What a long way we've come in the last ten years! "Anyone with a Tumblr, Twitter or YouTube account is practicing journalism in its most authentic form," Times deputy editorial page editor Terry Tang told some college students the other day. From sneering at blogs to embracing the pamphleteer model of social media, well, we've all come a long way, baby. The joke's on someone though. (Probably "all of us.")
Fuckers I am so sick of reporting on incremental tech news for fucking two years now, so sick I’m pretty much considering reverting full-time to fashion coverage…. But yeah, The New York Times took a step towards the future this blasted Sunday night and all of us tech press are expected to cover it like lemmings. Fine. Sure. It’s a big deal, in a business that is slowly dying, to show an understanding of 21st century distribution mechanisms. Kudos NYT. You’re still worth less than Instagram. Hahahahhaha, lol (drink).
—Honestly? I like the Internet a lot better when you're all just straight-up drunk-typing. Let's make a habit [...]
Esquire writer Chris Jones has killed his blog. This was the last straw for him: a Tumblr post by Deadspin writer Jack Dickey, who put side-by-side excerpts of pieces on Robert Caro by Jones and by Charles McGrath—with the headline "Guess Which One Of These Guys Was Pissy About Not Winning A National Magazine Award?" Last straws are funny things.
"Of course, it's a jab at the post I wrote here about my disappointment about not getting nominated for an Ellie for my Roger Ebert profile. Of everything I’ve written here, nothing has haunted me more. It’s been more than a year, and someone still makes a [...]
"I think you'd have to have a pretty successful blog to be sporting a $132 dress as your blogging uniform." [Previously]
BREAKING: Kids sure are messy! Luckily, there's a blog devoted to that very fact, in case you weren't sure! (And even more luckily for its author, she's friends with a Times writer who can give said blog a glowing comparison to Erma Bombeck in the Grey Lady's hallowed pages, thus paving the way for Yet Another Crowdsourced Blog That Might Become Something Resembling A Book. Hooray, Internet! Keep breaking down those walls!)
"I cannot say for certain until I speak to her, but it may have affected her. I guess she came to the realisation that prostitutes are just people, it's not the stereotype that people often seem to think." -Paul Magnanti, father of Brooke Magnanti, on his patronage of over 150 prostitutes. Brooke Magnanti recently outed herself as the author of Belle de Jour, the popular prostitute blog.
"The headline is finding relevance far beyond news media as it becomes a key weapon in fields like politics and business. No longer the exclusive province of copy editors, it is now the cornerstone of emailed political appeals, the fulcrum of crowdsourcing capital on Kickstarter, and arguably the basis of an entire communications medium, the all-headlines microblogging system Twitter…. New York-based Upworthy is part of a gamble by founders from Facebook, Reddit, and BuzzFeed that headlines can advance political change and profits at the same time. The aggregator, whose seed round closed this past October, makes editors write at least 25 different headlines for each post, then plugs top [...]
"Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression." – Jonathan Harris @jjhnumber27 #creativemornings
— Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss) June 1, 2012
As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it's not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about "curation" replacing "creation" because, well, for [...]
Awl pal Simon Dumenco has put together a group called the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation, which will promulgate standards about how to credit, quote and synthesize the writing of others. "The group will have neither carrot nor stick, but could end up with a kind of Good Housekeeping seal," as David Carr puts it today in the Times. Dumenco himself suggests that the group will work their way towards "a set of perhaps a dozen-ish common-sense guidelines" about how one should blog. I was invited to join the list of signatories, and declined, but solely on the principle that any club that would have us as [...]
One thing that happens is that you stop speaking altogether. One Thursday afternoon, shifting between various gchats—all with friends bored in their cubicles at offices across the city—I realized that I hadn’t said a word out loud in close to 18 hours. So I said "test" out loud. For a split second, before the word came out, I was actually worried about whether or not I was still able to speak. After I found that I could, I then worried about the fact that I had been legitimately worried about this.
I had stopped shaving. I mostly dressed like “Jonah Hill at the beach” or “Kristen Stewart on laundry [...]
