Among HuffPo’s top 11:

• iPod: little needs to be said, except, do you remember your life before having gigabytes of music in your pocket to listen to on demand?
• iTunes: made digital music downloads mainstream
• TiVo: the neutron bomb that hit TV. Do you remember when you had to watch TV in the order it was presented, or pop in a VHS tape to “time-shift”? How last millennium!
• Blackberrys/crackberrys/iPhones/PDAs in general: a computer on your belt or in your purse that is way more powerful than the computer you used to have on your desk, and it’s a phone and it’s connected to the web too!
• Kindle: still on the upswing, but do you remember where you were when Gutenberg invented the printing press? (don’t worry, it was 1439). You’ll tell your grandkids about seeing the first e-book. Yes, it’s that big.
• USB flash drives: flash memory in general is an absolutely revolutionary tool, as it allows us to record visual images (photos, video) on tiny devices that can go anywhere and record anything (which can then be uploaded on the worldwide communications platform we call The Internet). It also allows us to carry up to 300GB of data in our back pocket and hand it (say, nuclear secrets) to anyone we want.
• HDTV: 50 years after the commercialization of TV, the next step in picture quality, opening up all sorts of possibilities, but mostly, allowing men to watch football on giant screens.

Huffpo’s list is mainly “gadgets,” in other words tech hardware with some nifty software inside. What about things that were either sold or used only as software, on existing hardware? No diff really, but Huffpo skipped those, so here are a few I’d add:

• Google: came out in 98-99, but it didn’t gain popularity until 2000. Changed web search from a frustrating and incomplete exercise into an extension of our brains and thoughts.
• Facebook: changed online personas from sock puppets/imaginary selves to real people knitting their lives together.
• Twitter: it’s the first wave of the ‘real time web’ where information is shared almost as soon as it is created
• Blogging/content management systems: Took the creation of web content away from computer professionals and put it in the hands of everyone.
• Wikipedia: the open documentation and organization of all the world’s information
• YouTube: the first major step toward moving TV/video content onto the web. Trust me, by the end of the next decade, you won’t use a satellite dish or cable or rabbit ears to get TV content. It will all come over the Internet.
• Skype: buh bye, copper phone lines. Hullo, cheap voice and video phone calls over the web.
• BitTorrent: An amazingly simple way to share huge files containing entertainment (movies, concerts) over the net. I can now download a three hour, 1GB Springsteen show in about 15 minutes. At the beginning of the decade I was trading audio tapes by mail with people. How easy will it be in another decade?

I’d been wondering about the relevance of E&P in past months, so after getting over the initial shock, this decision comes as no surprise. E&P played an essential role in the newspaper industry in the pre-computer and pre-Internet days, but those days are gone forever. And like most of the media is covered, E&P had no real clue how to change with the times. Organizations like Media Bistro simply ate their lunch.

i just wanted to take a moment to note the passing of this trade magazine. It certainly signals the end of an era, amid the continuing death watch for major American newspapers.

This is not, as many assume, simply because the Internet came along and took away a lot of the advertising base, although that certainly has hastened their demise. It is, in my view, because the managers and journalists who run the nation’s big city newspapers got fat, lazy and complacent, well before the popularization of the Internet. They have only now really and truly woken up from this slumber, and it is probably way too late. Sorry guys.

The fact is that, even today, virtually all of the journalism on big city media web sites is subsidized, one way or the other, by the print side of the house. Even if the print side is losing money, it is still employing high-paid veteran journalists, whose articles are then posted on the paper’s web site. There, despite robust online traffic, those articles won’t generate nearly enough revenue to pay the salary of said journalists.

At some point, this model will become unsustainable, and those veteran journalist jobs will be gone. They will either not be replaced or they will be replaced by much, much cheaper labor.

I took the title of this post from an august conference at Yale Law School a few weeks back called “Journalism and the New Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messenger?” As the rest of the title of my post says, that is indeed the question.

I would have liked to attend the conference, but I only learned of it today, and besides, I don’t fly across the country for such things, unfortunately. But in a semi-ironic twist, I may very well wind up watching some of the proceedings from the comfort of my home or office, because they have posted video of the panels.

