Pop Culture References

First thing Finkel would say is, "It's Kenn, not Ken."

 

couldn't agree more.

what seems clever to you won't seem clever - or even make sense - to a good percentage of your readers.

i despise this crud

 

And if you don't, then you don't.

 

How is it even possible to do three pages on this topic without mentioning the names Klosterman or Simmons?

 

HeinekenMan, just curious. How would you have teased the story?

 

I don't mind pop culture/current movie type references. It's a judgement call as to whether or how successfully you can pull them off. I try them out in the newsroom. If even two people don't get the reference from the cross section I try, I drop it and go in a different direction.
I'd fight for the Oliver Stone reference though, especially with World Trade Centre in the theatres now. I might concede movie director Oliver Stone but you wouldn't need parentheses. They're distracting and slow the flow.

 

In a business where space is disappearing I often feel too many writers are concerned about writing for themselves and their buddies and not for readers.

now try this for top two graphs on a recent gamer that appeared in a major paper:

Maturity is not easy. A youth movement doesn't come with a linear growth chart.
Dissect the statistics, crunch the facts and feed them all into the Jack LaLanne Blender - and good luck drawing a conclusion. The analysis doesn't account for pressure, when breathing becomes difficult, palms sweat and goosebumps surface.

 

Stephen King and Jay McInerney populate very successful novels with pop culture references.

 

There is someone trapped in the 1950s.

 

Kenn is a very strange dude, and unfortunately his personality sometimes turns people off to his message. But I was exposed to his handouts three years before I met him and seven years before I worked with him, and even those who were predisposed to agreeing with him sometimes wished he'd give it a rest once in a while. But his presentation, copies of which were given to me by another editor, plainly states that his observations were taken from sources such as Bernstein and Zinsser, and as I began reading those people I realized that Finkel was merely a conduit. If you have a problem with Bernstein and Zinsser, too, I shudder to think what your copy looks like.

 

Go back 22 years and read some of the "Jackson victory tour" references that geniuses all over the country wrote whenever someone they covered named "Jackson" did something good.

Cringe. Cringe. Cringe.

And today's lines --- "So-and-so has become a bigger parasite than Kevin Federline" --- will sound equally stupid 22 years from now, if not 22 months from now.

 

OK, so then my question is... who gives a darn what copy from 22 years ago looks like? Or 22 months ago?