Venture capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson is awfully touchy-feely when it comes to media.

"I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their f——— Representatives are." — Entertainment Weekly contributor Stephen King, on the decline of our culture and the rise of subject matter for his column. [Time]

Why are so many websites painful to look at and worse to use? Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman has found the culprit: the media. Reporters don't get the Web, he claims, or if they do, their bosses force them to run stories about business deals instead of design. An entertaining conspiracy theory, but entirely false. If anything, there's been very real pressure from newspaper and magazine publishers to churn out page after page of "special coverage" on design, packaged nicely with high-gloss advertisements. Online editors who closely watch website stats know better: Design stories, while occasionally worth doing, don't get the clicks. Good design is like pornography: People know it when they see it. They don't need to be lectured about it.

Currently, the top three bestselling titles for Amazon.com's Kindle, Jeff Bezos's tree-killer killer, are newspapers and magazines: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time magazine. Despite the fear that newspapers and magazines are dying, they are the most popular purchase on the future's book killer. These traditional publications are all available online, mostly for free. Kindle purchasers, in other words are spendthrift, hyperliterate gadget junkies who feel guilty about both the environment and the demise of old media. Who besides Craig Newmark is buying this thing? I can't wait to I buy a $20 Kindle on eBay — a past reminder of a failed future.

Yahoo president Susan Decker's newspaper consortium is just fine, thank you. Just ask Yahoo PR, which today announced that 17 new newpapers have joined, raising the total to 415 dailies and another 140 weeklies. It's a big number; the result of a rare good idea out of Yahoo. Problem is, Yahoo's blowing it.

Hollywood writers striking over Internet compensation plan to resume talks with film and TV producers Monday, November 26. Why? Wouldn't you rush to terms if you were being forced to spend time "in solidarity" with washed-up actors like Ray Romano, Brad Garrett, and Jason Alexander?

Beatblogging.org is a new site about hybrid forms of collaborative information gathering backed by thirteen credible news publications including Wired.com and the San Jose Mercury News. The premise:

The premise behind Facebook's Social Ads is the notion that users of the social network will declare their brand loyalty on the site, and thereby opt into targeted ads from some of their favorite corporations. Starbucks, despite a recent dip in store visits after a price hike, serves 44 million customers a week. So you'd think a few of those customers might have admitted to being fans of Facebook, right? Wrong. Facebook's Starbucks product page has all of 59 fans. I think there were that many people in my local Starbucks the last time I bought a latte.

Despite condemnations from Star editor and notorious nobody Julia Allison, who called Google's New York cafeteria "questionable," the New York Department of Health has decided the loudly colored eatery is safe enough for now, according to health-inspection reports found by the Hygenie blog. It's cleaner, even, than old-media stalwart Hearst's cafeteria. This despite the fact that Google houses its New York office in a grimy old Soho Chelsea bus repair shop and Hearst just spent $500 million on its new headquarters. (Photo by advencap)

You'll recall a certain conference about blogging that went mostly unattended and unmentioned. Well, Read/WriteWeb's Alex Iskold actually went, and came back with a gem of a navelgazing thumbsucker, too. I'm not sure how using Google Trends, which tracks the frequency of searches on terms, gets you anything meaningful about "blogging" versus "newspapers," but I'm sure I don't care. This one's for the dead-tree lovers among us, baby.

Writers are striking in Hollywood because they want a bigger piece — in fact, any piece — of revenue studios earn when they put content online. The studios like to claim the content is "promotional" — a use for which writers don't get paid — and that the promise of the Internet isn't fully understood yet. The World Wide Web might still be a fad. Nonsense, say writers, who have distributed fliers claiming Disney will pull in $1.5 billion in digital revenue this year.

"What would happen if a Web site's readers — instead of editors — could decide which stories should be published?" The Wall Street Journal posed that question nearly two years ago, in an article about Digg, the social-news website. Now, the Journal's editors are letting Digg users make those decisions for them. Articles on WSJ.com will carry Digg buttons, says Digg founder Kevin Rose in a blog post. When users "digg," or vote for, the stories, they won't require a subscription to read. Since it's easy to submit articles to Digg, this makes the entire website essentially free — or at least the stories Digg users care about. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, the Journal's new owner, has been making noises about dropping the website's subscription barrier. This deal with Digg pretty much tears down the paywall for him.

For at least the third year in a row, Reader's Digest has excerpted a few headlines from totally-not-safe-for-work humor/craziness site Fark. After the jump, why you Digg fans should stop snorting into your lattes.

CNN is planting its foot into Second Life, if only to claim it was there before the fall. But the news organization isn't looking to understand the virtual void firsthand — it's leaving the actual legwork to the resident population. A genius move. At any given time, there are 80,000 idle thumbs with nothing better to do than lurk about in the big empty and file reports to CNN, sparing the cost of an expensive journalist to the virtual world, as competitors like Reuters have done. We're just waiting to see headlines like "Rain of penises disrupt interview with former virtual masseuse" on CNN's headline crawl.

He's never going to live it down. Otherwise likable Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's ludicrous pronouncement is on its way to becoming his I-invented-the-Internet tagline. Why? Because he made the mistake of proclaiming Zuck's Law to a roomful of very senior people who work in — you got it — media. Mistaking his audience for Web 2.0 fanboys, Zuckerberg turned his big moment into a running joke among reporters and publicists alike. I heard it repeated several times at last night's San Francisco book party for Fake Steve author Dan Lyons. You know: "Once every hundred years, Forbes picks up the tab," etc. I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg didn't write the doofy line himself. But when you're CEO, you needn't parrot your publicists. My advice? Mark, don't take it back. Instead, repeat it over and over. Convince a critical mass of A-listers to abandon their blogs in favor of Facebook profiles, the new media for a new century. Here's a helpful hint: Some of those guys can be bought. (Photo by AP/Craig Ruttle)

Digg is close to announcing its sale to a major media player for $300 million to $400 million, according to sources close to the company, I hear. When I floated this Digg rumor past some knowledgeable friends, several scoffed: "When isn't Digg up for sale?" It's true: The news-discussion site is perpetually in talks — but we hear the price tag always sinks potential deals before they're consummated. CBS, for example, backed off, with effervescent dealmaker Quincy Smith citing the media company's bubbly $280 million purchase of Last.fm as the reason it couldn't bid a high price for Digg. Things are different now, though.

When we first began to cover the many close relationships between flauntrepreneur Scott Jones's ChaCha search engine and Indiana University, the Indiana Herald-Times was one of the few local newspapers to closely question the relationship. Steve Hinnefeld of the Herald-Times was even following Valleywag's coverage, and came to similar conclusions: Although nothing legally wrong occurred, IU officials' failure to disclose their ChaCha ties was suspicious. However, since then the newspaper has provided the issue little attention. Why?

As the only Valleywagger who writes for the Wall Street Journal, I get lots of email from readers who want to know Sweet, how can I land that gig next time you're busy? Careful what you wish for. Freelance writing is hard work. Unless, that is, you follow my easy guide to slacking your way to the top — well, not really the top, but sort of near the top. Which is the whole idea.