The real effect of Twitter on journalism is – well, the “spare-time bullshit, take as peer group, social-climb, brown-nose for career advancement” relationship journalists used to have with their sources? Now instead they have it with each other.

BRUH

kontextmaschine:

This is dumb as hell, but hey, it’s kontextmaschinebait. This bit though:

So should we start interpreting “Bad Blood” in a whole new light? Hearing “You Belong With Me” as a secret conversion anthem?

The Tayswift alt-right anthem is Change, for fuck’s sake.

the real significance of this is that “buzzword X + buzzword Y, bang them together and write around” is the classic aggregation strategy, and “Taylor Swift” has ranked a slot for a while now and this is “alt-right” just now debuting as eligible

Nick Denton’s brilliant stroke, going all the way back to Gawker’s origins as Gawker Stalker, was to not even make pretense to the American tradition of Sulzbergerian evenhanded postwar monopoly journalism, but to go the British competitive no holds barred venomous one, all taking shots at each other, stirring up witch hunts to boost circulation….

There’s a reason British libel law is so strict, and that’s to create some leverage to tamp things down when they start stepping on toes that matter.

(13/11/14)

This is dumb as hell, but hey, it’s kontextmaschinebait. This bit though:

So should we start interpreting “Bad Blood” in a whole new light? Hearing “You Belong With Me” as a secret conversion anthem?

The Tayswift alt-right anthem is Change, for fuck’s sake.

kontextmaschine:

so one thing I’ve noticed in the last decade is that commercials on channels like ESPN and CNNHN - channels used as background in mid-to-upper environments like bars and airports - worked fine if you saw them normally, saw them as pure video (muted or lost in a loud environment) OR heard them as pure audio

that’s great! and I don’t think it gets enough respect.

browser ads. always been behind. do ad guys take them as the junior leagues? there’s so many times I’ve overheard ads from another browser tab, even unaugmented Firefox gives you mute buttons for that now

and I just heard this one and it was almost there, for Toyota cars

audio 70% described the skit, and 60% described the deal, but the voice sounded exactly like Flo from Progressive so the branding was confusing as hell!

radio was better than this even when there was TV

STEP UP YOUR GAME

like, I know you’re playing darkside tricks, I know you’re waiting until I’ve had that tab open a while and forgotten about it, from when I hear you until I find what tab it is to kill you you have maybe 3-8 seconds

YouTube ads have learned to grab you in 5 seconds for a shot at retaining 15 or 30

STEP UP YOUR GAME

so one thing I’ve noticed in the last decade is that commercials on channels like ESPN and CNNHN - channels used as background in mid-to-upper environments like bars and airports - worked fine if you saw them normally, saw them as pure video (muted or lost in a loud environment) OR heard them as pure audio

that’s great! and I don’t think it gets enough respect.

browser ads. always been behind. do ad guys take them as the junior leagues? there’s so many times I’ve overheard ads from another browser tab, even unaugmented Firefox gives you mute buttons for that now

and I just heard this one and it was almost there, for Toyota cars

audio 70% described the skit, and 60% described the deal, but the voice sounded exactly like Flo from Progressive so the branding was confusing as hell!

radio was better than this even when there was TV

STEP UP YOUR GAME

davidsevera:

♫ He’s a thinkpiece wizard
♫ There has to be a twist
♫ A thinkpiece wizard
♫ Writes such unsubtle shit

If I didn’t know better I’d say this was written by Freddie de Boer on his second week after taking the red pill. (The “Good Facts” trope in particular reminds me of both “hate facts” and Derbyshire’s “goodwhites”)

Socialists, huh.

“Milo is actually 44 boys in a trenchcoat” is kind of funny, but the mockery’s missing an important point.

(Assuming the thing’s not a damned April Fool’s joke)

Online publishing’s in an iffy place. A lot of money sloshing around recently but a lot of antsyness, and that’s only going to get worse come the inevitable app crash. If Milo’s gambit succeeds - and that gambit is NOT to get his guy elected or to make his ideas hegemonic, but rather to establish Breitbart as right-Salon or -Gawker by mainstreaming the alt-right and proving that ad-supported conservative content can draw a young audience - people are going to copy him.

People will found Breitbart clones. Institutional conservative media will realize they need some connection with Trump types to maintain their relevance, and the #NeverTrump dinosaurs aren’t going to do it. The investors holding the purse strings to Vox, or whoever owns a majority of Gawker now, are going to point out publishing a left-millenialbait site but not a right-millenialbait one is leaving money on the table, and they won’t stand for that.

And you’re going to need to staff up for that. And where better to find someone to do the Milo thing than people who’ve been doing the Milo thing?

“Milo has 44 interns” means he has 44 proteges loyal not to the Beltway, foundation-funded “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” journalism, but to Milo and the ad-supported punchmouth attention-seeking Breitbart model, and they’re ready to be seeded throughout the media firmament within the year.

Swear to god, if Gamergate turns out to be our Dreyfus Affair and he turns out to be our Zola…

This is thumb-sucking season in Washington journalism. It is the time when the men who report to the nation the doings and misdoings of its federal government find the springs of factual news all but dried up and are reduced to turning out, in the guise of news, dispatches that in major part are the product of the reporters’ communion with their own imaginative souls. The production of such dispatches is known to the craft as ‘thumb sucking,’ and the products themselves as ‘think pieces.’

2006: “Look at all these pompous NYT and WaPo pundits whose only understanding of the world outside their elite bubble comes from brief smalltalk with the peasant class. No wonder they don’t understand anything!”

2014: “We don’t talk to anyone outside our bubble but it’s ridiculous to think you could understand things by asking people, anyway.”

It bugs me how the NYT refers to politicians as “Mr. McConnell”, “Mrs. Clinton”, instead of just by their last name like normal people.

(That’s saying nothing of “Ms. Warren". It hasn’t been the ‘70s for a while, stop trying to make Ms. happen, it’s not going to happen. And if she’s still trying to make it happen, don’t indulge her.)

At least it’s not as bad as The New Yorker spelling it “coöperate”, I endorse breaking arms for that.

“[Deadpool] display[s] an earnest faith in the realization of [its creators’] idea: that American males want to be bad boys and good men.”

- Richard Brody

Who’re you trying to kid, T.R. woulda loved it.

bemusedbibliophile:

[…] The Man in the High Castle translates onto the screen what might be the most potent political sentiment of our contemporary moment. The resistance movement of the television series captures, unwittingly, a generalized mood among many working-class and middle-class American whites that the time has come for them to throw off the shackles of a multicultural, politically-correct elite. A significant portion of white Americans believe they have been disadvantaged by the globalization of capitalism and the domestic valorization of diversity. Like Juliana Crain, they look at the footage from the mid-century United States with admiration and envy, and they wonder how and when the country went wrong. The distorted nostalgia that drives The Man in the High Castle is an ideal match for this pervasive mood. Like the subversive resistance fighters in the series, a substantial, perhaps growing number of Americans are convinced that they must act to take their country “back” — both back to some previous, unspecified moment and back from some generalized but ill-defined enemy.

If you’re going to pull a quote that’s a good one but there’s better and more subtle stuff in here