The longest is “Lady We All Kind Of Forgot About Decides Not To Do Job She Didn’t Have A Chance At” at 18 words. You can guess the topic of the story.

But what skews the data is the plethora of two or three word tweets. “Show Good.” “Cliff Collapses.” “Bear eats pizza.” Or my favorite: “House Housey.”

It’s a cute little trick. @Awl has mastered SEO: search engine obfuscation, daring the reader to click.

Few others make Twitter look so roomy.

In February, Lehmann secured a book deal based on the columns, which examine the institutions of modern capitalism and a provide “glimpse into how the top one percent maintains an iron grip on almost half of America’s financial wealth.” Last week, Rich People Things became available for preorder, with the release date for preorders slated for September 15. Fans of Lehmann’s column have already been clamoring to order the book — if Lehmann’s columns are any indication, the book promises to be full of his signature mix of biting satire and sharp prose.

This week, I spoke to Lehmann about the book, the column, and the events that led him to write about so-called “Rich People Things” — and Lehmann also provided an excerpt of a chapter for Mediaite readers.

First: tell us a little bit about your book — how would you describe it?

I’d say it’s like a long and sensual walk on the beach with an extremely attractive soulmate. Or else a jaundiced look at a corrupt and wheezing money culture, steeped in denial and free-market propaganda. Take your pick, really.

I tried to keep certain long-ago books on similar themes in mind as I wrote—like Edmund Wilson’s collection of Depression reporting The American Jitters, and Thurman Arnold’s The Folklore of Capitalism. Not that I’d put myself anywhere near such distinguished company, mind you—but both those books sharply expressed the mixture of raw disbelief and restless curiosity about how events conspired to create a catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression. I’ve seen all too little of that sensibility in reports on our own economic plight, so I’ve tried to revive it a bit, both in the online column for the Awl and in the book.

A curious note about Thurman Arnold, who was a bitterly cynical former antitrust official in the Roosevelt years: There’s an office building named for him now in downtown DC. I can’t tell which is stranger: That there was once a federal appointee who could write a scabrous attack on free-market pieties called The Folklore of Capitalism, or that his most visible legacy is an office building full of bankers and lobbyists toiling unknowingly in his name.

In your first column for the Awl, you talked about your experience working at New York magazine and particularly your reaction to  their “Rage of the Rich” issue in spring 2009. Can you tell us a bit about that experience at New York?

Hoo boy. Well, suffice it to say, after a lot of loose talk about “giving the New Yorker a run for its money” and “reviving long-form literary journalism” and whatnot during my interviews there, I was instantly tasked upon my arrival with overseeing the redesign of “The Strategist” shopping section and its metastasis from 6 or so to 24 or so pages in the magazine. There was also the agonizing meeting to determine the Platonic form of the New York Magazine Cover Story, and the consensus choice was a profile of bag-making ingénue Kate Spade. I blurted out in reply that I would flee the building before I would read such a thing. From then on, let’s just say it became clear to all concerned parties that my hire was less than an ideal fit.

And, what gave you the idea to start writing the Rich People Things column?

The aforementioned New York mag issue. Alex Balk and Choire Sicha had asked me to write for the Awl prior to its launch, but I wasn’t really intending to. (Hello, they still don’t pay contributors!) But I saw that NY mag package, and could imagine all too vividly the process by which it was conceived and executed, and when I resolved I couldn’t remain silent, I also knew that the Awl would probably be the only place to run such a thing. I had no intention of writing a column; Choire had given it the Rich People Things slug, which I believe was coined originally during his tenure at either Gawker or the New York Observer, when he posted that first entry. Alex asked me if I objected afterward, but I couldn’t think of any grounds to complain, partly because I didn’t really understand what the phrase was supposed to mean.

But as it happened, this was the spring of 2009, and the economic indignities just kept on coming. Someone else the following week forwarded me a link to really myopic piece in the Washington Post on Obama’s tax policy, and from then on, I realized this was actually one of the easiest columnizing gigs on the planet—and a good thing, too, since as I mentioned before, it DOESN’T PAY A GODDAMN THING.

You’ve described the book in the past as a ”bestiary of the permanent institutions of American capitalism.” What institutions do you single out the most for analysis and why?

Well, I thought it would be good to use the column’s point of view to examine a lot of things that we take for granted as other-than-rich-people-things in our common life—like the Constitution, the Democratic party, the Supreme Court and whatnot. I also wanted to discuss a few things that were, in the stricter sense of the word, actual things—like the iPad, the art of Damien Hirst, and reality TV. The idea, I think, was to mix more somber historical and political features of economic life with the cultural forces that sustain our beliefs in meritocracy and the gospel of success. Also to keep the tone pretty arch and satirical, since our guiding economic dogmas are many things, but as the events of the past two-plus years or so have shown, they are really not all that rational.

In your columns you’ve referenced those who you call the “are nots.” How do you define this term, and who are you classifying as are-nots?

