Michael Agger at Slate writes about the financial return on blogging, and his findings validate every blogger’s secret fear: In the grand scheme of things, we ain’t worth shit. Unless, says Technorati, we’re raking in a 100,000 or more unique visitors a month. In which case median annual revenue is roughly (wtf?) $75K+. All I need is for 100,000 of my closest friends to check out my blog once a month, click on a few penile enhancement ads, and I’ll be set. So long Creative Loafing!

But wait–I could continue to blog here @ City Desk with Gawker’s pay model, which pays $6.50 for every thousand page views. I’d have a reason to get dressed in the morning, brush my teeth, shave my uni-brow, etc., etc. I’d feel compelled to offer City Desk readers my best writing, my wittiest quips, my most intimate anecdotes. And based on the page views I’ve earned thus far, I’d make about…$12 every seven days or so. Fuck yea! That’s enough for one pack of cigarettes a week and a dollar-menu item per day!

Disclaimer: Bloggers who are susceptible to reality checks and/or own firearms should avoid reading Agger’s piece at all costs. Mostly to keep from learning how much Perez Hilton makes in a year. (I think Agger may have a typo in his story, but if the number he puts forward–$111,000 per month–is accurate, then Perez Hilton makes over a million dollars a year. A Million Fucking Dollars For Drawing Semen On AP Photos. [Dear god, I haven't asked you for anything since my sophomore year of college when I came down with food poisoning and shit my pants/vomited into my lap in front of all my friends, and I asked you to kill them for laughing at me, but I'm asking you now: Let that stat be a typo.])

Regardless of how much PH makes, I know this: I should have gone to law school.

Last minute addendum: The following arrived in an email from boss-man Erik Wemple (new title: King of the Downers), which he excerpted from a Paul Farhi piece. “Newspapers that were hoping to be rescued by their online ad businesses woke up to a sobering reality in mid-2007. By then, it was becoming clear that online advertising wasn’t growing fast enough to make up for the rapid disappearance of print ads (see “Online Salvation?” December 2007/January 2008). In fact, at the moment, online ads aren’t growing at all. Sales at newspaper Web sites fell 2.4 percent in the second quarter of 2008. This may be as ominous a development as the meltdown of print. Online newspaper revenues had grown smartly in every quarter since the Newspaper Association of America began tracking them in 2003. No longer.”

Today’s Washington Post has a horror story about how the apparent collapse of Century Pool Management, a swimming pool management firm in Gaithersburg, left a lot of young foreign lifeguards stranded in the U.S.

City Paper wrote about that same company’s reliance on labor from Eastern Europe at the beginning of the pool season.

At the time, Century and others in the recreation realm were complaining that changes in work visa regulations would keep tens of thousands of experienced lifeguards out of the U.S. this year. Only foreign students were still able to take the seasonal work legally this summer, while veteran first responders, who used to get into the U.S. using H-2B visas, were shut out when those visas were all-but eliminated amid the anti-immigration mania on Capitol Hill.

Century’s foreign lifeguards are quoted in the Post piece that Century stopped paying them before summer’s end, and now the company has shut its offices leaving the imported laborers unable to afford the trips home.

Welcome to America!

Everyone is gushing about the growing popularity of scooters. They get 65+ miles per gallon and are cheap to maintain and insure. Dealerships are selling out of popular models and buyers are acting like iPhone acolytes, making goofy plays to get what they want. My mechanic at Vespa Washington told me one guy recently got offered $6,000 cash for his Vespa by some dude on K Street. The dealership accepted a trade in of a 1965 Corvette (or was it a Mustang?) for a 50 cc Vespa.

There is one big downside, though, especially for us mishap-prone scooter owners: the wait for service is way longer than it was when the only scooter riders were mods and delivery men. If you want to schedule a tune-up at Vespa Washington, you’ll have to wait more than a month. In my case, I had to wait nearly a month for the shop to fix my ride after thieves tried to steal it and only succeeded in breaking the fork. It’s not as easy as just hiring more mechanics. There’s a shortage of qualified mechanics who know how to work on scooters. I wonder if they make more than journalists? Hmmmm.

Last night, I spoke to my grandfather for the first time in many months. The occasion was Father’s Day. “Happy Father’s Day,” I said to him. (My grandfather is also a father).

My grandfather was happy to hear from me. He refused to discuss Wisconsin, his health, my cousin’s upcoming wedding; he just wanted news from the nation’s capital. “What’s going on in Washington, other than a big funeral?” he asked. He was speaking, of course, about Tim Russert. “I’m speaking, of course, about Tim Russert,” he explained.

I told him about the general depression at the news, the many tributes, the cautious speculation about Russert’s replacement at Meet the Press.

My grandfather rarely misses an opportunity to impart to me some career advice. This was no exception. “I think you should apply for an internship,” my grandfather said. (My grandfather often tells me that I should apply for “an internship.”) “That weatherman, Willard Something,* started out as an intern,” my grandfather continued. “He was also the original Clarabell the Clown.** You should write a story about him. I know you need all the help you can get.***”

When I explained to my grandfather that I already had a job, and so didn’t need an internship, he insisted I should always be looking for something better. “Oh hell, you should just apply for Russert’s job,” my grandfather said. “You women are taking over everything anyway.”

