God Almighty, how long do we have to keep having this argument?

Next session is with Mitch Perry, who recently joinedCreative Loafing in Tampa; William “Windy” March, who blogs for theTampa Tribune (and its affiliated media outlets) at “March on Politics;” and Adam Smith, proprietor of“The Buzz” blog for theSt. Petersburg Times.

Each
of them has an interesting — and different — approach to journalism
and blogging. Adam says that there is a risk of the blog kind of
overwhelming the print news version, Windy is concerned about the
encroachment of blogging and the fast turn-around time onto the
traditional print media, and Mitch (who just a few weeks ago came out
of a broadcast media background) is finding that because he works in a
weekly format, the blogging becomes key for timeliness and convenience.

Windy
also doesn’t really understand why having so many “hits” helps a media
organization. “How much money [is my organization] going to see from
that? The answer, of course, iszero.”

Actually the answer is PLENTY, if you can leverage/pimp out your audience for advertising dollars. The point of getting a lot of hits, besides the obvious gratification of being read by everyone on the planet and being all influential and shit, is to tell advertisers, “You know you want your crocheted cat shit seen by 1 billion squillion people, so pay me thousands of dollars, bitch.” This is, incidentally, exactly why newspapers want large circulations. Free papers don’t see a dime from their readers, so why try to get more? To be able to charge more. Jesus tits.

Question: Blog comments are so vile and racist … they just all seem
mean. So what’s the purpose of anonymous online comments?Adam:
Well, we don’t know who the commenters are. If someone is really
horrible, we’ll block the IP address, but for better or worse, it’s
pretty free-wheeling.Windy:
we require registration, but it doesn’t really help because someone can
create an email address and sign up that way. So even so, we get a lot
of vituperative comments, a lot of which comes from the same people
over and over — we call them “trolls.” “I guess I got a lot of
trolling when I did a story on Mark Foley a week or so ago.”

I don’t mean to pick on this one dude, I don’t know him, but it’s a pretty good illustration of something I’ve been yowling about for a while now. If you don’t understand the Internet, don’t use the Internet. Not every aspect of the Internet is something you have to use. User
polls and anonymous comments and blogs for every damn sports columnist
are not mandated by law and you’re not being oppressed. If you don’t really want something, sack up anddon’t have it.And if somebody asks you why you don’t allow comments, say you don’t have them because you don’t wanna and fuck you, anyway.

I mean, if you don’t see a use for anonymous comments don’t pull this “we hate comments but we have to have them because we want hits even though they’re sucky, plus people are awful, but everybody else has them so we can’t have the standards we like to jaw at everybody else about and make a decision we can stand behind.” I don’t understand how they’re so tentative all the time. Do what you want to do and then admit you made the choices.

A.