The Old Country's Biggest Blunders

I spent most of my last year there fighting to keep TV Club Classic alive a while longer, but it was on life support back in 2012 or '13, whenever Netflix streaming became the more common method of watching stuff.

Oh, it's Todd? Sorry about the 'new media kid' crack, then. I like you. 

I just don't understand why a writer would defend stuff like this. I mean, the only point to the articles I can see are to 1) validate millennial consumer habits and/or 2) pat La Croix's marketing team on the back. The old 'Old Country' would have been in a position to make fun of stuff like this. The old AVC used to court readers by appealing to their intelligence instead of insulting it. 

But I guess this is the way it is now. In response, I was going to link back to Slate's series on 'bogus NYT trend pieces", but then the latest search hit I get from Slate is this: www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2016/03/in_defense_of_the_new_york_times_trend_piece.html

Again, you have my sympathy.

TV Club is dropping Adventure Time reviews.

THIS IS BULLSHIT.

I know it probably brings in the most views and what-not, but I would like to go one week without a mention of GOT.

I don't care. I'll never care. Don't think I haven't tried, but I don't care.

Then again, maybe I should have stayed out of this thread. Reading these comments, despite what I said not too long ago over at AVCAD, is making me realize I really don't have much of a reason to log on to AVC anymore. 

The careful to not step on any toes chatter on twitter amongst the various freelancers has been kind sad too.


Oh Zach:

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.