“You talk to people, these small online startups, as Len Downie and I did, the optimism is absolutely infectious. Even journalists who have left or been fired from or been let go from traditional mainstream organizations now are working at lower wages for some of these organizations and they are grinning ear to ear. They have never had such a good time.” –Michael Schudson, academic sociologist and faculty member of the Journalism School at Columbia University, in an interview conducted at Yale, as quoted on media’s unhappy pallbearer Jim Romenesko.

Well!

DO YOU SEE ME GRINNING FROM EAR TO EAR, YOU DOCTORATE-HAVING, TENURE-LOVING, SUIT-WEARING, PONZI-SCHEME-ENDORSING, CHEERLEADER FOR THE DEATH OF THE UNION AND THE PENSION? YOU AND YOUR PAL LEN DOWNIE ARE LIVING IN A HILARIOUS FANTASY-LAND OF FANTASIES AND MAGIC.

To wit:

1. “Serious news organizations sometimes with five, sometimes with 10, sometimes with 20 journalists, mostly young, but not all, who are doing serious reporting in their locales, sometimes that the mainstream media never did or hasn’t been doing for a long time.”

Goodbye, old people who have been employed! (Old, by the way, is “over 40.”) There is no place for you.

2. In case we’ve forgotten: this year, a largely-unscientific, self-selecting poll found that 6% of jobless journalists found new jobs in their field.

3. How will there be journalism jobs, professor? “But you still need some money to pay these people and they are finding it primarily through philanthropy at this point. We are hoping that government will take an interest in funding such projects, as well as mainstream projects.”

Oh! Yes! The journalists will work for the government. What a great idea!

4. “We need a mixed model of funding streams and we need society to take a kind of common responsibility for providing news to the democratic public.”

Have you been outside the J-School, where you and your pals are taking tens of thousands of dollars from young people to give them a ticket to nothing? Do you know what the “democratic public” thinks of news-suppliers? Here, go read the comments on this blog, which include:

* “They could always go to work for the Obama adminstration…oh wait…they were already doing that.”

And:

* “’Journalists’ should be registered like sex offenders.”

And go on and on. Good luck with your fantasies!

A letter from Jim Ledbetter, the editor of The Big Money, corrects a fact in our column yesterday on Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s treatment at the hands of the financial press. In discussing a piece by Heidi Moore at The Big Money, we conflated the amount of Goldman Sachs’ total mortgage assets with AIG with the amount of their government bailout funds.

Big Money editor Jim Ledbetter writes:

I read your entertaining piece on the Awl about Heidi Moore and Matt Taibbi (this is the first I am learning of “concern trolls.”) I agree with the thrust of some of what you said. But I think in the context of the WSJ article, you have seriously misrepresented what Heidi wrote in TBM back in August.

You wrote: “So much, then, for Moore’s point that Goldman wasn’t appreciably more exposed than other banks trading with AIG, since ‘Merrill Lynch received $12 billion, as did France’s Société Générale and Germany’s Deutsche Bank’ after the $80 billion insurers’ bailout.”

Heidi never wrote that Goldman’s exposure was lower! I don’t think we knew then, nor do we know precisely now, what Goldman’s exposure is. She was comparing apples to apples: how much of the AIG bailout ended up in Goldman’s pocket? That’s the issue originally raised by Taibbi. But you’ve mixed in an orange, by talking about their overall exposure, which was simply not the subject of Heidi’s article.

Even if you’re right, by the way, and GS exposure was $33 billion, and they only netted $12 billion from the bailout, then that means that the government left them on the hook for $21 billion-which surely does not bolster Taibbi’s point that the government serves as Goldman’s lackey.

I do hope you will correct this glaring misuse of numbers.

Thanks, and best,

Jim Ledbetter

Editor, The Big Money

Chris Lehmann responds:

Big Money editor James Ledbetter has written in to dispute that the sum that Wall Street Journal’s reporters mention as the extent of Goldman Sachs’ exposure at AIG — $33 billion in total mortgage assets-represents a qualitatively different figure than that used in Moore’s original takedown of Taibbi, which was the $12.9 billion in government funds that Goldman received as part of the AIG bailout. In comparing Goldman’s bailout take to that of other major banks, Moore was not asserting anything about Goldman’s total exposure in the meltdown-a point I had missed, since Moore initially presented the comparison in the voice of an anti-Goldman conspiracy adherent. That’s still no excuse for flubbing a key category distinction, though, and I apologize to Moore and Ledbetter for doing so.

My kid, who just turned five, wakes up before me every morning and plays in his room. I hear him talking through my half-sleep, spooling out imaginary dialogue between his Ben 10 action figures, mostly about who will defeat who, who has stronger magical powers or superior fire power. This morning, though, amidst the usual, I heard something different.

