It's a tired Silicon Valley drum beat: print is dying, blogs and Twitter are the future of news. Many in the business of blogging like to think that print ad revenues are declining and subscriber bases are shrinking because online media is vastly superior to those dinosaurs. This is one area where the evidence actually seems to suggest that the bloggers are justified.
However, if you're not so full of yourself that "citizen journalism" seems like a revolution, you can understand the real reason that print is dying: newspapers' shit is all retarded.
Too many big words, articles that are way too long, and boring stuff like researched facts. Fuck all that shit, I want my news as it happens, and I don't care how true it is. Bloggers call this process journalism...whatever. That's just writers trying to convince themselves that they're serious when they know deep down that their readership is only interested in sensational titles and text no longer than 300 words. Any more than that, well, shit's all retarded.
The only satisfying part of journalism turning into shinythings.com is watching intellectuals whine about it. See, I probably should be an intellectual. I've got a degree in mathematics, I'm a computer programmer by trade, but every time I've knocked an article out of the park for The Register, it's been a great troll. That's the only way to get by in online media, and even the New York Times knows this.
Take for example, NYT columnist Paul Krugman. He won a Nobel Prize in economics, and has been writing the same op-ed column for NYT for the past 8 years: "Republicans are the cause of all the world's ills." Someone who's shit is arguably all retarded has been reduced to trolling to get page views. And it really works.
If, as a blogger, you're above trolling, then the only other way to be popular is by printing blatant falsehoods. In 2008, people actually started to pay attention to CNN's iReport because somebody wrote that Steve Jobs had a heart attack. Apple lost 10% of its market capitalization in 10 minutes. Now that's fucking power. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, showing an obvious tell of a manic depressive, keeps going off on Last.FM with lies about them giving data away to the recording industry. None of it is true, but it brings readers.
It certainly doesn't hurt that TechCrunch shies away from words longer than eight letters.
Print media isn't hurting because it's an outdated business model, print media is hurting because it's boring. Blogs and Twitter are succeeding because their shit is clearly not retarded. And you know what? I love it. Intellectualism is dying, and the news is now anything we want it to be.
I just can't wait until 4chan figures that out.
However, if you're not so full of yourself that "citizen journalism" seems like a revolution, you can understand the real reason that print is dying: newspapers' shit is all retarded.
Too many big words, articles that are way too long, and boring stuff like researched facts. Fuck all that shit, I want my news as it happens, and I don't care how true it is. Bloggers call this process journalism...whatever. That's just writers trying to convince themselves that they're serious when they know deep down that their readership is only interested in sensational titles and text no longer than 300 words. Any more than that, well, shit's all retarded.
The only satisfying part of journalism turning into shinythings.com is watching intellectuals whine about it. See, I probably should be an intellectual. I've got a degree in mathematics, I'm a computer programmer by trade, but every time I've knocked an article out of the park for The Register, it's been a great troll. That's the only way to get by in online media, and even the New York Times knows this.
Take for example, NYT columnist Paul Krugman. He won a Nobel Prize in economics, and has been writing the same op-ed column for NYT for the past 8 years: "Republicans are the cause of all the world's ills." Someone who's shit is arguably all retarded has been reduced to trolling to get page views. And it really works.
If, as a blogger, you're above trolling, then the only other way to be popular is by printing blatant falsehoods. In 2008, people actually started to pay attention to CNN's iReport because somebody wrote that Steve Jobs had a heart attack. Apple lost 10% of its market capitalization in 10 minutes. Now that's fucking power. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, showing an obvious tell of a manic depressive, keeps going off on Last.FM with lies about them giving data away to the recording industry. None of it is true, but it brings readers.
It certainly doesn't hurt that TechCrunch shies away from words longer than eight letters.
Print media isn't hurting because it's an outdated business model, print media is hurting because it's boring. Blogs and Twitter are succeeding because their shit is clearly not retarded. And you know what? I love it. Intellectualism is dying, and the news is now anything we want it to be.
I just can't wait until 4chan figures that out.