I think the phrase—which I cribbed from political scientist Marc Landy, if memory serves—invokes the idea that our incomes and wealth-holding don’t match up to our status anxieties. So, for instance, if a Tea Party protestor was absolutely convinced that the Obama stimulus plan was a tax increase—when it was in fact a tax CUT for anyone earning less than 250K a year, you sort of have to conclude that person is protesting something other than their slipping economic footing. What that is, I could only guess at—but it would seem to involve a sense of exclusion from the so-called elites who lay out the economic aims of the liberal state, the Red Army in the lamestream media, the coastal lords of the culture industries and what not. The complaint, near as I can suss out, is that there’s conspiracy afoot among these remote figures to deny, well, something to the overlooked people in the American mainstream. To the extent that something is their own status or sense of self-worth, I think it’s useful to characterize them as “are nots.”

Is any of the book from past Awl columns? How much is new material?

It’s mainly new material—85 percent or so, I’d guess–with some other published work I’ve done in non-Awl outlets also woven in. But since I’ve never really written a book before, I haven’t real mastered the art of repurposing old material in a new format.

Also just to confirm — the official release date is Oct 15, but it’s available for pre-order now, correct?

Yep, it can be pre-ordered now—and the release date for pre-orders, for both the e-book and print version appears to be Sept. 15. This all has something to do with the bold new DIY business model at OR books, but it’s so bold and new that I don’t really grasp it. My editor, the delightful Colin Robinson, constantly tells me, though, that the volume of pre-orders will determine the eventual print run in October, so tell your readers to take pity on an poor old unpaid Awl columnist and pre-order the thing in droves.

********

>>>NEXT: Exclusive excerpt from Rich People Things, featuring New York Times columnist David Brooks! Click if you want to find out if it’s flattering or not.

Today, the New York Times is reporting a gain in second quarter profits for its parent company, Times Co., over last year’s second quarter numbers. Though your initial reaction might be to jump and cheer for this apparent sign of recovery in the world of print media, Choire Sicha at The Awl suggests you instead take the report with a grain of salt.  A post today at The Awl dissects the total revenue and operating costs of the NYT over the past five years to show that the reported gains come at a steep cost, or, rather, through a steep cut to costs.  Moreover, it’s clear that the NYT’s profits are falling so quickly that it can barely cut costs fast enough to stay afloat. From The Awl:

If you look back over the last five years, what you see is the newspaper radically chopping its operating costs.

One way to do that is by firing people! And by making your paper smaller. But you have to be careful how many people you fire and how small you make the paper, because you still have to keep people interested in your product.

The “keeping people interested” bit is key here. The Awl’s graph of total revenue v. operating costs (below) reveals that the newspaper’s total revenue has dropped dramatically in the past two years, necessitating the major cuts in operating costs. So while the NYT might be reporting a bigger profit this year than last year, that doesn’t necessarily herald a resurgence in print media.

Sicha stipulates that they don’t mean to imply that the Times is in its last days. Nonetheless, next year, the NYT will begin charging for online content and it will be interesting to see how the newspaper continues to balance its costs and revenues in the coming years and to what lengths it’s willing to go in order to do so.

Regardless the fact of the matter is that if the existence of the stories hadn’t been scooped by all forms of new media a few weeks ago, they certainly would have been considered bombshell-esque by many. Just the mere fact the Times has run two huge, not flattering, A-1 stories on Paterson in and of itself is newsworthy and probably does not bode well for Paterson’s political future.

So what does this one say. Well it’s not scandalous, but it’s not great. Paterson is remote, unreliable, and is “increasingly reliant on people whom he feels comfortable with but who lack deep experience in government” also he may not actually work that hard.

A review of several months of Mr. Paterson’s private schedules shows that his days were not long; he often arrived at his office in Manhattan or Albany after 10 a.m. and departed by 4:30 or 5 p.m. Sometimes, he has failed to show up at long-scheduled events.

Last May, Mr. Paterson was lined up to speak in Manhattan at the evening graduation ceremony for Teachers College, Columbia University. It was kind of a makeup: he had agreed in 2008 to be the speaker at the same ceremony but canceled at the last minute because he needed emergency eye surgery.

University officials were surprised last year when Mr. Paterson canceled again, with just two hours’ notice.

“The second time, it was going to be kind of like closure,” said Joe Levine, a spokesman for the college. “I don’t really know why he didn’t come.”

He had to cancel, the governor said, because of an emergency terrorism briefing. The Times requested the names of others who attended the briefing, or other evidence that the briefing had occurred, but Mr. Paterson’s office declined to provide any.

Also, apparently not even Paterson’s friends want to go on the record supporting him.

As The Times prepared this article, Mr. Paterson and his staff encouraged reporters to interview a number of the governor’s supporters to speak about his record. One declined to comment. Two others did not return phone calls requesting an interview. One supporter who did agree to speak for the record was Robert G. Wilmers, a Buffalo banking executive and former appointee of Mr. Paterson as chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation.

It’s not a flattering piece. It may not be a bombshell as we have come to understand it in relation to Albany but between this and Wednesday’s piece there is there is a sort of relentless wearing down effect that may in the end do more damage. Read the full article here.

