One year later... Whitlock talks to The Big Lead again...

Winger, I agree, but I just get a little put off by the high-fiving TBL does to Net Jumpers, as if what he's doing has anything to do with what they're doing. It's not an apples to apples comparrison. It's apples to Muppets.

The Big Lead (pictured here) gets its latest tip on which NFL quarterback may have impregnated L.C. from The Hills.

 

It's a pleasure to share the board with you, DD.

 

Has TBL weighed in on the Bert-Ernie dynamic yet?

 

He's doing Chesney/Manning first, then blowing the lid off their hot Muppet love as a follow-up. Well struck, DD.

 

high-five dd.

is big lead still ripping off photos?

 

The freedom to get out and fucking cover stories, womack, without worrying about whether your beat will be eliminated tomorrow or a .02-cent increase in newsprint will wipe out your travel budget. Jesus. Grow some thicker skin, man.

 

Yes, because bloggers are out doing precisely those things.
The freedom to work for free, from home, with no sense of responsibility.
Whoo-hoo!

 

NOW you're talking...

 

http://nymag.com/news/features/39319/

"Consider the Gawker mind-fuck at a time of rapid deterioration of our industry: Young print journalists are depressed over the state of the industry and their inability to locate challenging work or a job with health insurance. Although the situation may not be as dire as they might imagine—a healthy magazine is constantly on the hunt for young writers, because it wants the fresh take on the world found only in the young, and because young writers tend to be cheap—they need a release, the daily dose of Schadenfreude offered by Gawker’s gallows humor, its ritualistic flogging of working journalists and relentless cataloguing of the industry’s fall (e.g., items like “New Republic Page Count Watch”). Though reading Gawker subtly reinforces their misery, they generate an emotional bond and soon begin to tip it with their own inside information (and misinformation, as reserved for their enemies). The system keeps getting stronger, a KGB of media gossip, a complex network of journalist spies and enforcers communicating via e-mail and IM, until Gawker knocks print out of the box. With Gawker, there is now little need for the usual gossip players like the New York Observer, vastly diminished in its news-breaking capacity and influence, or even the New York Post’s “Page Six,” emasculated by the Murdoch hierarchy after the Jared Paul Stern scandal. The panopticon is complete. “Peering into my in-box in the morning is like looking at the id of every journalist in the city,” says Gawker writer Emily Gould.

 

Yeah, swell.
Life is a spectator sport.
Substance be damned.
I'm fucking thrilled.