Print Media Still Clueless ‘Bout Hipsters

The other day while flipping through an issue of Newsweek, I was reminded why no one my age gets news in print form. Reading through an article trying to explain Coachella to Newsweek’s target demographic is painful enough, even if they manage to get all their facts straight. Of course, they didn’t. And this made your friendly resident hipster sociologist upset.

Saying something like “Hipsterdom’s indie- music extravaganza” to describe Coachella is fine, until you say this in the very next paragraph: “A showcase for such pop immortals as Madonna, Jay-Z, Paul McCartney, and Prince.” One of these things is not like the other… and until you work up the give-a-shit meter to look up the term “hipster” on Wikipedia or at least goddamn Urbandictionary, why are you being paid for your shitfest of an article? Here I am, sculpting the perfect article out of the finest prose and syntax while this clown uses phrases like “hunka hunka burnin’.” What does that even mean?

I’d be more forgiving of a fellow writer if it was a one time mistake, but in the final paragraph here we go again: “The fest is typically a Hollywood-heavy affair, teeming with movie stars, models, porn performers, and reality-TV regulars. This year they’ll be able to take in indie-pop sensation Florence and the Machine, the hit-making French house-music producer David Guetta.” Hollywood, Guetta, and reality TV is the kind of shit that hipsters despise, make fun of, and expend all their energy trying to avoid. And once again, five minutes on the internet would have told the author this.

The convoluted point is this: Five minutes of Google usage would have made this article informative instead of hilariously wrong and out of touch. And yet, the author didn’t care enough to get things right and still got paid for it. Print journalism in a nutshell. Maybe the internet didn’t kill print journalism; it just pulled back the curtain and showed the public how lazy reporting was doing all of the killing. Moral of the story? Read HipsterJew for news about fests and hipsters. We might not get paid, but at least we know what the fuck we’re talking about.

Check out Newsweek’s bad quality control regarding factual stories here.