PepsiBlog is gone, whither ScienceBlogs.com?

July 8, 2010

Adam Bly, CEO and Visionaire in Chief of Seed Media Group (to which Scienceblogs.com belongs), has pulled the plug on the Pepsico blog titled “Food Frontiers”.

Undoubtedly he hopes this will stop the hemorrhaging of talent by giving the fence-sitters a way out. This is a big backdown on Bly’s part, make no mistake. It gives all of us (you know I blog over there, with co-blogger PhysioProf, right?) some very serious cover.

Will we take it?

Some stalwarts of the ScienceBlog community have already jumped ship. Lots of the journalist types have as well. I differentiate these two because there IS a palpable distinction between the way the journalist-leaning and book-author leaning bloggers approach the ScienceBlogs experience and the way just-bloggers do.

This is the focus of my current internal discussion, btw.

I’m not a journalist or a book author. I didn’t join Sb to give myself a platform for promoting my professional career. I didn’t do it to sell books. I don’t have their sensibilities when it comes to the alleged “Chinese Wall” of journalism and traditional news media.

What I DO have is a tremendous amount of scorn for what purports to be “ethics” in journalism. I see their obsession with appearances, the “Chinese wall” and confusion of advertising with news-ifying because they have to. They have brought this shit upon themselves.

My conceit is that we scientists have not quite done so yet, although the problems exemplified by the ongoing (and going, and going) Nemeroff affair should give me pause in my confidence.

Nevertheless, our normal workaday conflicts are, I believe out there in our declarations of grant funding sources. This is relevant to our industry, not blogging of course. Pseudonymous blogging makes it slightly more complicated but I believe the basics are covered. Sharing a blog collective with a corporate PR blog does not strike at my core the way a scientist who fails to disclose material conflicts of interest for his scientific writing does.

The point being, I do not feel myself sniffy and miffed the same way the journalist bloggers previously affiliated with ScienceBlogs.com do.

So I’m having to think a little harder about whether I want to continue with the borg.

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48 Responses to “PepsiBlog is gone, whither ScienceBlogs.com?”

  1. juniorprof Says:

    If you come back to wordpress maybe I’ll fire the old blog back up. How’s that for incentive? You could make an announcement right after The Lebron Show tonight.

    In all seriousness, I’m not getting the whole PepsiCo deal. Sure, the thing is sponsored by Pepsi but the content was going to be from their legit scientists and they were perfectly up front about it. Is this any different than Merck scientists presenting their work at a conference. Everyone knows they’re from Merck and everyone knows their presentations got cleared by the suits in legal and no one really cares. Maybe this isn’t the most fitting analogy and maybe I’m jaded because us pharmacologists work pretty closely with big-bad industry on a daily basis but I really don’t get it.

    When it comes right down to it all any scientist has, at the end of the day, is their integrity. In this economic climate I think that is something we all hold pretty dearly as you never know when that next budget cut (NIH or industry) is going to mean that your job is suddenly gone. I can’t imagine that those PepsiCo scientists would have been willing to sacrifice that for the sake of a PepsiCo propaganda machine on SB. I also find it fairly pathetic that more or less all the bloggers on SB jumped down their throats before they even got started.

    Like

  2. drugmonkey Says:

    if you read all the breast beating and comments (and I’m certain you have not :-)), it is readily apparent that some of the fervor is in the nature of “straw that broke the camel’s back”. i.e., a proximal push for a long standing set of grievances. Some shared, some unshared.

    I am trying to grapple with my major goals, sources of reinforcement for blogging and whether or not Sb still fits those needs.

    the attention is blogger crack…but we all know crack ain’t good for you in the long run

    Like

  3. juniorprof Says:

    Yeah, well, obviously I did not since your blog is more or less the only one I pay attention to over there but I did scan some of them. I figured something like that was part of it but the pomposity of the “money=bad” breast beating really got to me. The reason I more or less gave up on the blogging was to make sure I was successful in bringing in funds for the lab and making some jobs around here. Over the past year we did a really good job of bringing in money and making jobs and the whole thing totally changed my view on what this is all about. I’m sure those PepsiCo scientists are honest people trying to make a living for their family and there is no reason they shouldn’t be heard if they want to take a stab at some public outreach. People interested in science, especially trainees, desperately need to hear more about alternative career paths and what science is like in different careers and that is what I saw as an immediate potential good of that effort. Not impressed that a bunch of blowhards couldn’t see that.

    Anyway, I doubt that your attention will drop precipitously if you come back here (although I’m in no position to know). Your readers seem pretty loyal (even if they stop commenting for months at a time — see exhibit A: juniorprof) and I’d imagine most of them would follow you back here. Might refocus some of the discussions and bring back some of the one-on-one advice too… just a thought.

    Like

  4. Eskimo Says:

    Why shouldn’t you offer your opinions on relevant topics where you have knowledge, like many other NIH-funded scientists have for years?
    Is someone giving you trouble?
    A lot of what your posts do is start a conversation where others take the lead roles, rather than you propagandizing.
    I say do what you want and keep blogging on ScienceBlogs if you reach more people that way.

    If you don’t have time to blog and think it’s more appropriate to take care of your lab (a huge task), that’s certainly an honorable reason to hang back for a while.

    Like

  5. drugmonkey Says:

    jp, it wasn’t the money so much as the attempt to mingle naked corporate shillery with all the rest of the blogs. without identifying it as such.

    opinions vary. some see this as no different than the biases that any others of us embody, even if we have no formal connection between our institutional affiliations (i.e., real employers) and our Sb blogs.

    what I am trying to get my head around is that the ones that got the feistiest about this are the ones whose blogs ARE intimately connected to their real employer. meaning their free-lance writing, journalism and book authoring gigs / careers. Now THAT was weird. to me anyway.

    Like

  6. Art Says:

    I read Sb because it is an aggregator of blog posts from interesting people about, at least loosely, science. I manually pull posts off the 24 hours scroll to read. Is much as I like your posts, if it doesn’t show up on that scroll I won’t be reading it.

    Bummer to lose you if you exit Sb, but that’s life.

    Like

  7. myrmecos Says:

    “what I am trying to get my head around is that the ones that got the feistiest about this are the ones whose blogs ARE intimately connected to their real employer. meaning their free-lance writing, journalism and book authoring gigs / careers. Now THAT was weird. to me anyway.”

    That’s the least weird thing about Pepsigeddon.

    Self-employed freelancers and journalists are their own brand. In many respects the exodus isn’t idealism but naked capitalism.

    A blatant association with a corporate fakeblog projects the wrong image to the customer base of the freelancers. That’s bad for business, so of course they are the first to jump ship.

    What’s weird is that Seed seems completely out of touch with the motivations of the bloggers. Well, now that I’ve been at Sb and seen the lack of communication first hand, perhaps not so weird.

    The interesting question is why the Scientist-bloggers were happy to share space with the for-profit journalists and the book-writers in the first place.

    Like

  8. drugmonkey Says:

    I meant weird in the sense of the on-face outrage about Pepsiblog, not the fact that it injured their brands. That part I grasp :-)

    why the Scientist-bloggers were happy to share space with the for-profit journalists and the book-writers in the first place.

    I wouldn’t say it went unnoticed. but as I’m trying to work out here, I don’t see how the blogger’s personal business interests really challenge what I want to do with blogging. I may crack wise about Uncertain Chad’s relentless shilling but ultimately it is about communicating science to a broader audience. I can get behind that. I share those interests. I don’t share PepsiCo’s interests and in fact they are antithetical to my broader existence in a public health sphere.

    say, when is your coffee table book of critter pics going to come out anyway? I’d buy that… :-)

    Like

  9. pascalelane Says:

    So when and where can we buy WWDMD bracelets and other swag?

    Like

  10. pinus Says:

    why does cpp have a shirt that is anti DFW?

    Like

  11. drugmonkey Says:

    Is that still there? Dang.

    Like


  12. [...] help much, Jason Rosenhouse dismisses this as a teacup storm, and ERV has the best response. Drug Monkey settles in. Rebecca Skloot moves, twice. Even the Germans are sensibly commenting. Enough, already. I’ve [...]

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  13. bsci Says:

    I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this whole thing. If the management is consistently this tone deaf and you don’t see signs that will change, you can safely assume these types of events will happen approximately every 6 months. Is that worth the headache? Do you think management is finally getting the hint that perhaps it’s stable of bloggers should be part of its process when making key decisions?

    There are some really cool things about scienceblogs. There’s no question, there are bloggers that I was introduced to because they were deemed worthy of being on the site (others on the site, I could do without).

