Category: On Media

As a weekly columnist for a 140-year-old newspaper, I’m an endangered species. I’m like a steak, cooking backwards: rarer by the second. More so now that the run of my column is being halved. There was a contraction in the newsroom. The afterbirth is, as Terry Gilliam might say, “100 percent more Less.”

Ever hear of a “fortnightly? columnist? Neither have I but that’s what what am now. Perhaps I’ll eventually become a monthly, then annual columnist. After that, I’ll publish with less frequency than appearances of Halley’s comet.

I know what I?m talking about ? a kid in my brother’s sixth grade class was a direct descendant of Halley. She was 11 when the comet last visited. The local paper did a story and pointed out that she’ll be 86 when it returns in 2061. That?s about when my next column will run. Or, at least that?s how it seems to a man who?s spent his entire professional career on deadline and needs the juice like some kinda junky.

The comet had been observed before but never as colorfully as when it ranked a mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 1066 (medieval media!) when scribe “Eilmer of Malmesbury” spied the comet for the second time in his long life and lamented, “You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers, you evil. I hate you!”

Eilmer’s comet comments could pass for the reception of one of my columns. But wait there’s more: “It is long since I saw you,” he writes “But as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country. I hate you!”

What the hell is a fortnight anyway? Sounds like an evening spent building a fortress of couch cushions. Apparently, “fortnight” is an abbreviation of “fourteen nights.” Filing a fortnightly column drops my annual published output by 26 columns. It’s all relative I suppose. Even if I filed every one of those 14 nights I’d still only be doing only 1.4 percent the business of Scheherazade.

So, doing 50 percent of my own business ain’t that bad — perhaps it’s the difference between being half-assed and an ass-whole (Ba dum tss. I’ll be here fortnightly). Expect more blogs.

It used to be the pornographers who pioneered innovative ways to distribute their product, from the banal (like matchbooks and playing cards) to the once-cutting edge province of the Interweb. In the mid-90s, the Federal Communications Law Journal published an essay by attorney Peter Johnson that?succinctly captured porn?s opportunistic exploitation of media:

“Throughout the history of new media, from vernacular speech to movable type, to photography, to paperback books, to videotape, to cable and pay-TV, to ‘900’ phone lines, to the French Minitel, to the Internet, to CD-ROMs and laser discs, pornography has shown technology the way.”

Porn has a way of filling every crevice of medium it encounters, with a particular emphasis on novelty. Until now, the only thing porn hadn?t filled, it seemed, was Chipotle cups (the container used in the cultural low of ?two girls one cup? was unbranded). However, it failed to fill this final frontier — instead Chipotle cups runneth over with literature, thanks to author Jonathan Safran Foer.

Five Authors, Five Cups

Thanks to an appeal made by Foer to Chipolte?s CEO Steve Ells, publishing is taking the big gulp and printing original works by the author and a cherry picked roster that also includes Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders and Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Lewis, who?s site, VF Daily, broke the story.

?I tried to put together a somewhat eclectic group, in terms of styles,? VF Daily quotes Foer?I wanted some that were essayistic, some fiction, some things that were funny, and somewhat thought provoking.?

And now they?re also disposable.

Perhaps porn will have its day at Chipotle when the chain serves adult beverages. Until then, as Ohioan Steve Elbert protested to the Chicago Tribune when a local adult video store was bulldozed for a McDonald?s, ?We think fast food is equivalent to pornography, nutritionally speaking.? Raise your cup to that.

Among the various breeds of online brain-candy, by far one of the most insidious is the so-called Listicle. A portmanteau of ?list? and ?article,? the word sounds like what would result if you tattooed your grocery list on a particular part of the male anatomy (which would probably fit right in with the adventuresome inksters at Whole Foods, actually). Milk, eggs and what else? Permit me to unzip and check my listicle.

The listicle is usually comprised of a thin lead, a series of bullet points and a vague summary. I?ve written dozens ? or rather, I?ve filed dozens when I was too hung over or bored to write something that required extra line breaks to fill a column inch. This is not one of those moments, tempting as it is to enumerate the ?5 Reasons I Missed My Deadline Again? (No. 3: ?Deadline, I thought you said ?bed lyin? ? so I slept in?) or ?3 Ways to Have a 3 Way Without Your Marriage Counselor Trying to Get Involved ? with Your Wife.?

List-inclined writers often struggle to get as many words into their work as bullet points. Consequently, their pieces read like Bonnie and Clyde?s Flathead Ford. Sure, it drives but?

This isn?t a problem for me since I usually don?t know enough about any one subject to have more than a couple of bullets about it. And I?ve got to gussy those up with copious amounts of verbiage lest my readers notice the holes in my liberal arts education. Actually, there?s just one hole, but it?s vast and black and inhaled a lot of money into oblivion some years ago.

Listicle of Listicles

Predictably, the listicle concept has turned in on itself resulting in listicles about listicles. I?m guilty of having once written, Top Ten Top Ten Lists. Last month, my colleague Rachel Edidin, at Wired?s Underwire blog, published 5 Reasons Listicles Are Here to Stay, and Why That?s OK. Obviously, it?s okay ? Listicle.co has based its business on the concept. ?Listicle is a social blogging platform that allows everyone to create and share listicles,? its site explains. Great, more amateurs pushing out the professionals. Good for you, Internet.

Cracked, the humor site that spun out of its print magazine, has mastered the listicle principle in its own cockeyed way. Every ounce of its content is effectively a list: as in, 5 Random Coincidences That Invented Modern Pop Culture ? No. 5: Stan Lee?s Laziness Led to the X-Men.? Apparently, Lee forewent the work necessary to create origin stories and asked instead, ?What if they were just born that way??

Perhaps that?s how listicles themselves came to be ? they?re not undernourished articles reduced to a collection of skeletal subheads, but rather mutations. With superpowers. And maligned by bigots who fear them. In short, heroes here to clean up the joint, through brute force if necessary.

As Wolverine says, ?I?m the best at what I do but what I do best isn?t very nice.? Yes, Listicles are kicking my ass.

But why? Because, according to Edidin, ?2. Lists Give Us Additional Ways to Interact With Information ? Lists let us process complicated information spatially, transforming it from cluster to linear progression.? Since much of real life is a cluster (add your own four-letter word here), let alone some newspaper columns. Perhaps listicles are the solution to all our problems, perhaps not. All I know is that my name has been on one since grammar school ? usually circled and with a check next to it.

That said, I don?t doubt I?m doing it wrong. I should try to use the power of the list as a force for good ? like not forgetting to buy butter at Whole Foods. Okay, sign me up for a listicle. Just one thing, how bad does it hurt?