Tkcacik Kicks 'Nothing-based Dystopia ' of Media

“Phone sex,” writes Maureen Tkacik in the Columbia Journalism Review,

is not so unlike being a reporter. A central challenge of success at both is keeping random strangers—horny guys, hostile hedge-fund managers—on the phone, talking to you, confessing to you, growing fond of you, resolving to talk to you again. And at all times, phone-sex operators, like reporters, are expected to remain detached, wise to “The Game,” objective—but in a way, that’s crap. It’s not easy to become beloved by strangers if not a single part of you truly yearns for that love.

The ex-Time mag, ex-Wall Street Journal, ex-Gawker, ex-Jezebel hack laments the present state of journalism and its branding fetish, but aims for 'journalistic redemption' in rebranding herself. "Look at Me!" is the Misty lyricized title of the article that obsesses at length about the self-obsession of bloggers.

Uh oh. X Rated.

How 'bout that Barack Obama Hussein X? Rad, Man in de (White) house.
The WashPo online had some quick correcting to do when they somehow confounded the present prez with the late preacher... so these page grabs by Gawker have got to be embarrassing indeed

Snarky Aughties defined by Gawker?

The lowest common denominator is how to dominate the media, no? From Mediaite, (not to be confused with meditate...) learn why this past decade will be known as the Gawker Years.
A remarkable 400,000,000 page views in November left editors gobsmacked...but also keep in mind the following

* The snarky, bomb-throwing editorial voice on which Gawker prides itself could be its biggest liability. If the success of hackneyed puppet comedian Jeff Dunham has taught us anything, it’s that a New York/LA sensibility ≠ the pulse of America. People who read blogs right now aren’t the pulse of America either, but that’s changing. A more upbeat sensibility like OnSugar’s, which the New York Times described as “short, light and sarcasm-free, with big photos and headlines,” could carry the day.

That said, Gawker broadened its focus and brightened its hues a few years ago to anticipate this; the snark factor has significantly dropped since the days of editors Jesse Oxfeld and Jessica Coen. The Nick Denton myth is occasionally overblown, but he does have a knack for foreseeing the big trends.

* Older powers, which still have the most resources at their disposal, can reemerge. In Hearst’s early days, the New York Times was seen as a dusty old has-been, with a circulation of only 25,000; look at what happened. Given its bulk and age, the Times has done a remarkable job of evolving with the web. Most recently, it has built up a commanding presence in social media, thanks, in part, to digital partnership and social media whiz Soraya Darabi, who is soon to depart the paper for Drop.io. And the upward trending of its blogs — the more than seventy of which the Times is thankfully pruning this year — is further proof of the Times‘ willingness to experiment and innovate.

Ironically, Gawker has been moving in the opposite direction by hiring experienced reporters. Actual reporting, done in an opinionated but informed voice, may be the key to the successful blogging — or is it web publishing? — of the next decade.

* Cheeky upstarts can materialize, seemingly from nowhere, and shake everything up in short order with new models previously undreamt. Old habits may die hard, but free habits — like which online publications you read — die easier and are reborn easier. Recall that Gawker was founded only in 2002.

Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article

Aggregator websites that cherry-pick the best quotes from newspaper articles and then sell ads on the back of this minimal effort have enraged a reporter, Ian Shapira. But this only happened after his initial rush of ego fuelled by an extra 9000 clicks online through a Gawker link. His post about having his story on business angst counselling ripped off by the Gawker snarkmeisters garnered 254 comments on the WashPo website. Is it linking or larceny? asks Time mag. Rachel Sklar, a media analyst, acknowledges that it was a ripoff."Generational Consultant Holds America's Fakest Job" is an attention-grabbing headline, so hats off to Gawker.

TIME editor off-piste, colleagues pissed-off

The disgruntled 600 staffers recently laid off by Time Inc. collectively gnash their teeth about the expenditure lavished on lame reportage about the economic summit at Davos, according to Gawker. The tone of these self-indulgent editors is even gently mocked in the mag itself!

Vicious Snarkfest annoys critic, who tries to profit from the trend. But 'snot so snarky!

"New Yorker critic rails at web malice," tsks the Guardian in London. One doubts that the old school hacks just can't hack it. All this ersatz brouhaha appears to have been concocted mostly to promote Denby's latest slim volume, shown above in all its snot green glory (photographed by cogdogblog, the cur.) Snark's not a mythical critter as in the 'Hunting of the Snark' by Lewis Carroll, but a snide/remark [snark, geddit?] posted in a flame fest of sarcasm. It's what the Guardian might refer to as an irascibly arch comment if it wasn't trying to be bloggy and jiggy widdit. So embarassing all this boomer pandering to the younger, cooler set.

It is the bane of the modern world. It is cheap, nasty and heralds a new cultural dark age. It is "snark".

Or at least it is according to David Denby, a leading critic on the New Yorker magazine, who has sparked a literary debate over snark which pits the printed word against the new world of the internet.

