Deep Dives Into Scientology, Behind the HuffPo-AOL Marriage and Talks With Shady SEO Experts

If you ask this thetan, there's little better investigative fodder than the Church of Scientology's relationship with Hollywood, a link that has bestowed enormous awareness and maybe even a little credibility to a group that numbers, by one count, far fewer members than even Rastafarians. In this week's New Yorker, Lawrence Wright, known as a great chronicler of Al Qaeda, shifts his gaze to a different group of, um, true believers as he narrates Oscar-winning writer-director Paul Haggis' public split with Scientology. The cause of the divide is Mr. Haggis' outrage over Scientology's antipathy towards gay rights, but, in the course of this long article, it's clear the hubbub as much to do with the failures of this expensive and demanding system of personal betterment in fixing the rather broken Mr. Haggis. The director of "Crash" might be an Operating Thetan VII, but what 35 years of Dianetics bought him is two broken marriages, alienated kids and a bad smoking habit. (What it bought us is the odious brand extension "The Scooby and Scrappy Doo Puppy Hour," episodes of "The Love Boat" and "The Facts of Life," and the concept for "Walker, Texas Ranger," but that's a different topic for a different time.) Naturally, other celebrities populate the account, including non-believer Josh Brolin: Want more? The Awl's Maria Bustillos did a great job of chronicling previous successful investigations into Scientology, looking in particular at work done by The St. Petersburg Times and the Los Angeles Times, which produced a multipart series in 1990 that helped shed light on lies about founder L. Ron Hubbard's background that were perpetuated by the church. One of its authors, Joel Sappell, was interviewed by Ms. Bustillos: Lloyd Grove, writing for the Daily Beast, delivered probably the best piece of reporting around AOL's $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post in his profile of Ken Lerer. Mr. Lerer, little-known outside media circles, is the wealthy PR genius who teamed up with Arianna, helping to secure the financial backing for her traffic juggernaut. His ties with AOL go way back to when he was an outside PR consultant and then in-house communications chief, before the Time Warner merger. While one suspects there's a lot more to say about Mr. Lerer, this is the fullest profile I've seen of a very important man in the media industry: The New York Times' David Segal has quickly established himself as the best chronicler of the not-easy-to-cover world of search-engine optimization. Last year, he gave us the story of Vitaly Borker, the online retailer who badgered and threatened customers into giving his company bad reviews that would help it rise in search results. This past week, he wrote of a recent black-hat search campaign allegedly on behalf of JCPenney that made the retailer a top result for any number of search terms. My favorite part of the piece is Mr. Segal's chat with shady SEO expert Mark Stevens, which, naturally, isn't his real name: In a piece perhaps more provocative than correct, The Guardian's Will Hutton argues that we shouldn't confuse advances in online media with real innovation of the sort that creates massive amounts of jobs and wealth. The piece leans heavily on Tyler Cowen's e-book, "The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History." I've yet to read the book, but I do often wonder about what, besides more fewer impediments to obtaining and creating information, the internet age will yield:

Deep Dives Into Scientology, Behind the HuffPo-AOL Marriage and Talks With Shady SEO Experts

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