Craig Carton Destroys The Daily News, Shouts Out The Blog World
It absolutely blows my mind how these newspaper guys can’t understand whats going on around them. How can you write a plain old wallpaper column for a newspaper and not understand that you’re a part of a dying industry? How do you not realize you’re a dinosaur on the verge of extinction? These guys just grit their teeth, stand their ground, and hope to God that doing things the old school, antiquated, boring way will somehow hold up. Meanwhile, idiots like me with a wordpress blog and a twitter handle who understands what people like and how the world works can blow right past you in the blink of an eye.
Everything Carton said here is 100% true. Barstool works because we’re all just normal dudes with relatable opinions. Nobody’s an expert. Nobody is level headed and rational. Nobody is impartial. You know why? All that shit is boring. None of the Barstool writers are that way because no normal sports fans are that way. We’re all just shooting the shit at the bar and on sports radio. Sticking up for the team you and bashing the guys you hate. Arguing passionately from the heart and cracking jokes about who sucks and who’s fat and who has a hot wife. Thats the kind of stuff real sports fans like. Nobody likes fucking Rick Reilly writing letters to Derek Jeter’s unborn kids. Nobody under the age of like 40 wants to read snoozefest articles taking the stuffy professional angle thats been done 500 million times before.
But Gary Meyers is 100% right when he says its not his job to write from the fan’s perspective or root for a team. Thats the whole problem, you dope. Newspaper journalists look down upon that. They think they’re above that. But thats what readers want. And when you don’t give the people what they want, your product becomes obsolete. Its fucking crazy to me that Carton is one of the only people in the mainstream media around here who is willing to acknowledge the popularity of blogs. All the other dinosaurs at the Post and the News just convinced they’re still king of entertainment content. Its like Blockbuster sitting around telling themselves people will still show up to rent DVDs as Netflix put them in their grave. Adapt or die, because a site like Barstool can do everything the newspaper does much faster and in a much more entertaining fashion.