So this has been happening to me a lot lately, specifically with The Celebrity Apprentice. We don’t watch the show live – we almost always watch a night or two later, and inevitably the last couple of weeks, I’ve known who got fired before ever watching the actual episode, whether via a headline in a paper’s RSS feed or even right on the damn cover of our local free daily. Needless to say, I’ve been more than a little pissed about it…
…because here’s what I think is interesting – I don’t really follow a lot of “traditional media,” but they’re the ones who still seem to be at the root of my problem here. I’m not reading on Facebook or Twitter who lost, I’m finding it in the newsfeeds of the only actual “newspaper” that I still read (our local one) or on the cover of the free daily paper that I pick up on the corner. It’s not on any of the blogs that I read, or even on digg.com – really, it’s only the print dinosaurs that are fucking this up for me!!!
And that’s why I’m wondering if this is mostly a generational problem – maybe us young’uns who grew up with the Internet understand the concepts of netiquette and spoilers, whereas the older guys are still pinned on their whatever grabs the readers’ attention-mentality to afford them another week of survival. Which in itself is amusing simply because I’m getting a lot closer to just turning them off altogether and getting my news from publishers who actually get that not everyone has had a chance to watch the season finale of American Idol just yet…
I can’t be the only one who has these frustrations … how many people are using DVRs these days??? Is the solution just to ignore the news altogether while your favorite shows are running so that you actually get to experience them firsthand? Or here’s a thought – maybe the paper could just go with “Idol Winner Announced!” instead of “HERE’S THE DUDE’S NAME WHO WON!!!” I know it’s not as catchy as the prior, but is there something to be said about not pissing off a chunk of your audience in the process?