AlwaysOn has an interesting entry from Mark Suster:
"Last night I co-hosted a dinner at Soho House in Los Angeles with some of the most senior people in the media industry with executives from Disney, Fox, Warner, media agencies and many promising tech and media startup CEOs. The topic was "the future of television and the digital living room." With all of the knowledge in the room the person who stole the night wasn't even on a panel. I had called on Chamillionaire from the audience and asked him to provide some views on how artists view social media, why they use it and where it's heading. He was riveting."
Really, his insights apply to anyone in new media.
Long-time Winds of Change readers will remember colleague/contributor Hossein Derakshan, the father of the Iranian blogosphere, who is noted in the column to your right.
It occurs to me that while I was away, you may not have been updated about this:
"Mr. Derakhshan, 35, is widely known by his online name "Hoder." He was born in Iran, but moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen in early adulthood. He is a staunch advocate of free expression in Iran, and became known as the "blogfather" of Iran's on-line community for training pro-democracy advocates to blog and podcast in the late nineties. Later, he apologized for his dissenting views, and emerged as an unlikely supporter of the regime, at one point comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a modern-day Che Guevara.
So when the Iranian government invited him to travel to Iran in 2008, he accepted, thinking he would help his country reach out to the world, according to friends and family. Upon his arrival, however, another branch of the government arrested him.
On Tuesday, he was convicted of insulting Islamic thought and religious figures, managing obscene websites and co-operating with "enemy states" because he visited Israel five years ago...."
He has been sentenced to 19.5 years in prison.
Hoder's attempt to find a locus of collaboration with the Islamic regime dilutes his status as a prisoner of conscience, but does not erase it. Or touch the legacy he leaves. He remains in my thoughts - and I hope, in yours.
One thread of the argument I'm personally interested in, however, is Goldberg's apparent belief that it's somehow extremely difficult for a young conservative with orthodox views "to break-in at places like NR, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, etc." One could be snide and observe that the very fact that Jonah Goldberg (!) was able to break into those venues is indication enough that it's in fact quite easy, but to be fair to other National Review writers when you're talking about a case that extreme you actually do need a boost from nepotism....I'd say the absence of a self-reflective ability - at all (as shown in this piece) is the biggest gap (of many) in MY's intellectual armor.

Right wing bloggers at the top of the food chain don't have to worry about this dynamic, because they're well compensated through a variety of means -- and also conspicuously silent on the subject. It's the toadies on the bottom who churn right wing propaganda for free who are whining, and they clearly don't understand the financial structure that both traditional media outlets and liberal blogs are operating within.Hmmm, let's go to the record: