It’s Thursday – Make Me Cry!
Posted on | December 15, 2005 at 5:57 pm | 7 Comments
What if there were some sort of publishing model where anyone could write a daily / weekly / whatever entry, say whatever they wanted to say with no professional editing at all, and have it distributed to and read by a large group of people in their local (or global!) community? Well, let me tell you, that model exists today! And it has given us some very interesting things to ponder. I’m speaking, of course, of “YourHub”.
YourHub is a supplement that comes with our local paper every Thursday. There are different versions targeted for the different neighborhoods in the metro area. The content (stories, photos, event calendars, etc.) is provided by normal people like you and me through a website, which is synergistically linked to the print version. This experiment in amateur citizen journalism has been going for a couple of months now in my neighborhood. At first, I cynically thought it was just an attempt to push more local advertising under our eyeballs while getting people to provide content that the papers don’t have to pay for (in fact, fully 75% or so of the print edition seems to be ads for local businesses). But now I see that is a bold new vision for the future. Because it gives us such brilliant fare as the weekly columns Exposing The Golden Years and The 30s On The Plains.
When I read my first Exposing The Golden Years, I thought What the…? What is this? Some bitter elderly guy ranting about how great things used to be and how horrendous they are now? A weekly manifesto about how it sucks to be old? Who would want to read this? But then I started really getting into it. I also started slowly realizing that the author was saying life really was not all that great in the old days either, that life in general kinda sucks. What a refreshing and interesting thing to find in my newspaper. The prose is simple and minimalist but effective, pretty much a just-the-facts-ma’am recitation of what was and what is, eschewing such colorful linguistic attributes as similes, metaphors, adjectives or adverbs. (Imagine if millions of people decided to do this sort of thing over something like a “World Wide Web”, so that everyone can join in the misery!)
Eventually Golden Years was joined by The 30s On The Plains, which if anything, is even more minimalist. The author is a senior woman who recounts what it was like growing up in the dustbowls of the Great Depression. Again, just the facts. Again, no colorful language. But again, I find something utterly brilliant about it (and I’m not just being totally snide or sarcastic here). Now I find I can’t get through my Thursdays without my weekly double dose of We’re Old And Our Lives Suck. There’s just something so reassuring about it, in kind of a slap in the face way to the “All Is Right In America” ra-ra cheerleaders of the current administration.
I know the columns are striking a nerve (as they did with me initially), since there was a letter published a couple of weeks ago from a woman who was dismayed and horrified at the tone of the “columnists”. Obviously my neighbors have yet to absorb the pure genius of this concept in self-publishing. But someday they will. Maybe I should start writing a column about how it sucks to be middle aged, geeky, and single. Nah… who would read that? Though I do so wish I had an outlet for that sort of thing.
(Note on navigating the YourHub website: There doesn’t seem to be a way to link directly to the areas for the separate communities. If the links above don’t seem to work or if you get the wrong community, choose “Lakewood” in the dropdown box on the left and refresh the page. Try to navigate to the “Lakewood \ Sound Off” area to see the complete list of columns from these columnists. Also, the columns appear on the website days later than in the print edition, for some reason.)
Next up: My exciting exposé on pomegranates.
Latre.
Comments
7 Responses to “It’s Thursday – Make Me Cry!”
December 15th, 2005 @ 7:35 pm
“A lot of neighbor men would gather in a huge circle on a section of land about 1/2 mile or a mile apart and gradually close the circle walking towards each other to the center driving rabbits ahead of them. When they met in the center they had hundreds of rabbits, which they proceeded to club to death. Women and children sat in their cars watching. I can still hear the squeals of those rabbits being killed.” Damn, we don’t have anything like that in OUR local paper!
December 15th, 2005 @ 7:44 pm
Oh, and the guy who writes Exposing the Golden Years looks just like “Mr. Six,” the dancing oldster from the Six Flags TV commercials!
I discovered a third oldster column in the archive: Meandering through the mazes of the mind. Rog, I think you need to contribute a column so the “voice of youth” is heard in Lakewood. Compared to all of these elderly people you’re a relative youngster.
December 15th, 2005 @ 8:16 pm
Do you still hear the squealing of the rabbits, Clarice?
All my columns would be probably be about The New Pornographers. And then all the old folks would get pissed (”pornographers?!?”) and club me to death.
December 15th, 2005 @ 8:23 pm
FYI, here’s a blog entry from someone else talking about contributing to YourHub (new acronym alert: CitJ for “Citizen Journalism”) in order to get more out of life.
December 15th, 2005 @ 9:57 pm
That Six Flags guy is something that, as essentially a non-watcher of TV (I watch 2-3 shows a week and skip the commercials), completely flummoxes me. I saw a billboard and was like, uh, why is an old guy in a suit in that inner-tube in the water? People laughed at me; ignorant fool. But why Six Flags decided a dancing old guy would work for them…ah, the genius that is advertising. Avant-garde art? Phooey – sell overcrowded mini-Disneylands – that’s where the art ends up these days. (It sucks to be not all that old.)
December 15th, 2005 @ 10:43 pm
Overly crowded terribly expensive mini-Disneylands…
December 16th, 2005 @ 11:52 am
I thought the “Six Flags Guy” was the old man from the Sopranos. Dominic something.