Tomorrow I Will Experience Congress

I love the smell of democratic governance in the morning.

I'm back in Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress and their aides as part of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Long Tail Fly-In. Around 50 web publishers have paid our own way to come to D.C. to explain how Google AdSense and other contextual ad networks power small businesses.

This is my third year attending the event. We spend one day talking shop about web publishing and learning about new web privacy legislation, then spend the next marching around the halls of Congress to explain that some of that legislation will kill our businesses and force us to return to a life of crime -- or whatever it was we did before the web came along.

(I was in the newspaper business. Don't make me go back there!)

When I was interviewed by AdWeek about the event, I tried basically the same approach on the reporter I'll be using on Rep. ToBeDetermined and Sen. NotSureYet. I've been publishing on the web since 1995 and ran sites before AdSense came along. Ads were completely untargeted, aggravated users because they didn't relate to their interests and didn't earn squat. Now, with ads that use anonymous cookies to learn some demographics about the audience, I've been able to publish the Drudge Retort for eight years.

I could not afford to do that without this ad model, given server hosting costs of around $7,400 a year on a site that gets two million hits a month. AdSense helped my blogging hobby get completely out of hand and turn into a small business. (Some of the Retort's conservative users believe that this experience in bidness will turn me Republican. I have thus far avoided that fate.)

I'll have more to say about the privacy concerns and the pending legislation this week, after I hear from the main policy wonk at the IAB. The biggest issue is likely to be the browser do-not-track header, which Microsoft is turning on by default in Internet Explorer 10.

There are over a million people using contextual ads to fund full- or part-time businesses. Google has paid $30 billion to AdSense publishers in the decade since the service began. Even during the worst of the 2008 economic crash, ad-supported online sites were a part of the economy that was growing.

As one of the only political bloggers who attends this event, I talk on Capitol Hill about the thousands of independent news sites and blogs that fund themselves through this model. You can publish a commercial news site or blog today and be beholden to no one.

I worry sometimes that the thought of getting rid of bloggers will be viewed as a plus by some members of Congress.

Last year, our efforts were unfortunately timed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed up on the same day to address a joint session of Congress, and the members all decided to hear him speak instead of us. I did get to wave to Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) as she left her office, but was unable to convey the importance of contextual advertising through a hand gesture.

Politics · Business · Google · 2012/06/04 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Kim Polese is a Cautionary Tale?

There's a dreadful sexist commentary on Forbes magazine today by Eric Jackson that suggests early Java executive Kim Polese caused herself to be wildly overhyped and the same mistake could be happening today to Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Under a headline that dubs each woman a Silicon Valley "It Girl," Jackson makes comparisons between the two women that all relate to gender, aside from flimsy observations that "they both like(d) magazine covers and editorial spreads" and "they both get (got) ranked on different arbitrarily created rankings of important people/power lists by business publications."

Making matters worse, he doesn't know his '90s dot-com history.

I was following Java closely in 1997 as I cowrote my first edition of Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days.

Polese wasn't a poor choice for Time magazine's 25 most influential people that year. The Java language had exploded in popularity since being included in the Netscape Navigator browser two years earlier. Polese and three core members of the team that created Java at Sun Microsystems, Arthur van Hoff, Jonathan Payne and Sami Shaio, all left together to start Marimba. It was widely viewed as the first hot startup to build on the technology, which was as big in Silicon Valley then as social networking is today. Polese had named Java, served as its product manager and became one of its best-known evangelists.

If you're a list-making journalist looking for somebody associated with Java to be the face of the trend, Polese was one of the top choices.

"History doesn't remember Kim Polese so well," Jackson claims, but Polese led Marimba to its public offering in 1999 and profitability. In 2004, the company was sold to BMC Software for $239 million. Though that's not as successful as people expected it to be in the heady days of the launch, it wasn't a flop. Any software startup that rode out the dot-com bust and sold for nine figures afterwards was doing something right.

Jackson writes that her next venture, SpikeSource, "seems to have quickly gone out of business." The company launched in 2003, Polese became the CEO a year later and it was in business for six years as an open-source infrastructure developer before folding.

