The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

Still never seen any hard evidence of this "Lacroix," which is the main reason the original article was so baffling and offensive acting like it was omnipresent. Quite frankly it sounds made up.

My uncle, a former massive alcoholic, credits it with helping him go cold turkey. 

I'm going to keep this in mind for when I inevitably have to make this choice.

Oh good, kvetching about millennials. That's as original as sarcasm!

I take pride in being part of the Rorschach generation, so named because whatever bitter people see when they write their funny little diatribes on what's wrong with millennial culture inevitably says a lot more about them than it does about us. We're entitled, or we're vapid, or we're ironic, or we're naive, or we're consumerist, or we're thieves, or we're lazy, or we're spoiled, or we're disrespectful, or what the fuck ever who gives a shit what people think? Young people are being young people and doing whatever young people feel like, which verges significantly from what other young people feel like, because with like a billion fucking millennials in the world are you really trying to ascribe universal qualities to the 'generation'? Generational psychology, by the way, is speculative nonsense espoused by morons.

Even just using the word millennial gives unjustifiable credence to generational psychology, which today appears to mean that any random person can cast a wide gaze over society and with laser accuracy pinpoint sweeping and generalised generational trends which inevitably demonstrate that some generation other than theirs is defective. I could find you a dozen 'millennials' who represent everything bad you associate with young people, and a dozen 'millennials' who represent the exact opposite. Forget the armchair sociology and find something more productive to do with your time.

Don't let it get you down too much.  Old people have ascribed some assortment of these negative traits to the generation that came after them for at least the past fifty years.  Olds bemoaned how terrible my generation was what with our apathy and cynicism...our laziness and poor taste in music and fashion, and now that my generation are the olds we are doing the same thing to the kids that came after us.  In ten to fifteen years time the millennials of today will be complaining how Cyborg Children or MechaYouth or whatever are horribly entitled know-it-alls who think they're better than everyone because of cybernetic enhancements and how those cybernetically enhanced teens don't know the real meaning of "hard work."

And the problem isn't that any particular generation is particularly bad, for the most part*, it's just that as people get into their 30s and 40s, they begin to realize that teenagers and early 20-somethings are utterly awful human beings, almost completely without exception. Not willing to accept that about themselves (because they, too, were awful at that age), they assume it's that generation's problem. Most people grow out of it, of course, but pleasant interaction with a teenager is pretty much an inherent oxymoron.

* Except the Boomers, obviously.

Leaving aside any specific articles, I don't really think there's a generational shift at play here (I mean maybe in the very specific case of The AV Club, but I find that old school AVC readers often seem to remember it as The Hater and then very little else). Fluffy, light features have always been part of journalism, and they've always been popular, because people want to know about [insert trend/hip thing here]. And they can be done well or poorly! That's a problem if you're applying that sort of fluffiness to, like, politicians or policy questions. But when it comes to less essential things, like celebrities or fashion or sparkling water, fluff doesn't really hurt people. (Certainly there are non-fluffy ways to cover these topics, but I don't know that every story on Earth needs a hard-nosed approach to be good.)

More broadly speaking, I think what you're talking about is how the internet used to be the primary news source for very few people, and those people tended toward a sort of earned, bitter snark, a kind of exhaustion with the system as it was and a certainty that it would never change. And that also pointed toward institutions like the media itself. To read, say, Gawker in 2005 might have been exhausting and made you feel a little dirty, but it also felt like it was "real" in a way the traditional media didn't (because to this sort of reader, that snark really WAS more real). 

But now everybody gets their news on the internet, and that means the tools of the old media have largely moved onto the internet unchanged. Some of them have started to die off (the celebrity profile is probably going to go away), and the internet has invented new forms. But for the most part, the vast majority of online #content is there to suggest that things are just fine, that the system is, in some ways, equitable, and that most of the changes we need to make are cosmetic and around the edges. When we know that's not true! So the trick is when to agitate and when to celebrate (because we need both), and what the mixture is. Nobody's figured this out, but I don't think skewing all the time toward snark is the answer.

I'm a little late to this whole mineral/sparkling water argument or whatever.

But part of it has got to me that beverage companies are now pushing sparkling/lightly flavored water like CRAZY, while soda is fading somewhat. There's a health push/realization that soda, even diet, is pretty awful for you and so companies want you to buy water instead. I am sure LaCroix's resurgence has something to do with this. It's a trend that goes beyond one brand. (If this was actually covered in either article, I apologize, I didn't actually read them.)

Also, anecdata, one of the grocery stores I shop at had LaCroix marketers a few months ago giving out full-size cans of the stuff.

Believe me, I share many of your feelings. It is gutting to me to see what's happening to TV Club right now. But I also get that Facebook drives so much traffic now, and it's hard to get people to read, say, classic TV show recaps off a Facebook share. Much easier to get them to read "Jon Snow is Ramsay Bolton."

One reason I like working at Vox (shameless plug!) is that we've figured out a way to split the difference between the sort of Facebook bait you basically have to do to survive and more extensive journalism (and have often figured out how to make Facebook interested in that journalism). But it's not an easy time to be in this industry.

I also once got a visit from my security guys telling me that one of their ads was attempting to feed malware.

TL;DR version: It looks to me like, at this point, that there isn’t a good any way to (monetarily) reward engagement of readers over volume, which is unfortunate because it’s engagement—I don’t mean commenting, but reading that makes you grow in some way—that makes reading worthwhile.

Ron Howard Voice I think we are starting to see some paid media retrenchment—the obvious case would be newspapers, which mostly seem to require at least some kind of membership, or stuff that’s established but niche in some way—I regularly pick up The New York Review of Books from my local bookstore in part because I like having a big, stapled-together newspaper that I can page through but really because a lot of stuff I want to read online is subscription-only. They’re an established name, though, and I’d guess they’re probably nonprofit.

Online I think some sites with a definite, loyal audience manage the freemium model of having basic global content and then another level for paid content. Talking Points Memo does this—I think with paid content you get both long-form investigative reporting and some kind of commenting/community features, but they have an established and specialized audience. I know paid membership for the AVC was discussed in the comments around the time when it started to look like a shift to nüDisqus was inevitable (anyone else remember that—pre-Dissolve-split!—time AVC’s Auld Disqus system was switched to nüDisqus and how freaked out we were?) and when Hear This/Watch This started (which was seen as the harbinger for the site turning into clickbait, which is both kind of true and kind of hilarious when you think back at how solid a lot of those Hear/Watch This articles were, even if they were brief). Paid membership would help stave off the inevitable Disqus hordes and support content, it was thought.

I think it was probably a reach—after all, how many AVC commenters are in college/unemployed/really willing to pay for the privilege to post…OF COCK? But on the other hand I remember people citing an old census the site did of its readership that showed the site’s readership was older and more affluent than one might expect from the comments, and certainly looking at this forum’s membership you see a cross-section of people that’s more than just a bunch of underemployed kids just out of college (like I was during my peak commenting frequency). There’s definitely a sort of middle market—people who are interested but not experts (I was interested in film before the AVC but my growth as a cinephile there was exponential; I liked TV but rarely would have considered it art; I knew TV’s history but wasn’t really engaged with it; I had a vague idea I liked comedy but had never heard of people like Maria Bamford), people with some degree of sophistication but are willing to learn—that the AVC really knew how to capture (and still sometimes does). But that middle media market—and not just for pop culture but for politics, science, &c.—seems to be one that’s being squeezed out.