It’s understandable that journalists shocked at the financial state of their industry would at some point think about a non-profit business model.

Behind the cynicism of most reporters lies a romantic streak, for one. We like the idea of being able to pursue our dedication apart from the muddied waters of the profit motive.

For another, we’ve all seen the damage caused by the short-sighted drive for profits in the large companies that own so many of the nation’s daily papers.

It’s well established that cost-cutting and ever-increasing boardroom demands for higher returns crippled papers in various ways when they needed to figure out how to navigate the internet.

But it’s a dead end, for a number of reasons. Here’s a few.

1. There is no money in it.

As I have written about before, one of the unfortunate aspects of the debate about the future of newspapers is how little basic knowledge of the economics of the industry is brought to the discussion.

A precis: Newspapers didn’t sell news and we as readers did not pay for it. Subscriptions make (and made) up only a small percentage of the paper’s revenues.

Newspapers earn their money by selling ads on newsprint and delivering them, via a societal convention cum monopoly, to people’s doorsteps’ each morning. The value of that monopoly subsidized the news gathering.

Unfortunately, the monopoly is seeing its value plunge precipitously.

The point is this: Any plan to make money doing journalism that doesn’t contain a revenue source involving magic money on this scale isn’t going to work.

2. And that’s only half of it.

It’s likely that a lot of the people reading this essay fancy themselves news junkies or the like.

Most people aren’t like us.

They go—or rather, went—to the papers for the sports section, the ads, the stock tables, the comics, the TV listings, or because they always did, or because their parents did.

What was the percentage that actually, you know, read the news? 40 percent? 30 percent?

In the non-profit model we ask readers to pay us for the news, via tax-deductible donations or voluntary subscriptions. (I’m assuming the news wouldn’t be up behind a pay wall.) 

It’s far to take as a benchmark of the money available for this what people used to pay for the daily paper delivery; at least, it’s as good a measure as is available.

So if you want to transfer the economics of newsgathering to the web, you have to take the small percentage of revenue the papers actually got from subscriptions—10 percent, 20 percent?—and then take 30 percent of that.

I’m not saying my calculations aren’t crude, but I am saying it’s a realistic place to start.

Now, there’s an upside, actually, on the other half of the equation. Doing a high-minded nonprofit news operation on the web doesn’t have the same overhead as a big city paper does. Let’s start with no delivery drivers or printers, HR departments or page designers.

No more of those fluff non-news departments, and no unions, either!

Still.

The costs-to-potential-income ratio is vastly, fatally, lopsided.

3. It’s not just that the economic base of the operation will be small. The readership will be, too.

People say they want news, of course. World news! Investigative reporting! Reporters digging through public records!

Yeah, right.

Let’s stipulate the creation of your online news site, created as a nonprofit, that somehow managed to craft together donations from whatever sources to get a staff together and writing strong journalism.

If it spent that money presenting high-minded news, it wouldn’t get much readership.

At Salon.com, which I think is a fair example to give, in that it balanced serious and investigative journalism with, uh, lots of articles about sex and TV, we all saw how few people read the articles that took the most time and money and effort to produce.

Now, it didn’t always happen that way. If you kept banging on a particular issue, over time you could build up a decent readership for in-depth reported stories on the subject. As I recall, the series of articles Eric Boehlert wrote about scummy Clear Channel, which I had the privilege of working on, got some pretty good numbers after we’d posted a few.

But even those would be dwarfed by anything about “Survivor,” or Lord of the Rings, or certain sexual proclivities, or, in the tech world, the open-source darling of the time.

(Let me tell you, an article about a Star Wars/Lord of the Rings trivia contest between lesbian Linux programmers would have caused an internet meltdown.)

Here’s the issue: Trying to build readership for a nonprofit news organization from scratch will be extremely difficult.

The interest just isn’t out there.

4. Aha! say the non-profit proponents. We will leaven the investigative work and stuff that’s good for society with lighter fare!

OK, let’s do it.

We have two options. We can try to find that audience-building fare for free, or we can pay for it.

The first option can work, and sometimes does, even if it does tend to involve videos of cats playing the piano.

Let’s take a breath and examine our business plan for option one:

“People are going to give us money for a non-profit enterprise to produce high-quality journalism, which generally they don’t want to read, but we’re going to lure them in with non-high-quality but more popular things, which we will produce for free.”

Hmmm—time to fine-tune. The second option—paying for the other stuff—can be effective, too, given some sharp editors capable of finding and nurturing talent. But the editors cost money, and so does the talent.

And that puts you into another tangled position—raising money to pay for the lures to your site … to get people to read the stuff they don’t really care about reading, which you also want people to give you money for.

