Bloggers Infighting GO!!
I'm so flattered to be the subject of so much blogging. If you haven't seen or heard any of it, you probably don't really care, which is a good place to be, but if you do care but just aren't in the know (I'm the topic of many of these blogs, and I didn't even know about them) then I will try to lead you down the threads I've found.
People are a-buzz about the Downtown Living issue of EU. There are people from The Landing that are up in arms because i said The Landing was the least interesting thing going on downtown these days.
The quote:
"The Downtown of today is a far cry from the ghost town that celebrated the opening of The Jacksonville Landing in the early 90s. In fact, The Landing is probably the least interesting thing happening at our urban core these days, although it always makes for a nice photograph. Now there are galleries, artists co-ops, some of the best dining in the greater metropolitan area, great night clubs, and even a friendly community."
I know. Harsh right. Theres one typo and the landing actually opened in the late 80s. I didn't really focus enough time on that "dis" to really make sure it came across right. So people are saying the writing is bad, EU isn't journalism, etc etc. The funny thing is that four pages later Kellie Abrahamson talks, in detail, about the great shops in The Landing:
"Take the Water Taxi over to the Landing and grab a quick bite to eat at one of their many restaurants and eateries. The Landing has a wide variety of restaurants, each with very different flavors, atmospheres and prices. Once you’ve eaten your fill, do a little shopping. Pick up unique gifts at Edgewater Treasures or an “I Love Jacksonville” T-shirt at Destination Jacksonville. Be sure to pop on over to The Toy Factory and let the kids check out some of the hottest toys in town."
Pretty berating, right? So The Landing is ostensibly pulling EU from its halls. That actually isn't much of a loss for our paper, in my mind, because I want our paper to appeal to locals and local people don't spend much time at The Landing. That's not because it isn't interesting. Its just because most of us have seen it and done it. I still go there all the time. Fortunately the people that have been blowing my phone up and blogging their bloody little fingers off about me don't have the first clue what I look like.
It is sort of fun to be written about, so I will share some of the highlights. Check out this thread at MetJax. Metjax is a blog about downtown by downtown merchants, residents, and other interested parties. Here's some of the highlights:
Pearlstone says:
"The Landing is probably the least interesting thing happening at our urban core these days..."
Well if that isn't a dis I don't know what is.
Doesn't matter anyway because Toney Sleiman just instructed all of them to be removed off the Landing property and not to be allowed back on.
If they feel we are the least interesting thing then they don't need to be utilizing our property free of charge to solicit their materials.
Downtown Parks Said:
I think you are taking this way too hard, personally. The fact of the matter is, downtown is more than just the landing, yet EVERYONE thinks thats all there is to it.
I dont think they were saying the landing isnt interesting, just that there are other things going on. The landing gets covereage all the time.
If its true Toney removed the EU, then he lost some credibilty in my book. Since when do large scale developers care about small scale magazines?
The IT Steve said:
the point was - what is going on at the landing that people can see? I have no doubt that Sleiman has good things planned, but until he turns dirt on these, people won't buy it.
Meanwhile places like the Burrito Gallery and Boomtown are doing very well, and didn't exist two years ago (boomtown did, but not in downtown).
Trust me, the landing gets it's due. Ask anyone from Mandarin what they know downtown, and the landing will be one of them. The next step is to get people to thing of Bay Street, Hemming Plaza, Laura St, the Cathedral District, LaVilla and Brooklyn. Downtown must be more than the Landing.
Duval Democrat said:
thats your first mistake, confusing the EU with journalism, or anything printed in this area really.
Then Pearlstone said this, which is hysterical to me because what better promotion did Downtown get last week than the cover of the EU?
"That's why it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to promote our city, especially our urban core, as a whole and to the very best of our abilities ... that way our enthusiasm is the impression the visitors are left with. Something they can truly 'FEEL'.
We do have an AMAZING amount of influence how the outside world thinks of us and I say it's hightime we use it!!!
Are you ready? I am!!!!"
So there is a lot of drama on those three pages of threads, feel free to check them out yourself if you can bear the catty infighting of people at their computers discussing an outside world. But if that isn't enough to fulfill your need for local gossip and you still feel like your personal opinion hasn't been conveyed, but you're teetering on the edge wondering if you should log on and insert your opinions, maybe this will push you over.
Another local blog, probably more popular with general audiences, is Urban Jacksonville. Go to urbanjacksonville.info and read the 30 posts about this same issue. Again, I've pulled some of my favorites out for you to read right here.

fawnleibowitz said:
The way i feel about downtown in general is kind of the way I feel about really good unknown bands I like: I really want people to like them, but not too many people, if that makes sense. It’s like, I want downtown to become vibrant and appreciated, but I don’t want all the bandwagoners just latching onto and making it lame. I like that when I go to TSI it’s full of cool kids while Mark’s is full of Yuppie douches who’re dressed like they just came from Sunday school. Coincidentally, its the latter people who I feel are the bandwagoners who are going to make downtown as lame as the rest of Jacksonville is. So, i mean, i want progress, but I would like downtown to keep what is, i think, it’s edge and coolness, if that makes sense.
Adam Beaugh said:
i checked out EU over lunch today, and overall it’s pretty good. My main problem is with the guy who writes the movie reviews. They are so poorly written that it’s almost fun to read. Maybe he’s 16, which would explain it. the wording, sentence structure, and stream of thought are horrible. i don’t want to be mean, but it’s just in my nature.
Nick said:
EU’s redesign is nice, but the writing is often atrocious. There doesn’t seem to be much of an editorial presence at the mag.
Vicup state said:
Excellent coverage and publicity for DT. To Tony, Joey, Terry, Stephen, et al….Thanks for bringing Sexy Back !
UTurn said:
So, if we’re supposed to be going to all these cool bars and restaurants at The Landing and Downtown and Springfield and hanging out at the coffee shops and the record stores while we’re purchasing furnishings at Urban Outfitters for our new $300,000 downtown loft and taking part in all the art gallery galas and taking in all the indie bands playing in the various venues - when is anybody supposed to actually work?
And then Travis really brought it home with this hit:
I’ll make a fortune in recycling Pabst cans. You can be my helper. We’ll give each other horrid haircuts and listen to bands with impossibly long names that tend to sound like a marching band farting in an elevator.
We’ll have business cards with so many buzzwords on them that the pure synergystic light will melt the face off of mere mortals.
At the end of a day of hard work, we’ll both retire to our floor on the strandoplex and web 2.0 the shit out of each other.

If there are more threads out there about EU or the Downtown issue, please let me know. This has been solidly entertaining me for days and days. If I could get people talking about EU like this all the time, our paper would be filled with only the advertisers i want in it and I could afford to hire the writers I want to hire that will provide real local representation in the media the way no other paper does. So blog on, and let me know where you blog about it. I want to read it. I want to laugh and get mad and use lots of exclamation points in my posts!!!

Atlanta Pranks Boston

I have spent many a night in front of my television trying desperately not to fall asleep so that I could watch Adult Swim on Cartoon Network for just a little longer. It's during these nights of laughing myself to sleep, that I often wish I worked at Adult Swim. I want to be one of the people that makes the chat-room-like spots that run between the shows. They are this hysterical dialogue with the viewer, making your single-sided television experience slightly more intractive.. or at least seemingly so. I get the sense that I have friends on Williams Street in Atlanta sending me funny texts at inopportune moments. These friends just haven't met me yet.

Although I've often wanted to be one of them, right now I wouldn't. If you didn't see the news yesterday about Adult Swim's guerilla advertising campaign for the new season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, They sent out almost forty light-boards that has a flashing Mooninite (an Atari-looking character that speaks in a refined thug slang) flipping his middle finger.

Authorities in Boston saw flashing boxes with wires and batteries on them on local bridges and buildings around town and naturally assumed a terrorist attack was underway.
CNN reported it thus:
"The devices displayed a 'Mooninite' -- an outer-space delinquent who makes frequent appearances on the cartoon -- greeting passersby with an upraised middle finger. But the discovery of nine of the light boards around Boston and its suburbs sent bomb squads scrambling throughout the day, snarling traffic and mass transit in one of the largest U.S. cities."

