Wednesday, February 4, 2009

'Self-referential hipness'

Too terse to be truly gonzo, I think, but Fear and Loathing in Georgetown had this on the Culture11 shutdown:
I hope for two things:
1) The writers at Culture11 all find new employment, especially Poulos.
2) That they recognize the failure was a result, not of the sagging economy, but allowing their self-referential hipness to get out of control. It went to your heads like a nerd who becomes a popstar overnight.
Which sums up something important, I think. Competitive Enterprise Institute is having an open house tonight at their new HQ. Why am I mentioning this? Expect updates . . .

UPDATE: The reason I was mentioning the CEI open house was because it was a news opportunity. How many journalists showed up at the open house? Lots. How many were shrewd enough to see it as a news opportunity? Only one.

Granted, that's just a sort of society-news tidbit -- the stuff that shows up in community newspaper features called "Scene & Heard" or some such. But somebody's got to do that sort of stuff, and the haughty arrogance of those who think such minor-league reporting to be beneath them has always disturbed me. The lean-and-mean journalism operations of the future will require more versatile generalists, and fewer narrow specialists.

2 comments:

  1. I'm rather eager to hear Culture11 criticism, so that I can learn from the flaws of a project that had plenty of room for improvement. But it would be helpful if critics offered some examples to illustrate their beef. I edited roughly a third of the articles posted at C11, and I can't think of any that were particularly self-referential. Does this critique refer to the articles, or only to the blogs? Which of the blogs? Which kinds of posts? I'd be grateful for links.

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  2. Why is Culture11 getting so much more attention in its demise than during its existence?
    Recalls Air America.
    Tempted to add something constructed from "run for the Senate?" and "who from Culture11?" but I never read it, and so that would seem a cheap shot.

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