This life lesson on how not to exist brought to you by Howie Carr's column.
Here's a tip, kids: If you're making fun of how antiquated your rival paper is, maybe you shouldn't scoff at how it's worth one dollar, and then add, "eight bits!"
You knew Howie Carr was old, but did you know he flew here from the 19th century?
Also, don't deride other reporters' "tastefully weathered summer homes on Nantucket" when you live in Wellesley.
Don't sarcastically call Pinch Sulzberger a "shrewd operator" when Pat Purcell writes your paychecks
Stay away from reference to the "Lucky Sperm" contest, lest you want your own imperfect genes to be closely analyzed
And, how can we top this, from one Herald commenter?:
"Yet more breathtaking irony. Howie using the term 'Donuts' in one of
his derogatory, smart-ass monikers for someone else. Even better, he
invokes the notion of 'writers who can't write.' Good God, you can't
possibly make this stuff up."
The Globeis now online! And, no, we're not talking about it's website, which would be the obvious conclusion there, but
it's new weird incarnation … Globe Reader.
The New York Times Co.
is apparently Reader-crazy. It's flagship paper released Times reader 2.0 a few
weeks ago, and now here comes the Boston
Globe tottering after it. (There you go, doomsday soothsayers … why would
the Times waste the effort on this product if it's planning to shutter the
paper entirely??).
The Globe site doesn't have its demo up yet, but it's
probably the same concept as Times Reader. The basic premise is that you
download THE BEST NEWSPAPER EVER to your computer in a matter of minutes, and
you can carry it, and the past week's editions, around in your computer without
the internet. Or, you can connect to the internet and it's constantly updated
with THE BEST JOURNALISM IN THE UNIVERSE. Basically, it's a website you can view
without the internet. It's like a newspaper, but you have to read it on an
expensive electronic device. Did we mention that the New York Times is PRETTY MUCH THE BEST THING EVER?
The words "Mindich" and "toes
sucked" should never appear together in a sentence. Yet they did, horrifically,
last week, when resident crotchety media mogul Stephen used them in response to
a Herald article about Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch's plans to go after the
escort ads on craigslist and in the Phoenix, in response to the murder
of Julissa Brisman, which has
apparently noted all public officials on the eastern seaboard that sex workers
do, in fact, exist, and are very vulnerable.
But
now we are all vulnerable to potential spontaneous vomiting, because Mindich is
defending his paper's escort ads with koans like:
“Should someone be arrested for sucking toes or wanting toes sucked?”
You see,
those of you who thought Mindich is just a tiny, ponytailed rich dude who burps
dollar bills to pay for meandering opinion pieces about why Sara
Palin is like Annie Oakley, you're wrong. He's so much more than that.
He's a feminist:
"Young girls are killed all the
time. I’m sad and horrified about it. [Brisman] wasn’t killed by an ad, but by
a person."
A First Amendment advocate:
“What are you going to do? Take down
the entire Internet?”
A privacy advocate:
As for his erotic revenue stream,
Mindich refused to divulge his profits from the sleazy services.
“It’s none of your business,” he
said.
And a historian:
“Jack the Ripper didn’t have the
Internet,” he added.
Obviously, Mindich is right, in that
when the government starts limiting someone's right to publish something,
you're stepping on tricky, faulty ground. But, surely, publishers need to claim
responsibility for their content, since you really can't sit on the pot without
shitting, or there will be an awfully long and angry line when you eventually
emerge from the bathroom (that's how the expression goes, right?). If Mindich thinks
sex work is an underground industry and trade between consenting adults, that's
fine. He should just say so. If he really, sincerely believes that the AG will
end up persecuting toe fetishists alone, he's even more senile than we thought.
Whoever is in charge of the
slideshows on the Boston Globe's website is perhaps our favorite person on the
face of the earth (Hiawatha? Is that you?). Such a strange, wry sense of humor.
Or, alternatively, such a moron.
In the past, this individual
has taken us through the secret lives of cheerleaders,
gone through every single motion of an awkward hawk
attack (hawkattack!) in breathless detail and showed us what anchorladies
look like, in case we don't own a television.
