People used to say that content was king. Amid the recent upheaval in mass media, Time Magazine recently demoted content to a pauper. But an article in the current issue of Wired makes me think Time set the bar too high. Content — or at least content creators — may be headed for serfdom.

The story is about Demand Media, a privately-held Web company that will earn $200 million in revenues this year producing thousands upon thousands of  content bits using a combination of algorithms and freelancers.

The algorithms sift through search terms to anticipate what people might want to know; determine whether there is a glut or surfeit of content in that regard; then estimates the likely revenue-potential of that content through pay per click advertising.

Human freelance editors turn these machine-generated leads into topics that are posted on a work board (Wired author Daniel Roth says, “It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot.”) Freelancers claim the topics. Short how-to articles may be worth $15. Brief videos $20.

As the article says, Demand Media has discovered that “online content is not worth very much.”

Surely that bodes ill for content creators.

Working at the center of the newspaper industry meltdown has been humbling. I can’t recall how many goodbye cakes I’ve tasted in the last few years. I’ve quite lost my appetite for them.

But I agree with Jack Shafer of Slate who thoroughly debunks the notion of legislation to benefit newspapers. In his piece, “Saving Newspapers from their Saviors,” Shafer writes:

Propping up troubled papers has a cost. It weakens the enterprises that are rising from below to compete with them to deliver advertising and, yes, deliver news.

If market forces doom incumbent media that doesn’t mean using news to build a community can’t be a money-making venture. It just means new people with fresh ideas will have to figure out how to do it. Meanwhile, as one of the incumbents who hasn’t been moved out or moved on, I have to work harder and think differently, because this is an interesting time to be in media.

Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at newspaper advertising in 2009 which is expected to collapse to $31.6 billion, or just below 1993 levels. When he adjusts for inflation the situation gets far worse:

You have to go back to 1965 to find a year with revenue lower in 2009 dollars than what this year is projected to be. That year, the industry took in $4.42 billion, which works out to $30.22 billion in current dollars. The industry can only hope this year hits 1966 levels, which work out to $32.4 billion in real dollars.

I wondered how the revenue picture aligned with newsroom staffing. I wasn’t able to find a comparable time series but I did scan a recent Congressional Research Service report on the state of the newspaper  industry which said:

Daily papers cut their newsrooms by 11% in 2008, the biggest one-year drop since 1978. Daily newsroom staffing is off 17% from the recent, 2001 peak of 56,400.28 According to Erica Smith, a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, nearly 10,000 journalists were laid-off or took buyouts in the first five months of 2009 alone.29

In 1984, when Rush Limbaugh was finding his voice on radio station KFBK in Sacramento, California, I had several in-laws who were initially charmed by his bombast, though they ceased to be fans after he moved to New York in 1988.

Since then Limbaugh has arguably become the nation’s demagogue in chief. A July 6 cover story in the New York Times Magazine reveals that his contract with Premier Radio Networks earns him about $38 million a year. Limbaugh says:

First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates.

Writer Zev Chafets says Limbaugh has gone deaf and wears a cochlear implant so he can hear callers. Not that he’s there to listen. That’s the audience’s job, as Chafets writes:

Limbaugh’s program that day was, as usual, a virtuoso performance. He took a few calls, but mostly he delivered a series of monologues on political and cultural topics. Limbaugh works extemporaneously. He has no writers or script, just notes and a producer on the line from New York with occasional bits of information. That day, and every day, he produced 10,000 words of fluent, often clever political talk.

Or what passes for political talk in America, I suppose. The wonder is that a man who, as we learn has a private jet and is considering the purchase of an NFL franchise, has apparently dialed in to a wide swath of the American psyche. The best line in the piece was an observation by his friend, Joel Surnow, that a movie of Limbaugh’s life would be “Citizen Kane” meets Howard Stern.