“Oh, you lost your jobs?” he said, in a deep monster voice. “I’m sorry.”

Then in the higher voice of another character, “We’re just kids!”

“Okay.”

Then back to the sounds of laser blasts and clashing swords, etc. But it seems that someone’s been eavesdropping on the grown-up conversations at holiday parties.

After contemplating the psychological effect my unemployment might be having on my child, and wondering if there might be any percocet left in the medicine cabinet, I got out of bed and went in to the kitchen to fix his lunch for school.

My wife, in pants already, was preparing to leave for work. She’d made him breakfast and gotten the newspaper, which I found on the counter. Here’s the headline stretching across the front page: “Poll Reveals Trauma of Joblessness in U.S.”

Out of 708 unemployed adults surveyed last week, it said, “Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About 4 in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they attribute to their difficulties in finding work.” The article, and three accompanying profiles of out-of-work Americans (losers!!!), is full of depressing anecdotes. Evan Gutierrez, who lost his job as a music director in Los Angeles, has moved his wife and newborn son into a smaller apartment and applied to a church’s goodwill fund to help pay the rent while he looks for work. “We grow up with the impression there’s a correlation between effort and the fruits of your labor,” he said. “To be honest with you, I have very little confidence I’m going to be able to turn this around. It just feels completely, completely out of my control.”

2009, ladies and gentlemen! This year can not be over soon enough.

Ya like freedom, responsibility, opportunity, and compassion? Course ya do, you’re an American. Ya know who else is big into that stuff? George W. Bush! In fact, they were the core principles of his time in office. And now you can stand with the former president and his lovely wife Laura by becoming a Charter Member of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. In fact, if you contribute $50 or more, “your name will also be included in the Freedom Registry on permanent display at the Center.” Normally I would be totally into this, but ever since the guy drove the economy into the ditch I’ve been out of work, so I don’t really have that kind of cash available to throw around. But, hell, someone must, right?

Getting smacked in the face with a souvenir statuette may have been the best thing that could have happened to Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian Prime Minister, due to be released from the hospital tomorrow, is the beneficiary of a wave of sympathy that has changed the conversation in his country.

Graphic images showing the leader with blood splattered over his face will likely to boost the premier’s political popular, analysts say, just as his popularity had begun to plummet amid sex scandals, a public divorce, and legal woes.

And while his assailant, the mentally-disturbed Massimo Tartaglia, has already apologized for his “cowardly and rash act” and made it clear that he was acting alone, the Right is making much of a “climate of hatred” against the premier, which it will presumably use to justify further restrictions on protests against him. You might even think the whole thing was some kind of set-up! But that would be crazy. This is Italy, that stuff would never happen.

In related news, “the $16 souvenir that Tartaglia used as a weapon became a best seller among tourists and curious Milan residents, according to souvenir vendors.” Maybe they were in on it too!

Syndicated columnist and National Review editor Rich Lowry has this to say about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s struggle to obtain the supermajority now necessary to pass health care reform:

Reid’s struggle getting to 60 makes some liberals fear that America has become “ungovernable.” In other words, it isn’t putty in their grasping little hands. Unfortunately for them, the Founders created a balky system resistant to precipitate change. It is designed to frustrate ideologically drunken (and perhaps temporary) majorities insistent on passing sweeping, unpopular legislation. Reid’s difficulty is exactly the way James Madison would have wanted it.

Someone wanna clip that out and save it? I have a feeling it might come in handy at some point in the next decade.

by Erica Sackin

Brooklyn had about 12 craft fairs this weekend, with four or five taking place in Williamsburg-Greenpoint alone. There was the 3rd Ward Fair in Williamsburg, and the Hearts and Crafts Affair at Cafe Grumpy, in Greenpoint. These are often grandiose affairs, like Etsy on acid, with DJs and gift bags, and someone serving happy hour-priced mixed drinks and Colt 45 in juicebox-size bottles. For sale, everything from clothing to recession-based holiday gifts, like keychains for keys to things you do not have. It makes sense, of course. With so many struggling artists per capita, why not connect them with the masses desperate to buy that one unique gift?

Maxwell Sherman, 28, and Sarah Jones, 24, sell meticulously-made neon spandex clothing and cotton hooded sweatshirts (Ruffeo Hearts Lil’ Snotty). Both also wear their creations while sporting oversize glasses and asymmetrical haircuts. Maxwell kept apologizing for how sleep-deprived he was, but, while helping customers find the right size of striped rainbow underwear, he explained their story. The two started out protesting-sweatshop labor, the World Trade Organization, the War in Iraq-but soon realized that they could make more of a difference by changing the means of production themselves.

