Look at this amazing video of some kind of demon bursting out of a manhole in New York today. And it would be so much more amazing if this citizen journalist had simply held his or her phone horizontally instead of vertically. Your viral video should not be a narrow strip surrounded by the void.
We are told we live in the era of citizen journalism. Reddit is the new CNN, Twitter is our real-time newswire, and that stoned-looking guy with a mustard stain on his Mets t-shirt might just capture some video on his cellphone that changes the course of history. Well peak citizen journalism was reached yesterday, with some random dude wandering an empty office building in Tennessee.
AOL hired an army of underemployed music lovers to interview bands at South by Southwest. But the citizen journalists, paid $50 per story, are missing their deadlines, so AOL sent a panicked mass email (below).
Luckily for lazy journalists, there is a permissible way to "crowdsource" the hard work of reporting to the Twitter masses. But there are many more wrong ways to slack. After the jump, a collection of microblogging "don't"s.
The subway does the strangest thing to people. For example, sometimes, the penises of men will escape their pants! This is a strange phenomenon that's only well-documented in retrospect. Until now. Uncensored flasher action, after the jump.
Dadgummit, porn ruins corporate strategy! CBS is learning the hard way that if you give people a "branded mobile platform" to "upload" their "user-generated content," the "content" they will "generate" is "nekkid womens." The Tiffany Network started a site called CBSeyemobile.com where you, the idiotic consumer, can upload photos. And now they're shocked, shocked to find out that it's full of filth, loose women, and inappropriate public demonstrations of lesbianism! Ad Age broke the story in a Pulitzer-worthy feat of journalism, causing them to (modestly) publish this rather NSFW picture, which we are prepared to say is the most newsworthy photo that has ever graced that august publication's pages:
After all this Mickey Kaus blathering about MSM gatekeepers censoring the news and preventing the reader from learning "what happened yesterday" (or, at this point, last week), it's wonderful to see the citizen-journalists and crowdsourced new guardians of information acting just as ridiculously about this supposed John Edwards scandal. As you'll recall, the National Enquirer caught John Edwards sneaking into a hotel late one night to visit former staffer Rielle Hunter and her child. When they confronted him on his way out, he hid in a bathroom. Fox News confirmed the visit. But none of this meets Wikipedia's high standards of notability! You won't find Rielle or the Beverly Hilton even mentioned on the Edwards entry.
Former White House correspondent and current MSNBC host David Gregory just may be taking over for Chris Matthews once Matthews' very expensive contract is up next year. It is hoped, by MSNBC brass, that the kinda well-liked Gregory will be less of a headache than the notorious diva Matthews. But maybe he'll be just as bad! We asked for your stories about Gregory, and you delivered. As we said yesterday, his reputation in DC was not particularly bad for a TV "star." But that town is sycophantic enough to forgive a lot. So far, you all agree that David Gregory is, in fact, a jerk. Your personal stories of jerkdom, after the jump (and feel free to send more).
MSNBC took away Tucker Carlson's show because it was terrible and no one watched it. They gave to former White House correspondent David Gregory (the tall guy). We're not sure if his show is terrible or not, because no one still watches it. But regardless, rumors continue to fly that Gregory is being "groomed" to take the place of Hardballer Chris Matthews. Matthews is a network star, but he comes with a lot of baggage, like accusations of sexism, embarrassing magazine profiles, and his inability to deal politely with his staff. Gregory—famous for, in addition to his height, his testy and sarcastic exchanges with Bush press secretaries—doesn't have the ratings to justify any of this yet, obv, but supposedly CBS wants him so therefore NBC needs him even more because that's how TV works with its "talent." But would replacing Matthews with Gregory be even more of a disaster?
This man is just waltzing around SoHo, in this ridiculous Speedo thing, holding a Whole Foods bag. He is attracting attention. He doesn't seem to care. No apparent hidden camera crews indicative of a "punking." So. Spring? Attached is a camera phone shot of the weird naked SoHo dude. Two more after the jump!
Old Media is dead! Today CNN officially launched iReport, the first citizen media site other than Current, NowPublic, Newsvine, and other ones that don't matter. But CNN's making a good run for not mattering either. See, some reports on the site, which has the tagline "Unedited. Unfiltered. News," get edited and filtered and put on TV. What made the cut? Teenage book reports and disaster porn. I'd put an example below, but CNN failed to learn from the one thing YouTube does right and let people embed videos on other sites. A real shame, because they'll miss out on all this news:
