Theme this week: over-indulgence
________________________
But thanks to Huffington, all self-respecting journalists—especially those who fear for their jobs—have abandoned those anxieties and are happy to chase Arianna’s SEO Speedwagon wherever it may go. They’ll even drive over inconvenient journalistic shibboleths that stand between them and their page-view destinations.
-Jack Shafer, SEO Speedwagon: The rapid rise and sale of Arianna Huffington’s Post, Slate, Feb. 7
________________________
That’s a bit like how social networks get built. (Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: “You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.”)
-David Carr, At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs, NYT, Feb. 13.
________________________
For every loser I’ve screamed at, there have been nice, normal single guys with perfectly acceptable ZIP codes and ages and jobs and habits who never did a thing wrong but for some reason were chucked after the first or second, or maybe even third, date for being boring, predictable, too nice, too normal, not successful enough, or . . . admitted to no one, perhaps not even myself: too available. The scariest of scary words.
-Jen Doll, The plight of the single lady, Village Voice, Feb. 9.
________________________
Clawless, fangless, and slight of build, he could at best look forward to furtive boltings of carrion until the day he became meat himself. It took humans quite a while to learn how to gang up for self-protection and food acquisition, the latter usually a hyena-style affair of separating infant or sick animals from their herds.
-B.R. Myers, The Moral Crusade Against Foodies, The Atlantic, March 2011
________________________
Any self-respecting journalist would sooner endorse incest than come out in favor of pack journalism.
–Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus, 1972
Inverted Soapbox 