DailyFish Bowl reports that in his upcoming column for The New York Times Magazine, Bill Keller rips media at large for creating a culture that allows aggregating sites like Huffington Post to flourish, and even says that Arianna Huffington once aggregated him in person. Keller goes on to call those who critique the media, “oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks.”
Keller will accept the OPC President’s Award at the OPC Awards Dinner on April 28. Keller has been vocal lately about media trends. He said at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism this past week: “I think if you’re a regular viewer of Fox
News, you’re among the most cynical people on planet Earth. I cannot
think of a more cynical slogan than ‘Fair and Balanced.'”
Keller’s article, “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate” begins:
- According to the list makers at Forbes, I am the 50th most powerful person in the world — not as powerful as the Pope (No. 5) but more powerful than the president of the United Arab Emirates (56). Vanity Fair, another arbiter of what matters, ranked me the 26th most influential person in the country. The New York Observer, narrowing the universe to New York, put me 15th on its latest “Power 150,” a list that stretches from Michael Bloomberg to Lady Gaga. New York magazine asked Woody Allen to name the single most important person in our city; he named — aw, shucks — me.
Huffington snaps back with a post touting HuffPo’s page views (70% more unique visitors than The New York Times — where this data comes from and for what time frame is not stated, two crucial elements to assessing UMV and their meaning) and the word “convergence” is a word that she claims she’s used to describe the changes happening in the media “for years.”
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