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Because THIS?

Ladies, start your coding please. (Also I would like a TimesWire for Slate. Which I guess I could build myself easily enough from their RSS but I have some important smoking to do. THANKS!!)

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The Huffpo has a staff of 203 (among those are 97 full-time editorial staffers), and they're currently at 26 million monthly uniques (according to their numbers). That's 128,000 uniques per employee.

The Daily Beast has 65 full-time employees (positively tiny in comparison), and, in November, 6 million uniques, as per Omniture. (comScore reports it as 3.7 million.) The Beast also doesn't have "free bloggers," and yet (using their numbers, of course), it still comes up with a pretty good 92,307 uniques per employee.

Slate is now doing 6.48 million uniques (comScore for July to September, as a three-month average). It has but 30 editorial staffers and counting the full team (some of which are shared across the Slate Group), they're 42 people, coming in at a whopping 154,285 uniques per employee. Slate is also, you know, seven times older than the Beast—and all that time online makes for a nice stream of search results and archive pages.

What other ways can we start looking at what websites are and how they perform? Well, pay rate, sure (though try prying that number out of anyone).

Then there's traffic versus site income, certainly. Take the HuffPo again—that's $30 million this year, they say, and they were reporting 26 million uniques via comScore back in March, so let's just totally ballpark it and say they did 312 million uniques this year. That puts their income at just about 1:10 with readers. Fascinating!

Don't compare that to print, by the way: the print edition of the New York Times has, very roughly, just a million subscribers. How tiny and quaint, you think? Well, the news division of the Times Co. alone takes in—mostly from the print product—somewhere around $150 million... each month.

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Mr. Sullivan, for his part, didn't respond to an email seeking comment. But, of course, he had posted a small item on www.andrewsullivan.com. "In my opinion, most online magazines will in the not-so-distant future become agglomerations of bloggers," he wrote. "Their most popular features are already drifting in that direction. What they will eventually become will be more like talk-radio stations, where a handful of provocative bloggers will create a branded talk environment, rather like the blogosphere itself, but with a few editors picking which people to include."

Ta da! We actually should give him some kind of award for this.

And, to even be fair to Weisberg, he has come down on the right side of history for quite a few years! Also in 2005, he wrote:

[M]any old-line journalists have tried to define their work in a ways that exclude the new aspirants. Insitutionalized journalists argue that bloggers don't do conventional reporting, aren't accurate, aren't responsible, or aren't paid "and hence are not genuine reporters. They fret that the current influx of amateurs will undermine professional standards or that seasoned professionals will be unfairly brought down by an electronic lynch mob, as some posit that Dan Rather of CBS and Eason Jordan of CNN were.

Disregard all such self-interested whining.

So with that in mind we won't even get fussy and picky about the rest of the things Weisberg puts forward in the interview. Here's to everyone! The Internet, it is full of friends! And mostly: thank God everyone's done fussing about "what journalism is." That was the worst conversation ever, and the annoying people lost that argument quite thoroughly.

Update: Weisberg thoroughly trashes the piece in a memo as "a good example of a kind of bad journalism we thankfully seldom see at Slate." SHEESH.

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Me on the other hand, I'm not a person, I'm a vegan, from even before that neon green book came out. So I was doing what all vegans do when you sickos annually sacrifice poultry to long-dead Puritans: straight up fuming, about absolutely everything. Here's a fume about how hard it is to find grocery store stuffing that doesn't use chicken broth. There's a fume about how Lil Wayne actually sucks, and just the general idea of Nike. And of course, right here's a fume about Slate, a website that I love, but also one that tests my patience from time to time.

I find it hard to imagine Jacob Weisberg's Obama's Brilliant First Year wasn't relegated to Slate's "Saturday After Thanksgiving" slot for a reason, that reason being that even the most plugged-in word over-consumers were too busy marauding for bargain 'Tendo X-Cubes or whatever to pay attention to the Internet. Weisberg may be El Jefe over there, but everyone has to be told "No" from time to time, especially if they're, y'know, wrong.

