![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
For nobody’s amusement but my own, I note that Henry Miller bore a kinda, sorta resemblance to my X:
My X:
It’s Henry’s 124th birthday today, by the way. Henry deeply resented the fact that he wasn’t born on Christmas Day, and accused his mother – I forget in which book – of deliberately keeping him inside her an extra day, clamping those uterine muscles down on him out of sheer spite – which, as a woman who’s gone into labor twice, I can assure you is absolutely impossible.
###
I listened to the first season of Serial while running last week. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite movies, the deeply disturbing River’s Edge. It was exactly what you’d expect This American Life’s take on True Crime to be – which is to say, it was far more interested in exploring the case’s emotional effect on the show’s producer, Sarah Koenig (who mispronounces her name Kay-nig) than in shedding any new light on the murder of Hae Min Lee.
That’s because, in all likelihood, there is no new light to be shed on the murder of Hae Min Lee. I think Adnan Syed did it, though sure, there are a number of inconsistencies with the timeline, so had I been on the jury and disposed to take the jury instructions seriously, I might have voted not to convict. All doubt is reasonable when you come right down to it. I mean, it’s your doubt, right? And you have reasons for entertaining it.
What was a lot more interesting than the podcast itself was the mini-phenom it became in the media.
Back when I was an entertainment journalist, I used to advise other entertainment journalists (with far more experience than I had), when they were tearing out their hair about finding new angles for the old, old stories they’d been assigned, to look on the Internet. No, they wouldn’t necessarily find new primary source information on the Internet. But they would discover exactly what the Fans were clamoring to be fed. And that’s actually the root of all entertainment reporting.
This is still the best advice for any entertainment journalist today.
One may quibble that if you write about Kim Kardashian's love of rich red Vulva Supreme Lip Gloss (as reported on TMX), but Kim Kardashian prefers wearing rich red Pudenda Supreme Lip Gloss that you've misreported a story! But, get real. Outside of the grosses, entertainment chronicling ain't news. It's marketing. Who the fuck cares? Or more to the point: Who will care a year from now?
Serial got picked up by the Reddit fanbase who devoted a sub-Reddit to it. That's maybe 17,000 people, which hardly constitutes a national obsession.
Nevertheless, reporters connected to more “legitimate” news sources ranging from The New Yorker and The New York Times to webzines like Slate and Salon began covering it as though it was a national obsession. That's because they didn't have to do a lot of work to write that story. In fact, Slate actually devoted a weekly 40-minute podcast to critiquing the weekly Serial podcast.
And thus, it became a national obsession.
Can you say, Lazy, self-reflexive reporters?
Mister Rogers thought you could!
My X:
It’s Henry’s 124th birthday today, by the way. Henry deeply resented the fact that he wasn’t born on Christmas Day, and accused his mother – I forget in which book – of deliberately keeping him inside her an extra day, clamping those uterine muscles down on him out of sheer spite – which, as a woman who’s gone into labor twice, I can assure you is absolutely impossible.
###
I listened to the first season of Serial while running last week. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite movies, the deeply disturbing River’s Edge. It was exactly what you’d expect This American Life’s take on True Crime to be – which is to say, it was far more interested in exploring the case’s emotional effect on the show’s producer, Sarah Koenig (who mispronounces her name Kay-nig) than in shedding any new light on the murder of Hae Min Lee.
That’s because, in all likelihood, there is no new light to be shed on the murder of Hae Min Lee. I think Adnan Syed did it, though sure, there are a number of inconsistencies with the timeline, so had I been on the jury and disposed to take the jury instructions seriously, I might have voted not to convict. All doubt is reasonable when you come right down to it. I mean, it’s your doubt, right? And you have reasons for entertaining it.
What was a lot more interesting than the podcast itself was the mini-phenom it became in the media.
Back when I was an entertainment journalist, I used to advise other entertainment journalists (with far more experience than I had), when they were tearing out their hair about finding new angles for the old, old stories they’d been assigned, to look on the Internet. No, they wouldn’t necessarily find new primary source information on the Internet. But they would discover exactly what the Fans were clamoring to be fed. And that’s actually the root of all entertainment reporting.
This is still the best advice for any entertainment journalist today.
One may quibble that if you write about Kim Kardashian's love of rich red Vulva Supreme Lip Gloss (as reported on TMX), but Kim Kardashian prefers wearing rich red Pudenda Supreme Lip Gloss that you've misreported a story! But, get real. Outside of the grosses, entertainment chronicling ain't news. It's marketing. Who the fuck cares? Or more to the point: Who will care a year from now?
Serial got picked up by the Reddit fanbase who devoted a sub-Reddit to it. That's maybe 17,000 people, which hardly constitutes a national obsession.
Nevertheless, reporters connected to more “legitimate” news sources ranging from The New Yorker and The New York Times to webzines like Slate and Salon began covering it as though it was a national obsession. That's because they didn't have to do a lot of work to write that story. In fact, Slate actually devoted a weekly 40-minute podcast to critiquing the weekly Serial podcast.
And thus, it became a national obsession.
Can you say, Lazy, self-reflexive reporters?
Mister Rogers thought you could!
