A few months ago I teased Jim Romenesko and the team over at the Poynter Institute for being so doggedly “prudish.” Well imagine my gratification to click on one of their harmless-sounding (if not quite grammatically unimpeachable) listicles, “5 Ways to Get People to Contribute Good Content for Your Site” and find myself reading…

Miner talked about the “Joe Francis theory of community editorial,” which her former coworker Laura Simkins coined. (Francis is the brain behind the Girls Gone Wild videos.) The theory suggests that the girls who appear in the videos aren’t likely the consumers of the DVDs.

So it truly has finally come to the “taking a page from the convicted felon tax cheat child pornographer playbook” point for the journalism industry, huh. Well. In that case I am just going to put it out there that in general, it is a challenge getting people to contribute good free content to anything unless they happen to enjoy the process of creating it, and since “masturbating while drunk” is a fairly enjoyable activity to a lot of people the internet is glutted with amateur porn and I am pretty sure Girls Gone Wild doesn’t actually make much money anymore, but if you’re wondering why the supply and demand of slightly more intellectually taxing content seems to be running low I think the answer begins with the fact that the people running websites these days are trying to emulate Joe Francis and the people looking at websites these days have been assaulted by porn for so many years now that they’ve even gotten sick of getting off.