I thought that Sites That Women Don’t Want sounded like an exposé of the online pornography empire, but it turns out to be a fairly dead-on analysis of why sites such as Oxygen, iVillage, and Women.com are having financial woes: because women is not a terribly specific target audience. Well, duh. The problem is that women’s media (which was actually overwhelmingly authored and edited by men before the mid-1970s) have been ghettoized in the publishing trade for so long out of the serious magazines, that trying to build web sites based on that same old media model is inevitably going to end up in a fairly hopeless product.

Give this really excellent short story a read. I found it on Metascene…

Reading Salon.com News: Who’s afraid of the big bad Horowitz? brings back memories of, well, just a few weeks ago, actually. Since I have myself protested an advertisement in our campus newspaper, it strikes me that many of the people writing on this topic seem to have no idea of what the real issue is here (although those who note that David Horowitz is a self-aggrandizing pig making publicity for himself on the backs of young journalists, are not far off).

This is simply not a free press issue. Horowitz was not being censored by some evil cabal of thuggish p.c. mavens, and if the so-called Human Life Alliance’s pamphlet had not been distributed in The Plainsman, they would not have been censored either. Student newspapers are incapable of denying them a forum for their views, since David Horowitz and the HLA are rather rich national figures, and Horowitz is himself a columnist in Salon. The point of a campus newspaper, however, is not to give a voice to well-positioned outsiders who have enough money to buy their way in. The whole point is to give students an open forum.

This doesn’t mean that all political advertisements from outside sources should be banned, since I recognize that student newspapers do need to make money somehow. However, it is extremely hypocritical for Horowitz to pose as some kind of martyr to censorship. Particularly when he and his colleagues are doing it in the pages of a webzine which reaches literally millions more readers than campus newspapers could ever hope to reach.

If Horowitz and the HLA really want to make their voices heard, they ought to write a damn Letter to the Editor like everyone else, or else take their commercial advertisement where it belongs: a commercial newspaper.

I was rather surprised to see a relatively fair presentation of Utah’s new ombudsman for obscenity and pornography complaints in a Salon article from the Sex section, Mormon is nation’s first porn czar. I was unsurprised, if a bit disturbed, to find that Ms. Houston has been harassed with press gossip about her sex life:

Since taking the job, reporters have asked Houston about her own sex life, and the state’s largest newspaper, The Salt Lake Tribune, reported that she was a virgin.

However, kudos to her for standing up against it: Houston, who has never married, denies answering the question and says her sexual experience is irrelevant.

Man admits posting bounty for abortion provider [Salon] — Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to offering $1.5 million online to anyone who would murder an abortion provider. He could receive up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine for intimidating an abortion provider. Why the hell he isn’t in prison for a couple decades for attempted murder, I am not sure. Oh, PS, he will probably get a few more years in prison and/or whapped with another $250,000 in fines, for the child pornography that he happened to have on his computer when it was seized by authorities.