    One thing I’m still trying to wrap my mind around is why running a blog network costs so much? There are enough companies like WordPress that can outsource hosting at a reasonable rate. They have a couple of editors, but are those editors key to the value of the network? Is there a cheaper way to decide what appears on the front page?

    Now that I mention it that way, a dailykos type of format could be very interesting. The front-page indices could be individuals who have an established reputation and individual posts could be voted to prominence. In addition, their next rollout will include options for personally branded blogs and a bunch of built in social networking features. Most important, unlike Seed, Kos Media has a history of making webpages with user-generated content profitable primarily off of ad revenue (and subscriptions for ad-free pages). Worth contacting him to see if he’s interested in starting a new business?

    Like

  14. juniorprof Says:

    Bsci, let me get this straight, you’re advocating eliminating jobs or outsourcing them as a solution to running a network of blogs more cheaply in which maybe 50% of the bloggers use it as a platform to promote themselves? I am assuming, of course, that none of the bloggers pay SB for the space.

    Like

  15. drugmonkey Says:

    bsci, it is perhaps the case that running a “media group” housed in manhattan that costs so much…

    Like

  16. Neuro-conservative Says:

    I have been reading Sb for years and for a long time it has strictly been train-wreck-watching — The signal-to-noise is so low that the noise has become the signal.

    If you cut loose I will follow you here and not waste so much time and blood pressure thinking about those losers.

    Like

  17. bsci Says:

    I don’t think I’m suggesting outsourcing. For that matter, I’m not suggesting anything. I’m really just trying to figure out why Seed is having so much trouble profiting off underpaid writers at a highly trafficed site.

    If the “sciencebloggers” became a bunch of wordpress bloggers with some rough connective tissue, it would be inferior to the current product, but I’m not sure if the drop in cost matches the drop in quality. If people wanted to put their money where their mouth is, they could probably make an equivalent platform by hiring one or two people.

    I’m also not sure the Kos Media comparison is about where the company is based or the size of the staff. Granted, dailykos is a site with higher traffic, but hey have a fairly large number of paid full time or mostly full time staffers. See: http://dailykos.com/special/about2 I count 7 main employees, they also do contracting for discrete jobs, and they give some payment to their contributing editors. (Also note that calling your main writers “editors” makes clear their value in the corporate decision making process).

    Kos Media also built http://www.sbnation.com/ on a similar platform before selling it for a lot of money.

    I’m also not sure if the issue is Manhattan or the hiring policies of an internet-based company. Kos is in the SF Bay Area with gives Manhattan costs a run for their money. The difference is his employees are mostly people he met online or role in prominence at dailykos and they still live where ever they were living.

    Like

  18. drugmonkey Says:

    The web traffic of dailyKos absolutely dwarfs that of ScienceBlogs. If you check the people listed on the Seed Media Group website you will see that a similar ratio to your 7 Kos employees does not obtain.

    Lots of people are making a similar call for the disgruntled to set up another collective. One bit that may not be obvious is the tremendous traffic skew at ScienceBlogs at present. The top 3 blogs account for a huge fraction. Any way you look at it a blog that departs will lose a LOT of audience so estimating the initial revenue stream is not easy.

    Like

  19. bsci Says:

    I assumed dailyKos is much bigger, but I just surprised myself. I dont’ know which analytic sites to trust, but this one says they’r neck&neck with SB actually having slight more traffic:

    http://siteanalytics.compete.com/dailykos.com+scienceblogs.com/

    alexa metrics on each company actually put number of users and ranks fairly close with the typical dailykos user staying slightly longer. I’ll also note, that dailykos is more designed for direct interact rather than RSS feeds so the numbers might be higher.

    There must be some metrics where dk dwarfs sb, but I’m not sure what they are. I suspect the number of very reliable users dedicated to dk is much higher. As you mentioned, a good chunk of sb users might be visiting a single location and aren’t dedicated to the site itself.

    Like

  20. drugmonkey Says:

    well damn. Color me shocked as all hell. Obviously I was mistaken.

    Like

  21. myrmecos Says:

    I’m not sure I’d lose all that much traffic in departing Sb. I had about 1,000 hits/day at my old blog, and that’s what I’m getting at Sb as well- although I’m posting less frequently at present. I have a seriously niche blog, though, which might account for the stats oddity.

