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
Filed under: Uncategorized, newspapers, Random
hi, andar here, i just read your post. i like very much. agree to you, sir.