Hi all, I'm also delurking for my first post. I agree with much of what has been said thus far about the piece (thanks/sorry danah, etc.). Thank you, Terri, for inviting Monica to the list; complaining to each other is not as useful as educating outsiders. Two points stick out for me. First, while I agree this piece was definitely not up to snuff (the comment that all of us save danah have so little expertise that a reporter could exhaust it for a newspaper story is just laughable), I'm scared to say that it may be better than most of what the print world writes about the internet. For starters, she actually looked up and cited something from the internet, including the author's name--unjustified mockery notwithstanding. How many articles have you read that describe blogging and bloggers without citing a single blog--even citing specific breaking news stories without citing their source? (Yes, I know I'm returning the favor; I'd be embarrassed to do it in a blog post, though, and nobody's paying me to write those.) It's part of the broader trope of the internet as a dangerous place composed primarily of unsubstantiated rumors, dopey videos, and malware. "Internet as citation-worthy" and "internet as object of study" is a move up, even if we're portrayed as a backbiting lot of landgrabbers who have little to offer past danah's email address. Second, and relatedly, our corner of the world is particularly subject to a lack of quality coverage as the result of cutbacks in newsroom budgets. I can't speak to the specifics of this story, but in an era when most newspapers are cutting the staff they already have, they can't possibly be investing in the new people required to cover the internet competently and train their other beat reporters to do the same. Most of the other major topics in the newspaper--crime, business, policymaking, war, movies, sports--were well-established when Wall Street was still hungry for newspapers. They cope with cutbacks by forcing internet coverage through those strainers, so we get: internet crime, mergers & acquisitions news for tech stocks, and (abhorrent) coverage of (generally abhorrent) proposed tech legislation. This time, we got run through the "style" strainer and (surprise!) it's all about idol worship and jealous gossip. Internet-as-new-social-phenomenon coverage would be challenging in the best of times, and it's coming along when newspapers aren't laying out the capital to invest in new areas of investigation. Expect this trend to continue. Happy holidays, Bill Bill D. Herman Ph.D. Candidate Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania bherman (ampersand) asc.upenn.edu billdherman@gmail.com