I'm in Chinatown, on my way to somewhere not Chinatown. Chinatowns, in whatever city, or China-strip-malls, in whatever small city or town, are a great place to land before going elsewhere, because they are a zone that exists outside of the context of the neighboring contexts. Good for a deep breath. I take the opportunity to grab a plate of fried dumplings, or "dollar dumplings" as I call them, because in my Chinatown they cost a dollar. They are fast and cheap, plus also they are more delicious than they have any right to be. It's a dumpling house in a quiet corner, and it's a beautiful evening, with [...]
DISGRACED FORMER WOULD-BE TOP COP 9/11 HERO and WHITE HOUSE LIAR-TO Bernie Kerik's 48-month federal prison sentence begins just a month from now, and he's just, you know, hanging out, updating his new Blogspot blog. Now, unfortunately, he's not running Google ads or anything, because we are pretty sure, once he racked in some dollas, we could find some state from which to draw a plaintiff to file a Son of Sam claim against him? (JUDITH REGAN?) This would be great.
Mark Penn, publicist and pollster for corporate murdering outfits, dodgy mortgage companies and Hillary Clintons, strikes again in the Wall Street Journal-on the topic of blogging. Do not look! He is trying to make you blog about this-using the tactics of PETA and Aubrey O'Day! Okay, but did you know that nearly 1% of Americans earn income from blogging, according to Mark Penn? I do not believe that factoid for one minute. And yet it is still fewer than the number of Americans in prison.
When Joe Biden and Zombie Ayn Rand Paul Ryan begin their televised debate Thursday night, hundreds of professional media employees will be "liveblogging" the proceedings for hundreds of topical websites, from the New York Times to (maybe?) PerezHilton.com. Millions of otherwise sane humans will turn on the television and then frantically reload the websites of their favorite bloggers while simultaneously making their own jokes on Twitter, Facebook and probably in the comments of the aforementioned websites. After digesting and processing thousands of one-liners and spot reactions and weird jokes about the candidates' genitalia, the now-informed electorate will "pick the best candidate," which is a fake Big Bird account on [...]
"He ate another piece of bacon. 8:14 a.m.
He tweeted: 'Here. We. Go. Let’s. Do. This.'" —Joe Weisenthal's job at Business Insider sounds terrible! Also, don't you think a Times mag profile of a blogger who works 17-hour days is remiss to not mention his pay or equity (???) arrangements? If the marvel is that people work like this now, don't you think we should know how this life-shortening labor should be compensated?
"I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The 'sort ofs' and 'reallys' and 'ums' and 'you knows' that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it. Never before had 'folks' been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as [...]
Millennial rules for dating and blogging: "I have probably ruined countless relationships with my penchant for oversharing and the somewhat naïve belief that honesty trumps all else. Writing is my one true love. Everyone else-from sweet, corn-fed boys with curly hair to rough older men with adroit hands-will always come second. I'm probably not as sorry about that as I should be." Jesus Christ, you kids, no one is going to be able to run for Senator in twenty years!
An exhausted liveblogger was just forced to blog for ten hours. Xan Brooks, of the Guardian, was barely keeping it together.
"9.10pm: Is it over? It is not over. For a brief moment back then, I thought it was over."
"8.40pm: It's 56 games all and darkness is falling. This, needless to say, is not a good development, because everybody knows that zombies like the dark."
"8.20pm: Wow, is that really the time? I must go home; can't think what's kept me. Wa-ha-la-ha-la-ha-la!"
Good news though! Liveblogging was finally canceled due to darkness. Bad news: there'll be more tomorrow.
A writer named Lisa Warren wrote a story yesterday afternoon on the Huffington Post. It was headlined "Two Black Role Models Done In By Hubris." One of those two "Black Role Models" was the president. (The other one was some athlete.) "It is tragic when an icon falls. When a black icon stumbles the tragedy seems doubly problematic," she wrote. The responses are apparently not quite what she expected! (Somehow!) Fortunately, she has her Twitter to keep her warm.
