Posted 6:26 AM by Gene

Too much of news hackery is talking things up. If nothing happened in the Superdome in the middle of a catastrophe, we have to talk up rumors, right? The same with our media tycoons. We've talked up loathsome men like SUMNER because well, they're our bosses, and what's good for Time Warner -- er, VIACON.... The Cute Little Pink Paper has latched onto Nick Dorken's star (I won't bother to link as this @#$%&* rag uses GENERIC LINKS, even though its stories DO HAVE THEIR OWN LINKS, but they're impossible to find), typically using any excuse to put ANYTHING into the paper, as in:

It also seems reasonable [?????] to guess that Mr. Denton is bringing in revenue, given the number and frequency of ads on the site. The only concrete information he would give, however, was that a $4 ad buy—the minimum for Gawker on the company’s rate card—would be good for 1,000 appearances. At 5.5 million page views a month, if each page carried one bottom-shelf ad and if a good half-dozen reasonable objections were ignored, that would mean more than $20,000 in monthly revenue. But it would probably be quicker and simpler to use a dartboard.

Translation: we don't know a DAMNED THING about this clown, but he's SEXY, and he's SEDUCTIVE, and we're giving him SIX PAGES on OUR Web site. "Nick Denton Is Either the Luce or Hefner of New Age," gasps Cute on its home page, but revere or detest Luce and Hefner (we tend toward the latter) they built considerable properties. No, Nick Dorken is more like the J. Edgar Hoovers of G000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,GLE, king of an empire of thin hot air, but he has MANY MEDIA FRIENDS, and we'd bet in time thanks to them he'll become an INTOLERABLE ZILLIONAIRE TOO.

In short, our NEW-MEDIA oppressors are just about the same as the OLD ONES.

In shorter, Nick Dorken is TINA BROWN in DRAG.

A VERY BIG AND LONG NEUHARTHISM OF THE WEEK AWARD TO TOM SCOCCA!

P. S. on 3/1/2009 at 1:40 p. m. For what it's worth, we found the link.