We Want Media

When Jonathan Landman walked into the room, I had him pegged for a New York Times guy. With his squared glasses and graying hair, he looks like a Times guy. With his composure and enunciation, he talks like a Times guy.

"According to the Riverton Sheriff, his deputies found guns, ammunition, knives and coded messages in the bedroom of one of the suspects."

As if it wasn’t bad enough that you might not get that fabulous job because of a handful of un-PC comments on your MySpace, now you can get tossed in the slammer for posting your answer to the above question online.

Just when you thought media’s attitude on ethics left a bad taste in your mouth, The New York Post’s Page Six came along and dosed a spoonful of arsenic.

Bravo, SPIN. With a little flourish and some Klosterman karma, you fooled hundreds of bloggers into thinking that Axl Rose was finally going to deliver after 15 years with Chinese Democracy.

Kurt Andersen says celebrities are dead and we’re slowly beginning to shun their dying personas. I think he’s wrong – and Paris Hilton is probably banking on it, Sidekick and all.

Arianna Huffington screwed up. She knows it, George Clooney knows it, the blogosphere knows it, and now, the nation.

This Thursday, CBS began streaming live telecasts of March Madness (the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship tournament for those of you who didn’t fill out brackets) free of charge on the Web.

I’m sick of the Brokeback media trend. Ever since Jake-Darko-Gyllenhaal laid one on "That’s the most words I’ve said in a year" Aussie Heath Ledger, people have been snatching up cowboy boots and hoping their gay best friend finds a guy who castrates cows for a living.

As a cutting-edge politics junkie (and yes, I'm nothing but cutting-edge), I've seen my fair share of Gallup polls. From Dean screams to trial denials, the Gallup poll has been a wonderfully cynical way to tap into the fears of your favorite American-next-door. But their latest poll on the Big Easy had me scratching my head.

I recently read a fantastic article spotlighting image in the media. The piece used various parallels – from A Million Little Pieces author James Frey to Madonna – to explain how we, as consumers, use a double standard to judge the honesty and integrity of a media personality’s persona relative to their person.

So Jessica Gawker (Jessica Coen for all you media hounds living under a rock) came into NYU to talk to a bunch of students about journalism last week, and formalities aside, it was astounding.

Napster can’t be to blame. After all, how did Sean Fanning know what he was getting into when he attached his moniker to a slick little piece of software? Filesharing has been the topic du jour since this millennium started, and there’s no end in sight –- but it arguably has changed the way music does business.