Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users « Clay Shirky:

To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular.

The article threshold has often been discussed as if it was simply a new method of getting readers to pay, to which the reply has to be “Yes, except for most of them.” Calling article thresholds a “leaky” or “porous” paywall understates the enormity of the change; the metaphor of a leak suggests a mostly intact container that lets out a minority of its contents, but a paper that shares even two pages a month frees a majority of users from any fee at all. By the time the threshold is at 20 pages (a number fast becoming customary) a paper has given up on even trying to charge between 85% and 95% of its readers, and it will only convince a minority of that minority to pay.

The Believer – Haterade:

When I think of the coiners of the term haterade, those young, mean/smart, media-obsessed bloggers on mean/smart, media-obsessed websites who seem to be able to whip up five hundred words of clever commentary in the time it takes people my age to think of an opening sentence, I wonder if their brains are wired in such a way that the slings and arrows of free-flowing obloquy don’t inflict quite as much pain on them as they might on their elders. The fact that they’ve developed several playful iterations of the word hate—you can hate on someone, show some hatitude, or simply be a hater—suggests that they’ve found a way to laugh at and therefore defang (reappropriate?) the whole gestalt. But I also wonder how often they get to experience the thrill of clueless abandon. I wonder if they’ve ever really been able to express anything—in print, on a blog, on Facebook, wherever—without on some level bracing themselves for mockery or scorn or troll-driven pestilence. I wonder if they could write something as controversial as “Safe-Sex Lies” (even in a more coherent form) and expect anything less than a full-blown assault from an electronic lynch mob and a lifetime of damning search-engine results.

Source: True_BS

Opinion: It never ends how it starts:

One also has to ask what, if anything, did Hosking learn from the experience, given that when a team-mate told her over dinner Sunday evening her comments were spread across the Twitterverse, she told reporters the next day, “It’s gotten the world talking about women’s cycling, hasn’t it?”

Source: VeloNews

USA Cycling Cyclo-cross National Championships:

In a heavyweight slugfest for the ages, Jeremy Powers (Rapha Focus) withstood a barrage of blows from rivals accounting for eight of the last 11 national titles before ultimately delivering his own knockout punch and his first national championship.

Amidst raucous applause, a visibly moved Powers crossed the finish line first in the final event of the five-day USA Cycling Cyclocross Championships held at Badger Prairie Park near Madison, Wisconsin with a hard-fought and masterfully measured performance.