What is the advantage? It’s like an NFL coach with a shitty team telling the beat reporters he thinks the solutions are already on the roster, I can’t decide if they really believe it or not. Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that all the money flowing into the hands of grubby little outsiders like me is a symbol of a broad discontent within the audience? Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that if nothing else this is useful market information, all of this steady drip drip drip of Lorenzians and Yglesiaii and Nates Silver, Bronze, and Gold? Tina Brown! When Tina Brown feels comfortable sitting at the freakazoid table at the high school cafeteria, perhaps it’s time to ask if maybe there’s some reason why, that maybe the business has grown myopic and scared, that it’s responded to financial difficulties by crawling into a defensive crouch. At exactly the time when the public’s appetite for outsider voices has been proven, quantitatively and with dollars attached, the usual suspects have built the walls higher around their pages, making freelance contribution even harder. Why? For who?