So that she doesn't end up a sad "cautionary tale" like Polese, Sandberg should get back to her job and stop accepting so many awards and magazine covers, Jackson advises:

Maybe you should tone down the public appearances for a while and just keep your head down at Facebook. That doesn't mean do no public appearances or keep your light beneath a bushel. It just means to keep a balance more between the internal job and external stuff. There will always be some new Fortune Magazine cover to do, or award for being the most powerful woman executive in the world to accept.

(Any Facebook exec who thinks magazine covers will "always" be there should call the people running MySpace -- if their phones still work.)

Eric Jackson is a cautionary tale on how not to write about women in tech. Since publishing the commentary, he has deleted a line about how Sandburg's husband is "super-smart to boot" and another telling her to "just keep your head down at Facebook" -- without noting the edits were made. People are lining up on Facebook and Twitter to work him over.

The same year Polese made the Time 25, I taught myself Java and applied for a job at Marimba.

I'm still waiting to hear back.

Steve Elling Mocks Overweight TPC Fan

While covering the first round of the Players Championship Thursday at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fl., CBS Sports golf columnist Steve Elling made a really ugly crack about an overweight fan in the Tiger Woods gallery:

A distinctly rotund, lava-lunged woman was following the former world No. 1 all day, and was making no secret of her level of adoration for the 36-year-old. Make no mistake, the players in Tiger's threesome were tracking the hilarity, too, as Woods had to repeatedly fight a smirk. ...

To put it politely, the woman looked like 300 pounds of cottage cheese stuffed into a 200-pound sack.

Elling liked mocking this woman's size so much that he devoted the lead and conclusion of his commentary to her, calling the fan and the challenge faced by Woods both "large and unavoidable." He also posted seven insulting comments about her on Twitter:

1: "Cabrera's WD announcement was 2nd-biggest laugh of day. First was every time the 300-pound female fan tracking Tiger today opened her yap."

2: "@HolterMedia Rinaldi was flustered probably because he was terrified that she might fall over and crush him."

3: "The 300-pound woman kept calling Tiger 'baby doll' and Mahan and Fowler nearly had aneurisms trying to keep from laughing."

4: "I misspelled aneurysm. Probably cause a vessel burst in my head when 300-pound woman bent over and her unmentionables nearly toppled out."

5: "After that 74 today, Tiger should be happy to have any fans out there cheering for him. This woman should have counted as two."

6: "I stand corrected. Shotlink had the woman at 400 pounds. Ha ha."

7: "@sallbee87 Yeah, he was responding to my question about the corpulent woman who was following him and calling him 'Baby doll.'"

I've attended the Player's Championship several times in recent years, and the expectations of fan behavior are really high. There are dozens of volunteers on the course asking for you to be quiet and stay still while players make shots, and cell phones were not allowed at all on the grounds until this year. Most fans are extremely polite, even around the island green at 17 where you can lounge around the hole all day long drinking beer -- and hundreds do exactly that.

Elling wrote a commentary in 2010 about how golf "has forever been a spectator sport where decorum rules, sportsmanship reigns and nary is heard a discouraging word."

A pity that sense of decorum isn't shared by Elling.

After publishing this post Friday afternoon, I heard from Peggy Howell, the PR director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, a group that fights weight discrimination. She called Elling's comments "immature" and said in an email, "I find it really interesting that this man is so full of fat hatred and bias that he can't focus on doing his job. Was he there to report on the fans or on the tournament? So now there's a size limit for attending sporting events?"

She added, "The fact that this woman was able to follow the tournament the entire day says quite a lot for her fitness level, doesn't it? Guess it's not true that all fat people are lazy slobs who do nothing but sit on our couches eating junk food all day!"

Howell's point about following a golfer's gallery is a good one. I've done that at TPC Sawgrass and you have to walk and climb hills all day long to keep up in the Florida heat. It's much easier to park your butt somewhere and let the golfers come to you.

Elling hasn't retreated from his comments on Twitter, but the "300 pounds of cottage cheese" insult disappeared from his column this morning.

Ironically, he's on Twitter today criticizing gender discrimination at the Masters.

Golf · Jacksonville · Journalism · 2012/05/10 · Comment · Link

Tech Journalist Quits the Internet

Paul Miller, a blogger who covers tech for The Verge, is quitting the Internet for a year. He'll continue to file stories for the site by pioneering a revolutionary new technique in online journalism: Calling people on the phone.