5. But let’s say you figure out how to thread that needle.

You get an extraordinary group of people together ready to create, for free, content that will bring readers to the site. That content will draw attention to your operation and its worthy and societally important hard-news reporting.

Never going to happen. Why?

Because in the old-fashioned terrestrial printing or broadcasting models, the organizations could always get a base audience just by virtue of the fact they existed. The magazines were on the newsstand, in the newspaper boxes on the street, on peoples’ doorsteps; the TV or radio stations were right there to be stumbled upon by potentials viewers or listeners.

On the web there is no de facto or built-in audience. You have to come up with something to draw attention to yourself.

But: A nonprofit company is a timid company.

I’m not saying they won’t publish tough articles on tough subjects.

But that’s the stuff we’ve already talked about: The stuff people say they want to read and never do, and that we journalists want people to read, but know they don’t.

I’m talking about things that will bring readers to the site. Elements that will take chances, create sensations, and draw attention to themselves.

Now, once in a while non-profits do that, too, and often laudably stand up and brave criticism, and even withdrawal of their funding.

But they don’t like it. And in the long run they can’t make provocation part of their day-to-day business model.

You want content that draws attention on the internet? It has to be provocative.

I don’t mean Glenn Beck provocative. But you need people to take counter-intuitive, iconoclastic positions, just to find some attention in the vast web.

That’s all well and good, until the people go a bit too far.

Going too far works in some ways. It draws in like-minded people, starts building a community. In that context, a provocative columnist, say, can feed them red meat.

But then that starts undercutting your reporters and the news gatherers. Soon, some of the people paying the bills, whether big ticket funders or, in the fantasy we’re working with here, the bunch of regular people willing to put up their hard earned money for good, straightforward hard-hitting journalism, will start having second thoughts.

“Is my money going to that?!?”

No no no, you explain. Your money is going for the reporters….

“… But see, since no one cares about what the reporters are doing, we have to find alternative ways of getting eyeballs on the site, and our scheme is to have Fred, there, develop a crazy following to bring in people to read the actual journalism….”

It would be great if a nonprofit news site had the cojones, if you will excuse the expression, to make that argument. It actually makes sense, and a talented person could probably pull it off. (More on that in a minute.)

But I don’t think that DNA is going to be in the makeup of these sites.

5. What you really need to do is find a visionary.

A strong and capable leader, committed to the non-profit model, willing to use his or her flamboyance and charisma to keep the money coming in and get the company through the inevitable crises with good humor and reputation intact, could, in theory, lead a non-profit news site to success. .

There’s not a lot of people like that. They are valuable if you can find them, of course, and that’s their major drawback: They cost money.

That site in SF is already taking heat for the $400,000 salary it’s doled out to its CEO, a veteran not of publishing but of the the McKinsey consulting firm … and we’re still waiting to hear what it’s paying the top editor.

ProPublica pays nearly $600,000 for its editor.

That’s a fair model, I guess, if you don’t care about money, the publication’s image, the morale of its employees, or just basic standards of what’s appropriate and what isn’t in the nonprofit sphere.

Alan Mutter, on his site Reflections of a Newsosaur, notes there’s another available, like the one used in Minneapolis, where a $1 million or so annual budget keeps 18 people on salary and a lot of freelancers writing.

That’s a model that can make an honest appeal to contributors. But whose going to donate to a local news site where editors are getting paid $400,000? Who’s going to contribute free content?

6. And finally, non-profits are too goddamned wholesome.

Here’s a cheap shot, but I think it’s a good example.

That startup in SF got a local rich guy to pony up $5 million for a nonprofit news site there. Some other groups are involved and there are some other funding sources, too.

It was originally called the Bay Area News Project.

The new name? The Bay Citizen.

What a crummy name. It’s hokey, wishful, dishonest, smarmy and abstract all at the same time. It sounds like something out of a Hardy Boys book.

Is that what that $400,000 McKinsey consultant is bringing to the table?

Take a look through some of the home pages of the nonprofit sites up and running now — in San Diego, Orange County, Minneapolis — and you will see very little that’s compelling.

I’m not saying they are bad. I’m sure a lot of the information they are generating is worthy, too. I’m just saying that most people aren’t going to give those sights a second look. The headlines are turgid; the designs are cluttered.

As for the lighter material, check out some of the provocative commentary on the Minneapolis site: “In defense of libraries, both home and public”; “Whistling songs: at least 15 ways to annoy your friends and co-workers.”

——–

The trouble behind all of this is that we want people to be different from the way they are.

In reporters’ dreams, we all chip in a little to give them a livelihood, and their earnest, dutiful stories are the talk of the town.

But it didn’t happen that way before, and it’s not going to happen in the future.

——–

Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Dying (but don’t get talked about), part one.