The thrust of the article appears to be that the Gov. surrounds himself with shady (unelected) characters who have too much power and a not great history of being violent towards women. From the piece, which probably would have been more bombshell-ish at least had it not been preceded by two weeks of over-the-top speculation combined with a loudly disgruntled Governor. Nonetheless, it’ll be interesting to see how long Johnson keeps his job after this. Side note: It’s hard to wonder whether the story would have received the sort of front page placement it has today had it not been for the last two weeks of ‘bombshell’ rumor-mongering that turned it from a local-ish story to a national one. Talk about the tail wagging the dog. In the meantime, from the article (hint: no real need to hold on to your hats).

A review of Mr. Johnson’s rise and his history, undertaken after he emerged as perhaps the man closest to the state’s chief executive, shows that he was twice arrested on felony drug charges as a teenager, including a charge of selling cocaine to an undercover officer in Harlem.

In a statement, Mr. Paterson noted how long ago the drug arrests had happened. “David Johnson has demonstrated, over the course of his adult life, that people can change their personal circumstances and achieve success when given a second chance,” he said. “I will not turn my back on someone because of mistakes made as a teenager.”

Mr. Johnson, 37, has also on three occasions been involved in altercations with women, two of which led to calls to the police. As recently as October, the police responded to a complaint of harassment at a Bronx address of a woman involved with him. It is unclear if the altercation was verbal or physical or both, but the case is listed as closed.

While compiling this list, I asked a few people a dumb question: What was the biggest online event of the year?

Random answers included Oprah joining Twitter, Michael Jackson’s death breaking on TMZ, and Susan Boyle coming and going. Someone even tried to argue that a writer who detailed his firing from The New Yorker on Twitter was momentous. Sigh.

But frankly, I’ve got nothing better. So try this out: Matt Haughey selling PVR Blog on eBay for $12k was the most emblematic online event of 2009. Why? Because the amount seems both ridiculously high and preposterously low at the same time. It proved that if there was ever a time when you couldn’t tell what the fuck something was worth, this was it.

With Kim Kardashian making $10k per tweet, even internet fame seemed synchronously bankrupt and filthy rich. Or as someone else asked, how didn’t we notice that Perez Hilton had accidentally become more famous than his namesake Paris? And how is it possible that more people are reading Reblogging Julia than Julia herself?

So it’s time to stop being wishy-washy about our value assessments. A few years ago, someone convinced me to drop the title “Best Blogs” from this annual list and change it to “Most Notable” blogs of the year. It made sense at the time, when the medium was still figuring itself out: chiefs were being chosen, voice still being refined. But as I began to assemble this year’s list, it became clear that, no, these blogs actually were my favorites, not merely the most interesting.

So here they are, the 30 Best Blogs of 2009:

[Previous years: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008.]

30) Dustin Curtis
Woe, the personal blog. It’s a small tragedy that the decade began with the medium being used primarily by single individuals to gather and share small insights, but ends with the impersonal likes of Mashable and HuffPo. In the age of more more more, it’s remarkable to see someone dedicate so much time to a single post, making sure the pixels are aligned and the words are all just right. Dustin Curtis’ personal site is one of the dying breed of personal bloggers who care about such things (similar to how Jason Santa Maria puts art direction into every one of his posts). Start with: The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X.
(See also: Topherchris, We Love You So, A Continuous Lean, and Clients From Hell.)

29) NYT Pick
The bloggers behind NYTPicker had quite a year: they got Maureen Dowd to admit to plagiarism, they pointed out several errors in the Times obituary of Walter Cronkite, and Times contributor David Blum was revealed and then un-revealed as one of them. In the process, they showed that blogs can comment on the New York Times in a more substantial way than making fun of silly Sunday Styles trend pieces. If anyone really still thought blogs couldn’t be the home of original reporting and research, NYTPicker proved them wrong. They watch the watchdogs! Just wait for an enterprising blogger to start NYTPickerPicker in 2010.

28) Gotcha Media
Every year it seems like a site should emerge to take the video aggregator trophy, but the space is still a hodgepodge of sporadically embedded YouTube clips. Gotcha Media was the closest to the quintessential destination for finding video events we remembered through the year, whether that be Kanye crying on Leno or Michele Bachmann leading a anti-health care prayercast.
(See also: Gawker TV and Mag.ma.)

27) Animal
As Virginia Heffernan recently asked in a recent NYT essay, what exactly should a magazine look like in the digital age? Once a sporadic print title, Animal is now one of the last remaining examples of what an underground magazine could look like online.
(See also: Black Book Tumblr and Scallywag & Vagabond.)

26) Shit My Dad Says
Several people tried to convince me to change this entire list to “Best Twitterers of the Year,” a listicle that someone probably should compile but which exceeds my pain threshold. In the meantime: “Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”

25) The Rumpus
As literary magazines go, The Rumpus is something of a mess. Created by Stephen Elliott, who spent most of the year jostling around the country in support of his novel, The Rumpus defined itself mostly in opposition to what it is not. But columns by Rick Moody and Jerry Stahl, along with a rambling assemblage of interviews, links, anecdotes, reviews, and whatever fits onto the screen, make it the best case going for a reinvented online literary scene.
(See also: HTML Giant, The Millions, Electric Literature, and London Review of Books Blog.)

24) Best of Wikipedia
…Coprolalia, Foreign Accent Syndrome, Stendhal Syndrome, Dude, Mopery, Sokushinbutsu, Tyvek, Shm-reduplication, Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome, Pica, Kayfabe…
(See also: Double Tongued.)

