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Journalist and screenwriter David Simon has published his first blog dispatch. His new site is called “The Audacity of Despair.”

After holding on to his website for many years, the creator of The Wire opened his site to share his online thoughts. In his introduction, Simon included a stern warning for all creators who write for free on the Internet. Check it out:

In short, for newspapers and book publishers, it has lately been an e-race to the bottom, and I have no desire to contribute to that new economy by writing for free in any format.  Not that what is posted here has much prolonged value — or in the case of previously published prose, hasn’t soured some beyond its expiration — but the principle, in which I genuinely believe, holds:  Writers everywhere do this to make a living, and some are doing fine work and barely getting by for their labor.  Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere.   If at any point in the future, this site offers more than a compendium of old prose work and the odd comment or two on recent events — if it grows in purpose or improves in execution — I might try to toss up a small monthly charge in support of one of the 501c3 charities that I soon hope to list in the How To Help section.  And yes, I know that doing so will lose a good many readers; but to me, anyway, the principle matters.   A free internet is wonderful for democratized, unresearched commentary, and it works well as a library of sorts for content that no longer needs a defense of its copyright.  But journalism, literature, film, music —  these endeavors need people operating at the highest professional level and they need to make a living doing what they do.  Copyright matters.  Content costs.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What if you promoted all day but never actually wrote anything?

Journalist Dennis Cass asks that question, and promotes his book at the same time in a bit of web video genius-ness. As I pointed out earlier today, more and more of the book promotion process is falling into the lap of the writer--so this sad-but-true-video is only going to get sadder and truer.

Over at the New York Observer, Choire Sicha got the literary blogosphere in a tizzy today by writing: "it’s not crazy at all to feel bad for the young male writers of our time, despite all they have done to us with their books. There are these legends that loom; all women, all terrifying. (Norman Mailer, sad to say, belongs to 1968, and that was so long ago already.)"

As a sort-of-young man writing in this young-men besotted world, I only have one piece of advice for anybody worried about that article. Read Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night. He had Vietnam and a divided Democratic Party; we have the Iraq War and another fractured political scene.

1968 wasn't so long ago. It's not about the quality of the men, it's about good writers meeting their historical moment. The next few troubled years will give all us literary men and women plenty to write about.