"Weather Porn" and the Boy King with all the Bling

This article in the Washington Post about the Discovery Channel's plans to market video content specially  made for cell phones reads like parody.  An executive at National Geographic shoots himself, and his company in the corporate foot thusly, committing what Michael Kinsley once defined as the classic "gaffe"--saying what's really on your mind in public. 

National Geographic Ventures, the for-profit arm of the National Geographic Society, is creating high-action shorts of natural phenomena such as tornados and hurricanes, which Chief Operating Officer Ted Prince refers to as "weather porn."

Also beyond belief is this:

The job of feeding content to small screens falls to a six-person team inside the new-media department. Four "preditors" -- industry short-hand for producers/writers/editors -- create programming for Web sites and mobile phones, combing the companies' hundreds of thousands of hours of footage for segments that can be knit into cellphone-size bits of up to two minutes. Instead of a two-hour documentary on zebras in the Serengeti, animal footage is more likely to take the form of "Top Five Takedowns," which lets viewers vote by text message on their favorite clip of predators attacking prey.

Realy scarrry, eh kids?  The Post kindly links to the "Predators Attack" video.  What a public service this newspaper is performing and it is clearly not at all looking to cash in internet readers' interest in cheap thrills.

 

Comments

[Bill Kalish]

Mad props to Count Floyd!!