“We were feeling a deficit of clothing we wished was out there and made in an accountable way,” Maxwell said.

“We also lived in a small town and there was nowhere to get a job,” said Sarah, who started working with Maxwell back in 2005 when the two were in Olympia, WA. “We decided to create our own clothing line as an experiment and it worked out.”

Now they support themselves making clothing full time, and even appeared on CBS to teach Mo Rocca how to make a hooded sweatshirt (which he then took to Martha Stewart for an on-air review).

“Protesting is good,” said Maxwell, “but if you can make your daily life about changing the means of production, that’s really revolutionary.”

Korakrit Arunanondchai, 23 (art, clothes) wore his own creations too; intricately silkscreened clothing that from afar resembles Jackson Pollock in dayglo, but up close is startlingly beautiful.

“The shirts are designed to be worn to a gallery,” Korakrit said. “The more people who wear them to look at art, the more they become art too, and the more seamless the experience becomes.”

Korakrit came here four years ago from Thailand to study art and silkscreening, and all his designs are based on traditional Thai patterns mixed with Japanese manga language. Korakrit usually hand makes about 100 shirts a year, and will occasionally give them away to high-profile figures (this year three went to M.I.A., who did not wear them, and one to each member of the indie band Yeasayer, who did). But because he makes each shirt by hand, he doesn’t give them away often. “For someone else who mass produces their work, three shirts might be nothing. But three shirts cost me about $100,” Korakrit said.

Phillip Stearns, an audio engineer and composer, was promoting his classes on handmade electronics as well as selling his work.

He describes his creations as “musical compositions manifested as electronic circuits that are both interactive and self-contained,” or more simply, “art that needs you.” His course at the art space Third Ward, which was hosting that day’s craft fair, teaches students how to handmake their own version of The Clapper.

Sitting in front of his creations-spindly-looking electronic devices that stood alone or patterns of wire and speakers mounted on cloth and wood-he explained the point of making electrical circuits by hand.

“There’s something about working with a real physical object,” Phil said. He waved his hand in front of a piece of burlap sewn with light sensors, wires and speakers, demonstrating the different sounds he could make with his shadow. “So often engineers work with abstract representations of circuits on a computer. They never actually work with the circuits they design.”

There were also un-Christmas cards by a young artist who makes great drawings.

With the exception of Maxwell and Sarah, most vendors I spoke with did not make a living from their crafts. Many were art students, either in school or recently graduated. Others taught as well, or held part- and even full-time jobs to support themselves. And then there was Chris Sullivan, a scruffy and enthusiastic 22, who was selling love letters for a penny.

The idea came from an independent film he’d made this summer featuring a young girl selling love letters. Since he had the sign left over, he figured he’d try his hand at the craft fair. “Love letters connect people,” Chris said. “They make people happy.”

Although he’d only made about $15 that day, the money was beside the point.

“The weirdest one I’ve written was for a guy who came up and said, ‘Make me one that’s the dirtiest one possible,’” Chris said from behind his handmade wooden sign. “It was pretty raunchy-he said he wanted to give it to a girl that he thought was pretty. I found out later that he gave it to a model from Project Runway.”

Although Chris has written dozens of love letters for other people, he’s never gotten one himself.

“He also does it to meet girls” said Chris’s friend, as Chris worked on a letter for Awl readers.

“That’s not true!” Chris replies. “At least,” he adds, “not anymore.”

Previously: The Underground Press

Erica Sackin writes and lives in Brooklyn. She was once a contestant in the Ms. G Train competition, but lost. ‘The Spandex Report’ covers the lives of the youngs.

Ladies! You are doing it wrong, reports a lady who has been working as a man, on the Internet, for the last three years: “Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service. No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic. Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.” It’s totally true! I get totally different sorts of emails (and email response rates) from people who think my name is a lady-name. Then they find out I’m a man and they give me whatever they want. True fact! (via)

And now to Wales: “Police hiding in a car with a disabled boy and his parents as they made the morning school run saw a man mimicking the child, a court has heard…. They saw Steven Beavan, 35, of Rhyl, Denbighshire, tap his head, adopt a limp and make ape-like expressions.” The prosecutor, however, will not put the mother on the stand, because of how she and the boy’s father have treated Beavan during a lengthy dispute: “[O]ver a six-year period the couple had allegedly called Mr Beavan various abusive names including ‘vermin’, ‘scum’, ‘gayboy’ and ‘gaylord’. They had had leaflets addressed to ‘gaylord’ sent to his house.” The hearing continues.