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Pixels Versus Pulp.

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Deadbeat Aditorial Meeting

One of my regular e mail bro's sent me a rant recently about what passes for the latest content in Deadbeat...aaah yes...Deadbeat. I'd almost forgotten about them. They are still in last year somewhere, tail wagging Lovano and the imploded industry line up game plan. Poor Deadbeat with fewer than 50 employees, numerous poorly paid stringers and a revenue base shrinking like a slushball on a Dallas summer sidewalk. It's like a bug in amber. I don't know why my friend cares.

The pulp backwater where the Village Voice, Deadbeat and various other relics slosh around has a very weak web presence, which may be all for the best. The Boston Phoenix is a similar fossil. More and more people get their news in an aggregate like Google News. It's another wonder of our time, especially since it introduced an element of choice where you get to promote or, best yet, demote news sources. I love that app!!!. Buh Bye Fox, WSJ, ABC,WAPO, LA Times and a whole vast media piggery and the cool by-product is, when you kick those hogs out of the system, all sorts of interesting source stuff happens. Who knew?

Newscorp, unfortunately and unlike the numbnuts at Deadbeat and what's left of the Voice, understands Search Engine Optimization. They are terrifyingly web savvy. They get page ranking and crowd the news feeds with their swill. Deadbeat and the Voice foolishly think their 'content' is worth money and paywall it. They are sinking fast. Page rank is everything.

Circulation numbers for rag piles is useless and in smaller entities, readily manipulated. Some little lawn paper kicks out bundles all over the place and most get tossed by the venues that give them shelf space but the press run passes for circulation, more like littering.

I've worked at web press facilities. The things are astonishingly wasteful. You burn through a few huge paper rolls just calibrating the run. The pulp paper industry is a reeking sulfur dioxide stew. You got to haul all that stuff around and dump it in restaurants and wherever thrown in with every other idiot's paper crap. Subscription magazines are the worst when they low ball the subscription price so they can sell your address to every junk mail jackass they can find. I made that mistake with Fortune, years ago..never again.

As for me, I'm shifting gears to a more interesting advocacy arena, shilling on steroids and the happy or dismayed beneficiary of all this shilling will be All About Jazz for the simple reason that it is the web benchmark for media content on the subject. Another significant reason is that the contributors generally do it for fun like Matt, Steve and me. The site crew is small and overworked and underpaid.

But 15 years of effort have given it page ranking to die for. That's all you need. So I'm doing free business development for it, building a sales team made up of musicians, making contact data spread sheets from my own vast bookmark files and beta testing it's functions with an eye to Web 2.0 enhancement options and shillery schemes.

I have used it as a link resource for what passes for my writing since the beginning. When I need a reference link for Francois Grillot or something, it's gonna be with AAJ or someone like Stef. It ain't gonna be in Deadbeat. They don't lift a finger unless the aditorial industry carcass urges.

And AAJ is thinking very hard about how to be useful to artists, besides actually writing about them. It's a grand big tent thing that has room for free jazz peeps who are ever the main victims of my tail wagging shillulations. That's all it needs to be, inclusive.

May I confess that, until recently, I never read jazz writers as a rule. I listen to the music and give thanks that it exists but I'd rather have a root canal than wade through a Deadbeat piece. I don't even read the career making saintly sorts who boost my friends. It matters to them, but not so much to me.

Bloggers are another matter. I like them and am happy to work with them as they take it back to the days when it was happy go lucky amateurs and follow their hearts whether its old folks revival stuff like the majestic Mr. Jazz Lives, the voluminous, hilarious and insightful mini memoirs from the web savvy elders such as Mr. Albertson or Ramsey or thoughtful pieces from all over the map.

And they all do it for free. Where much of jazz media has become some wreck hustling a buck. This crowd does it for fun without some stinking editor, citizens overwhelming mandarins.

I don't ever want to get paid for writing unless it is some eyeglaze job like the Animal Use Protocols or other tech documents I did in Biotech. You can't pay me to write and I sure as hell don't want a 'book deal.' I'm trying to work myself out of a job here and ever seek the most efficient way to do it. I had the amazing blind luck to have Triple Double as an office neighbor for a year and learned the ins and outs of web biz models in real time art state mode for free. I make decent dough as his data gnome.

So if I can carry this fire over to AAJ and all the other people I root for, it will be a hell of a lot more useful than writing in a blog. People will get jobs and writers will get paid. I have no objection to the idea of writing as a profession as long as it isn't me. I want to see people I respect thrive and prosper. And if it all works, I'm finally off the hook.

Plus it is pretty funny. The owner feeds my stuff into the AAJ aggregate. I let him know he doesn't have to as I'm fairly embarrassing and pretty low quality but he tolerates my nonsense anyway.

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