The dek-"By January, he will have accomplished more than any first-year president since Franklin Roosevelt"-is more irksome than the article's title, which, by itself, was actually just innocuously vague (or vaguely innocuous, perhaps). Because Obama's first year actually has been quite brilliant. I'm half-black, man, and it's awesome to see another half-black dude chilling in the Oval Office like it ain't no thang. It's awesome that, unlike when my father was a boy, single mothers of children of color can hold their babies in their arms and promise them, in all seriousness, "You can be the leader of the world one day." It's awesome that there's finally a president courageous enough to stand before the United States and tell it that, in the "War on Terror," it's not necessarily as innocent as it thinks it is.

All that stuff is indeed brilliant. And I applaud it. But "accomplished more than anyone since Roosevelt"? The buck stops here, Weisberg!

Did I not use that phrase properly just now? Oh well. I only wrote it to segue into a paragraph about Harry Truman, the president who originated it and the guy who immediately succeeded FDR. Harry Truman is also someone who, in his first year in office, accomplished more than Barack Obama will in the same time span.

After just about six months in office, Truman gave the executive order to incinerate a quarter of a million Japanese people with the most horrific weapon known to man-even today. Reasonably terrified, Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers, and World War II was completely over. Kind of a big event. Since then, the A-bomb's ugliest fallout hasn't been its radiation, but the fact that every bad guy in the world with dreams of executing entire nations has been after it.

Now, you can certainly argue that it wasn't Harry Truman who ordered the creation of the bomb, and that FDR himself-or any president-would probably have acted exactly as his former vice president did. But when I shot out my dad's windshield with a BB gun my brother gave me, which someone else invented and ordered to be built, guess who took the heat?

In his first 365 days as president, Harry Truman also began work on this one thing with Jewish people in the Middle East.

In the often quoted statement addressed to four American envoys from the middle east who, at a meeting in the White House on November 10, 1945, warned [Truman] of adverse effects of a pro-Zionist policy, he declared: "I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents."

Maybe Mr. Weisberg forgot this accomplishment of Truman's presidency, because nobody ever talks about it and there's no lingering conflicts surrounding it, at all.

Later, in his first year as president, Jack Kennedy created the President's Commission on the Status of Women, and earlier that same year he scared the hell out of Fidel Castro during the disastrous Bay of Pigs. Ronald Reagan got shot, survived and began operating under the belief that God spared him to help destroy Communism! That precipitated Iran-Contra and a whole host of other fun things. And George W. Bush? Welp, within his first year he entered a good war in a bad way, possibly rendering it unwinnable. Either way, thousands of Afghan civilians and American troops have died since.

I suppose none of that stuff is as big as what Truman did, but it's certainly bigger than what Weisberg is claiming Obama's done-or, more accurately, MIGHT DO. Weisberg wrote: "The case for Obama's successful freshman year rests above all on the health care legislation now awaiting action in the Senate." Thanks, Weisberg. Joe Lieberman has no doubt read your article and is at this very moment gleefully massaging his jowls in anticipation of proving you wrong. Because that's what that guy does.

The stimulus was huge, but definitely not as important as ending WWII or the acceptance of Zionism as an American ideal. And as for foreign policy?

When it comes to foreign policy, Obama's accomplishment has been less tangible but hardly less significant: He has put America on a new footing with the rest of the world. In a series of foreign trips and speeches, which critics deride as trips and speeches, he replaced George W. Bush's unilateral, moralistic militarism with an approach that is multilateral, pragmatic, and conciliatory. Obama has already significantly reoriented policy toward Iran, China, Russia, Iraq, Israel, and the Islamic world.

Ah, yes, he's not immediately a xenophobic asshole to the browns! What a brilliant year!

Congrats, America: Our bar is now this low.

Previously: Newspapers Are Doing as Badly as You Think.

Cord Jefferson is a writer-editor living in Brooklyn and The Awl's Special Correspondent for Slate's Counterintuitiveness. Some of his other work has appeared in National Geographic, GOOD, The Root and on MTV.

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"Chillax, people," wrote Daniel Gross, who also works for Newsweek, a newsmagazine that fired lots of people last year before cutting its page count. "I can't help but think that many newspaper-doomsayers are conflating hope with analysis." Which brings us to our first problem: Based on this article, it would seem Gross believes there are actual Internet monsters-"newspaper-doomsayers," "digerati," etc.-cackling and blogging with glee every time a newsroom loses an editor. Mentioning the latest abysmal newspaper circulation statistics, he says "newspaper haters" must be joyous.