In an age where we are numb to the forced advertising impressions of television and we avoid or ignore most solicitations because we are so thoroughly inundated, reaching us is especially difficult. Advertisers are learning (as displayed by the recent drop in dollars from major television advertising in expensive and ineffective television campaigns) that get the attention of your target customer, you have to be creative, innovative, and relevant. Adult Swim employing a guerilla advertising campaign is both innovative and brilliant for a medium (TV) that is usually so sycophantic in its approach to promotion, made the most relevant impact a campaign in this new era can make.
How can the blame for the panic be blamed on Turner Networks when the panic has been nursed and cultivated by the administration on television everyday? Well they can be blamed because they got outside of "the box" which in this case was a television set. Bush and Fox News can terrorize us across the ariwaves, because we know not to listen to any of the propoganda that comes to us through ellectronic media. Thats why television advertising doesn't work for all things. When you are a bizarre channel that only operates late at night, you want to do what you can to cost-effectively get the attention of your target consumers, but you can't just advertise on your own network, because that's preaching to the choir, you have to do something that gets people talking about your product.
Had I seen a flashing Mooninite flicking me off on one of the bridges, you better believe i would talk about that all night to everyone I saw or spoke to on the phone. That's good advertising, Adult Swim, and frankly, all this news coverage ain't half bad either, but the bottom line: Adult Swim didn't do anything illegal.

CNN:
Boston's Attorney General Martha Coakley:
"It had a very sinister appearance," Coakley told reporters. "It had a battery behind it, and wires."
"I just think this is outrageous, what they've done ... It's all about corporate greed."

Corporate Greed? Our president bought his way into a professional baseball franchise by negotiating a deal with city government in Texas wherein the city claimed private property and used taxpayer dollars to build a stadium so that he could own his own baseball team with no money down. Adult Swim trying to get some people to watch their show is corporate greed? Wal-Mart walks into towns and they substantially increase that towns health risk by driving the employers that live in the community and pay for their employee's health benefits out of business, then hiring those people to work half of their old schedule with less pay and no benefits. But don't arrest them, they have the lowest prices everyday. When the Mays family can sell off Clear Channel to private companies (that the Mays family also owns) so that they are able to simultaneously broker a deal that pays the stockholders off handsomely (including the Mays family, who are the primary stockholders anyway) and also enables the Mays company that purchases Clear Channel to be private instead of publicly traded, so that a large portion of their restrictions are removed and they can essentially do what they want with the electronic media; That's what I call Corporate Greed. Not a Mooninite flicking me off. That makes me laugh.

"The first device reported was at the Sullivan Square commuter rail station, near the suburb of Somerville, Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon, four other devices were reported -- near the Longfellow and Boston University bridges over the Charles, at New England Medical Center and near the intersection of Stuart and Columbus avenues in the city itself, and four more turned up over the course of the day."
So everybody was scrambling around in a panic and ordering hundreds of thousands of dollars of response services, but between Wednesday morning and the arrest on Thursday morning, no one walked up to one and said "Hey this is just a Lite Brite, guys, no big deal."

CNN:
Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, said, "Whoever thought this up needs to find another job."

"Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists is marketing run amok," Markey, a Democrat, said in a written statement. "It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt."

Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis called it "unconscionable" that the marketing campaign was executed in a post 9/11 era. "It's a foolish prank on the part of Turner Broadcasting," he said. "In the environment nowadays ... we really have to look at the motivation of the company here and why this happened."

Sorry, Adult Swim, that you have to get punished for your innovation, but look at it like this: You've created folklore here. There is a Big Brother tale in this. Your advertising campaign may be the thing that puts this panic and hysteria into perspective for some of us. Your art has transcended the screen, in that sense, and proven what the Mooninites have always known. Mooninites are "Advanced beyond all that you can possibly comprehend with 100% of your brain." (that link takes you to a Mooninite game on the Adult Swim website. Go and show your love.) Our hearts go out to those people, filled with corporate greed, that were stuck in traffic on their way to work because of the panic our president instills in all people, that they must be scared and independently wealthy to be of any use to this adminsitration. But my heart especially goes out to those poor souls that are going to jail for their great ideas. I hope Turner sends his best attorneys.