    If those dKos and Scienceblogs numbers are true, there is some serious accounting for that has to be done on the part of Seed re: where the ad $$$ goes. It’s scandalous they can’t hire even a single dedicated tech person.

    And, our ads are even larger and more instrusive than the dKos ads.

    Like

  22. bsci Says:

    dkos also has a paid, ad-free version, which, I suspect, brings in a non-trivial amount of income. dk’s full background and border ads are as intrusive as anything short of flash animations covering text.

    Also, I would have never found myrmecos’ blog if he hadn’t spent time on photosynthesis (which is sadly defunct). I bookmarked your main blog, but I strangely didn’t read it reliably once you left scienceblogs. You’re now in my RSS feed, but I’ll count as one reader you picked up at SB who is getting quite an education on stuff I knew little about.

    Like

  23. drugmonkey Says:

    myrmecos:
    I was really just getting going here at WP when we jumped to Sb so I’m shaped by that. but still, the difference over there when you have something on the site-wide display versus not is tremendous. Don’t you notice bumps by being in the top bar or being on reader picks? Don’t you see all the referrals from Pharyngula coming over?

    Like

  24. myrmecos Says:

    Thanks bsci!

    The trouble with keeping Sb readers after photosynthesis is that I can’t photograph interesting things at the furious rate I was posting them. I burned through two years of my best material in about a month, and then had to get back to my research and the usual things biologists do. So I don’t at all blame folks for not keeping up. My regular blog is rather slow in comparison.

    Like

  25. bsci Says:

    I came for the photos, but the text was interesting too. I was more referring to the idea of a different scientific visualization expert each month showing the best of their skills. You seemed to do the best (possibly because you burned through two years of material), but there must be others out there to take turns talking about visualization and its relation to their work.

    Like

  26. myrmecos Says:

    bsci- yeah, that puzzled me as well. The quality of the photography wasn’t at all the issue. The last guy, Ted Kinsman, was frickin amazing.

    Rather, I was the most bloggy of the photogs to begin with. I already had an active blog, a stable of regular commentators, and a developed sense of the medium. I also posted more. I suspect Sb could jump start Photo Synthesis by looking for bloggers who photograph, rather than photographers who blog.

    Dm- It’s true that getting front-paged is a difference. Sb traffic is prone to enormous swings- I was doing 25,000/day for a post on the iphone. But the background rate for regular, non-select posts is about the same at both sites. So I guess Sb gives me a latent audience for the occasional power-post, but failing that my regular readership is steady.

    Like

  27. bsci Says:

    I definitely agree that the other’s work was also very good, they just didn’t know how to post enough to properly engage the medium. Another possibility would be to extend it from purely photography to visualization (like I guess I was doing with my earlier wording). At minimum, that would greatly increase the pool of potential guest bloggers.

    Like

  28. bsci Says:

    Regarding the earlier comments with drugmonkey. Instead of talking about what would be done elsewhere, a friendlier conversation would be what could be done with a clean slate. (i.e. this could even be at SB if they want).

    Lets say you want to set up a “digital science salon featuring the leading bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines.” How would you do it? There are now multiple models like SB, Nature, and Discover. Each seems to have strengths and weaknesses. What would be your ideal?

    Could only invited people blog or could it be a system where anyone can have a blog and the best rise to prominence?

    What is the format? Independent blogs with a aggregator on the front page? Who decides what is featured?

    Who participates in side-wide decisions? Who has a voice/veto? Does the final decision rest with an individual or a vote? Who adjudicates conflict? Who gets paid?

    How does it sustain itself or earn profit?

    How do comments work? Are there benefits to a login system (with the option to post pseudonymously or anonymously?) Nested comment replies? Ranking of comments/commenters?

    I’m sure there are many other major interesting issues, but these are the first that came to mind.

    I’ll humbly suggest that this might actually be a good discussion to have on your SB blog (though don’t put my pseud in the post)

    Like

  29. drugmonkey Says:

    Are you talking the general blog aggregate picture now or just the ant images?

    Like

  30. bsci Says:

    The bigger general blog aggregate idea though maybe everything we need to know we can learn from ants.

    Like

  31. drugmonkey Says:

    Well let me just suggest that this is a bit like science. Many of the obvious (and not so obvious) ideas are available to a lot of people. Different options favor different people’s interests and visions so the outcome could go a number of ways.

