HouseShoes
1yr ago
On a CW note, and thinking out loud, what is going on with men where someone is profiting by branding soap as distinctly masculine? Is this downstream of targeted advertising in the internet age ? I guess Irish Spring’s, “Manly, yes, but she likes it, too,” from the ‘80s suggests this has been around much longer.
I do wish mild ill on that dollar-store T.J. Miller from the Dr. Squatch YouTube ads — like he realizes he bought sweet pickles instead of dill after biting into a sandwich.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
De La Soul: Classic back catalogue finally available for streaming
Fun news if you like ‘90s hip hop. A court decision on sampling rendered De La Soul’s first six albums unable to be monetized, which has kept them off streaming services. But a new rights-holder is reported to have worked out the licensing. ETA is early March for streaming.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
That I don’t know. I’ve got three acquaintances I follow on there via their RSS feeds who are all cinephiles. I’ve not signed up for an account, myself, per my personal no social media policy.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
I just finished Harvey Sachs’ The Ninth about the historical context, both musically and politically, for Beethoven’s final symphony. It was a relatively short and enjoyable read, and nice to get more detail on the world and time in which it was composed.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
My book club is currently discussing short stories. It’s wonderful. I still get to discuss fiction, in person, with a group of people once a month. But the time commitment to prepare isn’t much more than an evening or two, to read, re-read and take down my thoughts.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
I think you are correct to a large extent, but as someone who still subscribes to print media, much that focuses on politics, the economy and current events is very negative in tone. This is natural as these publications place focus on trying to warn readers about negative developments and things that need to be changed and improved. It is funny that when comparing the op-ed sections of the NYT to WSJ, the Spectator World to the Atlantic, or the New Criterion to Jacobin, the other side — whatever it is — is usually winning, as “things are going well for us” is less persuasive as a call to action.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
A tangent:
I do know that RottenTomatoes and other kind of review sites have become utterly worthless as metrics of quality because big companies have realized how important internet cachet has become as an advertising mechanism, and the inevitable tyranny of Goodhart's Law follows.
Find a cinephile or three to follow on Letterboxd who’s taste you respect. You don’t even have to sign up for an account or visit the website as Letterboxd provides an RSS feed for each user account.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
So you don’t think there was a noticeable shift left that at a minimum overlaps the digital age, whatever the press’s aggregate position before it?
HouseShoes
1yr ago
This. There is little to no overlap between the types of people that sell advice on how to make money in the stock market or real estate and the people who actually make money in the stock market or real estate.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
This is true for the major outlets but not the industry as a whole. And my point was not that journalism will fully cease to be. But that consolidating up to the biggest publications caused small-to-midsized ones, and all the jobs they provided, to shrink, and that contraction’s impact, in combination with other factors, helped push the industry left.
This, too, also has a feedback loop. With the rise of cable TV and social media, politics are increasingly national, so easy enough for papers around the country to just syndicate stories from the AP, Reuters, WaPo, the NYT and WSJ, as readers who live outside New York and D.C. are less interested in a localized view of politics.
HouseShoes
1yr ago
I think this is similar to what Carlous Rex told himself when deciding to advance ahead of his supply lines and into Russia. And in his defense, taking the initiative had helped him in a number of previous battles and to secure his kingdom.
A bit of a tangent, but as to the first half of the above, I think it is a two-way street. It’s not just “get woke, go broke”, but also and likely more the case, “get broke, go woke”.
All this leftward movement in the prestige press came after journalism’s financial peak and did not cause it. Social media companies and search engines siphoned off ad revenue, Craigslist killed the classifieds section, etc. The industry was shrinking, and the number of people that could make at least a middle-class living within it was, too, with the added strain imposed by aggregation of news on free sites and the increased ability of readers to shift to non-local coverage provided by the largest outlets (NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Guardian, FT, etc.)
This downward trend in financial prospects for journalists meets with the accelerating desirability of journalist as a prestige job and the increasing number of journalists who attended a select set of colleges (Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, Mizzou, etc.). Gone is the very-old industry joke of, “Please don’t tell my mother I’m a journalist — she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.” Also, not gone, but largely-diminished, are the kids who graduated from state schools and worked their way up from small beats, with normie political views, because there aren’t enough newspapers and jobs anymore to provide jobs for them, and they can’t list a degree from a highly-ranked J-school on their resume, nor draw on significant networking resources.
What happens when an industry contracts is that you get a lot of people with significant professional experience applying for the same jobs. And then also a lot of kids out of school trying to get their feet in the door against that current. So to Ms. Hoyt’s point, networking is certainly very important and this does make at least not outing yourself as not having “correct” views important. But that follows on the heels of the contraction.
The impact of millennials entering the industry was also two-fold.
(1) In the digital age when revenue was tight, both traditional and online outlets noticed opinion and reaction got as many clicks as first-hand coverage and investigative journalism, and that it could hire millennials just out of school to crank the former stuff out on the cheap. Those millennials had come through American universities that had already gone through their leftward shift, and brought that political orientation with them.
(2) Those millennials would not stay satisfied being cheap fodder as they got older. Paying one’s dues in one’s early twenties is one thing, but many would change careers as they got older. Those that landed choice jobs had to contend with a glut of some straggling boomers and a slew of gen-Xers above them. Twitter and Slack provided spaces for millennial journalists to try and enforce an industry culture. Then the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests while America was doomscrolling during pandemic lockdowns, and the collective national freakout and heightened sensitivities. Millennials were able to pounce and clear out a few older colleagues as the gen-Xers were on aggregate less likely to be up on their intersectionality, id-pol, etc. These incidents while few had a chilling effect that is only now starting to thaw just a little bit. Also, millennial tech staffers at big outlets had enough clout to feel emboldened to weigh in on journalistic matters in company Slack channels. In the pre-digital economic model, editors did not care what anyone in the print shop thought about the paper’s focus of coverage, and also might have to listen to ad salesmen complain, but would not have treated them as peers — would have considered the thought insulting.
Multiple factors have coupled the media’s leftward shift to its digital-age financial decline. It isn’t as simple as normies not liking the leftward shift and withdrawing their attention/subscription revenue.
Could you link to the OP, or explain why popular rage at a federal authority would push a country towards even larger government?
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