An influential media strategist reveals how blogs are controlling the news in the digital age and exposes the ways in which today's marketers are manufacturing news stories, affecting stock prices, and shaping elections.

Originally published with different preface and appendices: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, 2012.

Book I. Feeding the monster: how blogs work : Blogs make the news -- How to turn nothing into something in three way-too-easy steps -- The blog con: how publishers make money online -- Tactic #1. Bloggers are poor, help pay their bills -- Tactic #2. Tell them what they want to hear -- Tactic #3. Give them what spreads, not what's good -- Tactic #4. Help them trick their readers -- Tactic #5. Sell them something they can sell (exploit the one-off problem) -- Tactic #6. Make it all about the headline -- Tactic #7. Kill 'em with pageview kindness -- Tactic #8. Use the technology against itself -- Tactic #9. Just make stuff up (everyone else is doing it) -- Book II. The monster attacks: what blogs mean : Irin Carmon, The Daily show, and me: the perfect storm of how toxic blogging can be -- There are others: the manipulator hall of fame -- Cute but evil: online entertainment tactics that drug you and me -- The link economy: the leveraged illusion of sourcing -- Extortion via the web: facing the online shakedown -- The iterative hustle: online journalism's bogus philosophy -- The myth of corrections -- Cheering on our own deception -- The dark side of snark: when Internet humor attacks -- The 21st century degradation ceremony: blogs as machines of hatred and punishment -- Welcome to unreality -- How to read a blog: an update on account of all the lies -- Conclusion : So ... where to from here? -- Appendix A. [Case studies] : Infiltrating an exposing helpareporterout.com: a microcosm for everything wrong with online journalism -- Punking celebrity gossip: creating a fake twitter scandal -- The Tucker Mex Planned Parenthood clinic: a rejected $500,000 donation becomes a major media story -- Appendix B. [Articles] : How Greenpeace manipulated the media like a pro: analyzing the Shell Oil hoax -- Broken on purpose: why getting it wrong pays more than getting it right -- How a reformed media manipulator uses the web to generate sales -- How the pros PR for free.