Here's how Miller imagines the phone-driven journalism process working:

"I'm going to try to use the six degrees of separation a little bit," he said on Tuesday afternoon in an interview -- by phone, of course. "I have a lot of co-workers and they know a lot of people and so anybody I can get a phone number for I'll call that person and maybe they have a phone number for another person. So I'll have to follow that sort of chain."

I have some experience practicing journalism without an Internet. The life he romanticizes of gathering information through phone calls, library research and good old fashioned shoe leather was mine at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from roughly 1989 to 1994.

The job was great, but being a reporter became so much better when the web arrived. At least until some guy named Craig started killing all the newspaper jobs. No longer did I have to annoy sources and prowl libraries for each morsel of news I could gather. The entire world was serving up an all-you-can-eat information buffet on every subject under the sun -- and some of it was even factual!

The only things I miss about the old days are the sexy reference librarians with corrected vision. Tina, Linda, Carol, Dennis. Sigh.

Contrary to what Miller thinks, when calling people by phone you don't have to get their number through word of mouth. There are huge books published each year that list phone numbers. I wish I could tell him this in an email.

Journalism · Tech · Newspapers · 2012/05/02 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Coroner: Andrew Breitbart Died of Heart Failure

Photo of Andrew Breitbart by Gage Skidmore

Conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart died March 1 of "heart failure and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with focal coronary atherosclerosis," the Los Angeles Coroner's Office revealed Friday afternoon.

"No prescription or illicit drugs were detected," the office announced in a press release.

Breitbart had spent two hours that evening at the Brentwood Restaurant in LA's Brentwood district and had drunk some alcohol but "he wasn't drinking excessively," Arthur Sando, a marketing executive he met there for the first time that night, said in an account to Hollywood Reporter.

The coroner's office said Breitbart's blood alcohol content was .04 percent.

He was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center at 12:19 a.m. March 1 after being seen by witnesses collapsing on a public street. Media reports have conflicted about where Breitbart was when he was stricken.

After leaving the restaurant sometime around 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 29, Breitbart crossed the street and fell down in front of the Starbucks coffee shop in the vicinity of 148 S. Barrington Avenue.

Paul Huebl, a detective and former Chicago police officer, wrote on his crime news blog March 2 that he went to the scene and interviewed an eyewitness who had seen Breitbart collapse. The man, Christopher Lasseter, told him he was walking his dog after midnight when he saw Breitbart cross the street. Huebl wrote, "Once Breitbart stepped up on the curb, as Lasseter put it, 'He fell hard like a sack of potatoes.'"

Huebl wrote that he sold video of his interview with Lasseter to TMZ.Com. The photos he published on his blog match the location confirmed by the coroner's office as the place that Breitbart collapsed.

"I know Christopher was actually there because I asked him to describe Breitbart's clothing and he did so accurately down to his Converse tennis shoes," Huebl told me Friday in an email. "Christopher did not seem to know who Breitbart was other than that he was somebody who seemed important because of the media attention."

Though Huebl and others have speculated that Breitbart could have been murdered, the coroner's office dismissed the notion. "No significant trauma was present and foul play is not suspected," it stated in the press release.

A final coroner's report will be available within two weeks.

Developing ...

Politics · Journalism · Health · 2012/04/20 · 1 COMMENT · Link

George Zimmerman Contradicts Himself on Stand

During the bond hearing today in his second-degree murder trial for the Feb. 26 death of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman said something in his testimony that is clearly contradicted by his original call to police on the night of the shooting. After his attorney Mark O'Mara told the court that Zimmerman wanted to make a statement, Zimmerman took the stand and made brief comments directed at Martin's parents, Tracy Martin and Sabryna Fulton, who were present in the courtroom. He said:

I wanted to say I am sorry for the loss of your son. I did not know if he was armed or not. I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am.

Since Zimmerman is 28, this statement indicates he thought Martin was in his mid 20s.

That's not what he told a police dispatcher when he called to report a suspicious person in his neighborhood minutes before the fatal incident. Here's the relevant part of the call transcript:

Zimmerman: Yeah, now he's coming towards me. He's got his hands in his waist band. And he's a black male.

911 dispatcher: OK How old would you say he is?

Zimmerman: He's got something on his shirt. About like his late teens.

911 dispatcher: Late teens?

Zimmerman: Uh, huh.