Five Key Reasons Newspapers Are Dying (but don’t get talked about), part two.

The Sun-Times’ travails have gone on a ridiculously long time. In the form of a calamitous ownership by Rupert Murdoch, they predated my arrival in Chicago in 1988, and continue still. But the paper somehow managed to retain a formidable staff, which is of course what a newspaper is all about.

But people have been leaving, drip drip drip. DeRo’s departure was of course scooped by the amazing Rob Feder, who covered his beat at the Sun-Times (local radio and TV) better than any reporter I’ve ever watched. He not there any more, and did the story about DeRogatis for the ‘BEZ blogs.

Ebert remains, too. I don’t live in Chicago and so don’t see the paper day-to-day anymore. But the impression from afar is that it’s hard to see how losing people like Jim doesn’t represent the real beginning of a final door closing at the paper.

There’s a lot of talk about the disappearing film critics, or the disappearing rock critics. In fact, there’s a lot more and better writing on the web. The dirty secret is that most local film and rock critics aren’t that good, and even at prominent papers, as with most of the rock magazines, they fall into promotional writing, lassitude, and solopsism.

Jim’s an old friend, so take that into account when I say he was the best most aggressive and full-bodied pop writer in America. Was he irritating? Yes! Did he have hobby horses? Yes! Did he romanticize Lester Bangs too much? A thousand times yes!

But he listened aggressively, and championed new and local music, holding it to a national standard. He also took stands against rock’s geezer brigade, and took a lot of institutional heat for it. Unlike virtually every other pop music writer in America, he was also a reporter; he monitored the local scene, crusaded against city laws that threatened local live music, and just in general did more than do phoner interviews with pop acts coming through town.

He also wrote about the national music industry. He might be best-known nationally for breaking the R. Kelly story—and nearly going to jail because of it—but the salient fact there is that it wasn’t a fluke.

It was a natural result of being an actual fucking reporter—one whom people in the community turned to when there was an important story out there.

DeRogatis’s new position is at Columbia College in Chicago. It seems like a smart move for him—the S-T might not be around this time next year. He will still be doing his radio show and still writing. (Greg Kot, I should mention, is as formidable as DeRogatis on most of these counts; the city’s critical corps to this day far outstrips any other in the country.)

So I want to make clear. This isn’t a blow to readers, who will still be able to read him, or to DeRogatis, who will no doubt be better off outside of a calcifying institution; but it is the latest blow to a number of things: the country’s daily newspaper industry in general and the Sun-Times in particular, but also to a unique city’s sense of itself and shared experience.

A sample:

The Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup in ‘07. Yeah, a hockey team came to Anaheim. Yeah, they built an arena in Anaheim.

Everyone jumped on the poor guy, but to me it was a distilled and perfect piece of local journalism. I mean, accusing a local newspaper columnist of leaden humor, brain-dead solipsism or freakish sentimentality is just a waste of time.

Anyway, Whicker apologized, and in the end I’m with Keith Olbermann, who pointed out that columnists are allowed to have bad days; it’s the guy’s editors whose heads should be on the chopping block.

The affair jogged something in my memory, but it took a few days before it coalesced. Many years ago, back in Chicago, a local sportswriter got off a column, written as well after an unspeakable tragedy, that I personally think deserves to be remembered in a hall of fame right next to Whicker’s.

At the time, I contributed a weekly column on music for the Chicago Reader. (It was called … Hitsville.) I wrote a piece about that column, which drew a couple of funny letters, including one from the guy who wrote it.

Some time went by and I had an occasion to revisit the topic, which generated a stream of letters it pleases me much to read to this day.

The first Hitsville entry came as the second item in a two part column:

Hitsville
May 19, 1994
By Bill Wyman

Bad Sports
A Quincy goes out to Rick Telander, a Chicago-based Sports Illustrated senior writer and a regular on the cable sports-talk show The Sportswriters. The award, its name derived from the famed punk-rock episode of the Jack Klugman TV series (”Why do people listen to music that makes them want to hate, when they can listen to music that makes them want to love?”), goes to people who say stupid things about rock ‘n’ roll. Telander contributed the unctuously written, awkwardly titled story “Sport no nirvana, but structure can be life-saver” to last Sunday’s Trib sports section. The splashily played article’s thesis was that if Kurt Cobain had been involved in sports, the natural bonding mechanisms of the game might have saved him. “There is something about sport that I feel could have helped fill a void in the Seattle grunge king’s life,” wrote Telander. “Cobain was a sensitive, small, and troubled youth, and his parents could not, or would not, give him guidance. And he had no team. And he had no coach.” Hitsville avoids reading sports sections as a matter of course: is this sort of analysis typical? Organized sports consists almost entirely of suit-and-tied strategists telling the players what to do every other second; rock ‘n’ roll is basically a forum for artists to express themselves. Even with this difference, however, there are in rock ‘n’ roll what Telander calls, with unbearable condescension, “authority figures.” Cobain, for example, had a powerful management company (Gold Mountain) and label (Geffen) behind him–and he repeatedly went out of his way to thank them publicly for their help, though it was fairly uncool from the indie perspective to do so. The second problem with Telander’s argument is that Cobain had an instinctive and thorough loathing of male rituals in general and of sweaty, macho corporate sport in particular. “Rock and sports,” writes the addlepated Telander, “are like restive siblings,…two flip sides of a two-metal coin. Those boys who can, play sports; those who can’t, play music.” Barf. Cobain needed sports like he needed a hole in his head.

