chuck_taylor

I've worked in the news business for 30 years and I've never even heard of OpenPR, for what that's worth.

They're not getting paid per call. It's just for metric purposes.

I think you mean AdSense. AdWords are a way for content creators to <i>spend</i> money, not make it.

In any event, AdSense revenue is trivial compared to the cost of creating content that has any widespread impact.

Well, OK, but that's an awfully narrow example. What happens when you are asked, or want, to write of something about which you know only a little? Or something you sort of know well but which requires a modest degree of fact-checking and verification?

Put another way, how much do you expect to earn per hour for this sort of work? How long does it take you to write an informative 300 words?

Word count is not an indication of the effort involved. Itg's not merely a matter of typing in words like a monkey. You have to know about which you write. The more you know, likely the more time it took you to learn it. Time is money, words are just words.

Most likely Wired didn't do anything based on a press release. The P.R. industry would like you to believe they are able to drive the news agenda, but when it comes to the Wireds and The New York Timeses of the world, it's rare for a press release to lead to a story of this magnitude.

Most likely, Demand Studios' P.R. people freaked out when Wired inquired.

This story likely took weeks to report and write. A graphic artist probably spent at least a week preparing the chart. Good journalism takes a lot of effort, and so few people realize that.

As someone who has been paid to write and edit news for 30 years, this article was pretty depressing, but I already knew about Demand Studios. And you know what? It looks like they take good care of their writers, at least in the karma department. These seem to be folks who have always wanted to be paid to write but never had the opportunity to get paid for it, enjoy surfing the Web, and can bang out three or four of these articles in a day and have some good walking-around-money.

They seem to be mostly American, but at some point I'm sure the Third World will be recruited to drive the price down even further. Seen what they are paying on Mechanical Turk?

It doesn't help that many writers and publications use clever and cryptic headlines that often are the sole way of judging whether an item is worth clicking or not.

Did you notice that he says he's going to buy an iPhone because Microsoft's mobile offerings suck?

OpenID in its present form will never really catch on because it's too involved and complicated for normal people to use. I am not a technologist but I'm a pretty savvy user, and I have never really understood how to use it.

As the story points out, the fact we removed this material was announced shortly after it occurred, but the details of how it was done are new.

I don't know of any newspapers that aren't already doing most or even all of these things. These tips aren't really all that helpful. They're obvious.

Both principals' original and rebutting words are at once smart and sloppy. This speaks to the complexity of discussing the economics of knowledge and taste.

For example, neither writer seems to have tackled the role of advertising revenue and other intangibles in assessing the value of content.

There are comparatively few ads in an edition of The Economist, which might explain why a subscription is so much greater than that of Time. And that should be factored into any newsstand-price-per-page analysis.

And some weekly trade publications, delivered by mail at no small cost, are monetarily free to the readers because subscribers pay with other currency -- information about themselves, their companies, and their spending plans.

I would also point out that the popularity of a fabric pattern or the life story of Sarah Palin are related more to taste and fad than to the value of any elusive wisdom, such as that derived from The New York Times or The Economist.

Mr. Graham is correct in noting a demarcation between conveyance and content, but as Mr. Weaver points out, it's not all that simple to proceed from there.

In any event, I've really enjoyed reading both sides of this, and I am impressed by the overall quality of the comments.