There is no shortage of death knells being rung for print media. And pundits, experts and other assholes forward all sorts of reasons for its demise. But, naturally, they leave out the most salient one. That is, most of the writers suck and don't report on anything relevant.
If you work in advertising the most egregious hack writer of all is the ad columnist for The New York Times. Whenever Stuart Elliott feels like taking a three-day weekend he writes a column that asks 20 irrelevant questions that I suppose are meant to be funny.
Not only does Elliott ignore virtually everything that's of importance to the industry--say Joyce King Thomas' resignation, the decimation of the industry, one of the major accounts up for review, in today's column he asks this odious and tone-deaf question. "Will the executives of an oil company whose extensive, and expensive, efforts to create a greener image are drowning in a sea of black crude tell a reporter, “You ask a lot of questions for someone from Brooklyn”?"
I mean c'mon, Stuart.
1) You can mention BP by name.
2) There are larger issues than your Brooklynite provenance.
3) The subject-object split between BP's advertising and BP's reality demands real investigation. What is BP's culpability in propagating their green lies? What is Ogilvy's, their ad agency? What of the networks? Have we no check on outright lies in advertising--where is the FCC in all this?
Apparently none of these issues matter to Elliott or, even, The New York Times. They'd rather focus on burning matters such as this: "Did anyone who saw the magazine ads for chino pants from the Banana Republic division of Gap, which carried the headline “Live in Chino,” call the chamber of commerce in Chino, Calif., to inquire about housing or jobs there?"
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