over their role in the current economic downturn.  True, it is not their sole responsibility, but they certainly contributed to the over exuberant enthusiasm people had for the markets.  Mr. Stewart, who is a comedian and hosts a television program dedicated to fake news, was the only thing close to a journalist that has had the gumption to take people such as Mr. Cramer to task for their total lack of warning to consumers of what was coming. The problem is that people such as Mr. Cramer claim to be experts on the economy and markets, but yet, mere weeks before the collapse of Bear Sterns, he was still saying it was a “buy”, and as the collapse neared, he moved simply to a “hold”.  Well, we all know how that worked out now. I have embedded the videos (warning: uncensored language) of the interview below, and I will have more thoughts below them.

Is this what journalism has come to? That I have to turn to a comedian to deliver one of the news stories that I should have been seeing from professional journalists for months now? People such as Jim Cramer must be called on all of their “shenanigans” that they have carried on with for years. Where were these “experts” trying to warn people that bad times were coming? Even I could see it for crying out loud! I knew the new housing start numbers were insanely out of control the past few years, and I tried to warn people of such. There is, however, a large difference between someone like me trying to tell people and someone with a national audience trying to tell people, but, no, they sat around singing happy songs of this magical financial land where unicorns pranced through the daisies and all was good and right with the world.

It wasn’t.

In the second video Jon Stewart bluntly calls Cramer on something I have thought for years: this is a game to some people. There is no doubt in my mind that a lot of people view finances as a game, it’s all fake money on paper, what does it matter? Well it matters to people like myself and the people who read this blog. This is our retirements, our college funds for children, our homes and more that people like Cramer played with. Well, the game is over, the King is in check, and I, for one, thank Jon Stewart for having the guts to finally spell it out for people that you must stop listening to so-called “experts”. Cramer bluntly spells out in the video clips that Stewart shows how one can manipulate stock values with little to no effort. Are these people you still want to trust to advise you on how to invest in your future?

Stop the madness, folks. Invest in safe, secure items, and stop thinking that you can get rich easy by playing the markets, because believe me, for every one that pulls it off, thousands fail. Don’t become a statistic.

For some reason Nightline though Rachael Ray was worth interviewing, and the subject of those infamous FHM photos came up.

I say “infamous” because for the life of me I have never been able to figure out why FHM thought they was reason enough to ask her to pose, and then why she was willing to accept.  Although she may have accepted because she originally thought the title stood for “Food and Home”.

Yeah… I know… she’s a brain trust as that would have been”FandH”,  “FaH” or “FH”, not “FHM”.  No one ever said she was quick.

What we did learn from the interview, which I did not watch, but saw the clip later, was that her mother was, and still if, furious over the photos.  Yet, oddly, her husband was all for them!  Imagine that.  Truly surprising.

I have never made my utter hatred of this woman exactly a secret around this blog, but I truly can’t figure out why anyone finds her even remotely interesting.  The fact that Nightline wanted to interview her is odd enough, but why bring up these photos that were published in 2003?  Did anyone even remember they were still out there?  Did anyone even care?  Cynthia McFadden, the reporter interviewing her, acted like it was some great revelation they even existed.  Anyone who has ever done an Internet search on the woman’s name has seen them, even I knew they existed and I can’t stand the woman!

You can watch the video on the Nightline site if you want (I couldn’t find an embed feature), but it just makes me laugh how the whole subject is broached like its some horrid secret from her past.

I knew from the moment this story broke that video would eventually show up of the crash, followed by the first few minutes. As always, YouTube delivers.

In this day and age of camera phones, video survelliance, webcams and every other imaginable way to record a video, it was inevitable that we would see actual footage of US Airways Flight 1549 actually impacting the water.  While watching a plane crash may seem morbid, of course this time it is uplifting and inspiring.  Capt. Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III is to be commended for his ability to bring the plane in the way he did despite losing all power.  If not for his skill as a pilot, this could have been a horrendous tragedy, and instead he turned it into a moment of triumph.

My only concern at this point is the amount of praise that is being heaped on Capt. Sullenberger.  I am certainly not saying he isn’t worth the praise, quite the contrary, it just worries me.  In the past, people have not been able to handle the attention they receive after such an event, and I am hopefully that he can.

However, I digress, this is about the video of the actual crash.  Duncan Riley over at The Inquisitr posted it after finding it on YouTube, and it is quite the show.  Shot by a fixed camera on the Hudson run by the U.S. Coast Guard, you can see the actual plane impact at approximately 2:03. By the time the camera zooms at 2:40, you can already see people on the wing, which I was fairly impressed by. The first boat pulls up the plane at 6:03, and I think huge kudos are owed to all of the boats that pulled up to help, and especially the quick response time they made it over there. All told the video is 10 minutes, with no sound, but it is well worth watching to get an accurate view of how things actually went.

