Author: jbenton

clem snide and calexico

If you will be in Houston on next Friday (March 14) and for some reason you don’t attend the massive Clem Snide/Calexico double bill at Fat Cat’s — well, you’ll deserve what’s coming to you. Two of the official bands of crabwalk.com, together at last.

sxsw preview

I will be in Austin for SXSW from Friday afternoon to Tuesday afternoon. If you need to reach me while I’m there, my cell is 214-914-9998. Unsure whether I’ll be updating; I’ll have my iBook with me.
If you want to catch me spouting off about the future of journalism, come to my panel Sunday at 11:30 a.m. Hopefully you’ll have worked off most of your Saturday night drunk by then. My more cogent fellow presenters will be Matt Haughey, Dan Gillmor, J.D. Lasica, and Evan Smith.
I’ll also be one of the presenters/performance artists/clueless newbies at 20×2 on Monday night. I’m supposed to go on for two minutes, answering the question “What are you waiting for?” (Ah! It all comes together, does it not, gentle reader? It does indeed.)

gonzalez column

Dallas Observer columnist gets into screaming match with Rangers center fielder. Not to defend Carl Everett, but geez, I’ve seen high school papers with better sports columnists than this Gonzalez guy. The column’s always about him, never his subject. And he spends all his time beating his own chest about what a scary bad-ass columnist he is, how he’s such a radical who can’t be kept down by The Man.

20×2 question

Okay, it’s audience participation time at crabwalk.com. I’d really like everyone to answer the following question in the comments.
What was the last thing you remember waiting for? Answers can be as practical or spacy as you’d like. Merci beaucoup.

raging cow

Dr Pepper/Seven Up enlists ‘bloggers’ to help market drink. Looking to create a nationwide buzz for a new milk-based soft drink, Dr Pepper/Seven Up Inc. wants young people to help spread the word over the Web. Over the next three months, the unit of Cadbury Schweppes PLC plans to provide samples of the sweetened drink, Raging Cow, to hundreds of writers of Web logs that appeal to teens and young adults.
A few thoughts: How likely is this to work? They’ve picked a core of teen bloggers and flown them to Dallas for “orientation,” given them free samples, and asked them to blog about this new drink. It’s got to be hard to do AstroTurf marketing when the process is as open as a blog is.
Second, I’ll be sure to bring this up the next time someone mentions that bloggers are all “journalists” and somehow above reproach, while Big-J Journalists are all corrupt because they work for The Man and worship at the altar of Corporate Power.
Finally, Jeff Jarvis makes a good point: But the truth is, it’s just a nitwitted marketing idea. I’ve been around media long enough to witness (and, unfortunately, pay for) lots of them. Somebody came up with this at a brainstorming meeting and nobody else had the good sense to hoot it down then. As Nick Denton once said to me: “We can’t afford brainstorming anymore.”
So true. The worst ideas I’ve ever seen have come from group meetings where someone offered up a stupid idea and no one could work up the courage to say, “No, sorry, you’re an idiot” then and there. There’s something to be said about the old hierarchical methods of killing bad ideas and promoting good ones. (That said, this seems like an idea worth trying — if only because the cost is low and the potential pay-off is big. Potential.)