THIS MODERN WORLD

Newsweek’s response to the Ongoing Clusterfuck is a fabulous new makeover:

Newsweek also plans to lean even more heavily on the appeal of big-name writers like Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria and George Will.

Starting in May, articles will be reorganized under four broad, new sections — one each for short takes, columnists and commentary, long reporting pieces like the cover articles, and culture — each with less compulsion to touch on the week’s biggest events. A new graphic feature on the last page, “The Bluffer’s Guide,” will tell readers how to sound as if they are knowledgeable on a current topic, whether they are or not.

You might as well buy some stock in the Washington Post Company right now, because I don’t see any way this plan could fail!

Holy … crap.

Via Bors.

Donations lately from Iceland, Finland, and Ireland. Not sure what this means, exactly. But thank you, of course.

(… not an oblique suggestion that you hit the donation button, by the way. To be honest, over the next few weeks blogging will probably lag — I have a number of other obligations demanding my attention …)

If you work in print media, at least: read Walter Isaacson’s cover story in Time Magazine, “How to Save Your Newspaper.”

See, it’s the cover story in Time Magazine., written by the former managing editor of Time. And after a fairly promising start summarizing the importance of journalism and how we got into this mess, the solution proferred is, essentially, that somebody should figure out a way to make micropayments work.

To put it another way, Time magazine’s cover story solution to the crisis in journalism: somebody should do something!

This is not an industry in crisis. This is an industry in its death throes.

* * *

In the same article, we learn:

One of history’s ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed.

File that under Things That Did Not Work Out as Planned.

Looks like I wasn’t the only person who noted the sheer head-exploding inappropriateness of KFC’s Battlestar Galacta tie-in Frak Pak Sweepstakes. Because this week it has morphed into what the announcer describes as the “can’t say that word on TV sweepstakes,” as this graphic appears:

I’m guessing this is the work of an ad agency that didn’t really understand what it was doing in the first place, and is now trying to use “humor” (complete with waggle-finger air quotes) to cover their fuckup. Or frakup, as the case may be. The problem with this follow up is, well — those of you who watch the show, or have followed the link to my previous post are way ahead of me here I’m sure — you CAN say the word on tv. That’s the point of the entirely made-up word — to serve as a stand-in for the word you can’t say on TV.

[/geekout]

…. except can you really signal the end of a geekout with fake html?