CNN takes on Busted Tees, Onion with headline t-shirts

In an unexpected development, infotainment monolith CNN has moved into t-shirt sales. I can only guess the kitsch apparel market, dominated by snark purveyor BustedTees, was unprepared for the bold move by the media outlet. News agencies have typically sought to monetize their information assets through publication and broadcast, not through a wearable medium popular with hipsters, homeless and bumper-sticker activists.

CNN readers are now able to click a t-shirt icon next to selected headlines, enabling them to purchase a t-shirt featuring the headline for $19.99 with the tag, "*I just saw it on CNN.com". It's like buying a transcript, only you wear it on your chest.

Selected headlines apparently cater to the coveted 18-35 demographic, focusing on soft news such as, "Another 'Idol' forgets they lyrics", or, "Suspect leads cops on golf cart chase". Other, newsy headlines like "D.C. sniper: 'Murder this innocent black man'" have not been included for apparelization. Hmmm, curious. I can't help but think what a conversation starter "Young mom dies; wedding rings vanish" would be if I wore it everywhere.

By grabbing only the featury headlines, CNN seems to be aligning their brand more with, say, The Onion than with the NY Times, the CS Monitor, or other serious news resources. Ironically, The Onion's tees don't feature headlines, but trade on the same brand of snark as BustedTees. CNN's tees really just signify which of their actual headlines are fluff. They won't be turning real news into kitsch memes, because I can't help but think somebody would object to me wearing a t-shirt about their kid: "Boy, hit by Prius, says he couldn't hear it".

...though it sounds more like an Onion headline to me. I don't foresee great success for CNN's t-shirt venture. The audience they're targeting likes crappy, ironic t-shirts because they seem more authentic than the canned culture we get from the mass media. They recall untainted youth with bad puns and schoolbook illustrations, and that's what we're going for. The off-kilter news that CNN is pitching as t-shirt fodder misses the mark because it's real. It's news of the weird, not fashion of the disillusioned. The corporate design job underscores this — they look more like something a CNN employee would wear tucked into jeans on biz-cas-Fri than anything you'd see in Williamsburg.

In summary, let's do a quick visual comparison. Which would you brand yourself with?


Fashion aside, they pretty much say the same thing.

Here's a press release that will generate no buzz

I came across this news item in one of my many feeds:

"AOL Launches New Website In Australia"

Is it a radical subsidiary or dynamic new style? Some new social network that nobody's seen before? No, it's just an Australian version of AOL's regular website.

The site offers AOL's suite of communications products, advanced video search, media player, and content focused on information and entertainment. AOL.com.au users will also have access to a search engine powered by Google, the Internet's leading search engine.

AOL has been around as a BBS since 1989, and they're just now launching an Australian website? They don't even have to translate a language to do this. MySpace was launched in 2003, and they have multilingual sites all over the world. I feel bad for AOL — they were the first face of the net as many knew it, and they are undoubtedly now the last.

Perhaps it's that new media doesn't play well with old media. It sure was interesting to watch Time-Warner move AOL right to the front of AOL-Time-Warner, and then later dispose of the AOL and go back to Time-Warner. It's like they were proud of their new toy, and when they figured out they didn't know how to work it, they put it in the closet. Huge mergers rarely signal that a company is doing its best innovation. It seems like when any multinational corporation arranges a merger, it's really for lack of anything better to do.

Which brings us to Microsoft's bid for Yahoo. While Microsoft is tech, they feel more like old media because they can't think quickly, they can't adapt to the times fluently. Their mandate now is to buy out others who can. I can only fathom that Microsoft would pick up Yahoo, absorb their services somewhat, and then Yahoo would just become as slow as Microsoft to adapt to change.

That said, I hate reading blogs and op-eds intoning that Microsoft's $60 billion gross last year proves they're obsolete. Microsoft is a powerhouse, and so are the major media companies, and wherever they sit on the bell curve of relevance, it's a big bell curve. They're a cash trust and an asset bank. So let's get real.

No matter how much one envisions a world run on OS X or Linux, the tech monoliths and media monopolies are firmly ensconced. Maintaining a huge market share is really just a matter of choosing what flavor of vanilla. Provided they don't aggressively drive consumers away with blunders like Beacon, they'll stick around. At least until the next aimless merger.

"Relentlessly comical"

This is a few weeks old, but it's my quote of the day from the BBC, on why clowns are terrifying to kids:

It is the fear of the mask, the fact that it doesn't change and is relentlessly comical.

Just that description of why it's terrifying sort of terrifies me. The fear of the mask... it doesn't change... relentless comical... *dies gripping bike horn*

"Relentlessly Comical" should be the title for Zach Galifianakis' autobiography. Not that I'm calling him a clown.

(via John Aboud)

Spin spin spin from the White House

I have to write out about a quote I read this morning in the Monitor. The article "EPA staffers go to Hill over global warming" features a great chart comparing US states' emission of greenhouse gases to that of entire countries. If states were individual nations, six would rank among the top 30 emitters of greenhouse gases worldwide.

But what got me was this infuriating quote:

"Deputy Solicitor General Gregory Garre argued that Congress never gave the EPA authority to regulate CO2. Even if the agency had the authority, he continued, "now is not the time to exercise such authority, in light of the substantial scientific uncertainty surrounding global climate change and the ongoing studies to address those uncertainties.""

The only "substantial scientific uncertainty", of course, is whether or not the Bush White House can accept documented science when it conflicts with corporate profiteering. And Garre's contention that the EPA lacks the authority to regulate CO2 hinges on the brainless argument that CO2 is not a pollutant. As if the thousands of tons of CO2 introduced into the air by industry, energy, and automobiles aren't pollution. If that's the case, perhaps Garre could sit in his garage with the car running for a few hours.

Beyond the more self-evident documentations available in An Inconvenient Truth about what greenhouse gases are doing to the atmosphere, Elizabeth Kolbert covered the irreparable effect CO2 is having on the oceans in the New Yorker last month.