23) WSJ Speakeasy
It didn’t start off very well. In the backdrop of the Wall Street Journal announcing Speakeasy in June was the chatter about Rupert turning the internet into a clunky vending machine (put a quarter in, junk food drops out). And the coverage at this culture blog was spotty at first, but the gentility eventually morphed into a more conversational aesthetic.
(See also: NYT Opinionator.)

22) Script Shadow
“I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process,” said Tim Robbins’ cocky producer character in The Player in 1992, and Hollywood seems to have listened. By reviewing movie scripts before they get made into movies, this site turns the focus back onto the written word.
(See also: First Showing, Movie of the Day, and Go Into The Story.)

21) Newsweek Tumblr
It isn’t enough that Newsweek is the only mainstream media organization dangling their toes in the rocky stream of Tumblrland; it also happens to be doing it better than most of the kids. (NYTimes.com has been threatening to do “something interesting” with the medium for a couple months, but there’s still nothing to show for it.) It’s tricky for an established old media company to find the right voice on a new platform, but the Newsweek Tumblr has figured out how to mix their own relevant stories with the reblog culture.
(See also: Today Show Tumblr.)

20) Asian Poses
The Nyan Nyan. The Bang! The V-Sign. The Shush. These are just some of the poses Asian Poses introduced us to this year, illustrated by photos of cute Asian ladies. Is it offensive? Maybe, but many of the most interesting blogs straddle that offensive/not-offensive line. Also, based on the well-known “members of a group can make fun of that group and you can’t” rule of comedy, this is not offensive since it is run by a Chinese guy. But maybe it objectifies women! Color me confused-pose.
(See also: Stop Making That Duckface, This Is Why You’re Fat, Really Cute Asians, and Awkward Family Photos.)

19) Look At This Fucking Hipster
If you thought the Internet had run out of ways to mock hipsters, Look At This Fucking Hipster and Hipster Runoff proved you wrong this year. Look At This Fucking Hipster took the more direct approach, simply asking you to look at photos of these fucking hipsters, complete with caustic one-line captions. It may come as no surprise that the author, Joe Mande, appears to be a self-loathing hipster, posing in black-rimmed glasses and a flannel shirt on his website. Literary-minded hipsters are surely jealous of LATFH’s book deal.

18) Hipster Runoff
Hipster Runoff’s Carles took a more satirical approach, blogging about pressing hipster issues such as the music meme economy and whether you should do blow off your iPhone in fractured, “ironic quote-heavy” txt-speak. Many people suspected that “Carles” was actually Tao Lin, since Carles’ writing was so similar to Lin’s affectless prose, but Lin denies this. Whoever Carles is, he is most certainly another self-loathing hipster. He knows far too much about Animal Collective to be a civilian.

17) Reddit
There’s a long-standing joke on this annual list to mention Metafilter every single time. But this was the first year it seemed that more people were paying attention to what was going on in the conversation threads on Reddit. For the uninitiated: Reddit takes some of the features of Digg, mixes it with the aesthetic of Twitter, adds the editorial of Fark, and accentuates it with the comments of Metafilter. But better than that sounds.

16) Smart Football
If you had told me at the beginning of 2009 that Steve Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell would get into a heated debate about football esoterica, and that this debate would happen, in all places, within an internet comment thread, I would have said, “Yeah, and Brett Favre will have the best season of his life at 40.” But every once in a while intellectuals wander into sports, and recently the NFL seemed the place where the Chronicle of Higher Ed crowd is hanging. So if you want to get smart about football, this is the place to do it.
(See also: Deadspin and The Sports Section.)

15) Information Is Beautiful
Is it? Yes, but only in the hands of those who know its power.
(See also: Infosthetics, Data Blog, and NYT Bits Blog.)

14) Snarkmarket
It looks like a conspiracy that Snarkmarket has made this list a few times now, but unlike most blogs that become sedentary in their success, it just keeps innovating. This year, Robin Sloan quit his job at Current TV to become (among other things) a fiction writer — and one of the most fascinating ones on the scene in some time. Matt Thompson had been gigging at the Knight Foundation, but recently hopped to a new gig at NPR. With them being so busy, Tim Carmody settled in as the new scribe of ideas. If they let me give it a tagline, it would be “The BoingBoing it’s okay to like.”
(See also: Hey, It’s Noah and Waxy.)

13) Nieman Journalism Lab
Where were these guys when we needed them? Sure, it’s another think tank, but Nieman Journalism Lab has been putting its not-for-profit money where its mouth is by also breaking news, such as the item about Google developing a micropayments sytem, the crack-ass idea from the Associated Press to game search, and little factoids like NYT’s most frequently looked-up words. It also happens to be the only place still hiring journalists.
(See also: Reflections of a Newsosaur and Newspaper Death Watch.)

12) Anil Dash
At some point during the year, I asked Anil for an explanation in the upsurge of blog posts on his site. He said it was merely recognizing an opening: there are so few people writing intelligently about technology today. True! Daring Fireball may have the links, and TechCrunch may have the coverage, but there are scant intellectuals left in the space. When it was announced last month that he was leaving Six Apart to work for a new government tech startup within the Obama administration, the techno-pragmatism all made sense.
(See also: Obama Foodorama.)

