Slipr

As someone who has written things that would have at least raised an eyebrow had I been working at places with less of a sense of humor (in retrospect, I still kind of can’t believe that this was my inaugural post for the SciAm blog) I can’t help but sympathize with the plight of Elliot Kalan, who is, after all, just another struggling writer who works in the big city but hangs his hat in one of them discount outer boroughs:

Daily Show segment producer Elliott Kalan was fired from his weekly gig as a humor columnist after his piece in the August 3 edition, titled “Newspapers: Information’s Horse & Buggy,” declared, “Nobody reads newspapers anymore … As this very copy of Metro shows, the only way to get most people to read a newspaper is to literally force it into their hands.”

Cleary “funny ’cause it’s true” isn’t a good heuristic when the joke is at the expense of your overlords’ ailing business model.

“I don’t really know what happened,” says Kalman. “My assumption is that the wrong person saw it and didn’t get the joke. They’re very straightforward people, the Swedes.”

So much for his chances of being re-hired.

It’s a shame really, had I ever seen his column, it might have qualified as the only thing worth reading in a free weekly I’ve touched maybe once.

Cf. Secret CIA prisons: So totally uncool

You know you’ve arrived when Hitler, Mussolini Mao and Stalin are practically name-checked in the second graf of a story (paywall) on your life’s work.

Roger Cohen in the Times:

‘It’s the wisdom of the masses that makes up our front page,” says Kevin Rose. He is the founder of a Web news site called Digg that rates stories, videos and other content on the basis of how many people like them. Editors need not apply; Digg is proud to have none.

Of course, the “wisdom of the masses” produced a few 20th-century bummers, not least in Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union and China. Collective wisdom is often an oxymoron.

Oh, old-media pundits, let us count the ways you loathe this new species of media:

1. “Not filtered.”

2. “People are dumb. People like Britney Spears and have made Us Weekly the most-read magazine in the U.S. Also, people elected the current administration.”

etc.

Obviously, none of these folks have spent much time with these new media, which is probably why Digg et al. seem so threatening: if you’re Roger Coehn and all you’ve read is the hype, you’d think that the way the internet robbed your employer of revenue indicates that some day the media landscape will be nothing but a blasted wasteland composed of Youtube videos and pre-literate bloggers posting endless diatribes about their roommates’ shit-stained escapades.

This is like thinking that TV killed Radio, or VHS killed movie theaters, blah blah blah.

Submitted without comment.

Wallstrip is a web-only TV show about Wall Street. So what, right? Well despite the fact that it started only last October, CBS just bought it for $4 million. Ah, so now you’re paying attention…

Liz Gannes of the GigaOM blog NewTeeVee had dinner with the folks of Wallstrip the other day, and here’s what they had to say about web video:

• Don’t do anything on the web that would be better on TV.

• The mass audience will cease to exist.

• Distribute video where it’s contextually appropriate, so people find it when it’s relevant to them, and watch it then. Don’t worry about centralization.

• Authenticity is the number one rule for web video. Wallstrip is going to start doing product placement, but will make fun of itself (note: not the product) for doing so.

Since I’m in print, I’ll re-write these for that medium:

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