Table of Contents
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
Book 1 Feeding the Monster How Blogs Work
I Blogs Make the News 11
II How To Turn Nothing into Something in Three Way-Too-Easy Steps 17
III The Blog Con: How Publishers Make Money Online 31
IV Tactic #1: Bloggers Are Poor; Help Pay Their Bills 41
V Tactic #2: Tell Them What They Want to Hear 49
VI Tactic #3: Give Them What Spreads, Not What's Good 59
VII Tactic #4: Help Them Trick Their Readers 69
VIII Tactic #5: Sell Them Something They Can Sell (Exploit the One-Off Problem) 75
IX Tactic #6: Make it all about the Headline 87
X Tactic #7: Kill 'Em with Pageview Kindness 95
XI Tactic #8: Use The Technology Against Itself 105
XII Tactic #9: Just Make Stuff Up (Everyone Else is Doing It) 113
Book 2 The Monster Attacks What Blogs Mean
XIII Irin Carmon, The Daily show, and Me: The Perfect Storm of how Toxic Blogging can be 123
XIV There Are Others: The Manipulator Hall of Fame 133
XV Cute But Evil: Online Entertainment Tactics That Drug You and Me 139
XVI The Link Economy: The Leveraged Illusion of sourcing 145
XVII Extortion Via the Web: Facing the Online Shakedown 157
XVIII The Iterative Hustle: Online Journalism's Bogus Philosophy 165
XIX The Myth Of Corrections 177
XX Cheering On Our Own Deception 187
XXI The Dark Side of Snark: When Internet Humor Attacks 195
XXII The 21st-Century Degradation Ceremony: Blogs as Machines of Hatred and Punishment 207
XXIII Welcome to Unreality 215
XXIV How to Read a Blog: An Update on Account of all the Lies 223
Conclusion: So … Where to from Here? 229
Acknowledgments 237
Appendix A 239
Appendix B 259
Notes 279
Works Cited 289
Further Reading 291
Index 293