WARNING: This is a post, by a media professional, about the media. If you are a normal human being, you will not and definitely should not care, except inasmuch as it’s part of a debate about whether or not we, the media, are failing you, the normal human being. If you are looking for something a little more general-interest, may I recommend, I dunno, a 10,000-word Grantland post about a prestige cable show. Or make some fantasy football trades. Or read a book, I don’t know!
On Wednesday, I wrote about Takes. My piece was a blog post, written on the fly, based on ideas that have been rattling around in my head for a while. If I’d taken the time – say a week, or a month – to organize those thoughts better, and clarify my argument, I would’ve written a very different – and almost certainly better – piece. But I didn’t do that (I am only guesting here at The Dish for one short week, after all), so I now cheerfully admit that, as my (friendly) critics contend, I conflated a few different Internet tropes. Specifically, in the words of Jack Dickey, I conflated “aggregated picayune garbage with the Take.”
So let’s get into this a bit more. Here are the primary types of garbage content that lots of money – money that could be spent on making good things – is currently being spent on producing:HT: MoneyBeat
No-value-added news blogging This is “aggregated picayune garbage,” and it is the primary pollutant in the Great Pacific garbage patch of the Internet. It is just mass-produced debris, utterly valueless, thoughtlessly sent into the world without regard for quality, but solely because it fills the short-term need to have some sort of piece of content on which to sell ads.
This makes up 75 percent* of the content on TIME’s “Newsfeed” (“Chris Pratt Messes Up First Pitch at Cubs Game, Is Completely Charming About It,” “43.5 Socks Removed from Dog’s Stomach During Surgery“), with similar numbers at the Huffington Post, and the newsblogs of AOL and Yahoo and MSN. That’s just the general-interest news media. In other fields, it’s frequently worse, largely because shrinking budgets have decimated everything that isn’t cheap aggregation. Music and pop culture sites in particular are full of semi-identical news nuggets (“Kate Bush’s House in Danger of Falling Into the Sea,” “Kate Bush Is Literally Living Life on the Edge,”, “Kate Bush’s House Might Fall Into the Ocean”), as are sites dedicated to film, comics, and entertainment in general.
*(NB: All percentages and figures in this piece are just made-up, but feel right to me.)
This sort of newsblogging is also, to varying degrees, what makes up much of the Gawker Media* sites’ daily output, even as they’ve strived (successfully) to produce a lot of original material that isn’t aggregation. And to be fair to Gawker Media, they were among the first to do this at all. When they were the only game in town, this sort of newsblogging was an entertaining substitute for reading multiple newspapers, blogs and magazines. Now no one actually reads multiple newspapers, blogs, and magazines, besides the people who aggregate for a living. Everyone else just reads what comes in through their feeds, and all publishers are fighting to post the version of the story that ends up in the most feeds....MUCH MORE
So, what is this irony thing you speak of?