The letters came in soon after:

It’s a Guy Thing
Surely Rick Telander deserves as much derision as one can heap upon him. If you’ve ever read one of his pompous, overblown articles in Sports Illustrated, or seen that silly Sportswriters show you know what I mean. Del Crustaceans indeed!
However, Hitsville [May 20] earned its own Quincy with the stupid statement that “Cobain had an instinctive and thorough loathing of male rituals in general.” Oh yeah? Then why was he in a rock band?
Despite the proliferation of wimpy college rock R.E.M. clones and wife-core bands (bands that include four members, one of whom is the guitarist’s wife or girlfriend, who plays bass or drums) rock ‘n’ roll is nothing if not a macho male ritual.
From Elvis on down through Hendrix and Paul Rodgers all the way to Nash Kato, B-Real, and most certainly Nirvana, it always has been. And that’s the way it should be. Rock on, righteous brothers!
Robert Heintz
Skokie

This one was from the columnist:

Bill’s Bitchin’
Dear Reader:
I was a little puzzled by Bill Wyman’s review [Hitsville, May 20] of my article on Kurt Cobain, suicide, and sport that appeared in the May 15 issue of the Chicago Tribune. While I welcome intelligent debate on any subject, I am curious as to what got Wyman so bitchy about a 900-word essay that basically asked if there was anything that might have prevented one of the world’s brightest young rock stars from taking his life.

I speculated that the best parts of the sports world–teamwork, discipline, nurturing instruction–might have been of benefit even to a tormented poet like Cobain. The worst aspects of sport–domination, subservience, repression–help no one, of course, and I have written often about this fact.

But there is a structure to games that seems to help athletes cope with bigger problems. NBA player Brian Williams, for instance, was suicidal last year, but his sport, his coaches, and his teammates helped him get treatment for his depression and become productive again. In rock, who tells the superstars no? So you overdosed on drugs, just cancel the concert. Cobain’s people made many excuses for the star, even denying that his near-death in Europe several months ago was a suicide attempt. The glorious freedom of rock is also its biggest pitfall.

I didn’t suggest that Cobain should have been a jock, as Wyman seems to think. I said, rather, that athletes “find shelter in the fabric and discipline of their game.” I only wish Cobain could have found similar comfort.

Beyond his misunderstanding of my point, Wyman used some words that I found unusual. I haven’t seen “addlepated” since Dickens, for instance. And “barf”–whoa, the creativity. But as the old saying goes: those who can, write; those who can’t, be critics.

Rick Telander

All was quiet for a few weeks, until yet another tragedy transfixed the country. I offered up this observation:

Hitsville
June 24, 1994
By Bill Wyman

Bad Sports II
Watching O.J. Simpson’s absurdist flight from the law last Friday night, Hitsville was suddenly struck by a thought: What if Simpson the celebrity had not been born and bred in the uncaring, rough and tumble world of sport, but rather had been nurtured in the more solidarity-minded world of rock ‘n’ roll? There’s something about rock ‘n’ roll that I think might have filled a void in the Hall of Famer’s life. In rock ‘n’ roll, the artist is never truly alone: he or she is surrounded by bandmates, producers, agents and managers and label people, all concerned with his or her well-being. In the world of sport, by contrast, even the most popular figure, like Simpson, apparently had no one around to help him work through his problems. Even after he was accused of a grisly double murder, no one could persuade him to handle the charges sensibly. As a rock star, he would have had a trustworthy and loyal drummer or bassist at his side, or at least a manager and a lawyer to help him out. As it was, Simpson had no authority figures around. And he had no bassist. And he had no drummer. Sure there are some wife-beaters and murderous stalkers in rock music, but they find shelter in the fabric and discipline of the world of music. That, tragically, was something O.J. didn’t have.

