• French media consultant Frédéric Filloux was offended by an off-color ad while visiting the Huffington Post, but for more than just the obvious reasons. This reveals to him that mediocrity is king at Arianna Huffington’s media empire, which also . . . :

“. . . acknowledges that its content is, in fact, cheap. It therefore admits that volume, rather than targeting or relevance, drives the value of its content.”

It’s a segue into a longer argument against cheap content, with this hopeful conclusion:

“In this ocean of mass audience low grade products, authentic journalistic efforts will have to get used to taking refuge on tiny audience islands. A consolation: such audiences will be solvent and willing to understand the true price of editorial. Hopefully.”

• Then the “Newsosaur,” Alan Mutter, dashes that hopefulness with plenty of pessimism that journalism startups will help fill the void. The reason, he asserts, is that journalists will be spending more of their time doing journalism, what they’ve always known, instead of working to build up their sites as businesses:

“Unless they invest as much deliberate effort in building audience and revenues as they do into chasing stories, the journalists run the very real risk of going broke and/or wearing themselves out before they achieve the critical mass necessary to ensure the long-term viability of their ventures.”

• The sports fan blogging conglomerate SB Nation rolled out city-specific sites in six markets on Monday, with a total of 20 coming on line by the end of June. There’s plenty of passion and unabashed fandom but (the story doesn’t mention this) precious little compensation for bloggers. Says chairman Jim Bankoff:

“We are actually complementary from what newspapers do. We embrace fan bias. Newspapers focus on objective coverage — and when you combine the two, you get both perspectives.”

• Blogging wages aren’t much better for those penning their bylines at Examiner.com, but new media guru Jeff Jarvis has no use for old media hand-wringing about the subject:

“Pro-am is the future. . . . If you care about journalism, you should want more of it.”

Jarvis, by the way, pays his bills by consulting in globe-trotting fashion on topics like this one, and writing books that are hardly cheap, and certainly not free. Here’s what I wrote about his spat with Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum, who rather effectively and deliciously replied to Jarvis’ open contempt for working journalists.

• I’ve rounded up some good reads on journalism at Ink-Drained Kvetch that include entrepreneurial/bootstrapping practices, upgrading skills and why a young print journalist walked out of his newsroom on his own volition to swim in the deep waters of uncertainty.

• At Atlanta Soccer News I noted the mention of a local soccer bar as one of the best in the country by GQ Magazine, which isn’t the only fashion glossy to jump on the World Cup bandwagon.

After some grueling writing and copywriting deadlines to meet, it’s time to play catch-up with some writers I’ve been wanting to mention here sooner:

• At Ink-Drained Kvetch, I posted today a collection of some recent links about the current state of journalism from Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon and James Fallows of The Atlantic.

The former lucidly explains how the act of journalism needs to be defined in the present context (and it’s not just for traditional journalists any more), while Fallows speaks with some of the engineers, computer scientists, journalists and assorted other technologists experimenting with news forms in the trenches at Google Labs.

I highly recommend reading through both links, plus a few others in my post.

• I generally don’t comment on politics, because I more or less subscribe to Ambrose Bierce’s assessment in “The Devil’s Dictionary” that it’s “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.”

Neither do I downplay its importance, and as the owner of a history degree I deeply appreciate historians who challenge us to be mindful of what we dislike.

Ron Rosenbaum has no use for the Tea Party crowd (neither do I), and his recent piece at Slate reveals his intensity about the subject with his usual polemical aplomb.

But that doesn’t prevent Rosenbaum, who wrote a book about the origins of Hitler’s evil, to warn that it’s foolish to ridicule the current wave of American anti-government zealots:

“Most people with a basic grounding in history find Tea Party ignorance something to laugh about, certainly not something to take seriously. But I would argue that history demonstrates that historical ignorance is dangerous and that it can have tragic consequences, however laughable it may initially seem. And thus the media, liberals, and others are misguided in laughing it off. And educated conservatives are irresponsible in staying silent in the face of these distortions.”

In the New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla has a go at the “libertarian mobs” (or “Tea Party Jacobins”) he also thinks “could shape our politics for some time.”

The folks at libertarian Reason Magazine’s Hit and Run blog in turn have some fun with Lilla:

“This is how the world looks to someone who thinks a revolt against bureaucratic institutions is a bad thing.”

This stuff just never ends. Which is why I usually stay away.

A couple of links roundups have been posted on two of my sites while the work of researching for writing purposes goes on:

• Selected journalism/media/web finds on entrepreneurial journalism, trust and bias in the news media and adverse uses of the Web can be found at Ink-Drained Kvetch.

• The origins and future of college athletics expansion is new at Extracurriculars, which is devoted to good reads about the sports world.