Zimmerman correctly identified Martin, who was 17 when he died, as someone in his late teens.

The prosecutor, Bernie de la Rionda, did not point out this discrepancy to Zimmerman while he was on the stand, but in another question he claimed that there were inconsistencies in what Zimmerman told police that night about the shooting. The prosecutor could not elaborate on what he meant because O'Mara objected and the judge sustained the objection.

After O'Mara asked for $15,000 bond and De la Rionda sought that it either be denied or set at $1 million, Judge Kenneth Lester set bond at $150,000 with GPS monitoring and other conditions.

Crime · Florida · Trayvon Martin · 2012/04/20 · 59 COMMENTS · Link

Andrew Breitbart's Closing Argument

Photo of Andrew Breitbart by Gage Skidmore

Thursday morning shortly after midnight, the conservative media provocateur Andrew Breitbart collapsed while walking his neighborhood in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. He could not be revived at a hospital and died, exactly one month after his 43rd birthday. My condolences go out to his wife Susie (the daughter of the actor Orson Bean), his four kids and the many friends he had in public and private life.

As publisher of the Drudge Retort, I've followed Breitbart's career going back to the days when he was doing half the work on the Drudge Report and getting none of the credit. Matt Drudge liked the mystique of the I-work-alone myth, and stories would be written that mentioned he had a collaborator without naming the guy. It was Breitbart, who had befriended Drudge and operated a legal defense fund for him after Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal sued Drudge for libel.

When Breitbart was still working at the Drudge Report in May 2001, I caught the site fabricating a source. In a story slamming the New York Times for being slow to cover Blumenthal settling his suit, the following paragraph appeared:

"What the NEW YORK TIMES is doing with its sin of omission is no doubt a form of libel of its own, corporate news slander of the highest degree," said Professor Emeritus Andrew Breitbart of the Cashmere Institute of Media Studies.

That institute was fake. Cashmere was a reference to the street he lived on at the time. Breitbart had quoted himself in an article he reported.

Four years later, when he helped launch Huffington Post, I sent the site an email congratulating him on the launch and asking if he brought Drudge's siren with him.

Breitbart replied back, "No, I left it at the Cashmere Institute for Media Studies."

After watching him rise up from anonymous Drudge lackey to infamous journalism mogul, I could never figure out why Breitbart sounded so angry all the time. He operated in a constant state of rage that seemed bigger than politics. He was still bearing a grudge, as a middle-aged man, against a high school principal he believed had turned other kids against him, he told the New York Observer in 2009. He once ruined a date with his wife at a Santa Monica restaurant by flipping off a procession of anti-war protesters, only to learn later that they were actually protesting the conscription of child soldiers in Africa.

Breitbart cultivated liberal enemies all day long on Twitter, like he was afraid they might lose interest and start hating somebody else.

Today, a link was shared with me that provided some insight into his personality -- a Usenet post he made in 1995 to the online discussion group alt.support.attn-deficit:

Two weeks ago, I was clinically diagnosed with ADHD; the psychologist stated that the diagnosis was a "no-brainer" after just one meeting, one in which I rambled semi-coherently and excitedly about my life. MY FAVORITE SUBJECT!!!!!!!! ...

I feel my condition is well worse than those I read about. I do not take much joy from this distinction, but true concentation is simply not an option, ever. ...

Ironically, I am not depressed by my myriad of symptoms of ADHD. I love myself -- maybe too much. I love TV, radio, the news, books, movies, coffee, etc. The problem is -- jobs, occupation maintanence, and conforming to the work standards of others is a bit hard with my dependencies that obviously conflict with workplace norms.

Breitbart never had to worry about workplace norms. His plate-spinner personality was perfectly suited to this media age. Last year, I posted on Twitter that "Andrew Breitbart's baked expression on the cover of his new book explains a lot." He retweeted it within minutes.

As much as I hated what he was doing to politics and journalism, I would have liked much more time to make that case in the years to come. At the GOP presidential debate in Jacksonville I covered last month, two seats were reserved on my row at the media center for Breitbart.Com. I walked over a few times to see if he'd turn up in one of them, but unfortunately nobody showed. He was a nemesis I wanted to meet.

Credit: The photo was taken by Gage Skidmore and is available under a Creative Commons license.

Journalism · Politics · Adhd · 2012/03/02 · 17 COMMENTS · Link