* Scott

** Ronald McDonald

*** This part is, in fact, true.

“Young & Old, Let’s Get it On!” by Alpha Tango Bravo / Adam Baker

Mark Leventhal started a weight loss service for lawyers (WARNING: mildly intoxicating/annoying music plays when you open this link).

Why, I wondered after reading a press release about said service, do lawyers need their own weight loss service? This deserved a phone call.

It takes a lawyer to understand lawyers, Leventhal said—to know how to harness and work with the being that is Lawyer and make that Lawyer lose weight. For example, a lot of weight loss plans involve group meetings. But lawyers, it seems, don’t like to admit to weakness in public, so this program has no group meetings—instead, lawyers check in with Leventhal every day to talk one-on-one. But lawyers are also very rules oriented—more so than regular people. Leventhal can tell lawyers they have to keep detailed food diaries, and unlike regular people who say OK and then don’t, the lawyers will actually do it.

Plus, there’s the lifestyle stuff—like that lawyers go to lots of dinner meetings—and Leventhal’s program takes these lifestyle things into account. So when a lawyer is going to a dinner meeting, Leventhal calls the restaurant ahead of time to find out from the chef what on the menu isn’t too fatty. That way the lawyer knows what to order, and won’t be embarrassed in public by having to ask the waiter for low cal recommendations—but also won’t sabotage his (Leventhal’s lawyers are mostly men) weight loss goals.

As soon I was starting to come around—maybe lawyers really do need their own weight loss programs?—Leventhal let slip the most delightful thing that has set my mind a-reeling for the last few hours.

Read the rest of this entry »

Happy New Year, working women! Tomorrow, celebrate Equal Pay Day, the date representing how far into the year a woman must work in order to earn as much as a man earned the previous year. Here’s wishing you many more productive 16-month fiscal years in the future.

The National Committee on Pay Equity places the current wage gap at 33% 23%—for every dollar an American man earns, a woman will earn 77 cents. The gap is closing. But unnmarried women advocacy group (and internal punctuation activists) Women’s Voices. Women Vote has some more detailed statistics on the salary gap between unmarried women and married men. According to their data, in 2006, unmarried women earned 56 cents to a married man’s dollar, while married women earned 62 cents to their husbands’ buck.

Also interesting to note is that unmarried men haven’t got shit on married men, either. Those ubiquitous “Marriage Works” ads ain’t lying: In 2006, an unmarried man earned 64 cents to a married man’s dollar.

So what are the unmarried, the female, and particularly, the unmarried female to do? According to an economist friend of mine, just “work in higher paying industries and not have children.” And if you’ve been hesitating to settle on a husband, now might be the time to do it! Alternately, NCPE has some tips for wage and salary negotiations.

Usually e-mail forwards are stupid. The one I received today was not. In fact, I must share it. It has shown me how to be a better employee, nay, a better female employee. Back in 1943, Transportation Magazine published 11 tips for (male) managers on how to handle the new, necessary influx of lady employees in the workplace. Here are some of the most vital tips:

1. Pick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they’re less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or they wouldn’t be doing it.

3. General experience indicates that ‘husky’ girls—those who are just a little on the heavy side—are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.

4. Retain a physician to give each woman you hire a special physical examination—one covering female conditions. This step…reveals whether the employee-to-be has any female weaknesses which would make her mentally or physically unfit for the job.

8. Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.

So now I just have to get married, get husky, ask my doctor if I have any female weaknesses, and start bringing a comb and lipstick to work. Problems solved.

For the un-invited, uninformed out there, I have just caught wind of yet another closed online network. This one has at least 300,000 members, and it is called doostang.com. (Yup, really.) All the information in this blog post was gleaned from the part of the website anyone can access, as I am currently not a Doostang member. But anyway, here’s what I’ve been able to determine: Doostang is a job recruitment website started at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. I believe these quotes say it all:

“I will be going to NYC with Citigroup Private Equity. Thanks for setting up Doostang.”
Luis Miguel Ochoa, Stanford Class of 2007

“I found my current Corp Dev position via Doostang. It’s my 2nd week here and I love it!”
Roger, Bowdoin College

There’s a big debate over the day laborers that congregate near Home Depot in Northeast. Neighbors are pissed that these folks, well, piss and do other unseemly things in the vicinity. See this story in the Washington Times for more on that.

Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr. has proposed building a multiculti training center on the site, the better to handle the open-air labor market that has sprung up at this contractor hotspot.

Build the center, indeed. But before building the center, raze the entire shopping center, bulldoze the parking lot, and keep digging. As Washington City Paper pointed out years ago, this project was launched and executed hastily, to the eternal detriment of economic and community development in and around Brentwood. The whole thing sits too high off Brentwood Road NE, a problem that the developers handled by building a retaining wall and saying, essentially, the hell with it. Bring this eyesore to street level, make the shops front the street, and then build the day laborer site. How hard could that be?

Department of Corrections chief Devon Brown, now live on the D.C. Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta, just put out a cattle call for recruits. For the first time since Lorton Prison closed in 2001, the DOC is actively recruiting new corrections officers rather than relying on the pool of former Lorton guards.

So dust off those résumés!