It’s always bugged me to read stories in the press about the financial problems the press is having. Journalists, it turns out, aren’t too clear-eyed (and often aren’t too intellectually honest) when it comes to analyzing the collapse of their own profession.

My argument for what’s really going on, or at least the beginning of a series of them, is currently up at Splice Today.

The result is a long—too-long probably—detailing of the five central issues that I contend are at the heart of the collapse of daily journalism. To me it’s incredible that they are almost never detailed in mainstream accounts on the troubles of the industry—because there’s no way to fix the problems if it’s not acknowledged what they are.

Part I is up now. Part II will be up later today. I’d welcome, of course, comments, criticisms and other thoughts on the industry.

I’ve been trying to examine my extreme schadenfreude at the troubles Annie Leibovitz is having. I’m not talking about her personal travails: In that realm, she has been faced with a number of upheavals in the past few years, all of it reason to feel only extreme empathy (the deaths of Susan Sontag, her longtime lover; and her parents) or offer best wishes (the birth of her second and third children, twins).

But her financial troubles … those are something different. Her affairs were in such disarray that she turned to a company that specializes in art-related loans and borrowed some $24 million against her homes in Manhattan and her personal archive. The loan is now apparently past due and the company is suing her.

In a NYT story on the issue Leibovitz refuses to comment; in another, a Reuters  dispatch on the case, her spokesperson quotes her as saying the allegations are “false and untrue.”

Hmm … false and untrue.

Most folks my age grew up with her Rolling Stone portraits—intriguing, revelatory and era-defining. As time went on, she slipped over into celebrity photography, a much different thing. Originally, she was a true journalist, finding in her work meanings separate from the stars. Later, however, you could feel her alliances shift, to where she became complicit with the celebrity masks. Her ambitions in this area soon transcended even that of her mentor, Jann Wenner, which is saying something, and she shifted over to being Vanity Fair’s celebrity portraitist-in-chief.

As her brand coalesced, she expanded her work into the extremely remunerative world of magazine advertising, and cornered a distinctive and celebrity-friendly corner of the market; most recently, there was her mega-expensive Disneyland campaign and the recent Louis Vuitton series, with appearances by Keith Richard and Francis and Sofia Coppola.

I find both of those campaigns repugnant: They are classic samples of celebrity and corporate porn, stuffed with pompous intents, mincing self-regard, and opulent excess.

The purchasers of them are the true judges of their effectiveness, but they also don’t seem very useful to me; the Disney ones, particularly, don’t call to mind Disneyland at all. They are weighted, dark, insular, and almost fetishistic in their handling of their celebrity faces. Indeed, they seem more about branding the celebrities (like Whoopie Goldberg’s tiresome simper) than the product.

But it’s the weight that stays with you; the ads do seem heavy to me, weighed down with ad-agency over-thinking, brand-consciousness, celebrity handlers, and, finally, the egos—Jesus, the egos!—the celebs’, Leibovitz’s own, and the bloated ones of the guys running these useless companies.

It all combines for an overwhelming feeling of decadence.

As the years went on Leibovitz became extremely thin-skinned—fruitlessly suing the producers of The Naked Gun movie series, for example, for an ad parody of her shot of Demi Moore pregnant. Meanwhile, like some real-life version of a Mick Jagger character, she looked for darker and darker photographic kicks, like her recent fuck-me shots of fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus.

Isn’t decadent what Leibovitz had become? Her financial troubles, according to the Times, long predated her personal ones, which again, should not be wished on any one. She was careless with expenses for decades; her handling of her own finances had resulted in tax leins and at least two lawsuits for nonpayment of debts.

As you can expect, while she doesn’t comment her amen corner is trying to spin the story her way, notably making the case that she did not live in a profligate fashion, though that is hard to reconcile with someone who owned three town houses in Greenwich Village and a summer home besides.

Instead of just keeping an eye on the loot she made playing around with bad actors and international conglomerates, she let it all go, and in the end essentially pawned everything she owned and had created. We’ll have to see how the case plays out, of course, but the chain of events in the Times story is pretty unappetizing. If as seems likely she ends up losing her personal archive, I’ll feel sorry for the nimble and innovative young photographer—but not so much for the suck-up to the stars.