11) Slaughterhouse 90210
Slaughterhouse 90210 combined lowbrow TV screencaps with highbrow literary quotes, making it kind of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of Tumblr blogs. Another comparison: an intellectual I Can Has Cheezburger. Seeing a quote from, say, The Bell Jar underneath a Friends screencap is pleasantly shocking — especially after you realize the quote fits the show perfectly — and a reassurance that it’s okay for smart people to like stupid things. Could be a good candidate for a book deal, if it weren’t for those pesky copyright issues.
(See also: The G Maniesto and Fuck Yeah Subtitles.)

10) Letters of Note
We’ve known for a while that the best blogs are dedicated to a precise nano-topic, but there is also a new thread emerging: the blog dedicated to disappearing technologies. The tagline of Letters of Note, “Correspondence deserving a wider audience,” says it all. There’s Hunter S. Thompson starting a screed “Okay you lazy bitch,” there’s Kurt Vonnegut writing his family from Slaughterhouse Five, there’s the letter from Mick Jagger asking Andy Warhol to design album cover art, and there’s J. D. Salinger’s hand-written note aggressively yet delightfully shooting down a producer who wants to turn Catcher in the Rye into a movie.
(See also: Significant Objects, Iconic Photos, and Unconsumption.)

9) Mediaite
Launching another media blog didn’t sound like rearranging Titanic deck chairs; it sounded like booking a flight on Al Quada Airlines to Jerusalem. But not even six months after launching, Mediaite was already on the Technorati 100, eventually landing somewhere around #30 on a list of players who have been there for years. Sure, it can go a little bananas with the seo/pageview bait, but it’s also one of the few entities in the whole bastardly New York Media Scene to actually have the will to take on Gawker (or its pseudo-sibling, The Awl).
(See also: Web Newser and Politics Daily.)

8) Clay Shirky
There were only, what, a dozen or so essays on his blog this year? But one of them, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, caused such a little earthquake in the industry that tremors were still echoing months later. Shirky is the only guy in the whole space who doesn’t sound like he has an agenda, who doesn’t have a consulting agency on the side that he’s pumping his half-baked theories into.
(See also: Umair Haque and The Technium.)

7) OK Cupid: OK Trends
Even the breeders in the crowd will be fascinated by the data porn on display here.
(See also: Music Machinery.)

6) Harper’s Studio
The book industry is about to go through the same disruptive changes that the music industry set upon a decade ago — this, it seems, almost everyone agrees upon. But just as with the previous natural cultural disaster, no one is sure how to prepare for the earthquake. The editors at the new Harper Studio are the most likely candidates for turning all the theory behind “the future of books” into actual functional products. An impressive list of inventive works on the horizon hints at their agenda, but the blog, which is something of a clearing house for discussing everything that has to do with the future of publishing, is like an R&D lab for print.
(See also: Omnivoracious, The Second Pass, The Penguin Blog, and Tomorrow Museum.)

5) Eat Me Daily
As one competing food blogger put it to me, Eat Me Daily is the Kottke of food blogs. Which, if you want to follow that obtuse metaphor, makes Eater the genre’s Gawker and Serious Eats its Engadget. And which, if you understand any of that at all, means that this blurb can end now.
(See also: Eater and Serious Eats.)

4) Mad Men Footnotes
As I wrote earlier, Mad Men Footnotes revived the moribund genre known as tv recaps.

3) TV Tropes
If you don’t know TV Tropes, it’s too bad, because I probably just ruined your life. If you’ve ever recognized a hackneyed plot device on a tv show and thought “I wonder if anyone else has thought of this,” the answer is: yes, a lot. I don’t even know where to suggest starting in this labyrinth, but try entries like Butterfly of Doom or Chekhov’s Gunman or Bitch In Sheep’s Clothing — or just hit the random item generator. My dream is to have Tarantino spend a month here and come out with his Twin Peaks.
(See also: Television Without Pity and Urban Dictionary.)

2) The Awl
The Awl is too good to exist, or so goes much of the catty banter in the media business scene. There is seldom a conversation of The Awl lately that doesn’t ask, “How the hell will they make money?” But let’s set aside that gaudy little question for a second and instead ask, “Why has The Awl become an internet love object?” I’ve done the math, and I have a theory, involving at least two factors: 1) It winks at all the sad internet conventions while both debunking and adopting them at the same time (Listicles Without Commentary and those Tom Scocca chats are the best example). And 2) it is willing to go to bat for the unexpected without sounding like one of those intentionally counter-intuitive Slate essays (Avatar and Garrison Keillor are two good recent examples). In short, it’s just less dumb than everything else. Even Nick Denton joked about it at launch, and I don’t know how they’ll survive either, but The Awl already exists in an admirable pantheon that includes Spy and Suck.
(See also: Kottke and Katie Bakes.)

1) 4chan
Go ahead, scoff. But I will tell you this: no site in the past year has better personified the internet in all its complex contradictions than 4chan. Blisteringly violent yet irrepressibly creative, vociferously political yet erratic in agenda, 4chan was the multi-headed monster that got you off, got you pissed off, and maybe got you knocked out. When I interviewed moot in February, I discovered a smart kid who had seen more by the age of 16 than someone who actually lived inside all six Saw movies. People tend to think of 4chan as pure id, but there are highly formalized rules (written and unwritten) within the community. Inside all the blustery fury of the /b/tards, there is more going on psychologically than we are equipped to understand yet.
(See also: Uncyclopedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Know Your Meme.)