Some people remembered the previous exchange; others didn’t. The letters, including another from Telander himself:

The Big Hurt
Editor:
I didn’t pick up the most recent edition of the Reader till today; you must have already received dozens of letters in response to Hitsville’s pointless observation [June 24] of the O.J. Simpson car chase episode. In wondering how O.J. might have handled his life differently had he been in a rock band rather than on a football team, Bill Wyman points out that there are many concerned people around a rock star should he or she have a personal crisis. Wyman surmises that “the fabric and discipline of the music world” could have saved Simpson. I have two words for Wyman: Kurt Cobain.
While I firmly believe in the naive notion of the transcendent, healing power of rock music, with every music biz fatality we are constantly reminded that there is pain that cannot be soothed by anything or anyone.
Lori Malinski
N. Moody

Stupid Ahistorical Drivel
Dear editor:
I do not number myself among Bill Wyman’s detractors regarding his musical criticism, but I am outraged by the obscenely stupid, ahistorical drivel he slobbered recently about O.J. Simpson [Hitsville, June 24]. The obvious idiocies are stunning: first, the history of rock and roll all too plainly shows that managers, agents, producers, and label people do not consistently effuse benevolent “concern” about musicians’ “well-being.” Second, does Wyman seriously believe that O.J. had no manager, no lawyer, no agent? As for bandmates, the tender bassists and drummers lovingly extolled by Wyman, O.J. had teammates, first and foremost of which was his college and professional buddy Al Cowlings, who was his teammate for ten times longer than the average life span of a rock and roll band. Even more obvious, rock and roll bandmates are often less than supportive: Wyman needs to reread his history, sadly lacking for a professional rock critic, about the legendarily acrimonious and often destructive musical partnerships that pass for the “solidarity-minded” world of rock and roll. Wyman’s short-term memory is also deficient: not two months ago he mourned the passing of Kurt Cobain, a troubled rock star who had the full complement of bassist, drummer, agents, managers, etc, but still managed to off himself amid the oh so rosy world of rock music.
However, Wyman’s last statements anger me most. What does he mean that the “potential wife beaters and murderous stalkers in rock . . . find shelter in the fabric and discipline of the music world”? Is he asserting that there aren’t any actual wife beaters and murderous stalkers in rock music? Excuse me? Ike Turner, anyone? More importantly, one of the key aspects of domestic abuse is the way it is hidden, ignored, covered up, and sheltered from public knowledge, something Wyman is contributing to by erasing it from the history of music. Second, what is it these potential beaters and stalkers find shelter from? I would think that the objects of their beatings and stalkings would have to seek shelter from them. I assume that Wyman meant to say that those musicians with the potential to beat or stalk find that, in the nurturing world of rock and roll, they can control their behavior, which is a crock in and of itself. However, his unfortunate phrasing implies that the music world shelters and protects these desires and behaviors, giving the impression that Wyman thinks that the music world’s ability to shelter its wife beaters from harm to themselves, rather than to others, is somehow a laudable thing. Although I hesitate to accuse Wyman of intending this meaning (I do heartily accuse him of extreme stupidity, insensitivity, and at the very least carelessness), it sounds like he is saying that what the potential wife beaters and stalkers in rock and roll actually find shelter from, what O.J. “tragically” didn’t find shelter from, is justice.
Meaghan Parker
Hyde Park

The Critic From Another Planet
Whatever Bill Wyman feels about Rick Telander’s opinion about Kurt Cobain’s lack of a coach [Hitsville, May 20], it is just that–an opinion. Mr. Telander is well versed in the facts of his chosen field, something that cannot equally be said for Mr. Wyman.

Bill Wyman states, “Organized sports consists almost entirely of suit-and-tied strategists” whereas “rock ‘n’ roll is basically a forum for artists to express themselves.” What utopian planet does Bill Wyman live on? I’m sure many musicians would love to go live there too.

Sure, maybe at the level of bar bands and small indie labels music may be played purely for art’s sake–people who play ball in college and the minor leagues may play for the love of the sport. But once you sign to a major label you become part of a giant selling machine that refers to you and your music as “product” and your talent is assessed by how many “units” you sell. Who do you think caused Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction to change the cover of their albums for K mart? A bunch of their buds going “Whoa dude, I find this kind of offensive”?

Maybe the Reader should have Steve Albini write your music column. At least he knows what the music business is really like.

