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• Tuesday, November 18, 2008 07:21 AM

  Joan Walsh, whoring for page views

  Sex sells, controversy sells, to put it simply. This article will probably get more page views than anything else Salon publishes this week. More page views equals higher ad rates, equals profitability. The only thing I'm not sure of is if Walsh is doing this consciously (in which case, she deserves at least a little evil genius respect), or if she actually thinks this is good writing (in which case, well, wow, just wow).

  This whole thing brings to mind a discussion I had with my cousin's wife. She worked for Rick Santorum's Pennsylvania Senate campaign, and when we were talking afterward about why he lost, she brought up that they thought that that wrestling ad (this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnfURvvNSI8) was "really successful" because it got so many page views. She didn't realize that the reason it got so many views is because people were linking to it to mock it. I picture Walsh sitting at her desk, looking at the page views for this and thinking "Wow, Kaplan is such a popular and great writer, look at how many people are reading this article! It's great how much respect and credibility she is bringing to Salon". Or maybe not.

  Salon is such a paradox to me - the regular columnists are mostly pretty good, and most the blogs (with the exception of Broadsheet, although the Machinist has been pretty poor as well since Farivar took over) are usually very good or at least decent, but the "featured stories" are often downright awful. The things that are mostly beyond Walsh's immediate control are good, the things that she presumably has more say over are hit or miss at best, downright asinine at worst. We can haz David Talbot back, plz? kthnxby

  —grad student Read grad student's other letters
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