Truly amazing, and so thankful that everyone made it out alive.

As a side note, leave it to a journalist to ask one of the stupidest questions I think I have ever heard at a press conference. While watching Mayor Bloomberg’s press conference shortly after the crash, an unidentified reporter asks, “Have they recovered the black box?”. Bloomberg shoots her a look that was tame compared to my deep laughter at the question. The plane is intact, where in the world do you think the black box is stored that it would mysteriously be the only piece of the plane missing?  “You know, in retrospect, perhaps we shouldn’t have installed the black box on the outside of the belly of the plane, Bob.”

For the record, they are stored in the cockpit to the best of my knowledge.  However, in a hectic press conference with people trying to get out all the info they could as quickly as possible, somehow I doubt that would have been my question.

1 hour and 8 minutes since a magnitude 7.5 earthquake hit Indonesia, and I can find ONE American news site reporting it.

While monitoring my Twitter feed today, I learned of an enormous earthquake hitting Indonesia via my boss at Mashable, Pete Cashmore.  Mr. Cashmore lives in Scotland, by the way.  So I am receiving news of a major world event via Twitter… from a man living in Scotland.

Okay, fine, but what did the major news sites in the USA show?  (please note that the following links take you to huge screenshots of the news sites named at the time I was looking)  Well, CNN was talking about if GM was worth saving.  Over at MSNBC, they were talking troops in Iraq, and just as I took the screenshot, they did add something up in their “Breaking News” banner.  Google News, which aggregates news from thousands of sites, had nothing on their main page at the time I visited it.  The only news site with something up when I first looked, a full 1 hour and 8 minutes after the event, was Fox News, and even at that, it was just a news blurb marked “URGENT” in red, while a story about Jones Town was the dominating story at the top of the page.  Because, really, the 30th anniversary of the Kool Aid drinkers is just that important.

I understand that it takes some time to report news, but a full 68 minutes after the event, and that’s all I could find?  Is Twitter the new news stream?  Will I have to rely on citizen journalism to get important news stories and links first?  It isn’t just me making some observations as you can see from the message Pete sent out on Twitter just a little while ago.

While I certainly would not say that this is the death of major news outlets, it certainly does not bode well for their future when a guy in Scotland is getting me news about Indonesia faster then they can.

On the episode of Saturday Night Live that aired on September 20th, there was a sketch about the New York Times sending their writers to Alaska to sniff out as much as they can about Governor Palin.

Host James Franco is playing the assignments editor and pitching the assignment to his staff.  As they are going over possible angles, the following exchange happens:

Reporter: What about the husband? You know he’s doing those daughters. I mean, come on. It’s Alaska.
Assignments Editor: He very well could be. Admittedly, there is no evidence of that, but on the other hand, there is no convincing evidence to the contrary. And these are just some of the lingering questions about Governor Palin.

At the end of the sketch, the reporter that asked this question is shown on the cover of the New York Times with the headline “While No Direct Evidence of Incest in Palin Family Emerges, Counter Evidence Remains Agonizingly Elusive” and “In a Small Alaska Town, Doubts Still Linger.”  It seems that some people are taking great offense to this portion of the sketch, and it has made it on to Fox News.

The article goes on about how maybe this whole sketch was about how the staff of the paper is out of touch with anything west of the Hudson river, however the rest of the article goes on and on about how this is harkening back to the rumors earlier this month that Governor Palin is not the mother of her youngest son, Trig and so on.

If the sketch had only pointed out about things about politics, I would say they have a case, but the sketch really was just focused on how New Yorkers fear what they don’t understand, which was pretty much anything.

• None of the writers in the sketch knew how to drive a stick… none had drivers licenses… they all thought they would get around by taxi.
• One writer stated he would need the number of two psychoanalysts while there to continue his treatment, but he was informed in all of Alaska there was only one licensed doctor for that.  He paniced.
• None of them could identify a shotgun or a snowmobile.
• Two writers dropped out when they discovered there was no Thai delivery food.
• One writer was positive he would be attacked by a polar bear, but he was assured there was none in the area where they would be.  (it was later revealed he was killed by a polar bear)

In the most damning moment of the sketch proving this was more about New Yorkers, and how out of touch with reality the paper was, the sketch was dated as events happening on Septmber 8th.  One writer was reluctant to go because he didn’t want to leave a story he was working on about Lehman Brothers facing potential financial problems.  He was informed by the editor that it could wait, Lehman Brothers would still be there when he got back.

This sketch was clearly about the the out of touch nature of the newspaper itself, and I felt it got the point across fairly well.  As for the Palin/incest joke, yes, this scenario has been floated by some bloggers, but that’s what SNL has been doing for 34 seasons and that’s touching on current events.  Palin is in the news, the paternity of Trig has been in the news, this makes the subject fair game to them.  If you don’t like it, well, I don’t know what to tell you except to not watch SNL.

Here is the part of the Fox News story that made me laugh out loud, though.  First off they use a very accusatory tone about how the video fo the sketch is not available on the NBC website.

Now, some bloggers are urging protests of the show be sent to producer Lorne Michaels. The video was not posted on the SNL Web site.

Well, I went and looked, and only five sketches were posted from this week’s episode.  Yes, the sketch in question is missing, but so was the one I actually thought was the funniest of the episode, “The Cougar’s Den” about older women obsessed with younger men.  Wow… NBC must have received protests from The Cougar Coalition to not post that sketch.

The article then had the following note tacked on the end:

Editor’s Note: When this story was originally published at 12:07 pm ET, the video was available on YouTube. It has since been removed and a notice posted that NBC Universal has issued a copyright claim. Many other SNL videos remain on YouTube.

Yes, it is true that the video was removed over a copyright notice, but so are dozens of other SNL videos removed in the same manner every day. Yes, there are some others on the site, but they honestly go up so fast, I doubt anyone could keep up with taking them down.  However, the way Fox News said it made me think back to the “Admittedly, there is no evidence of that, but on the other hand, there is no convincing evidence to the contrary.” line from the sketch.  There is no evidence this was removed due to pressure, it was just removed over the usual copyright issues.

I think everyone needs to just take a step back, take a deep breath and relax.  Remember, this is a comedy show, and SNL has a long history of picking on anyone and everything.  I will admit that in the first two episodes of this season there has not yet been an Obama sketch, but I think that is partially due to them lacking a strong Obama impersonator.  They attempted using Fred Armissan last season, and, well, to be honest, he sucked.  I am sure his turn is coming.

There are so many bigger issues in this election, why get worked up over a joke on a sketch comedy show known for pushing boundaries?  It’s beyond me.

Everyone seems to be in a tizzy over the fact that the voice we heard come out of 7-year-old Lin Miaoke during the Olympic Opening Ceremonies was actually that of Yang Peiyi, another 7-year-old.

Um… hello?  It’s China.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here is the video of the offending song, “Ode to the Motherland”.

According to a radio interview with the musical director of the ceremonies, Chen Qigang, on state radio in China, it was decided that Peiyi had the voice, but wasn’t cute enough. On the other hand, Miaoke had the face they wanted, but not the voice, so upper level officials made the call to have the cuter girl lip-sync the song.

“The reason was for the national interest,” said Qigang.  He went on to add, “the child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feeling and expression. … Lin Miaoke is excellent in those aspects.”  Was it his decision, though?  No.  “We had to do it. We’d been through several inspections. They’re all very strict. When we rehearsed at the spot, there were several spectators from various divisions, especially leaders from the Politburo, who gave the opinion it must change.”

I think I’m more surprised at the reaction than the actual act.  No, that doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do, but, come on, it’s a Communist nation, of course they want to portray a vision of perfection.  This is also not that uncommon in music. Anyone remember C + C Music Factory? Zelma Davis appeared in their videos lip-syncing the vocals of Martha Wash as Ms. Wash was heavier than the image the group wanted in their videos. This was only revealed after the whole Milli Vanilli debacle where it was revealed that Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus hadn’t sung one word of “their” hit album.

Again, none of this makes it “right”, but it isn’t especially shocking either.  I’m more shocked/surprised it even got revealed because this reaction isn’t to be unexpected.  China has the eyes of the entire world on it right now, and everyone is looking for things to pick on.  The fact the music director got away with revealing it on state-run radio is far more interesting to me than the story itself.  How did this happen?  Was it intentional?  Was someone just not paying attention?  Will there be ramifications against Qigang?  The interviewer?  All of that is the real story here, and I am dismayed by the lack of follow-up by professional journalists to go to that part of the story.  No no, it’s far easier to just point a finger and go, “A-ha!  See?!? The Chinese are deceiving us!”

Heaven forbid journalists actually ever WORK for a story.

In the end, it’s been revealed, the true singer has gotten her credit, and I think that is a good thing far more than I think it is a bad thing.  Sure, it would have been nice to hace seen the true singer out there, but it’s over and done with, just stop playing shocked by it!