Special thanks to these exceptionally nice people for contributing ideas to this list: Caroline McCarthy, Joanne McNeil, Melissa Maerz, Chuck Klosterman, Soraya Darabi, Mat Honan, Katie Baker, Erin Carlson, Noah Brier, Jason Kottke, Taylor Carik, Nick Douglas, Lockhart Steele, Matt Thompson, Anastasia Friscia, and Kelly Reeves.

This weekend, when the story of a police officer pulling out a gun at a snowball fight in DC erupted and spread online, the Washington Post was initially dismissive, despite having an eyewitness on the scene who said that the officer did indeed pull out a gun. They didn’t get the story quite right until days later; to dispel all doubt, the officer admitted he pulled a gun. In a scathing blog post, the Washington City Paper surmised as to how the Post slipped up: a snooty attitude towards the Internet.

The City Paper‘s Erik Wemple took the Post apart for fetishizing ‘traditional reporting’ as defined by talking to officials, despite the fact that the consensus on the Internet was more than wild rumor:

the reason why the Post screwed this up is that they all have linkophobia. If you link to an outlet—such as, God forbid, the Washington City Paper—you’ve lost. You got scooped and all your colleagues are going to look down on you. Linking is a huge sign of weakness—you just can’t do it. Far better to, like, call a top police official, buy his version of events, and just place it in a post, regardless of the contradicting evidence that’s already posted elsewhere…

What is important is that in one item, Fisher articulated a longstanding WaPo policy:

1) Link to other organizations only when belittling them;

2) Be sure to contrast the inadequacy of the linkees to the great Washington Post;

3) Make sure the link to Washington Post content spans many more words than the links to lesser organizations.

For all of the talk about the demise of print and the crumbling newspaper economy, it’s a fair bet that the Washington Post can whip any blogger at reporting. Right? Maybe not always.

Here’s an ABC 7 segment on the video that sparked the controversy:



(Washington City Paper via The Awl)

Here is the gist of the op-ed, which honestly is not saying much that hasn’t been said (and refuted) in harsher terms by many others in the past few weeks (Gawker gives a great debunking of the whole thing here):

“Climate-gate,” as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle — the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse…This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I’ve always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics.

Leaving aside the irony of Sarah Palin calling for “sound science’ vs plain old politics(!), there remains the question of whether WaPo is really just traffic-baiting by publishing the piece, (which is pretty clearly ghost-written, but as Kurtz points out that is not a new thing where politicians and op-eds are concerned).

Choire Sicha at the Awl won’t link to the op-ed directly because “they shouldn’t be rewarded with the clicks, which is pretty much what this is about, I figure.” Which, of course is what it’s about. Also, what I assume Bono’s (arguably less damaging) op-eds at the NYT are about. Also, what 75% of the internet is practically about these days. Also, in the larger sense why Sarah Palin was tapped to be Vice President in the first place, John McCain wanted the attention and the votes of a certain portion of the population.

The other week the Washington Post announced it was closing its New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles bureaus, a decision which could ostensibly leave this country with one national newspaper. If by printing a Sarah Palin op-ed they are somehow able to up their traffic or ad rates or something, than I think it may just be a sort of necessary evil. You know, like slide shows and the like.

They miss, though, the Secret Hidden Message™ of the video. That being: Asians only, please.

Friendster’s eastward movement was noted a few years back. As MySpace still dominated the United States, and Facebook grew to challenge it, Friendster was left in the cold. But it had already established a presence in Southeast Asia, and from there transitioned from life support to vibrancy.

Watch the video touting their redesign…

…and note the following:
1. Every single person pictured is Asian. Even the perplexed looking old guy.
2. It disparages its competitors as being “too common,” and “too generic.” As it says, “If everyone’s there, whoop-de-do!” Many people, of course, see the universality of Facebook, allowing you to stumble across a grade school crush, for example, as a selling point. Those people, per Friendster, are wrong.
3. It’s “fun and easy to use, just for you and your friends!” Wink wink!
4. Most nefariously, when they mention the games you can play, they show a game featuring Mario. From Nintendo.

It’s natural that a business would target an advertisement to the people who generally use it – remember, for example, how Microsoft Poland dealt with a culturally inaccurate photo. Here, Friendster looks to capitalize on that segment strength, and to bring it back across the ocean. Targeting less than 5% of the country, though, will be a tricky sell to investors.

And with that video, not an easy sell to consumers, either.

Related:
Friendster Gets A Major Makeover, Calls Other Social Networks Plain And Boring [TechCrunch]
Primitive Social Networking Site Gives It One More Sad Go [The Awl]
Lebenszeichen von Friendster [Kurier]

Earlier today The Awl reported that Gawker had decided to give employees at the company’s multiple blogs the option between going full-time or staying as contract workers — most of the bloggers who currently work what can be considered full-time hours are currently paid as contract workers.

