Bob Garfield of Ad Age and On the Media fame has started a site called Comcast Must Die which allows angry Comcast customers to post their rants re service issues with the cable giant.
We must be in a new era of journalism when a respected writer for a number of business publications launches an attack site against a corporation. It’s a bit reminiscent of the late Sixties when Norman Mailer, Tom Wolf and other activist writers invented the New Journalism. Mailer created one of the seminal New Journalism works when he published The Armies of the Night, about the march on the Pentagon (for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize).

The New Journalism was all about activist reporters and writers and putting yourself in the middle of the battle — which Mailer did at the Pentagon, and now Garfield has now done, over cable service. Slightly different causes.

Perhaps Garfield’s new blog site is the post-milenial version of Armies of the Night. Mailer wrote about the march on the Pentagon from an engaged activist point of view. Here’s what Mailer said recently in an interview about the event:

Mailer:

“I think it was the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam, and for a very simple reason: Lyndon Johnson saw 50,000 mostly middle-class people come to Washington to stage a set of demonstrations that were going to be opposed by troops and police. LBJ knew people well. From his point of view, most middle-class people were hardly full of physical bravery. If they were going to pay their own money and come by car or bus or train to march into the possibility of being hit over the head with a cop’s club, then there had to be millions of people behind them.”

Technorati Tags: Advertising Agencies, Comcast, New Journalism, Social Media

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 11:13 am and is filed under New Marketing, Steve's Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.