I got re-acquainted with my own mortality yesterday.
I’m OK – for some definition of: I have one fractured rib. I also know that I was lucky. Here’s what happened:
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Monthly Archives: March 2009
Mortgage Spam
Here’s a screenshot of a spam email from a mortgage broker. How do I know it’s spam? Because the email address used is (a) a thousand years old (in Internet time!) and (b) not associated in any way, shape, form or fashion (as my momma used to say) with my current address. Moreover, I am not a “valued client” as I’ve never heard of this guy, whose telephone number places him in Georgia. The person in this LinkedIn profile appears to be the culprit. These guys are as bad, in their own way, as the AIG people. Gack. Continue reading
Response To “Ink-Stained Wretching”
I both agree and disagree. Let me begin with an easy point of opposition: Google is not stealing content or revenue from the NYTimes. GoogleNews — and Twitter and Facebook and various and sundry other filters — help people find content, help drive traffic from people who would not have gone to the news site otherwise. To believe that Google News steals revenue is to believe that readers go no further than the headline (most of its links) or the headline + the first sentence of an article.
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Follow-Up: “No More Free Content”
After reading my “No More Free Content” post, a colleague observed (in an email) that information consumers “pay” for content with both attention (”monetized and sold to advertisers”) and “direct payment to content producers.” [Note: there is no direct payment for broadcast TV, radio and alternative papers like The Seattle Weekly or The Stranger.]
This colleague believes that the challenge facing newspapers is not a “paid vs. free” issue. Instead, the challenge is the ratio of “monetized” attention to direct reader payment.
Rebutting Kathy Kristof
On Friday night’s NewsHour, syndicated business columnist Kathy Kristof (Los Angeles Times) claimed that being attacked by bloggers was one reason that business writers avoided toxic mortgage stories:
Well, you know, I think all of the major publications had done a number of stories about toxic mortgages, about companies that were going way off the rails on what they were approving.
The problem is, is kind of what the other two have been just nipping at, is that we were early. And we kept on, you know, being the voice in the wilderness, the voice in the wilderness, the voice in the wilderness. And pretty soon, you say, “OK, how many times can I do that story?” And so you stop.
And we also got incredible flak toward the end of the bubble when we would write stories about toxic mortgages, because there were all sorts of bloggers who were trying to keep this fraud going. And they would just attack you, attack the people who you had quoted. They would do all sorts of things in order to stop you from publishing.
This sounded odd to Jay Rosen (which is what tipped me to the transcript).
And it sounded really odd to me when I read it, because it reads like Kristof is accusing bloggers of perpetuating mortgage fraud. Google is my friend (sorta):
