Jon Carroll writes in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Porn is a multibillion-dollar business — how multi is the subject of much speculation and little evidence, because of underreporting, cash transactions, shell companies and all the other fun parts of underground capitalism. There are even porn news sites, because porn is a business like any other and there are feuds, trends, spectacular success stories and sudden inexplicable failures.
(I have had three idle conversations in recent days with people at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, which is worried about what it’s going to be teaching in 10 years because of the aforementioned crisis in information delivery systems. I suggested to one of them that porn reporting might be a good subject. It’s clearly a badly covered business sector, and the school could charge a premium for enrollment in that class, and thus make money just as the Internet makes money. But apparently there would be some alumni problems with this approach.)