This just in: Journalism officially dead

I gotta give a shout-out to the guys (and gals) at The Oregon Commentator, just because I saw it there first, but it appears that the good folks at the Eugene Weekly are having a serious crisis over their image. I'm no expert in marketing, but I would imagine that if your readership consists mostly of aging hippies, eclectic music fans and anarchists, you would avoid putting an obscure Internet reference on your cover.

I say "obscure" here with full knowledge that anybody under 30 with a browser and a modem has probably seen the "LOLcats" phenomenon, but think about the people who read the Weekly for anything other than the personals and Savage Love, then think about LOLcats, and then just mull that image over in your head for a bit. By the way, if you're unfamiliar with LOLcats, it's a very complicated concept: You take a funny picture of a cat, put words on it that make no sense, and spread it around the Internet like the Clap. Here are a few examples:







Fun times. Anyway, as for the Weekly, I have a few theories. They could have hired a really young copy editor who was either a) getting fired that day, getting out of journalism and thought he'd have a good laugh or b) retarded. They also could have just been the Eugene Weekly: Irrelevant, politically pedantic, and with a readership that is too stoned or burned out to notice when the magazine they are reading makes NO FUCKING SENSE.