Paying employees who put in full-time hours as contract workers is fairly common practice — increasingly so these days with the economy being what it is, even so some found the timing of this decision interesting. We caught up with Gawker head earlier today who told us that the decision was a practical one.

“Our bloggers were drifting into full-time employment,” Denton told us via chat, “they’d start out intending to use the blog as a platform for magazine freelancing (and eventually a job) and they’d be working at home, but the job is pretty all-consuming.” (Yes it is!) “Also, we wanted to recognize that some of our bloggers were evolving into full-time reporters.”

Moreover, Denton says that if Gawker is interested in getting the best reporters from the print world, many of whom are looking to get out before the ship sinks entirely (John Cook and Irin Carmon recently joined the ranks of Gawker and Jezebel respectively) he has to have something to offer them. “If we’re to hire the best of the print refugees, we have to be able to offer benefits to full-time reporters.”

So there you have it, want paycheck security and a mostly tear-free tax season? Get yourself to the Gawker offices. One can only hope that TimeWarner, Conde Nast, Viacom, and the New York Times take note.

Related:
Gawker Media Goes Legit [The Awl]

So we found out.

Case study: #theresway2many.

#theresway2many was the top trending topic yesterday, and is currently the third most popular trending topic of the week. You can see there’s still a steady stream of tweets featuring the trending topic (it should be noted that, from the pictures, they’re coming from a diverse group of twitterers).

And here’s how it started. On Sunday, at 2:19pmET by Ed Lover:

For those who don’t know, Ed Lover is currently a radio host in New York on Power 105 and host of a web show, and he’s the former co-host of Yo! MTV Raps. You can find him on Twitter at @MrEdLover.

Lover has 62,051 followers – which puts him in the top 1000, but just barely. He has 4,000+ tweets.

After Lover tweeted the call to start the trending topic, he used the hashtag in several subsequent tweets by RT’ing what others had come up with. But he also played along, firing off another dozen or so tweets with the hashtag over the next 16 hours. Sample: “#theresway2many reasons that I need a vacation!” or “#theresway2many Ugly dudes wit pretty girls.”

So what did we learn? Here’s a few steps if you want to start a successful hashtag trending topic:

• Have a lot of followers- You don’t need to be Ashton Kutcher, but a solid 50,000 helps.

• Have a dedicated fan base- Simply having followers doesn’t do it – you need people who will follow your lead, and RT your hashtag to their group of followers as well.

• Pick a broad topic- As you can see from the responses, #theresway2many can go in a lot of directions, from the basic to the specific, from the serious to the obscene.

• Play along- You should participate in your own hashtag, as well as others started by other people.

—–
» Follow Steve Krakauer on Twitter

Say what you will about Google Ads – they are right on point in this case.

But I was offended — unironically, actually offended — by an Awl post this morning titled “What Were Black People Talking About On Twitter Last Night?”

At the risk of getting randomly harshed on by Tumblr: it was kind of racist.

Here is the post in 5 bullet points:

• Choire Sicha, like “some of you other white people,” is obsessed with “Late Night Black People Twitter.”
• On older social networks, white people did not know what was going on outside of their “stupid little bubble[s],” but now, thanks to Twitter, they are privy to the conversations of others, including the conversations of black people.
• A confusing, seemingly random conflict and reversal:
  

  A friend and I were talking the other day about why, in particular, Black People Twitter happens at night. In fact, it’s the other way around: White People Twitter for the most part happens during the American daytime. Black People Twitter happens all the time.

  Aha!

• Nick Douglas has an unnamed friend — a “poor dumb friend” — who had the overtly offensive (ironic?) straw man theory that “[black] people don’t have real Twitter friends. So they all respond to trending topics.” But not in a bad way! That was just different from what he was used to. Nick shot him down with something that sounded like Bullet Point #2.
• Conclusion: “So really the question is: why does Twitter get so white and boring during the day? Don’t white people do anything at work?”

Here’s the ‘illustration:’

I don’t know Choire personally, though I enjoy his movie criticism. I don’t think that he is a racist — or, really, that it’s fair to brand most people as “racists” in the noun form of the word.

But for all of its casual chumminess, his post was lazy and, well, casually racist. But not that kind of racist. The standard Sociology Class lexicon would use words like “fetishize” and “tokenize” to describe what Sicha is up to; at the very least, the Awl post reeks with fascination about the otherness of these black Twitterers.

The coy “race is a social construct” tag was belied by the great pains to which he went to show that see, he is down with black people. Late Night Black People Twitter is “awesome!” Last night’s #uainthittinthatright was a “very funny” example of a “hilarious chat meme!” Nick Douglas’s “poor dumb friend” is “so obviously wrong” with his bad racist theory! Daytime Twitter is “white and boring!”

To the extent that Sicha drops science in his post, it’s the statistic that 26% of African-Americans online use Twitter while only 19% of Caucasians online do. It might have served him better to bone up on danah boyd, the social media researcher whose work has explored the class and race segregation that plague online communities. Most recently, boyd (she likes lowercase letters) has been focused on the “white flight” from MySpace to Facebook; what’s most pernicious about it, she told The Observer, is the way in which white Facebook users don’t explicitly acknowledge the class and racial divides, but vaguely see the more nonwhite MySpace as trashy and uncultured.