    And ultimately, what wins out is the person (or people) who has (have) the resources, time and focus to actually make stuff happen.

    Like

  32. Neuro-conservative Says:

    I don’t think a collective is all that necessary. FSP maintains her status (don’t know about traffic) as a destination blog without any superstructure.

    Like

  33. bsci Says:

    And ultimately, what wins out is the person (or people) who has (have) the resources, time and focus to actually make stuff happen.

    I mostly agree, but the person who wins is the person who makes stuff happen AND convinces others to go along for the ride. SB is getting a bit rickety on the second part and ideas on what types of things would get the biggest buy-in would either help SB or whoever puts forward the time/resources next.

    N-C, as for what’s necessary, it depends on the goal. If the goal is to get a highly trafficked blog FSP is great. If your goal is to get communication across different fields and scientific interests, FSP is only marginally engaged in that discussion (i.e. just physics, generic academic life, & issues with being a woman in science). SB has been great at bringing people and ideas to my attention that I wouldn’t have randomly found on my own (i.e. myrmecos). Having a collective that is more likely to link to each other is a core thing that makes that happen.

    Like

  34. Neuro-conservative Says:

    @bsci —

    I dunno — I think the best “finds” happen organically and serendipitously, just by following links between un-networked blogs.

    I also think there are better ongoing “conversations” between DM, FSP, YFS, and a few others, than anything you might find within SB itself. By throwing such a heterogeneous mix into a confined space, way too much of the intra-SB “conversation” is merely flamewar, and the whole becomes less than the sum of the parts.

    Like

  35. drugmonkey Says:

    I agree with N-c that FSP makes it work (and by referrals she must have very nice traffic) and that serendipitous / random walk reading can turn up some cool stuff. But there is also some value in being hit in the face regularly with designed-in and even artificially enhanced* cross linking. As far as flamewar goes, well you know I’m occasionally an enthusiastic participant so we may differ on that.

    *collectives’ tradition of welcoming newcomers, sidebar auto lnks, etc

    Like

  36. drugmonkey Says:

    Responding to bsci, I am probably hopelessly unimaginative in that I do like Sb as the basic model. I’d tweak it but not revolutionize. Fix the commenting, make the whole thing work faster, tweak the highlighting of content to make it more balanced. That sort of thing.

    Discover is a bit too polished for my tastes, it certainly would rule my blog out. NN is too internally focused and sees the broader audience as scientists only. Too little interest in the public audience not in the trade.

    I tend to favor someone coming from more of a popular media type of perspective thinking about managing breadth. I would worry about most of us in the biz being able to see the breadth of fields that should be brought together. I mean these sustainable farming people? Wouldn’t have been on my radar but it is a welcome perspective.

    Like


  37. I think the real value of a network like SB *should* be in developing ways to push the larger conversations forward. We all have the things we primarily write about (animal cognition, neuroscience, sustainable farming, grantsmanship, etc), but presumably those who joined SB did so because we share some loosely defined set of goals with respect to communicating science more broadly, making science accessible, engaging society to discuss important scientific issues, etc.

    SB certainly lacks for the visual/technical improvements it sorely requires, but more importantly I think, it seemed to lack the follow-through for pushing the mission forward in terms of conversation and engagement. The last (only) example I can think of that seemed to work well was A Vote For Science.

    Like

  38. drugmonkey Says:

    The latter was promising, true. It was a basic operant psychology failure though. No payoff for participants. They ended up preferring to blog at home. For me it afforded the opportunity to keep drug politics / policy away from DM so I posted a couple of things. Say, maybe I should post the latest polling on the legalzeet initiative over there….

    Like


  39. So probably the solution isn’t to set up a new blog for every one of those large conversations. This is why we need creative people at the helm who have good ideas for how to make the logistics work, and qualified tech people who can take the ideas and make them work right and look pretty.

    Like

  40. bsci Says:

    For someone who is hopelessly unimaginative you’ve listed quite a few factors that aren’t combined in an existing service.
    1. Targeted to a lay AND professional audience (where everyone can interact and communicate)
    2. Welcoming of multiple writing voices with the recognition that not every reader might be drawn to the writer’s style.
    3. The central information aggregator is as balanced as possible
    4. Speed is vital
    5. Ease of content creation, both for bloggers and commenters, is vital.
    6. Managers with a broader vision who are looking for high quality voices that are missing from the discussion.
    7. Tools that encourage voices who might not usually talk with each other to communicate (i.e. when else would you have interacted with an activist/farmer in NY or an ethicist at some state school in CA?)
    8. Competent management that actively and regularly works with with the content creators to improve the overall product.

