As newspaper all accross the country are failing at an alarming rate, it always irks me when journalists' online articles fail to embed youtube links or at least hyperlink the text. This may be an legal issue but it didn't stop you tube or apple from becoming the disruptive innovators. The WSJ ran an article by Michael Phillips on the youtube sensation-of-the-nanaosecond (embedded below) an ode to- Paul Krugman- by Jonathan Mann but what caught my attention is that Phillips failed to embed the video in the WSJ online edition or even link to youtube but rather the singing jester's own website. This is a world of instantaneous digital gratification. Don't make readers work. Each click loses half the traffic. Like the price of Newscorp stock. Use the tools or lose the fools.
Singing the Recession Blues
Michael M. Phillips reports on the financial crisis.
Internet balladeer Jonathan Mann aims to become the Woody Guthrie of the Great Recession.
Mann, an obscure 26-year-old songwriter from Berkeley, Calif., has begun to make his mark with a series of short, wry, folk-rock songs about the economic downturn, from “I’m Drunk Because The Economy Sucks” (written while he was indeed drunk, he says) to “Come On, Nouriel Roubini,” a paean to the famously pessimistic New York University economist.
In “Black Monday,” he addresses himself to the Wall Street “fat cats:”
“Black Monday and our debt is unpaid
Is it my debt or your debt? Who do we owe anyway?
We missed all the symptoms now we’re in the disease
Start looking south and start learning Chinese.”
Much as his hero, Guthrie, hit the road with the Okies in the 1930s, Mann came to protest music when his freelance music-and-video business dried up with the national economy. “Like anybody else, I didn’t give two thoughts about the economy,” he says. “I didn’t pay attention to the Treasury secretary before September or October. Since then, I can’t get enough of it. The more I learn, the more freaked out I am.”
So he decided to write, sing and publish a song a day on his Web site, starting Jan. 1. He shoots the videos in the house he shares with his blogger girlfriend. Many are unrelated to the recession.
But a number of his tunes deal with the financial crisis and the bureaucrats and economists trying to resolve it. His biggest hit so far, “Hey Paul Krugman,” is a plea for the Nobel laureate economist to turn his newspaper critiques into policy. A television station played Mann’s video for Krugman when he appeared on a news program.
The Krugman video has logged more than 130,000 hits on YouTube – not a smash but a start down the road to internet fame.
“Hey, Paul Krugman
Why aren’t you in the administration?
Is there some kind of politicking
That I don’t understand?
Timothy Geithner is like a little weasel.
Wasn’t he in a position of power
When all of this[expletive] went down in the first place?
When I listen to you, things seem to make sense.
When I listen to him, all I hear is, ‘Blah, blah, blah.’”
Mann’s girlfriend, Ivory King, says the song-a-day format is “a good new direction” for him. “The more current events commentary is where he’s going to shine,” says King.
One of Mann’s most recent gigs was performing musical video game reviews.
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