Twitter may break down the barriers to hearing other people’s conversations, but the Awl post inadvertently shows that mutual understanding may be a long way off. If the post had to be boiled down to a single sentence, it would be Bullet Point #2 all over again: “On older social networks, white people did not know what was going on outside of their “stupid little bubble[s],” but now, thanks to Twitter, they are privy to the conversations of others, including the conversations of black people.”

That may be true, and it’s worth pointing out (and, as boyd has shown, it’s a fascinating field of study). But it’s a little rude to be so totally slack-jawed when confronted with people who you think aren’t like you.

The Awl is typically a place I go to find thoughtful and nuanced observations and insights. This was neither.

Over at The Awl, Choire Sicha has been doing a crackerjack, data-intensive job of sifting through one of the biggest, least sexy stories of our time: newspapers as we know them are going away. Yesterday, he put together this acclaimed chart of the circulations of six big papers over the past two decades.

The takeaway: the Wall Street Journal is bigger than everybody else (but cheats a little by including paid online subscribers in their circ figures); the LA Times seems determined to drive itself into the ground, and the NYT and WashPo aren’t looking too good themselves.

Today, Sicha covers newspapers’ coverage of their own decline:

So first, I wanted to look into the actual provision of numbers to the reader within reported stories because I got a sense at times that information was being obscured from the reader—as part of what I (anecdotally) see as a general trend of putting less “facty” information in newspapers. The amount of actual numbers given—as in “The Los Angeles Times, owned by Tribune, reported daily circulation fell 6.5 percent, to 907,997″—per article is then averaged for each year and in five-year increments.

[click through here to see The Awl's fancy-looking graph, not pictured here]

So! What we see is that there is radically less actual information about the real amount of newspapers sold in the last six years—the time of the real newspaper circulation crisis—than in the two previous five-year increments.

He also goes through slews of newspaper headlines reporting on the newspaper decline, and summarizes them thusly: “Reading through them in chronological order, it’s more like ‘meh bad same same same worser hey better worse worse OH GOD WORSE MUCH WORSE PANIC.’”

The trouble with “factiness,” aside from the temptation it poses Stephen Colbert’s lawyers to file an infringement suit, is that on the whole, people would prefer their “LOLcats” and their “SEO-friendly charticles” and their “Hamster Dance” and what not — or at least that’s emerged as the conventional wisdom.

(h/t The Awl)

Though its traffic seems to have since cooled a bit, it was “Volcanic” yesterday, rivaling the various “gmail down“-related queries of the day. Most of the site’s tweets of the past few days have been apologies for the frequent traffic-driven crashes.

The Awl’s Choire Sicha was all over this site way before it got big — which is to say, five days ago, when it was merely a Digg phenomenon. Sicha’s well-reasoned, three-part takedown culminates like so:

“This is purely for entertainment purposes and strictly limited to the outrageously bad / ugly / creepy / crazy shoppers,” says their About page. Yeah, well: so is going outside anywhere in the great swath of space between Hell’s Kitchen and Eagle Rock. But their photo captions are slightly off, and cruel, in the manner of people who have never written a blog about other people before, or at least have never done so by thinking about other people and how they’d read about themselves.

Many other bloggers agree. In The Awl’s comments section, the always-insightful Abe Sauer writes, “This and Cintra’s JC Penny thing differ in no real way (the latter being this blog with a thesaurus) in that they choose to target what they see as the visual failings of others.” People of Wal-Mart is “a sad example of a world gone retarded,” writes pamil-visions.net.

In light of this, Monday’s Time profile of the site (in the Arts section of their website) comes across as weirdly toothless. Time‘s Claire Sudath did some capital J Journalism and interviewed two of the young Indianan brothers who founded the site along with a friend. It’s taken as a given that the site is edgy and hilarious, except for the throwaway line “People of Walmart’s founders expect some people to take issue with the site’s tone.” Huh? You don’t have to agree with Sicha and his counterparts, but you should at least take their criticism into account. Maybe this is all a part of Time‘s misguided mission to establish a totally different presence on the Web, but it comes across as pandering and forcedly carefree, like an employee who laughs a little too hard at his boss’s jokes.

In this Bright Lights, Big Internet era, it’s easy for a cultural phenomenon to emerge without the support of the kingmakers of the past. But when fallen kingmakers like Time laugh and uncomfortably play along, it’s just sad, and it leaves bloggers to do all the real work.

•Over at Salon, Dave Eggers discusses his new book Zeitoun (2009) about Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, and further cheers us up about the future of print. (ZT)

• For Hemingway fans, and particularly those devoted to A Moveable Feast, this is a must read in light of the “bowdlerized version” that has just been published. “I recount this history of A Moveable Feast to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication. Ernest died before the publication of the book could go forward. When I visited him in the Mayo Clinic a few months before his dementia led to his suicide, he was very concerned about his Paris book, and worried that it needed a final sentence, which it did not.” (GM)

•Oddee.com has become a guilty pleasure. What other site gets 45,000 pageviews for an article called “10 Strangest Frogs?” Their listicles sure are addictive, though. (RQ).

•Wired has a great media consumption charticle in their most recent issue, proving The Onion right. (RQ)