This headline should go up next to "man outruns horse."

That's because James Fallows is a truly fine journalist. He screws up about as often as David Beckham misses a penalty kick (or Moises Alou loses a foul to a fan).

If I were looking for someone to head a strong magazine staff, I'd call Fallows first. The same if I were looking for someone to interview a world leader, or write about a foreign culture. (The picture of Fallows is from the University of Puget Sound, which made him its commencement speaker in 2002.)

But I can still do what I do better than James Fallows does what I do. You want someone on Internet Commerce? I'm your man, not him.

Fallows has a column out about Google, and AdSense, and the search for a blogging business model.

His mistake is to claim we've found one.

Fallows gathered some anecdotal evidence from two sites I haven't heard of, talked to a few other site owners, and concluded that AdSense revenue can make blogging pay.

He's wrong. He's flat-out wrong.

Don't get me wrong, blogging can help. But AdSense is not a business model.

Even the sites Fallows cites, specifically SeatGuru, put the lie to this.

Seatguru is a fine site. Matthew Daimler put together drawings of airplanes, calculated which seats were most advantageous, put it all together with an attractive interface, and does well.

But consider. His ongoing costs are minimal -- now that it's up all he's looking at is hosting. He has his own rate card. He has a sophisticated program for getting into corporate Intranets. He plays the press like a fiddle. Daimler put together a product, spends all his time advertising that product, and gets a return from it.

That's not the same as trying to run a blog and make money with AdSense.

Matt Haughey of PVRBlog, the other site profiled here, doesn't make his living from the site. He's with Creative Commons. And he's not alone in working at his site. He has other authors sharing the load. Plus, if you read Fallows' story carefully, you'll notice Haughey doesn't claim to be making a living from PVRBlog. He writes "The operators...have told a similar story."

Similar to what? Similar, we assume to the story told by Daimler. But there's really no similarity -- not when you look at the sites, not when you look at the business models.

What Fallows loves is the fact that you can sign up for AdSense, put the code on your site, and get checks. Well, LinkExchange did the same thing, many years ago. Amazon has been doing that for a half-dozen years. BlogAds is nearly as easy to use.

Fallows sold a story on Google, which the Times' editors love. He did his interviews, did the work. But his evidence doesn't match his claims, there's no meaningful background on anything, it's superficial.

It's also the way most journalism is practiced today. You see, if you actually knew something, you'd have "gone native," and then we couldn't use you. Especially if it was something specialized like the Internet or Web Commerce. Blankenhorn -- and hundreds like him -- are tainted. Better to give the story to a "celebrity journalist" and take a botched job.

I'm used to it.