Yakoob on 10/3/2012 at 02:52
So normally I wouldnt bother even making a thread about such minute and stupid thing, but the lastest Yahoo News headline just boggles my mind:
(
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/restaurant-review-of-the-olive-garden-goes-viral.html)
Restaurant Review of The Olive Garden Goes ViralQuote:
When Marilyn Hagerty, columnist and food critic for the local Grand Forks Herald paper, visited the city’s new Olive Garden restaurant (a place she hadn’t been to since dining at the location in Fargo a few years ago), she apparently enjoyed good service and a very satisfying eating experience. ...
“The chicken Alfredo,” she wrote, “was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese.” ... Other highlights from the review: ...
The entire "news" article is basically just key quotes from someone's blog post. Are-you-fucking-kidding-me??? I know the typical "celebrity drama" bullshit is pretty low, but this is like a whole new level I haven't deemed possible. Wow...
And before the typical snide "that's what you get for checking yahoo news," I don't, but I have a mail account with them and whenever you login it shows the latest headlines.
Renzatic on 10/3/2012 at 03:03
Quote Posted by Yakoob
And before the typical snide "that's what you get for checking yahoo news,"
...I've got nothing then.
Muzman on 10/3/2012 at 03:10
Seems like trolling so I'm not going to look. I've noticed similar things before; there'll be some crappy nineMSN story about suchnsuch's new music video "going viral" and you go look and it's got like 20,000 views (plus one).
Terrible cross promotion PR bullshit.
Tocky on 10/3/2012 at 06:03
I would check it out but I have to friend JC Penny so I can get the latest updates on store specials to fill up my facebook page. Paula Deen just wasn't doing it for me with the constant updates of her book tour.
I suspect Google will be next.
I'm kidding. I don't facebook.
Kolya on 10/3/2012 at 11:22
My and my morning coffee just went viral in the web 2.0 cloud. But I saw it had been spamdexed by splogs. This mindshare resulted in a paradigm shift to go content farming in Minecraft instead. :D
SD on 10/3/2012 at 13:54
Welcome to the future, where professional journalists have been entirely replaced by amateurs.
Muzman on 10/3/2012 at 13:56
haha, front page of nineMSN right now.
Ok, so it's one of those viral mockery things. Front page news, obviously. The stupid part is The Olive Garden isn't even in Australia. The joke of it being horribly phony in its quaintness, yet just fine for fooling old ladies, is completely lost. But, oh, it's big on twitter so that's a story..
That is pretty much the state of "journalism" these days; they don't write stories, they sit on their arse waiting for stories to come to them.
There was some article about this Kony business that pointed out it's actually all the bad things about the current media situation rolled into one. People only know who he is because it's on twitter et al, the media are only talking about it because its on twitter et al. Any benefit from this slacktivism is tied to the perceived click value and faddishness of the whole apparatus (which will arguably be marginal unless the twitter hoards are planning to descend on the Ugandan jungles themselves). Places with decent international news divisions like the ABC rounded up all their Kony coverage from the last ten years and laid it out almost with a notable amount of spite "Invisible children, huh? No one knows who he is eh? No one cares, hey? Bet you read all this stuff we wrote about it back in the day, didn't you, you useless motherfuckers!"
demagogue on 10/3/2012 at 18:50
I congenitally don't read this stuff. I've been seeing this Kony link on FB all week but never had the slightest itch to click it. It had side-show written on its face.
But stuff like debt in Europe, the state of US economy, Burma's opening, the Arab Spring & Japanese tsunami a year later, what's going on in India & China... These are the things I go straight to without even having a headline take me. Even the Republican nomination fight is on the fringes, since it's so detached from reality (the stuff they actually debate) until they actually pick somebody, then it's only real in political terms.
Edit: Ah, the Northern Uganda civil war. Yeah that's been the most forgotten war for the last decade. One of my good friends has been working on it for a long time, and I know about it through all her articles. I suppose we're supposed to say it's good at least it's getting some public recognition... But still that distrust of people learning about things through FB links and not really learning about what's going on in the world around them for its own sake. For example... Is it better for the ICC to prosecute war crimes in this war or allow an internal truth & reconciliation style of process to help normalize the region? That's the kind of debate that's important to deal with (that my friend was writing about), which you don't get from a Yahoo article. Always go to the top of the food chain for your articles if you want to know what's really going on. NYTimes, WashPost, BBC are all good. Academics & NGOs writing about it are even better.
PeeperStorm on 11/3/2012 at 02:45
You'll be pleased to know that they reported this incredibly important Olive Garden review related story tonight on ABC's national news broadcast.
