There’s a lot of stuff I want to highlight this week, but thought this one was worth a quick post. When we first started discussion the Medialoper and Mediacratic idea, our focus was on television. It took about thirty seconds to realize that we’d have to look at all media. In the worlds of entertainment and information, every cherished institution is being re-examined.
Even magazines. I noted earlier this week that magazines are beefing up their online staffs, but what about the magazines who, well, abandon words entirely? What if there’s a movie magazine out there comprised of, well, movies? Short films, to be exact?
Wholphin (yes, that’s the progeny of a whale and dolphin) comes from the brain trust behind McSweeney’s and The Believer. And it comes at just the right time for the reviewers at the Washington Post:
That’s because we at The Magazine Reader are sick. We’re also tired. We’re sick and tired of words — endless words marching one after another in horizontal line after horizontal line in paragraph after paragraph in article after article in magazine after magazine.
In other words, we’re sick of reading. We long to join the rest of our fellow Americans sitting on the sofa with beer and Doritos, basking in the glow of a TV screen. And now Wholphin enables us to do just that.