Huffington Post reports that Google “has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine” and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been a magazine junkie all my life and own complete runs of Rolling Stone, MAD, National Lampoon and The New Yorker on DVD. Now Google is making me feel like Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough At Last” — that Twilight Zone episode in which the man who loves books finally has all the time in the world to read them. Even better: My eyeglasses are intact.

I gave the Google magazine rack a whirl (for now, you can find it as a subsection of book search) and came upon the May 1977 issue of Popular Science magazine, which reported on a “hobby computer” that’s “comparable to an industrial-size system.” Brace yourself for the specs: It will perform 78 separate instructions and accept up to 65k of memory. Or check out April 1938 in which “Television Gets A Trial.”

You can browse issues of Popular Science back to May 1872 (which includes articles on “Science and Immortality,” “Woman and Political Power,” and “The Early Superstitions of Medicine”), but there’s a lot more to browse than just PopSci. There’s also Popular Mechanics, Jet, Ebony, Mother Jones, Baseball Digest, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, American Cowboy and Vegetarian Times, plus regional magazines like Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Texas and New York. There’s the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Black Belt, Prevention and Negro Digest. There are even a half-dozen copies of the revived Liberty from the 1970s.

Of course, Google is just getting started. I can’t wait for them to digitize Car and Driver so I can read those classic Jean Shepherd columns from the 1970s. Or Esquire. National Geographic. Scientific American. Time and Newsweek. Life and Look. Andy Warhol’s Interview. Those early issues of Spy. Classic movie and gossip magazines. All those funky pulps from the ’30s. The Saturday Evening Post. The list just goes on and on.

What an amazing treasure-trove of American cultural history. All one needs now is all the time in the world.

… I might have six more months to get my Christmas shopping done?

No?

Drat.

If you’re a consumer of media, participant in media, watcher of media, lover of media or employed by media, these are pretty grim days.

The Tribune Company files for bankruptcy. The New York Times mortgages its New York city headquarters. NBC Universal is restructuring. The Miami Herald joins a long list of newspapers up for sale. The Rocky Mountain News is folding. The Seattle Times is struggling mightily. And that’s just this week. And it’s only Tuesday.

In yet another indication of how bad things are, New York Magazine has created its own Media Death Watch — your one-stop shop for depressing news about the news.

I’m clicking around my LinkedIn groups and checking out the discussions the other day, and I noticed a thread about “article marketing.”

The idea behind article marketing, of course, is to post content on your Web site that help generate search engine traffic, links to your site, authority for your brand and so on. Here’s one of many sites that specializes in articles. Here’s another. And another. The Web is lousy with them: Google returns more than 3.6 million results for “article marketing.”

Anyway, in the course of the discussion someone wrote: “Professional writers generally charge anywhere from $4 to $8 for an article depending on the word count and research involved.”

Yep: That got my gears grinding. Which got me to responding, which gave me today’s post:

As an editorial professional since the Reagan administration, I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, the notion that people are waking up to the idea that quality content matters is a welcome one.

On the other hand, the notion that hack wordsmiths will swoop in and thoughtlessly churn out SEO text as opposed to real articles and content is profoundly troubling.

I’ve written dozens of SEO-optimized articles for a variety of companies over the past year. I’ve written countless magazine articles, press releases, Web pages, email newsletters and more (including about three dozen books) over the past two-and-a-half decades.

The cost of professional copywriting today is in the neighborhood of a dollar a word.

Sorry, [name redacted]: With all due respect, the idea that “professional writers generally charge anywhere from $4 to $8 for an article depending on the word count and research involved” is patently absurd — not to mention deeply insulting to any editorial professional.

Let’s talk about the high end of your fee range, though. How long does it take a real professional to write an article? Let’s assume the article is brief: about 250 words. Let’s further assume it takes 90 minutes to research and write the article. That’s $5.33 per hour. Given that, you’re better off washing dishes or flipping burgers for minimum wage — you’ll get paid almost 23% more for your time.

I’ve seen too many “editorial services” that churn out articles for pennies on the dollar. All of them are pure unadulterated crap.

What’s most disturbing about all this, though, is that (a) too many “marketers” simply don’t care if it’s crap, and (b) too many clients (and members of the general public) are too stupid to know the difference.

Takeaway for marketers: You get what you pay for.

Here are a couple of good ones from Lifehacker:

The best new and improved software of the year.

The most underhyped apps of 2008.

And this one ought to keep you busy for a while:

Most popular top 10s of 2008.