Mark Springer
Chicago

Rock vs. Jock
Dear Reader,

It was with great annoyance, and little amusement, that I read Bill Wyman’s latest volley in the continuing juvenile pissing contest between himself and Rick Telander (”Bad Sports II,” Hitsville, June 24). Shame Bill’s tongue, fat with promise. Telander’s piece on Kurt Cobain’s death was pretentious and misguided; Wyman’s initial response [Hitsville, May 20] was based on a misinterpretation of Telander’s point and appeared strangely defensive. The attempted chastising of Telander in last week’s O.J.-based missive was nothing more than unnecessary one-upsmanship. I read Hitsville every week to learn interesting things about the national and local music scene, not to read grown men quarrel like a couple of children on a playground. Since Telander has already been awarded one, Hitsville should give itself a Quincy and move on.
Brian Beck
Chicago

Sports and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll
Dear Reader:

OK, I give. Hitsville psychologist Bill Wyman is right: sports are evil. Just look, as Wyman has [June 24], at what playing football has done to O.J. Simpson. Never mind that Simpson hasn’t strapped on a helmet in nearly 15 years, he clearly is representative of the athletes of the world.

Kurt Cobain killed himself while high on heroin, but as Wyman wants us to know, that’s just one of those little speed bumps on the road of rock creativity. Cobain couldn’t have handled somebody in a position of authority and respect offering him good, stern advice. Nah. After all, he had fellow junkie, er, wife, Courtney Love to guide him. And there was all that advice he could get from those other great Seattle band members, people like Stefanie Sargent of 7 Year Bitch or Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone. Huh? They’re dead, too, of overdoses? Darn.

One of Cobain’s problems was increasing friction with Nirvana bass player Krist Novoselic. Cobain should have solved that by using the bassist from Hole, his wife’s band. Her name is Kristen Pfaff, and . . . what? She OD’d on smack two weeks ago?

Well, nevermind. Rockers are artists. They need no guidance. But beware those World Cup soccer players. Thanks for setting us straight, Dr. Wyman.

Rick Telander
Sports Nut

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.

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.

The device is expected to be launched alongside new content deals, including some aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project. The touch-sensitive computer will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.

Those “content deals”?

Recording industry executives said Apple planned to use the larger screen to offer new services such as interactive booklets and liner notes that come along with purchases of entire music CDs.

While iTunes moved legal sales of digitised music into the mainstream, the digital take-up for full CDs has disappointed the industry. Consumers usually select just one or two tracks.

Wow—liner notes and interactive booklets!

Whenever I read the word “interactive” it reminds of me of last year, during the presidential campaign, when everyone I knew was following electoral college scenarios on various news websites. A friend of mine told me he liked the one at LATimes.com. “They have an interactive map,” he said.

It wasn’t until later, after more discussions, that I realized he didn’t know what “interactive”meant—that he could, in this instance, click on the states to turn them red or blue and so change the electoral vote totals. He just liked the colors and accepted that it was, somehow, “interactive.”

All of which is to say that such packages aren’t going to do anything for digital sales of full CDs. People buy just their favorite songs from their favorite artists because, now, they can.

In the great pop era coursing through the first decades of the last century, people bought sheet music—of songs, not albums. In the first ten or fifteen years of the rock era, too, they mostly bought songs, in the shape of 45s.

There followed, in a happy confluence of commercialism and art, the album era, which lasted right up until 2001. It was a good thirty years for the record industry—particularly when it got folks to rebuy their collections on cassette and then CD—but it’s over now. We’re back to people buying songs, and there’s no reason it’s going to revert.

My theory? Steve Jobs is tossing another handful of gossamer dust into the eyes of the industry. The last time was when he allowed the prices of music at the iTunes Store to rise.

It seemed like a defeat for Apple. In fact, to the extent the increase—up to $1.29, from its previous across-the-board 99 cents—drove people back to the file-sharing networks and undercut the music industry’s sales even more, it worked to his advantage.

(I won’t be surprised, should the fancy-schmancy new album packages come to fruition, if the labels charge a premium for them. How much more would you pay for an “interactive booklet”?)

Whether the tablet will be a hit or not no one knows—there’s an argument against it here—but I do know that music fans are not going to go back to shelling out $10-plus for filler-laden hour-plusses of music, interactive or not.

The LAT says he’s sold nine million around the world since his death. The Jackson operation, leaking to a hometown newspaper, has always used the world figures whenever the national one aren’t that hot, but let’s take it at face value. Next question: How many CDs, how many digital albums? How many digital tracks?

The story doesn’t say, doesn’t say, and doesn’t say.

Of U.S. sales, the story says this:

Nielsen SoundScan said Jackson’s albums sold 1.1 million copies over the last seven days and had combined to sell an impressive 2.3 million in the U.S. in the nearly three weeks since he died.

Meanwhile, the NYT reports similarly that he sold 1.1 million copies of his solo albums, but then says:

Almost 1.9 million tracks, separate from albums, were sold as digital downloads.

That makes it sound as if he sold another 200,000 albums’ worth digitally.

The sales aren’t insignificant, and I don’t mean to be cranky, but I don’t see them as particularly strong. Boy bands used to sell a lot more than a million albums in a week, though sales overall are a lot lower these days, of course. Finally, a crank will of course note that about half the sales are of two latter-day greatest-hits repackagings, Essential and (the hyperbolically titled) Number Ones.