Newspaper haters is a group of people that doesn't really exist, but, even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of people in Internet media. Those people, if they don't occasionally do odd jobs for papers and magazines themselves, have close friends who do. Close friends who, if unemployed, are going to have nowhere to look for work but the Internet. In other words, a blogger who roots for print's demise is actually rooting for his pals to be fired and come steal his job. Nobody does that. Daniel Gross is projecting, arguing that the newspaper die-off is made up by making up some silly animosity on the part of the Web.

Next, this awful bit:

First of all, there's nothing ipso facto shocking about a decline in patronage of 10 percent in six months.... Consumers have cut back sharply on all sorts of expenditures. There are plenty of members of what I call the 40 percent club: businesses, many tethered to finance and credit, that have seen sales plummet by nearly one-half. These include automobiles, homes, luxury apparel, and diamonds. Many other components of consumer discretionary spending-hotels, restaurants, air travel-have fallen off significantly. Do we draw a line from trends over the last few years and declare that in 15 years there will be only a handful of hotels?

Uh, no, Daniel. You're right. We don't look at business trends in diamonds and hotels the way we look at trends in newspapers, mostly because those things are completely different from one another. Tell you what: when Apple comes out with hotel rooms you can make with your cell phone at the touch of a button, for free, I will literally attempt to put the whole Eiffel Tower in my ass (also, HOORAY! No more homelessness). Until then, I can't stress this enough: hotel rooms are different from newspapers.

Gross wraps things up with some heinous data noodling, telling everyone to look to Gannett for proof newspapers can still make money: "In the first three quarters of 2009, advertising revenues were off 31.6 percent, but circulation revenues were off less than 5 percent, even though many of Gannett's flagship papers lost subscribers." Great news! I mean, doesn't this independent researcher looking into Gannett's finances sound absolutely ecstatic: "[T]hird quarter performance wasn't as bad as I was expecting." So exciting.

Anyway, according to Gross, all newspaper companies need to start following Gannett's model, which is to cut costs and raise prices (i.e. fire people and then expect consumers to pay more for a less excellent product). This is literally the exact same advice this fake-ass Gordon Gekko recommends when trying to get rich off the laundromat business.

And there you have it: newspapers are like the laundromats, and they're both like hotels and diamonds. The end?

Cord Jefferson is a writer-editor living in Brooklyn and The Awl's Special Correspondent for Slate's Counterintuitiveness. Some of his other work has appeared in National Geographic, GOOD, The Root and on MTV.

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Unless we all missed a silly Weekly Standard essay making the claim that GG Allin is best understood as an undercover Christian rocker, whose songs reinforce "traditional values" by taking scum-filth to its terminus point of meaning (and thus subverting the scum impulse in general), my guess is it was Slate's close reading of Creed's awesomeness that got stuck in your aesthetic-critical craw. People are already making much better ha-has than the one above, of course. (Check the #slatepitches on Twitter, or just follow Brian Beutler already.)

Unlike Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, though, I don't really feel like I need to react here by inveighing against the tiresome preponderance of counter-intuitive articles, or even against Creed. The band's entirely earnest brand of boring anyone not operating under the influence of an immature persecution complex has been old news for about a decade already-and besides, by rising to elitist-bait so adroitly, I'd simply be doing what Slate wanted its counter-intuitiveness to achieve the first place.

But just because I'm not particularly in a mood to put Scott Stapp down today, that doesn't mean I won't do it to Jonah Weiner, a generally interesting critic who commits some fouls here that turn out to be totally unrelated to his assessment of the cultural import of a song like "Higher." The first thing that struck me while taking in "Creed is Good" was that it reads like the music journalism equivalent of Sarah Palin's GOP convention speech: feisty, attention-grabbing for sure, and sort of difficult to believe was executed in good faith by a responsible adult. I'm not saying Weiner doesn't genuinely like what he says he likes here. But I doubt (or at least I hope) he doesn't believe in the ludicrously false dichotomy between intellect and emotion his piece wants us to believe exists, simply because ... well, maybe some unnamed jerk hipster somewhere stupidly thinks her immaculately-curated record collection makes her a better or smarter person than regular folks who cotton to Creed.

