Posted 1:24 PM by Gene

Thanks to addicts like ROMY the Boston Phoenix has become the single most insistent outlet of pretentious blah this side of The New Yorker. Today the addict insisted on linking to a story in which another auditioner for the Kingdom of Tilley posits (or rather deposits) that the fake-news blackout will change the presidential race. "The Daily Show is now a dominant media brand for twentysomethings", says our auditioner, and while Eustace might at one time have squinched at that use of "brand" it has since proudly entered the arsenal of hacks who want to shoot us in the head. (We will not argue the point on the basis of the BRANDS' tiny audience, as people who hope to write for The New Yorker don't have to know such things.) Such stories seem based on the predicate that he who is first with the CW must be good, never minding Andrew Carnegie's old maxim that "pioneering don't pay", or that the W in CW is never wise.

Elsewhere in his site the indefatigable Romy links to some sort of story in yet ANOTHER "progressive" site where some practical hack devalues a degree in JERNALISM:

I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

This being ROMY (AND a Jann-factotum, and a "progressive" site) our hero conveniently neglects that people in medicine or some kind of science may not want JERNALISM wages, or may not have the time to practice it as a hobby, and that the biz more than any other defines the idea that "you get what you pay for" -- especially as more refuse to pay for it.

He also overestimates how much time you need to learn it.