Media's Facebook frenzy a snoozer
Mainstream media pros — that's me — climbed over each other to cover last week's overhyped Facebook event. Founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social site's new ad models and proclaimed a stupefyingly conceited Zuckerberg's Law — "Once every hundred years, media changes." But if the server logs at Slate are an indicator, no one cares but us hacks. My edgily-headlined report, "Why Facebook's Dinky New Ads Won't Topple Google," got prominent placement as Slate's No. 2 story of the day last Wednesday. The traffic report for last week shows it as one of my least-read Slate articles ever. It's well below the one about the talking pen, and far behind a primer on night-vision goggles that drew 20 times as many clicks (400,000 vs 20,000). No matter how good or bad the article itself was, readers didn't click to find out. Facebook vs Google? Yawn. The logs show they were much more interested in my editor's essay on how to fix Sports Illustrated.