Scattered thoughts 4/24/09

-Yesterday I was reading David Karr's piece in the Times about the resignation of New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan when I ran across this paragraph...

He will leave a New York media world that is very different from the one he began covering in The Observer in 1994 — one that is challenged by faltering bottom lines and atomized into dozens of blogs and Web sites. Just last week The Observer broke a story about a Brooklyn con woman, the so-called hipster-grifter, in an article that provided just the kind of New York intrigue and context that had been a hallmark of the newspaper. But Gawker, the Manhattan gossip blog, immediately took custody of the story, annotating it with attitude and reader-submitted sightings of the protagonist that all but obscured where the story came from in the first place.

Reading that struck me as a glaring but easily overlooked microcosm of why newspapers and other "traditional" media organizations are going out of business left and right. On the one hand you have a news organization that pays a writer/reporter a living wage to spend days, weeks, even sometimes months cultivating a story, only for it to hit the web, where it is linked to and commented on in a million different venues, many of which are making money because they're selling ads to feature content generated by someone else, and before you know it the original creator of the story is an afterthought. The thing essentially gets gang-banged to death.

This made me sad.

Why the sadness? Well, mainly because I have a blog, obviously, a moderately-read one, but still, a blog on the internet that people occasionally take time from their lives to read, and while I do provide some original content, I link to and excerpt other people's stories all the time. Granted, I do so with the best intentions...the only reason I post anything on here is to say, "hey, this is really cool and you should go over there and look at it," but I still couldn't help but feel like part of the problem. I mean, I LOVE newspapers and magazines, and I'm deeply troubled over the thought of some of them dying, especially if their death is the result of us people with blogs.

But then I remembered that this sort of thing happens in traditional media ALL THE TIME. Let's say for instance Fox News breaks a story about Barack Obama selling Texas to Hugo Chavez. Well, before you know it, EVERYBODY is on it. CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, you name it, this will be their lead story. But then the next day the LA Times reports that a high-ranking White House official told them that in order to convince Chavez to buy Texas, Obama gave him a blowjob...IN THE OVAL OFFICE! Well then the story has taken on a whole new life and it begins to spawn all sorts of rhetorical offspring that were conceived by the original story, yet it will rarely, if ever, get credit for it in any way. It sort of becomes like a feeding frenzy in the wild, where one animal may initially bring down the prey only to be left with little to eat once the other members of the herd swoop in and begin ripping flesh from the carcass. Once it starts, there's little or nothing to be done to stop it.

Now, I still have no idea what to do about all this in order to fix it, but I do feel less guilty about it all now than I did when I initially read Carr's piece, so there.

-Here's a question to ponder...if the "Craigslist killer" had responded to an ad for massage services in the back of the Village Voice or New York Magazine, would the news media have labeled him the "Village Voice killer" or "New York Magazine killer?" I doubt it. So why are they doing what they're doing now? Is it out of some sort of deep-seeded resentment over the effect that Craigslist has had on their advertising income in the past few years? This is all kind of retarded, really. I respect Craig Newmark, he and I are good buddies after all, and it's nice that he's made some public statements expressing regret in this matter, but really, he has nothing to feel bad about. A killer is a killer is a killer. The guy would have found his victims one way or another, and at least by doing it through Craigslist there were electronic fingerprints that were used to track him down and arrest him, as they surely will others in the future.

Also, how unlucky in love is the poor bastard who comes along and falls for the fiancee of this guy? Do you think he'll get anally probed by this girl's family, or what? "Well, her last boyfriend turned out to be a psychopath!"

-The NFL draft is this weekend! Hell fucking yeah! Most of the "experts" seem to have my Saints taking either running backs Beanie Wells or Knowshon Moreno (though what's wrong with Pierre Thomas?), or defensive back Malcolm Jenkins. I'm good with all three, though I'd probably prefer to see the Saints try and trade down with someone to get an additional pick in the second or third round. I mean, we only have four picks in the entire draft as it stands. That kind of blows. Or maybe we can trade Robert Meachum for an extra pick. Something. Shit.

-You know what I've noticed about celebrities on Twitter? That when I get a peek inside their brains via 140 character brain droplets and I see how poorly they often communicate what it is they're trying to say, what respect for them I may have had previously is just about fully eroded. Take Demi Moore for instance...I used to really like her in every way, and it truly had nothing to do with a desire to bone her. I just liked her. She seemed cool. Then she started Twittering and I wanted to step on her throat. Go figure! Another case is Kevin Smith, the director. I used to like him a lot, I mean, I wasn't one of those retarded Kevin Smith/Clerks fanboys, but I liked him. Then he started using Twitter to document when he jerked off and when his wife let him play with her "Easter basket," and I was all "EWWWW." Anyway, it's rare that any celebrity's Twitter has enhanced my respect for them in any way. Just sayin'.

-I'm so torn over this whole torture issue. I mean, I'm outraged by the things I've been hearing and reading of late, but I keep trying to bring myself back to most of us were thinking in 2002 and 2003...hell, even Nancy Pelosi didn't seem to be all that bothered with it back then. I don't know...I need more time to process it all I guess, but I'm trying to refrain myself from rushing to judgment. Really, I am.

-It occurred to me earlier today that I'm going to be eating boiled crawfish on every weekend in the month of May. You just can't even begin to imagine how happy that makes me.