Now, read Billboard closely, and you can see that Jackson sold 1.1 million for the week total, physical and digital album equivalents. The story says he sold 400,000 copies in the chart half-week immediately after his death, and then 800,000 last week, with a total since his death, three weeks ago, of about 2.3 million. Digital sales were high last week because retailers ran out of physical product. Now they are back in the pipeline.

For the nine million figure to be correct, Jackson would have to be selling almost four times as many CDs around the world as he is at home, a rate that, as we have seen, would far exceed his previous sales patterns.

Update: After nosing around, and checking in with worldwide sales expert Guillaume Vieira, I think it’s fair to say that Jackson has sold about seven million total worldwide in the weeks since his death. Vieira said specifically that the nine million figure is pieces shipped. In other words, the LAT—whose trumpeting of nine million sold was attributed to “a source”—was carrying Sony’s water.

Oh, wait:

[H]ere’s why the CBS Evening News is struggling in the ratings, how it can turn things around…and why none of it is Katie Couric’s fault.

That’s not the latest love letter to Katie Couric from Tom Shales or Howard Kurtz (or the LAT’s Matea Gold, or the NYT’s Jacques Steinberg …); that’s from Mediaite, the just-launched site that wants to give us the no-holds-barred, behind-the-scenes scoop on the media!

The title to that article is “The Current State of the CBS Evening News: Don’t Blame Katie.” After a no-doubt dogged series of interviews, the writer, Steve Krakauer, as the excerpt above indicates, set out to tell us what’s really wrong in what used to be called the Tiffany Network, before MTV bought it.

Now, as I read it, Krakauer after that big setup has exactly two reasons Couric is not to blame.

I know this because they are labeled “#1″ and #2.”

The first is “Politics.” The network, he says, is viewed as liberal.

Krakauer is referring to the image of the network when Dan Rather was the anchor. Funny thing. Times have changed and now, as you might have heard, NBC is the liberal network. The CBS image may no doubt linger, particularly among the senior-skewing evening news audience. But it has doubtless eased in recent years, particularly with the adoption of senior-friendly Katie Couric as anchor.

The other prong of his argument is that CBS’s audience is redder than the other networks. He cites a Time story on The Mentalist that makes the argument that CBS has “a lock” on throwback entertainment designed for the more traditional TV audience.

James Poniewozik is a strong analyst of TV, of course, but you could make the argument that he was, in effect, making the argument for The Mentalist. The hydra-headed amped-up CSI franchise on CBS is the opposite of everything The Mentalist is supposed to be. So is Survivor. So is Big Brother. So is The Big Bang Theory.

In other words, Krakauer’s argument a) isn’t true and b) to the extent it might be was supposed to have been eased by Couric.

Krakauer’s second argument (”Lead-in”) for Couric is that she has poor lead-ins from some CBS affiliates in LA and Chicago. Well, fine. She has some weak lead-ins from affiliates. But does that explain why her ratings have been dropping?

Here’s the case against Couric, none of which Krakauer acknowledges:

1) Her background is not substantive enough to be a network TV anchor. 2) Her experience is in the realm of infotainment*. 3) After that burst of publicity on her ascendance to the position, her ratings quickly dropped, and have consistently been far below that of her predecessor, Bob Shieffer. 4) The audience checked her out and decided it didn’t like her. 5) Her one big ratings bounce up came … after the last election, suggesting that America viewed her as a comforting lap to sit on when there wasn’t any real news out there. 6) Then they went down again. 7) Then they went down some more, to the point where she is now breaking her own record of the lowest ratings ever for the newscast. 8 ) For her reported $15 million salary, the network could hire 100 reporters and producers to, you know, report the news. 9) Instead of productively working to deal with these issues, she’s embarked on a long-running PR campaign, which, having exhausted all other venues, has now dripped down to internet startups looking for a little celebrity juice.

When, as seems inevitable, Couric gets dumped by CBS, shouldn’t Mediaite want to be ahead of that curve, rather than behind it with the likes of Howard Kurtz?

————–

* In an early post on Couric, I detailed some of the creepy stuff she did on the Today Show and referred to her, justifiably, as “the public face of a skanky network infotainment franchise.” More recently, I referred to her as a “skanky infotainment specialist“; a friend, offended, pointed out that I used the word to describe her. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s a fair comment; I shouldn’t call Couric herself “skanky.”

