“Magazine ad pages have been down slightly this year, and newspaper revenues have been tanking. But the problem might not be the medium, the readership or even that pesky shift of reader attention and marketer dollars to digital. It might just be the poor quality of print ads…”

This is an interesting article, even if you don’t care at all about advertising. It is becoming increasingly clear to me (and too slowly to the people who matter) that this is all about quality. Not delivery, not distribution, or speed or connectivity, but quality. Those are important but they aren’t the ultimate motivation.

What I am seeing over and over again is that it is not the medium but the message that has failed. This a common theme for everyone, old and new. Remember the number one complaint about online video is quality. OnDemand Cable and TV offer essentially the same benefits as the internet–24/7 access–but the problem is that there simply isn’t that much great stuff to access. The internet hasn’t solved that problem, only offered a little bit of hope.

Ultimately, what we see if that the ONE thing Hollywood has always offered monopolistically is broken: Their ability to cultivate and recruit talent. That political bloggers are even being compared to newspaper reporters is enough of a victory–after all, they did it without the prestigious editors and filters and credentials. That new niches are being discovered and markets served contradicts the notions that Hollywood and Madison Avenue have their finger on the pulse. The message to artists was always this: You can’t do it without our help. And the small semblances of success these people have had online has blown that perception away. Where many people go wrong is in thinking that no help is needed at all. Idealism like that is unfounded, they just don’t need help from the current ruling elite. Why else would 62% of Americans say TV is getting worse? But that doesn’t mean that Robert Scoble gets to take over either, he is just as clueless. Who does? I don’t know.

The new design is up. It took a little while, but it was clearly worth the wait. Bunny is the genius behind the designs and Luke is tech mastermind. For the record, the picture is not of me. But if you can tell me who it is, I will be impressed with your knowledge of obscure music.

Couple of notes:

-Why a site? I don’t write in the same way or even on the same level as most of the other writers. But my goals are a little bit different. I don’t want to get in the business of 5 part series, and I will be more of a typical blogger than you’re used to seeing.

-The old links still send you to the old design. So you might need to readd them on delicious or StumbleUpon if you did it before.

-All the contact info from before is now under the Contact page. If you want to add me on Facebook, or Myspace or Digg or StumbleUpon, go ahead. I don’t bother people with notes and bulletins every two days.

–The Reading List is still there and I should be updating it shortly.

-Since I haven’t been living in my own place for the last four months, all my books have been in storage so I haven’t been able to update the Book Quotes and Passages section. Updates coming there as well.

It is very easy, after the fact to go back and create a chain of events that led to an accomplishment. You can sprinkle the path with delusions of foresight and determination that never really existed. For me, getting a Rudius site is not that. I remember vividly sitting in a high school classroom and thinking “I can do that.” I felt there was a connection between the way Tucker and Sadler and some of the early messageboard posters looked at the world. I bet there are at least a thousand other people that felt the same way. I have seen their applications. But I went out and did it. Almost everything I have done in the last 4 years was in someway connected to making that a reality. It wasn’t “I can do that now” or “I deserve that today” but that it was withing my range. And so I made it happen.

No question, there are a whole bunch of people who deserve more credit than I. And that in the big scheme of things, there are way more important milestones than being absorbed into a blog network. But this way something that was important to me and I fucking wore myself down doing it. Everything I read, all the people I talked to, all the times I made a fool of myself or set myself up for disappointment–all of it was for this goal.

And in the process I learned two crucial lessons:

1) Don’t talk, Just Do. This post is probably the first time Tucker ever heard me express how far back my desire for a site goes. The only person that needed to know was me. There is that cool line in Hustle and Flow, about how people who talk are too busy to walk. There were all sorts of steps I had to take beforehand and anything else would have been a distraction. And quite frankly, it’s a lot easier to Get Stuff Done when you keep your goals to yourself. Look at Law #3.

2) Don’t swing at the first pitch (unless it’s the best) I had a lot of opportunities where I could have asked and almost all of them would been rejected. Maybe, I could have gotten lucky, but the point is that I am best prepared now. What I did instead was finagle chances to prove myself, then worked my ass off doing it. Like I said, I’ve wanted this for years. Waiting was the harder option, striking was the easy way. When it is reversed–when holding back is easy and going for it is daunting, that is the time to make your move.

I have a bunch of new stuff written up and ready to post but I am going to wait for the relaunch to do it. It shouldn’t be much longer. Hold tight, they are on their way.