    Jason contributed to my # 7, but I’ll also give him:
    9. Brings together people who want to communicate science more accessibly and broadly, and engage society to discuss important scientific issues.

    I wouldn’t call any of this overly imaginative, but they are the core parts of a product that doesn’t currently exist and I suspect a reasonable number of people want.

    I think the biggest imaginative gap is how to get to identify the voices and figure out who to aggregate information so that the sum is more than the separate blogs. (I’ll note that another knock at NN and Discover is that neither has grappled with the challenges of aggregation as seriously or as well as SB even if SB’s front page is still very flawed).

    I wonder if there is a more creative way to combine topic-based hash tags, site activity, and user-based recommendations to easily create aggregated pages for a human or computer editor. For example, if a list of blogs on multiple sites were deemed prominent enough, every post with a “AVoteForScience” would automatically create a blog on a new site. Interestingly, such a system could potentially allow people to blog on their own sites with their own layouts as long as they were formatted in a way that the joint site could harvest their posts.

    Like

  41. DrugMonkey Says:

    bsci, I would argue that most of that exists at Sb and where deficiencies iccur they are in the execution, not the concept. I do like the model. A lot. But Sb is falling short of what it *should* be.

    Like

  42. Jason Says:

    bsci, i agree with DM’s analysis on this one.

    Just to continue using the example of A Vote For Science – perhaps it didn’t work when bloggers were blogging on a separate blog, when they would rather just do it on their own blogs. So what I would have done would be to create another channel (like “life science” “brain and behavior”) called “A Vote For Science.”

    On the back end, when we’re composing posts, we choose which channels to feed our posts to; i might pick: select feed, news feed, brain and behavior, information science.

    When you’re out on the SB front page and click on “Brain and Behavior” channel, what ends up loading is essentially an aggregate blog (a series of posts in reverse chronological order) comprised of posts in which people chose “Brain and Behavior” as a channel.

    To do the same for “A Vote for Science” would be trivial. It would mean creating the channel, and then a different stylesheet could be designed to make it look, on the user-end, somehow different from the other channels. It could be prominently featured somewhere on the SB homepage. This way the bloggers are writing on their own blogs, but by choosing the proper channel, they can all be aggregated in the same place. Add an “about” page and a sidebar and it would look exactly like all the other blogs.

    The technology is built into the existing platform, we just need creative people who can come up with these solutions (or minimally, people who are willing to entertain suggestions from the bloggers), and tech/design people who can make it happen.

    Like

  43. bsci Says:

    I see your point.
    I guess the frustrating point is the Seed management was visionary enough to put something novel together that a lot of people like, but was unable to understand their own limitations and hire people to do the practical management and IT jobs that they didn’t have the skills to do things themselves (even if it meant talking a lower position within their own company).

    I also still don’t get how they could be losing money on science blogs where they pay peanuts for 90% of the content creation. I can understand how Seed as a whole might not be profitable, but, if they treated scienceblogs as a separate line on their budget sheet, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t at least breaking even. I suspect they they’re trying to use scienceblogs to get more money to subsidize other projects. There’s nothing wrong with a company doing that as long as they are honest with their employees regarding why they’re trying to get the extra revenue. (The other option is the books are so disorganized they only know the bottom line for the whole company and have no clue how individual units are doing)

    Like

  44. drugmonkey Says:

    Bora took a page from bsci and posted the traffic comparo of Sb with SEED Mag’s site (all that remains, the print mag has been defunct for awhile now). It confirms that nobody reads that product. I would really like to know just what business Bly thinks he’s in and how/why he thinks as he does.

    Like

  45. Neuro-conservative Says:

    Whaddaya think Bly takes in salary, benefits, and expenses?

    Like

  46. Dirk Hanson Says:

    Putting out a big glossy full-color magazine that nobody buys and nobody reads produces a giant sucking sound, money-wise. When I first opened a copy of Seed Magazine, I thought, wow, these folks either have a nice financial benefactor and institutional grants, or they’re gonna go under in about 12 months.

    Like


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