————

Previously in Hitsville:

Couric’s ratings: It gets worse
Confidential to Tom Shales and Howard Kurtz: Katie Couric’s ratings are in the tank again!
Couric Watch: Ratings plummet!
Paging Katie Couric!
Dear Tom Shales
Katie Couric—Where America Turns When the News Is Over™
Katie Couric, the News Anchor That Nobody Watches™
Couric and CBS, lying
Should CBS jettison its news division?
Katie Couric’s ratings hit a new low
Howie hearts Katie
Kurtz the lame
Couric, the debate, and the vaporization of CBS News
Katie Couric, a year later 

Us has been promoting the footage widely; the NYT today ran a short story saying that Pepsi claimed no knowledge of how the footage was leaked.

Wherever could it have come from?

The accident is a footnote to a footnote (the Pepsi campaign) to the batshit craziness that surrounded Jackson and his ludicrous family in the year or two after Thriller came out. The Victory Tour embarked upon by him and his brothers was one of the biggest organizational debacles in entertainment history.

The allegedly in-control Jackson was pressured by his family to go on tour with his brothers. Fair enough. But instead of simply hiring a promoter and setting up a simple and potentially astronomically lucrative MJ/Jacksons tour, Jackson let his brothers be in charge of it.

The first thing they did was hire Don King, which set the tone for the events to follow. For some pointless reason, Jackson’s parents were enlisted as producers, allowing them to skim a percentage off the top. Jackson quickly grew to distrust King in particular (who started the process off with a buffoonish press conference) and the set-up in general, and started bringing in his own producers, which created the predictable organizational chaos.

King had sold the Pepsi commercials on his own. (The Pepsi deal is often cited as an example of Jackson’s alleged brilliant business sense.) Jackson didn’t want to do them, and apparently tried to get out of them, and when he couldn’t limited his appearances as much as possible.

The fire happened when a small incendiary device went off too close to Jackson’s head. The footage looks a little scary, and the Jackson camp played up the injury mightily. But J. Randy Taraborrelli’s The Magic and the Madness says that the third-degree burn that resulted ultimately turned out to be the size of a quarter. I’m not minimizing the danger to Jackson, just relating the facts as they’ve been reported.

Jackson held up Pepsi for a while, and finally settled for a payment that was double of what he was making for the Pepsi commercials. (Taraborrelli says he donated the money to charity.)

So, two points: One, Where did the footage come from?

Taraborrelli: “As soon as the accident occurred, [Jackson manager John] Branca’s partner, Gary Stiffelman, seized the tape from the cameramen and took them. Pepsi didn’t have any footage. Michael had it all.”

I have two theories. One, a member of the Jackson family had a copy of the tape and sold it, LaToya style, to Us. Two, Branca, back in the picture as the executor of the Jackson estate, slipped it to the magazine.

So who stands to gain from its release? The angle Us is taking in its coverage, that the Pepsi accident got Jackson started on painkillers, points toward Branca, who might have released it with an agreed-upon editorial angle to jump-start a campaign to repair the mightily tarnished Jackson image.

If, a year from now, tawdry details of Jackson’s drug use have been dribbling out from the various medical and police investigations, a meme floating around that it all goes back to a tragic accident will give Jackson’s fans something comforting to think about when the truth is a little grimy.

Finally, it should be noted that the commercial itself featured a rewritten “Billie Jean,” with words like “It’s a whole new generation” replacing “Billie Jean is not my lover.” Jackson was pimping out the best song he would ever write to sell his fans sugar water.

Anyway, the plain ol’ paying for stories is now a little passé, but when the Jackson family is back in the news it never gets old. First up: The ever-enertaining LaToya, last seen at the Michael Jackson memorial wearing a hat the size of a manhole cover, and shown here to the right in a new ad for an Australian malt liquor.

She told the News of the World that her brother was murdered and she knows who did it:

As she posed a series of vital questions about 50-year-old Jacko’s sudden death 17 days ago at his rented mansion in Los Angeles, La Toya said the pop icon was:

• FED a series of addictive drugs to keep him submissive and controlled.
• KEPT from his family by manipulative people who blocked their visits.
• WORKED to exhaustion even though he DIDN’T want to do the gruelling string of 50 shows due to start at London’s O2 arena tomorrow.
• ROBBED of TWO MILLION in cash and gems as he lay dying.

Jackson never actually poses any “vital questions,” and never names her suspects, though she says she knows who they are:

“A couple of years ago Michael told me he was worried that people were out to get him. He said, ‘They’re gonna kill me for my publishing. They want my catalogues and they’re gonna kill me for these.’

“I knew something terrible was going to happen.”

Brushing her long dark hair back from her face—features that closely resemble her tragic brother’s—soft-spoken La Toya added: “Michael was being inappropriately treated by people who got him hooked on drugs.

“I can’t say who I believe is responsible as I don’t want to jeopardise the police investigation. But not everybody had Michael’s best interests at heart.