Denby has written a slim polemical book called Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal and It's Ruining Our Conversation, that has created headlines across America. It is a ruthless assault on a tone of writing that combines malice, humour and aggressiveness. While Denby traces the origins of "snark" back to the ancient Greeks, he postulates that it is flowering in the media culture created by the internet. He says that internet message boards, gossip websites such as Gawker and Perez Hilton and the proliferation of millions of blogs have come to dominate modern media with a tone of vicious, unpleasant humour usually delivered in just a paragraph or two. He says that tone has now spread to newspapers and magazines and it is destroying American public life.

Not that Denby himself is shy of using an insult or two. "Indolent parasitism as a work ethos," he says of those who write for Gawker and its ilk. He continues: "The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks ... spinning around in the media from moment to moment, is they don't stand for anything or push for anything. They're mere opportunists without dedication and they don't win any victories."

Many commentators and reviewers have welcomed Denby's book as a long overdue corrective. 'God save us from Gawker's world,' opined one review in the Los Angeles Times. But others have seen Denby's outcry as the last gasp of an older media world that is being reshaped by a new generation.

"Some snarkiness is nasty, cynical and damaging. Some is insightful and serves the public good. Young people are right to see that the sometimes personally nasty satire of the Daily Show often offers more insightful political commentary than mainstream newspapers," said Professor TV Reed, a popular culture expert at Washington State University.

Not surprisingly, the reaction among the websites and columnists targeted by Denby has been less than polite. Perhaps it has even been a little ... snarky. Gawker posted a piece on the book under the headline: "Please buy David Denby's book, so he can stop talking."

Ted Turner's undercover concubine network

At an academic writers' convention held somewhere in the white underbelly of America, Robert Olen Butler, a jilted Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, spilled the beans. Ted Turner, the media mogul and 'mouth of the south', had made his ex-wife, novelist Elizabeth Dewberry, an offer she couldn't refuse. She left him. He complained that Turner gave Dewberry a free condo in one of his buildings with the proviso that she share it with him for one week each month. And at least three other women have accepted similar deals.
So is Ted Turner, post Jane Fonda, just a philanderer, or is he now a proponent of Mormon-style Big Love, or a neo-Muslim with four wives? This undercover network is most intriguing. Condominium Concubine Network - a revamp by the guy who devised the original CNN. Gawker posted the weird memo which Butler, 50, sent to his graduate writing students at Florida State University.

It is not disclosed whether the paramours are all in the same building or --more likely-- bed down at Turner's 14 ranches in Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and South Dakota.) Butler's rather colorized version of the situation is that his perky child-bride (cattily dismissed as a mediocre novelist by her colleagues) has become infatuated with a man who resembles her own grandfather, the Christian Evangelical abuser of her youth, after suffering a painful blockage of the gut while cavorting with Turner in Argentina.
Who needs fiction with author's biographies as off the wall as this? Bookjacket photos of Dewberry and Butler, below, don't hint at these dark undercurrents. She appears to be as bland blonde as a Florida anchorwoman, though her books, such as His Lovely Wife, belie appearances, according to smitten reviewers. No photos of the family cats were available and the white fluffy dog they both dote on is something the Beast declined to publicize

Al Gore, III: GOOD guy with bad timing

Even a GOOD guy can have moments of spectacularly bad judgment, and speeding down the freeway in a ecologically correct Prius hybrid car at 2 am on the 4th of July was bound to provoke the cops in Southern California's stridently Republican Orange County, better known to tv viewers as the O.C. If it'd been a stretch Hummer, maybe the cops would have looked the other way.

The embarrassing drugbust of Al Gore III-- scion of Tipper and (Big Green) Al Jr and publisher of Good magazine-- grabbed headlines around the world.
There had been some odoriferous global warming going on inside the silent-running car before the police pulled him over and insisted he roll down his window. This ill-timed joint , along with a collection of feel-Good drugs like Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, Adderall and Soma which had no scrips, put young Al in the joint for 12 hours, until he could raises $20,000 bail. Why do they call it a high-way, he must have mused. (Coincidentally, Laguna Niguel, the spot where Gore was pulled over, is not far from the old haunts of last century's turn on, tune in, drop out guru ,Timothy Leary.)

Gore III, 24, rates as a new media personality, and is quite bloggable in his own right. Gawker covered both of his launch parties last fall and remarked that he was "no douchebag" . They doled out this rather faint praise because he'd confessed to "refreshing Gawker and Wonkette religiously." The bloggers kidded Al for taking time off "from saving the world on recycled stock paper", and joked that his launch party at the trendy Beaver club in Chelsea and the new issue were both, well, appropriately Good. Lauren Bush, the niece of the numbskull in the White House, attended the party as did Gore's rather straitlaced parents.

The timing of this arrest, on the eve of the Live Earth concerts on 07/07/07, could not have been worse. But so far there have been few reports of blood and gore on the home front. The hearing for speeding at 100 mph and drug possession will take place in 30 days. We bet it gets Good coverage.

Note: This piece was corrected when a reader pointed out that the ex-Vice Prez is Al Junior, named after his lawmaker father, so his son was christened Albert Arnold Gore the third. Similar confusion about the famous moniker cost an Irish bookie ten thousand euros. He'd run a pool on the next celebrity to go to jail, and fifty people had placed money on 14-1 odds that it would be Al Gore Jr.
Al leaves Orange County Jail on the morning after, heading to get treatment, according to his father.