Two main forms of advertising supported the newspapers we know today: display ads from regional retailers, and classified ads, largely from auto dealerships and employers. These forms of advertising skyrocketed after the Second World War, as new and expanded metropolitan areas developed.

Guess what happened next: the world changed. The metro areas got developed, and the Internet came along. Both types of advertisers no longer needed the traditional regional newspaper to spread their message, and so they largely stopped advertising in them.

It was those revenues that supported the newspaper journalism we know today. And now they are gone, and they ain’t never comin’ back.

That doesn’t mean the practice of journalism goes away. But the cash cow that underwrote it has run out of milk. And for the most part, the managers and journalists who run big city newspapers are still flatfooted. It was probably never likely that they would lead the next revolution, but it’s always hard to watch people struggling with their economic mortality.

I’m going to end this stemwinder with a few thoughts about how the messenger might get paid:

• The non-profit model: There’s no reason why a non-profit can’t be the publisher of a newspaper. It is in this case (the St. Pete Times), and has been for years.
• Non-profit, part 2: Free-standing non-profits, such as Pro Publica, can also raise money, pay journalists and distribute their stories.
• Cheaper labor: pipe the City Council meeting to India. Have a writer there watch it and write the story. Fire or reassign the rumpled reporter who used to sit there to do more in-depth pieces.
• Change the advertising-to-content mix: It’s amazing how much stuff publishers are posting on the net, with so little advertising around it. Spread the content a lot thinner, and get more ads.

This is not April Fools, and this is not a joke. The Tweeter in question, Justin Halpern, had already signed a book deal with HarperCollins. He’s got more than 700,000 followers for a Twitter feed he only started in August.

BTW, what did you do with your summer?

Here are a couple of gems from what is, absolutely, a very fun guy and his son:

• “Son, no one gives a shit about all the things your cell phone does. You didn’t invent it, you just bought it. Anybody can do that.”
• “I hate paying bills… Son, don’t say “me too.” I didn’t say that looking to relate to you. I said it instead of “go away.”
• The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out.”
• “Just pay the parking ticket. Don’t be so outraged. You’re not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked.”

How this turns into a PG-rated CBS sitcom is a good question. “Stuff My Dad Says” isn’t likely to be half as funny, and “funny stuff that happens in my family” has been done, and done, and done, starting with “I Love Lucy” in the 1950s.

Of course, in today’s world, getting the deal, getting to make a pilot and even just getting to make a few bad episodes before being cancelled is an excellent way to a) make a living and b) leapfrog onto other projects.

Per my opening line: this IS a sign of the present and future. Life has moved online (duh) and mainstream, mass market communicators are finally taking notice. Look for more such crossovers on a TV, in a book, or on a movie screen near you.

After starting her blog in 2007, she says she was besieged with free product — full-size samples of everything she could possibly want. She describes being fairly journalistic about methodically trying the products and reviewing them. But more came in than she could handle and she gave a lot of it away to her friends and readers.

Then, the recession hit, and the companies a) got chintzy with the samples and b) wanted more out of sending a sample than the possibility of a post — they wanted guaranteed good coverage.

It’s a good post and worth reading for a firsthand account of how the other half lives. My value-add will be the PR perspective:

There are effectively no barriers to entry in blogging — anyone can be a waitress one day and “fashion and beauty blogger” the next (or both at the same time).

Pre-Internet, the barriers to being a recognized and influential writer were fairly high, which made it possible for PR to figure out who to deal with and what they were getting out of the arrangement.

Now, since anyone and everyone can position themselves as “influential,” PR has a lot more trouble to deal with. Accept anyone’s claim to legitimacy and you end up giving away your products, or set up barriers and get blowback like this.

I ran across an example of this that I wanted to share: TechCrunch‘s regular contributions to the WashingtonPost.com site. TechCrunch is one of the top online technology media outlets. It was founded by a non-media guy who has always proudly proclaimed his independent point of view. The Post, as you know, is one of the pillars of mainstream media.

But for the last several months, the Post has been running  articles from TechCrunch on its web site [I don't know if they are in the print version too]. These are in-depth pieces that definitely provide some heft to the Post’s technology coverage.

Anyway, the point of this post was just to note the continued blurring of the lines. This is not, I might add, cause for despair or hand-wringing — quite the opposite. Remember, if you get a hit on TechCrunch, it might make the Post too — a twofer! In any case, it’s just a matter of noting an evolution of the media and adapting to it.

