Americans who had watched FOX News or MSNBC in the past week performed worse on an international current events quiz than those who had not read/watched/listened to any news at all. ANY NEWS AT ALL.
Read the whole study from Farleigh Dickinson University, including survey methodology, here.
Lady Comics: Who Needs Late Night? We’ve Got Tumblr
If you ask a female comedian how social media has impacted her professional life, she will likely respond like Elaine Carroll. “Social media has made my career,” says Carroll, the 30-year-old creator of the Very Mary Kate web series, a spoof of Mary Kate Olsen’s glam life in New York.
Remember just a few years back, when comedians (of any gender) relentlessly chased guest spots at the feet of David Letterman and Jay Leno? Getting a gig on late night was the ultimate career boost, but women comedians had to fight through the prejudices both professional (like infamously misogynist Letterman booker Eddie Brill) and cultural (let’s all try to forget that Christopher Hitchens essay).
But the level playing field of Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr means no one gets between ambitious talent and a potentially receptive audience. All it takes is perseverance, ability, skill, and infinite patience.
“Social media has essentially become my career,” says Kate Spencer, an improv instructor and writer at VH1 who blogs on Tumblr.
Consider Ilana Glazer, a New York comedy writer who, when she and writing partner Abbi Jacobson didn’t make it into the improv groups they wanted at Upright Citizens Brigade, decided to take their brand of girl-centric comedy to the web.
“We said, ‘Eff this, we’re going to make material for ourselves,’” enthuses Glazer, the co-creator of the Broad City web series.
That was 2009. The duo now have a deal with FX.“In the old days, if you got a spot on Carson, your life changed forever,” says Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show, who blogs at the Huffington Post. “That’s not true anymore. Do we even need those shows? I don’t think we do.”
Women still represent just a fraction of writers on late-night comedy programs, and they only represent 8 percent of directors of Hollywood films. Any female comic knows the comedy industry is rife with sexism.
But social media has opened up ways around these traditional paths. A sampling of a dozen women comedians offered up Tumblr and Twitter presences that have become huge in the comedy world — not just as side gigs, but as major marketing tools for these ladies’ work.
“Social media has done the same thing for women comedians as it’s done for other movements — it’s given women a way to know they’re not alone,” says Asie Mohtarez, a New York comedian and blogger. “What it does for me is provide daily evidence of women doing it — making weird/crude jokes (gasp), videos, and other content, which I find inspiring and freeing.”
There are plenty of other examples. Late Night’s Amy Ozols and Chelsea Lately’s Jen Kirkman have become social media standard-bearers in the comedy world, getting credit for their work in the public sphere. Last year, when The Office’s Mindy Kaling set out to promote her book, she used Tumblr to do it. And Whitney Cummings combined social media and dirty jokes about Bob Saget to get a prime-time show on NBC.
But for up-and-coming comics, those outlets can be even more important. “On the internet, no one can limit you, ” Glazer says. For her, that meant constant positive reinforcement of her work, and eventually, a mainstream gig.
She joined the likes of author Mariam Kobras, who used her Twitter following to land a book deal she said had “no agent interference, no rejections, no waiting. Or Allie Hagan, a Washington consultant by day and comedian by night, who turned her Suri’s Burn Book Tumblr into a publishing contract.
“I’ve gotten several freelance gigs based on Twitter and Tumblr, and I think that’s how a lot of people find me for live stuff,” says Julieanne Smolinski, a columnist for XOJane.com. “I’ve done a couple storytelling shows and some podcasts. I am also willing to do quinceañeras and that thing where you go to high schools and tell people not to be like you.”
And, of course, Elaine Carroll of Very Mary Kate, who got a deal with College Humor after producing the series out of pocket. And then got cast on Mad Men. ”There will always be hecklers and Youtube commenter types,” Carroll says of doing comedy on the web. “But the process of something going viral is contingent on it being good. It isn’t based on gender or race or sexual orientation. If your idea is good enough (or weird enough, or contains enough cats jumping into boxes), it won’t be ignored — even if you’re a female lesbian lady woman.”
As Mohtarez puts it: “My Tumblr has helped me hone my odd and sometimes dark sense of humor, and to find a little audience for it in between reblogged photos of other people’s breakfasts and titties.”
(Photo courtesy of Ilana Glazer, at left, with Abbi Jacobson, on the set of Broad City)
The hosts of ‘The Morning Show’, a national… er… morning show on Aussie TV, spent a segment rocking out with our app. This is awesome.
Ben Kweller playing for the SXSW crowd on 6th Street from the window at The Stage on Sixth.
The Path Fiasco Will Lower Your Conversions
Regardless of your opinion of Path’s sneaky activities, if you are part of the startup community, you should think twice before you forgive and move on. Their lapse in judgement will lower your conversions.
When the news broke that Path had been peeking into users’ address books and saving a copy on its servers, I didn’t much care. Sure, I thought it was immoral at best to do this without informing the user and it was certainly risky from a publicity perspective, but it was just another example of a startup that figured it would beg for forgiveness rather than ask for permission.
As the news, opinions, apologies, and absolutions swirled around the internet, I still didn’t much care.
But today I care.
Today I read Nick Bilton’s NY Times piece about Path where he poses the question “What’s the big deal anyway?” and immediately answers it:
The big deal is that privacy and security is not a big deal in Silicon Valley. While technorati tripped over themselves to congratulate Mr. Morin on finessing the bad publicity, a number of concerned engineers e-mailed me noting that the data collection was not an accident...
(emphasis added)
That sucks. The Path fiasco is contributing to the public perception that startups routinely abuse users’ trust with impunity. And as that thought permeates the brains of consumers everywhere, it has the potential to hit me where it most hurts: my metrics dashboard.
It’s a bit of a miracle that startups like Mint, where part of user registration is handing over the keys to your bank and credit card accounts, have been able to get off the ground—let alone become great successes. Consumers are astoundingly trusting and we as purveyors of new products and services benefit from that endlessly. But when a story about a startup abusing users’ trust and not being held accountable by the industry breaks, a chunk of that trust erodes and a few new visitors to your site decide that they’d rather not hand over their data. Good luck, Cake Health.
There’s a lot of chest thumping in The Valley about being a “hacker” or a “hustler.” And that’s awesome if being a hacker means “ building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done” and if a hustler is a founder who masterfully pits VC against VC to get a better valuation. While we should celebrate those who find success in hacking or hustling, we must be careful that we don’t let the spirit of these terms become wed to the idea (or even the perception) that part of starting a business is a willingness to embrace moral ambiguity and play games with users’ trust.
Path has a beautifully-designed product and it’s a shame that this is the context in which many users are being introduced to it. I hope the company is able to recover and move forward. And in doing so I hope they recognize the irreparable systemic damage they leave in their wake and I implore anyone with an interest in this community and industry to make user privacy and security a big deal.
Are they A/B testing language or colors? Or just trying to confuse viewers?
“You take a hot dog, stuff it with some jack cheese, roll it in a pizza, you’ve got Cheezy Blasters!”
Thanks, Meat Cat Epicurious!
In case you’ve been living under a rock (or in a third-world country in which access to potable water, let alone the open Internet, is a rarity) and you haven’t heard, Louis CK is doing an AMA on Reddit right now.