But today, Friday, March 27,
2009, it was all about WHALES.
… which are remarkably like
college students, it turns out, in both their mating
and eating
habits.
Now, this creates a lot of
questions, so many questions, for inquisitive minds. Why is this person forcing
the whale/college student analogy so much? Do they know a lot of fat, wet
college students? Do they find college students majestic? Do they wish the whales
would get off their lawn?
If you know anything about
the mysterious slideshow person, send your tips to mediafarm@weeklydig.com
Next week: Meredith
Goldstein will write a "Love Letters" column about how if you say
"Bloody Mary" into a mirror three times in a dark room, younger men will
find a cougar.
Sooooo, unless you've been hiding under a carpet hording
dollar bills, you no doubt saw Jon Stewart's glorious sendup of CNBC,
after Wall Street populist Rick Santelli,
which included no less than four callouts on screamy economic advisor Jim Cramer's bum advice.
In response, Cramer has done a series of pouty appearances
on sister networks, explaining that Stewart is a "comedian," thus his
point is invalid, whereas Cramer appears on TV all day long, and the market is
unpredictable, therefore we should forgive him for trying to predict the market
all day long.
This video
from Morning
Joe, while a tortuous 11 minutes long, pretty much sums up everything
that's wrong with cable television: Assholes.
Mika Brezinski
looks like she's going to hurl throughout this discussion, and at 3:45, they
come so close to getting to the point, which is asking … what's the point of
all this? And Cramer answers the question through his own self-importance with retorts
like, "I want to make people money … that's why they gave me the darn
show," and "Shocker, during the greatest boom market in history I liked
stocks." Don't you see?? It's all Jim! He'd like to see you do their jobs!
But our favorite part is six minutes in, when they consult
locally-grown plagiarist/make-shit-upist Mike
Barnicle. Always a good choice: pick someone who deserves their job even
less than you do to come to your defense.
No other profession is
more self-absorbed as the media. [we're with you so far … especially
considering the mammoth egos on Morning
Joe] And what we do is we rely on
human nature. And human nature is unfortunately more prone to the negative as
the positive. You're not going to get emails saying 'Great job, Jim, last
night,' so much as your going to get ten times the number of emails saying
you're a jerk.That's what happens. And
we tend to focus on the negative. And I've always understood that. With regard
to Jimmy, you're on TV … five live hours per week. And you're absolutely right,
Joe, you can pick and chose … what any of us say. And it feeds the beast out
there. People aren't sitting down to write emails this morning saying Mika you
look beautiful, Joe you made sense. They say I'm a jerk.
Brezinski, the only one who's played devil's advocate in
this little love-in, gives the camera this amazing "bitch please"
look, after Barnicle suggests they'd compliment Scarborough's
intelligence (fat chance) and her ability to sit there and just look pretty.
President Obama warns us all that if former President Bush tries to convince executive officials of anything crazy by distracting them with that big, mellifluous voice of his, they should not take him at his word ... er, song.
["whoa, what if, like,
Shakespeare? Had to twitter King Lear?
Ohmyfuck, the Bard would be the Tward!"--but we're with you so far.]
There
was a bit of King Lear in the scene on the Senate floor, a stormy, solitary
John McCain on “this great stage of fools,” as the Bard wrote, railing against
both parties and the president in fiery speeches and rapid-fire tweets.
[In this metaphor, is
McCain Shakespeare for tweeting or King Lear for being an angry old patriarch?
He can't be both]
“He’s
mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a
whore’s oath,” the Fool told Lear.
[nice quotation. What's it got to
do with anything?]
And
he’s truly mad that trusts in the promise of a presidential candidate to quell
earmarks.
The
72-year-old senator who seemed hopelessly 20th century when he confessed during
the campaign that he didn’t know how to use a computer or send an e-mail has
now mastered the latest technology fad, twittering up a twizzard to tweak his
former rival.
[Not words, Maureen].
Being a columnist does not give you enough creative license
that you get to string irrelevant sentences together in some kind of hippie
free-thought writedown (now you know where the Times gets its liberal reputation). WHERE ARE YOU, EDITORS?!?!?!
