What’s a hand-job?

Fifty dollars, same as in town.

I love that joke, and I thought of it as I read this. I laughed and laughed. Long day, long month, and I needed it, so I laughed until people started staring and then I came up short when I realized…

…Holy Romping Jesus, they’re serious. They think people will pony up $50 to hear Kristof or BoBo or Captain Obvious gibber like over-caffinated lemurs.

Pundits for money (and news for free)
Is the New York Times undercutting its influence by charging people who want to read its popular columnists online?

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By Farhad Manjoo
To hear the Times execs tell it, the decision to offer a subscription makes good business sense. Nisenholtz stressed that the company had researched its decision extensively through reader surveys and in conversations with other industry leaders, and that the company created various models to map out the kind of drop in traffic it might see once some of its content goes behind the subscription gate. But there's another aspect to the paper's success that's harder to measure -- its impact on the rest of the media -- and perhaps the most pressing question facing the Times is whether, by selling its content rather than giving it away, it is removing itself from the vibrant conversation online.
Already, some pundits online are saying as much. Blogger Andrew Sullivan greeted the Times' news with this unhappy headline: "The NYT Withdraws From the Blogosphere." "The great gift that the New York Times gives the world is free access to its articles, opinion-journalists, and stories," Sullivan wrote. But "by sectioning off their op-ed columnists and best writers, they are cutting them off from the life-blood of today's political debate: the free blogosphere. Inevitably, fewer people will link to them; fewer will read them; their influence will wane faster than it has already. The blog is already becoming a rival to the dated op-ed column format as a means of communicating opinion journalism. My bet is that the NYT's retrogressive move will only fasten the decline of op-ed columnists' influence."
It wasn't only righty bloggers who greeted the Times' news with disdain. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the proprietor of the popular left-wing blog Daily Kos, said that come September, he'll stop linking to the Times Op-Ed pages. "I think this is the best way they can become irrelevant," said Moulitsas. "If my readers can't read it, why would I link to it? The key to blogging is that readers can look at the source material and make up their own minds." Moulitsas is a fan of Krugman's columns, but he said that he would not personally pay for the subscription service. "I don't think it's worth $50," he said. "There's way too much content out there for me to pay for any of it."
…
Times columnist Frank Rich agreed. "If you believe, as I do, that basically there is going to come a time when people are not going to read print newspapers anymore, someone has to figure out a way to get income for news gathering," Rich told Salon. "Because who's going to pay for that bureau in Iraq?" Rich said that judging from the kind of e-mail he gets in response to his columns, he guesses that there will be some people -- people who don't regularly read the Times -- who will no longer read his work once it's not free. But many of his readers, he said, are Times readers -- they subscribe to the print paper, or they are interested enough in the paper to pay $50 for it online.
…
Media observers say the success of the Times plan will depend on its implementation. Will its price prove either too high or too low? Will the Times, like the Journal, make some of its content free to bloggers especially so that it may have an influence on the online discussion? And will the paper be too vigilant in cracking down on bloggers who copy and paste their content (Nisenholtz conceded that the paper is not vigilant now, but he said it will be in the future). And, perhaps crucially, will other papers follow the Times' lead?
…

Well, OK. Since I’m not a Fancy-Dan journalist, just plain folk, I have no insider information, and Scott McClellan won’t return my phone calls (OK, crank phone calls. “Hello? May I speak to Ann Eightinchcutmanwhore please?” OK, they’re not very good crank calls.) so I am reduced to speculating imaginatively as to what the real motives might be.

You know, like Judith “The Queen of All Iraq” Miller only without Ahmed Chalabi rump-rangering me sideways and stinking up my good sheets and towels.

And for that, I’m going to poach some of my own comments from my late-night visit to Mr. Gilliard’s and Ms. Jen’s newly remodeled blog (“To Serve You Better.”)

Since charging people a premium for what is essentially the NYT’s loss-leader make’s no economic sense whatsoever, let me propose an alternate theory: that BoBo, Capt'n Obvious, and the rest of the Accommodation Rodeo Clowns have been taking such savage, serial beatings for the inane shit they have to nerve to write that they finally had to go plead for protection.

The blogosphere is a vastly different place that the Big Rock Candy Mountain of the editorial good-old-days.

Then you weren’t certainly weren’t safe from opprobrium -- people could still reach columnists, write letters and, if you were really Old School like Royko, you made it a point of getting out into the streets and bars, nose-to-nose and beer-to-beer with your readers – but you were rarely publicly challenged for being a halfwit. There was no virtual world where hundreds or thousand or readers could communally post you picture and your words and then take them apart with laser and sledgehammers and show you to be an agenda-pimping gas bag in full view of God and everybody.

Nowadays, these slugs get salted – and fucking well rightly so -- almost before the electrons dry on their enervated, flabby words.

The NYT OpEd pages used to be Sacred Ground and now they have seen fit to populate the Right and Center of the page (so to speak) it with badly scripted Right Wing avatars and creative typists, and vacuous ponderers who leap from their long, dumb slumber, mount up their steeds and ride breathlessly through every Middlesex village and farm to tell us that a whole lotta people think the news isn’t very good, and are turning the likes of the NYT off, and Jon Stewart on.

Given what a howling embarrassment they have become to the paper, and given that I can’t imagine any one of these children being able to stand up for themselves in a full-bore debate, I think it is perfectly reasonable to posit that the lot of them scampered like a pack of six-year-old-girls who'd been freaked out by the Ouija Board at a slumber party into the Lord High Editor's office.

That they begged him to make those mean bloggers quit mocking them. And to lawyer them to death if they dare mount a single, feculent paragraph up on blocks for the purpose of disassembling it into its constituent, asinine parts.

Makethemstop! Makethemstop! Makethemstop!

Such a lovely tableaux they make in my imagination:
BoBo's frisking around the room, little tail snapping around angrily.
Friedman scurring around in the shadows, nibbling a wee bit of cheese and composing his next incisive column: "Cheese...is good."
The columnist with the head-of-Kristof-and-the-body-of-a-fly stuck in the web of his own dumb words, squeaking out "Help meee. Heeelp meee."

Well, cest la vie: we shall all be the poorer for it…although cut off from a broader readership, one must wonder whether the law of diminishing returns won’t catch up with Captain Obvious, and he’ll just finally give up trying to use his column inches to jackhammer the title of his newest book into Cool Kid's Hot Phrase Lexicon.

You had already noticed, right?

His new book Title: "The World Is Flat."

Phrases snipped from a few recent columns:
May 13th Column: “flattening of the global” and “flat world”.
May 6th Column: “increasingly flat world” and “today's flat world”.
April 29th Column (wherein Captain Obvious goes for the subliminal marketing Trifecta): “the flattening of the global economic playing field”, “not in a flat world: and YES, Ladies and Gentlemen, “developing our talent in a flat world.”

Probable Next Column: “My mama’s recipe for Flatbread. Is it the best in the world?” or “Flatworms: global friend or foe?”