Monday, April 14, 2008
BostonTHEN
A year or so ago I was bitching to my business partner about the fact that we had to, you know, actually sell our product, that it made me feel like just another damn peddler as opposed to the artiste I much preferred to consider myself. To which he responded, "You think this is bad? I was walking past South Station this morning and there was a guy there in a chicken suit handing out Metros. Now that's humiliating." Point taken.
The question for BostonNOW is, if your competition has a guy in a chicken suit handing out free product, what do you do? It's like getting an invitation to a Halloween party at Marilyn Manson's house and trying to figure out what to wear. If you show up in lipstick and fishnets (and are male), it's a sure thing everyone else will be wearing J. Crew. No matter which way you play it, you're going to lose.
On one hand, I am delighted to hear of the paper's demise, solely because there will be at minimum three fewer hawkers trying to stuff the damn thing down my shirt on my morning commute. One by the bus stop at Maverick square, one ten yards away at the T station, and another coming up out of the ground at South Station. I do hope those people find other, less annoying work, because it was an honest job, but until one of them mugs me to pay for his next round of scratch tickets, I'm putting it down as a win.
Likewise, this is probably good news for all the other papers in the city. All of them depend to varying degrees upon mindshare and advertising dollars, and BostonNOW did nothing but dilute what was already getting more watered-down than the seventh-inning beer at Fenway. It's not a good thing to have members of your herd dying off due to famine, but make no mistake: better them than you. That said, if I could have chosen, I'd much rather have seen the Metro go.
Make no mistake: BostonNOW was a laughingstock of a publication, the best argument I've ever seen for government licensing of writers, and a general offense to trees everywhere. But at least it took a run at personality, locality, and a needed break from the stupefying vapors of professional journalism that have over the past half-century utterly ruined an entertainingly disreputable business.
If Hell is English cooks, German policemen, and French mechanics, then the Metro is its newspaper, where "content" functions solely as a numbing lubricant to ease the entry of the real product, i.e., the ads for tires, online degree mills, and outpatient medical studies. If you think the Globe is a bit dull now, you have not even begun to imagine the possibilities yet to be exploited in extreme blandness in the service of ever-more-efficient distribution of promotional materials. I have seen the future, and it is a thousand monkeys, sitting at a thousand typewriters, rewriting press releases for Associated Press bureaux all over the world. ¶ 5:29 PM
A year or so ago I was bitching to my business partner about the fact that we had to, you know, actually sell our product, that it made me feel like just another damn peddler as opposed to the artiste I much preferred to consider myself. To which he responded, "You think this is bad? I was walking past South Station this morning and there was a guy there in a chicken suit handing out Metros. Now that's humiliating." Point taken.
The question for BostonNOW is, if your competition has a guy in a chicken suit handing out free product, what do you do? It's like getting an invitation to a Halloween party at Marilyn Manson's house and trying to figure out what to wear. If you show up in lipstick and fishnets (and are male), it's a sure thing everyone else will be wearing J. Crew. No matter which way you play it, you're going to lose.
On one hand, I am delighted to hear of the paper's demise, solely because there will be at minimum three fewer hawkers trying to stuff the damn thing down my shirt on my morning commute. One by the bus stop at Maverick square, one ten yards away at the T station, and another coming up out of the ground at South Station. I do hope those people find other, less annoying work, because it was an honest job, but until one of them mugs me to pay for his next round of scratch tickets, I'm putting it down as a win.
Likewise, this is probably good news for all the other papers in the city. All of them depend to varying degrees upon mindshare and advertising dollars, and BostonNOW did nothing but dilute what was already getting more watered-down than the seventh-inning beer at Fenway. It's not a good thing to have members of your herd dying off due to famine, but make no mistake: better them than you. That said, if I could have chosen, I'd much rather have seen the Metro go.
Make no mistake: BostonNOW was a laughingstock of a publication, the best argument I've ever seen for government licensing of writers, and a general offense to trees everywhere. But at least it took a run at personality, locality, and a needed break from the stupefying vapors of professional journalism that have over the past half-century utterly ruined an entertainingly disreputable business.
If Hell is English cooks, German policemen, and French mechanics, then the Metro is its newspaper, where "content" functions solely as a numbing lubricant to ease the entry of the real product, i.e., the ads for tires, online degree mills, and outpatient medical studies. If you think the Globe is a bit dull now, you have not even begun to imagine the possibilities yet to be exploited in extreme blandness in the service of ever-more-efficient distribution of promotional materials. I have seen the future, and it is a thousand monkeys, sitting at a thousand typewriters, rewriting press releases for Associated Press bureaux all over the world. ¶ 5:29 PM