Then! She lets Sen. McCain write half of her column for her:
Before
the Senate resoundingly defeated a McCain amendment on Tuesday that would have
shorn 9,000 earmarks worth $7.7 billion from the $410 billion spending bill,
the Arizona senator twittered lists of offensive bipartisan pork, including:
•
$2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. “quick peel me a grape,” McCain
twittered. [Someone! Do it for him quick! His antique stomach acids can't
process the peel!]
•
$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah.
“Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted.
[That poor, confused old man.]
•
$2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing
says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.” [It's
just a theory, anyway.]
Want to write a regular column for the New York Times? Take an irrelevant aspect of a current event, and
try to force it to fit with a piece of literature that you're clearly not
literate enough to understand, and mix these things together to create an
uneven column that doesn't really make any kind of point!
Hey, get me, I can drool on my keyboard, too! Now can I get
a cushy job not really opining for the nation's dying paper of record???
Still, Owens explains why GateHouse suddenly shit
a brick and sued the Boston Globefor linking their content, and the
narrative gives us interesting insight into internet paper battles. See,
originally, when the Globe's website
(and only growth sector) boston.com linked
to GateHouse stories, it drummed up web traffic.
GateHouse liked that. Everybody wins!
I
tried to explain that on the Web the concept of competition is marginal, and
that the main goal of a news site publisher was to become a trusted source of
news for site visitors. While the GHMNE site got a nice boost and traffic and
maybe picked up a few more readers, Boston.com reaped a huge reward, too: It
enhanced its credibility as the go-to place for news, regardless of the source.
Over
the next two years or so, Boston.com linked to WickedLocal.com stories as well
as stories on other GHMNE sites many times.
But when boston.com launched the YourTown sites, GateHouse saw it was
edging into the WickedLocal niche (warning: here comes "disintermediate,"
a word invented to entechulate the weblexicological aspect of Owens prose):
No
longer was Boston.com acting as a trusted source of culled and curated links,
nor as an intention-driven search engine … now it was systematically grabbing
substantially every headline and lead from a specific GHMNE site, serving a
specific GHMNE community in an effort to be directly competitive. …
Boston.com had gone beyond trying to be a trusted source to outright theft of
intellectual property (in my opinion).
The
day I first laid eyes on Boston.com/Newton, I coined the term "substitute
home page."
What
is a substitute home page? It's a page created by a competitor that serves
a single purpose: to divert traffic from another publisher's home page.
The goal is to disintermediate the competitor's home page in order to become
the primary home page for people interested in news for that shared coverage
area.
A
substitute-home-page publisher disintermediates by aggregating not only your
content, but also all other available content to create a one-stop start page
for people interested in such content.
Let's put aside for a moment the
fact that the ethics of this are tricky and stride a fine line (while the
business practices at boston.com might smell funky, how do you draw that line
between a "substitute home page" and a news publisher that wants to
be "a trusted source for news"? We see the difference (the fact that
boston.com encroached on the Newton Tab's beat instead of using it as a local
wire service of sorts), but you're going to have a hard time taking that to
court, as GateHouse learned when it sued the New York Times Co. (the Globe's parent company).
And, speaking of which, if the New
York Times has learned anything from the intellectual webproperty case, it's
that what it did was a good idea. Lately, the Times website has been linking to its own
local brethren more and more … over the weekend, pretty much all of the
weather-related links were from boston.com.
Oh, and just so our ass is covered, please check out
Owens' original post about the GateHouse case on his original website. It's
actually really interesting … plus, we'd hate for him to sue our ass.
Like a cool kid, I slept through my alarm back in Boston yesterday morning, scrambled to finish packing before my last minute cab showed up, and then forked over $40 for said cab to drag my sleepy ass to Logan for my flight to SXSW.
By weeklydig on Tue, Mar 16, 2010 7:17 pm
LIVE REVIEW BY RILEY OHLSON
RJD2 got his start DJing for Columbus rap group MHz in the '90s, but is better known for his solo work, beginning with Your Face or Your Kneecaps in 2001, and hitting his stride with widely acclaimed 2002 release Deadringer.
