le hamcat

The practice of “matching” a story is an outdated one that still continues despite the fact we’re all now working with a medium that no longer requires it. If someone already reported the story, you’ve verified their story is correct, and you have nothing to move that story forward, write a brief and link to who did the legwork already. By all means, let your readers know about the story, lead them to it. Be a beacon for all news, not just your own. Then, move on and produce something of more value. Newsrooms are low on resources, apply those resources efficiently. Your 500 word re-write of the same article your “competitor,” as you call them, is un-necessary and a total waste of time.

I believe strongly in high and low brow, serious and funny–marrying them–not only reach more people but to have a greater impact. I think people who use GIFs most successfully are using them that way. But really when you ask, What is a GIF?, it’s essentially a punch line.

Puffing on a cigarette, with an AK-47 rifle slung casually on his shoulders, this seven-year-old Syrian boy’s childhood appears well and truly over.

SXSW is the 21st-century equivalent of a medieval market town, just with more horseshit. It’s an orgy of capitalism, an unrestrained, unselfconscious celebration of sales, marketing, branding, and “gamification.” Even the dumbest of memes have been recruited in the service of sales. Grumpy Cat is here, and she wants you to buy Friskies. For a gathering so driven by the pursuit of money, the question of who has it—and who doesn’t—goes almost completely unmentioned. There are talks about social and civil rights issues—feminism, race, female genital cutting—but words like “inequality” literally aren’t on the schedule. (A search for “taxes” returns a session that mentions how awesome it would be to have a robot who could do them.) Maybe that’s because everyone knows that almost everyone here coughed up several hundreds of dollars for a conference pass, and hundreds more for lodging. Conversations about inequality are awkward. Conversations about futurism, tech triumphalism, entrepreneurship, and the “intersections” thereof reign supreme. There’s almost no talk of religion, electoral politics, or labor unions—anything that smacks of old-school collective action. This is a place of unfettered technological optimism, where coders and entrepreneurs can solve any societal problem. SXSW has a politics, but it’s one that mirrors the technolibertarianism of the Reddit generation: civil liberties (read: free speech, Larry Lessig, and Aaron Swartz), entrepreneurship, and individualism.

Maybe it’s unfair to expect a conference that’s essentially a glorified trade show to concern itself with a broader sort of politics. But SXSW is a big deal: Hundreds of media outlets cover it, and its overall tone sends a message to attendees and the broader culture.