The Smoking Gun business model works

The Smoking Gun, the 11-year-old blog that specializes in digging up public documents and mug shots, has created a business model online that works, says PBS media columnist Mark Glaser.

He reports that the site logged 5.7 million unique visitors last month with its outing of the bogus LA Times Tupac Shakur story and the photographs of Eliot Spitzer's prostitute. The Smoking Gun is still run by only three people, but manages to pull in about 3.75 million unique visitors per month, says its founder, William Bastone.

The site stands out because unlike many blogs it has stuck with original reporting rather than leaning heavily toward opinion.

The New York Times media columnist David Carr also did an interesting profile of the site recently.

Poynter: Scrolling No Longer a No-No

People may now be more willing to scoll further down web pages than previously though, according to a recent Poynter article. The way people read web pages is changing it says.

This is a reminder that it is important for us to remember that as we struggle to understand online journalism as a new medium, it is not static. It is dynamic and ever changing.

The article says a willingness to scroll may be the result of a generation gap, with younger people undeterred by long pages. It is interesting to think that many of us are the last generation of kids that will remember a time when our lives were not computer-centric. Our younger siblings and peers were probably on computers by the time they were weened. This must influence the development of their thought process and the way they work with computers, right?