Now that I’m older, wiser, and jaded, this seems like, duh, but back in my younger days, this really seemed like an issue to me. It was certainly evident that we journalists were largely steered to cover “acceptable” stories — city hall scandals, urban violence — while understanding that other stories — such as corporate control of the country, for instance — would not be career-building subjects.

So I left the media, did a half-dozen years of community service type work, then trended over to real corporate communications, figuring — seriously — that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Just so you know, I don’t always sleep well with this deal with the devil, but mostly, I’ve found a way to make a living while doing relatively benign “corporate communications.”

Today’s sermonette is prompted by the item in the Times today about the Los Angeles Kings hockey team hiring “their own reporter” to write stories about the team on the Kings’ web site. The story assures us that “reporter” is being given “complete autonomy to post reporting or commentary.”

However, the story goes on to fret: “how sure can readers be of tough, impartial coverage when image-conscious businesses are paying for it?”

As if the Gray Lady herself, the Times, isn’t image conscious.

First of all, this story isn’t news — Major League Baseball has had the same set up for its teams for several years. Secondly, it’s a damn good idea in today’s world. It’s a world of instant publishing on a global communications platform. Why wouldn’t you post your own fresh content?

And this brings us to “credibility.” Every media outlet has a point of view — you just have to figure it out and deal with it, whether you are a media consumer or a PR person. So this is just one more example of a type of media to deal with. Like I said, it’s all just corporate communications.

Inside peek: How The New York Times handles its blogs

Excerpt:

In many ways, the Times’ blogs are no different from anyone else’s. But there’s one organizational trick they employ very effectively: Division of Labor. Times bloggers don’t work on their own. They don’t handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post. The result is I can crank out more posts, and those posts are better overall, than if we writers did everything ourselves. I know, not everyone wants to have other people involved in their blogging. But there’s a reason people work in teams.

In the mainstream, there’s probably no more “prominent” spokesman for white supremacy than Pat Buchanan. I put prominent in quotes because the man is self-appointed, having never won election to anything.

In a recent appearance on the Rachel Maddow show, where he is a regular contributor, Buchanan once again spouted his white supremacy, non-white inferiority line of “reasoning” during a discussion of Sonya Sotomayor, and as usual, played fast and loose with the facts. While Maddow let him get away with it during the original segment, she took him to task in a follow-up segment, and in the process, gave the most eloquent and forceful endorsement of anti-racism I’ve ever heard on national TV.

This is a big subject, but let me summarize, because this is important to me:

• White supremacy means a world dominated by people who pass as white, and seeing the world through the lens of white peoples’ experiences and standards
• There’s a world of non-white people out there, and they have been systematically discriminated against by white people (don’t believe me — read some of these links)
• People like Pat Buchanan are completely bought into defending white supremacy and white privilege
• There is very little in the mainstream media as yet about combating racism and white supremacy, but I’m happy to say that in my personal/religious life, I’m deep at work on it.

I can’t do Maddow’s takedown justice by quoting her. You just have to watch it for yourself.

BTW, the relevance to PR: This country will be majority non-white in my children’s lifetime. If your comms aren’t changing to reflect this reality, you’re falling behind.

This has been a boon for PR — the more business media, the more PR people and resources needed to deal with them and pitch them.

It has never been easy to get coverage from the business media, but this year, it has gotten much tougher. Buyouts and closures are sweeping the media, taking out scores of talented and experienced business journalists.

Talking Biz News, a very good blog that follows the business media, reported today that 250 business media jobs were eliminated just during the first six months of 2009. That included the entire staff of Portfolio, the ill-timed new business mag from Conde Nast, and 100 positions throughout Bloomberg Media, which is heavily dependent on sales of its information to the financial services sector. But there have been scores of other jobs lost at national newspapers, regionals, magazines and business journals.

What does this mean for us in PR? It means we have to work ever harder to get stories placed. It means we can’t waste precious time pitching non-stories to over-worked journalists. It means that when we do pitch a story, we need to be ready to provide facts and figures, human interest, quotable quotes, photos, graphics and other sources for the story.

I know it’s hard to do. But that’s reality. So get back to work, people. Break’s over.