This completely unsupported, faux populist, straw man passage blows in particular: "And it's not that the band didn't deliver. To the contrary, Creed seemed to irritate people precisely because its music was so unabashedly calibrated towards pleasure: Every surging riff, skyscraping chorus, and cathartic chord progression telegraphed the band's intention to rock us, wow us, move us." [emph. added]

Wait, who ever gave disliking pleasure as a reason for not liking Creed? I'm actually pretty certain that while Creed's intent was to wow me, the reason I don't like them is because I feel they "didn't deliver" in this regard.

There's so much more unpacking to do here, insulting implications-wise. You're meant to understand that some music wants to give you joy, and that this totally helpful classification includes Creed, because they're direct in their presentation and don't hide behind anything annoying like artifice or subtlety. And then, I guess, there's music that's ashamed of pleasure or otherwise objects to its delivery in some fashion. And, apparently, the partisans of this latter style are inflexibly hostile to music that intends to "move us," because not only don't they appreciate being moved by music themselves, they're angry when others find this pleasure out in the world. These horrid people probably have other reasons for listening to music that exist outside the Aristotelian-sensual sphere, though the article doesn't bother to explain how this might work. At any rate, heal thyself, discerning consumer of music: if you don't like Creed, you best consider whether you're one of these snobs, or if you're actually even into the whole notion of getting pleasure from music as opposed to posing about music.

And that's just the part of this article that's insulting to listeners. How about the artists themselves? Well, the suggestion seems to be that musicians who embrace sophistication or conceptual gambits don't really mean to move us as much as our misunderstood hero, Scott Stapp. Miles Davis? Didn't want to wow you like Creed, by the way. And turns out, last year, folks got their hopes up for Chinese Democracy for some other reason than that they thought it might possibly rock them.

Now, in my job, I spend some part of my time talking to musicians, and not only pop artists. Some of these people work in unpopular or "difficult" genres, like noise, or jazz, or classical music. And I swear I've never met a single individual among this set who was driven into his or her life of penury and total aesthetic dedication in order to make the few people they encountered at concerts less joyful in life.

Just for example, this young composer named Mario Diaz de León is working in a really fascinating way with chamber music and electronics. It's a union that could easily be lame as hell, but he's put some real heart into the enterprise, and his absolutely phenomenal first CD, titled Enter Houses Of, is a sensual delight (at least if you're the kind of person who likes Fennesz and/or Luciano Berio).

Here's the first half of the album's leadoff track, "Mansion":

Believe it or not, I put that up because I wanted to improve your day! I think the mix of alto flutes and laptop noise is exquisite. And I know the composer hopes you'll like it too.

Again, it's worth saying that the critical argument Weiner advances about Creed is a fine enough topic for a piece, as far as it goes. Leave aside the author's incomprehension over the disfavor Creed has accrued over the years. (Though really, is it too difficult to understand why the zeitgeist in 2009 may feel as though this decade has heard enough from the species of the "well-meaning, Bible-fluent doofus"?) There's something deeply and properly illogical at the heart of music criticism as an enterprise in the first instance-the whole "dancing about architecture" thing. How can we make sense in print (or online) about what we love at a non-textual level? Anyone can make an argument for almost anything-which is why people loathe critics in general, and yet also find criticism rather addicting to consume. But rather than constructing unexpected, potentially unpopular arguments by tearing down competing traditions-or even worse, tapping into the easy anti-intellectualism that dominates numerous other American debates far too frequently-it's probably better for us on the whole if writers train their critical-poetic arts onto the works they want to champion. The critic should reveal to us what it is we've been missing, and if we find out the critic is correct, we'll chastise ourselves for having held blinkered assumptions-and we'll do it on our own time.

"'Bullets' is a furious blast of metal and one of the most galvanizing persecution anthems ever penned," Weiner writes, trying to do just this in the not-at-all objectionable part of his piece. The only problem is that the evidence he submits for this claim-the lyrics "At least look at me when you shoot a bullet through my head! Through my head! Through my head!"-doesn't do much to back up his praise.

At least for me. See, I don't much care for Creed.


Previously: Come Ye Despondent Cable News Watchers, And Restore Your Faith In Things

Seth Colter Walls is a culture reporter at Newsweek. Previously, he wrote about U.S. and Middle East politics for a variety of outlets.

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