Thursday, June 7, 2012

Damn those side boob headlines!

Everyone talks about how much trouble the print media is in.

But what I'm noticing is that the web media seems to be increasing desperate to catch my attention. They are using increasingly intrusive ways to interrupt the flow. Flashier, trashier, stupider.

I mean, if they keep going this way, I'll just turn them off, renew my New York Times subscription and pray they survive.

Seriously, I like the short little snippets of information in the aggregate sites, but not enough to wade through all the pop-ups and flashing lights and absconding of message and misleading headlines and hijacking of threads.

I mean, it's gotten so much worse just in the last six months or so.

Salon's revamp is horrible, Slate throws freakin' video and sound at me without asking, Huffington Post has more and more "sideboob" and "wardrobe malfunction" entries (I'm a male, I can't help it...).

So, here's the thing. Yeah, the web is laying waste to the print media, but I have to wonder if they are thriving themselves? In fact, I have to wonder if what's replacing print media is really making anyone money? Except in the most speculative way, of selling it off to some desperate print media outlet?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good question. And really, what waste has been lain to print? Some jobs have been lost and newspapers shuttered, yes, but people have been saying the Internet and ereaders and gadgetry spell doomsday for print for a decade and a half or more. At the very least, the rhetoric is overblown.