What I'm Really Learning From College

I don't think I'm breaking any new ground here, but Fridays are Fan-fucking-tastic.

At the paper I work for, our deadline is on Friday afternoon. Which this week meant I had to get up early and watch a (heartbreaking) documentary then condense it to 800 words, brush up on whatever Mos Def is up to, and hammer out a final article on the snowboarding thing I did earlier (see last post). There's really no greater feeling in the world then knowing when you are done for the week... particularly if you can celebrate this occasion over a beer and some wings at Happy Hour.

Here's the intro to the article I wrote on snowboarding. It comes out March 1st.

"One Sunday morning, and by morning I mean 1 o'clock in the afternoon, the entertainment staffers at our humble paper were kicking around ideas for stories that we thought would be, well, entertaining. Eventually someone had the thought that it would be interesting to read an article where we put some poor bastard in extreme situations that he had never been in before and then write about them. Well ladies and gentlemen, my name is Corey Spring, and I am that poor bastard. Welcome to the first in a recurring series where U Weekly tries to get me killed."

Thank God It's Friday.

A new UWeekly entertainment feature is where we send some poor bastard on these 'extreme' and 'crazy' adventures and he writes a funny little informative article about the experience provided he doesn't get himself killed.

Friends, I am that poor bastard.

Earlier tonight my friend Kate and I went out to Mad River Mountain to go snowboarding, the first article in this series. It was quite an enjoyable experience (except for the wrecked cop car that kept us stuck on 270 for about an hour). The staff there was incredibly helpful and friendly, and they had one of their top guys, Roger, give us a few lessons before hitting the slopes, since I had never been skiing or snowboarding (half the point of the story). My article on it doesn't come out til March 1st, but until then I'd thought I'd throw up some pictures from the day.

Enjoy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14641413@N00/sets/72057594067874101/

The Super Bowl. It's the battle to see who's the best of the best, the toughest of the tough. Okay, it's usually a battle to see if the team you hate the least will win or not. The real winners and losers in the Super Bowl, however, are usually no where near the field.

Advertisers are the real players in this game. A good Super Bowl advertising campaign can gain massive exposure for a company and turn it around. Don't believe me, think of Apple's 1984 commercial -- it told us virtually nothing about the Macintosh, and yet, people still talk about it today. There's also GoDaddy.com, formerly just a website in a sea of many that will register you a dot com name. Then a series of Super Bowl ad campaigns has turned it into one of the most popular domain name registration sites. Many dotcoms have also put all their eggs in one hat with Super Bowl commercials and gone bust when the new customers never showed up. Yes indeed, it's quite the day for CEO's to play Russian Roulette.

So with this in mind, here is my completely biased look at the real winners and losers on Super Bowl Sunday.



Loser - Burger King

From the people that brought you chicken fries comes a song and dance number reminiscent of the Ziegfeld Follies. I wonder how much this commercial cost to produce. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with having a big budget for a commercial, in fact, some of the best ever HAVE to cost a lot of money. But, can you recoup the losses of your own advertising budget? If the answer is no, then you don't go through with the campaign, that simple, it's like spending money you don't have, you can do it, but it's usually a poor decision. And why is it a poor decision for BK? Well, they sell Whoppers, that's why. And most everyone who wants a whopper, is already going to get one whether or not they say a bunch of hot girls dressed as ketchup and mayo. My point is, it's not likely to bring in a few million extra dollars, which is likely what this song and dance show cost. Maybe that's why they haven't had a commercial here in eleven years.



Winner - MacGyver

Finally, MacGyver returns to the airwaves in a Mastercard commercial. Yes, it's complete with stunts and explosions and the typical MacGyver fare, and was almost certainly more expensive to produce than BK's, but it still wins by a mile. Why? Um, hello, maybe because it's freaking MacGyver so shut the hell up, ok? In all seriousness, using Richard Dean Anderson to send up MacGyver in this manner is a brilliant move for Mastercard. Isn't it obvious? How many guys watching the Super Bowl, old and young alike, were/are MacGyver fans? It's a number I project to be at least in the hundreds of millions. This causes all these viewers to talk about this commercial the next time they see one of their buddies, which causes him to tell a friend, and on and on we go. Spending a buttload of money to get Richard Dean Anderson escape from a building with an air freshener = 7 million dollars. Word of mouth advertising = Priceless.

It's probably no secret I'm a news junkie. When I'm not writing the news, I'm usually checking out the latest stuff on CNN or Google News. Both of those have their drawbacks, though. For instance, have you ever seen the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on CNN? The entire purpose of this show is to rape every orifice of your body with up to the second headlines and video from around the world. Yeah, his name is Wolf Blitzer, but Wolf, let go of that terrible hold on my balls with that information, would you.

Google News is a fine service in and of itself, but only a few stories at a time are on their front page, and sometimes they are there for days at a time. Seems like the exact opposite definition of news, doesn't i? Plus, the whole editing process is done by an algorithm inside a computer... which many believe is great, because it can't be biased. However, the News business has a certain degree of humanity to it, which perhaps should not be removed. If only there were some sort of news source where everyone had a say instead, let the readers be the algorithm.

Well, there is. It's called Newsvine, and it rocked the boxer shorts right off me the first time I logged on (Okay, you got me, I don't wear underwear... not ever).

It's hard to describe Newsvine, but essentially, it's displays stories from the AP (where most news outlets get their news from, or, in the case of The Lantern, where the newspaper is copied and pasted from) and ESPN. It displays more news and you can submit any other site, or write your own article. It's a lot easier to just try it out then have someone describe it, however.

Here's the catch, though. Newsvine is invite only, while they work some of the bugs out. Fear not, dear reader. Being the news junkie that I am, I already have a Newsvine account, and if you'd like to give it a test drive, just leave a comment below and I'll hook you up.

(Unless you're some random douche... i.e - see below)