The first letter that I wrote was sent to the Boston Globe and was written regarding a story involving my home town. A local business man, who owns a floating restaurant call the Rockmore in the Harbor of Salem, MA as well as a ferry know as the Hannah Glover, was caught dumping raw sewage from the boat outside of the harbor. He was subsequently found to have been illegally dumping raw sewage from his restaurant and ferry for the last 16 years. This struck a chord with me because the Hannah Glover is the Ferry that takes kids to Childrens Island, a YMCA run day camp run on an island about a half mile from the mouth of Marblehead island. Along with almost everyone that I know, I went to Childrens Island and thus have many fond memories of the Hanna Glover. I do not however, have any fond feelings for Mr.Noyes who runs the Rockmore co. and is a trust fund baby, and for lack of a better word- a total jackass. I thought that if I expressed these sentiments, especially the bits about nostalgia, and the character flaws of Mr.Noyes I might have some chance at getting published.

To whom it may concern,

I am a life long resident of Marblehead, and though I am currently studying at the University of Massachusetts of Amherst, I caught wind of the Rockmore co. Scandal very quickly through friends and family. Needless to say I was absolutely appalled, here is a boat that my friends and I used to ride to summer camp every morning and they had been dumping raw sewage near our harbors and beaches the entire time! I don’t believe that its enough to simply fine the company and force them to take out an ad for an apology. Noyes, the owner of the Rockmore is a millionaire trust fund baby, who only runs the business because he needs to for access to his trust fund. A couple hundred thousand dollar fine is little more than pocket change to him. I think that the state should shut down the Rockmore and cut him off. Imagine the damage that 16 years of dumping raw sewage causes to a marine environment, it’s possible that this played a role in the rash of beach closings in recent years.

Sincerely,

Jeff Edwards

I didn’t get published, and I believe there are a multitude of reasons why. First and foremost, there was an issue with timeliness. I wrote my letter in response to some stories published in early February. I sent the letter around the 5th of February, and by the time they must have recieved and read the letter, the controversy had already been settled and the Rockmore co. was paying $300,000 in fines. Another issue was the tone of the letter, which was very irate. Also my letter was slightly slanderous towards Peter Noyes, though I stand by my claims.

My second letter was a bit more of a leap of faith. I wrote to Thrasher Skateboard Magazine concerning their February 2010 issue which had come with a free DVD copy of their newest video Prevent this Tragedy. I basically sang their praises, but also questioned the notable absence of one skater, who while on the Converse team had no part in the video and only two tricks in the friends section.

You guys are killing it! I saw PTT at a friends and it was so good I had to go out and get a copy of the mag so I could own it. The whole video was tight, spots, tricks, shenanigans, everything. I gotta say that Trapasso and Andrew Allen stood out the most though. That switch ollie to hill bomb was insane. I’ve got one question though, where’s Pappalardo at? Dude’s getting paid to skateboard and he can’t get more than a 50-50 and an ollie for his shoe sponsors video? Seems like only yesterday he was trying to switch-flip the Love gap, and now all I see from him is ollies onto cellar doors in hipster-town, Brooklyn. I mean I get it, its aesthetically pleasing, but enough is enough. Its not a fashion shoot, I wanna see some progression. Tell pops to step his game up, he used to be one of the greats, but lately it seems like he’s no better than the kids you see at the park everyday. Dude’s not even 30 there’s no excuse to be slacking like that, especially when you’re getting paid as much as he is!

Jeff
Boston, MA

As far as I know, this letter hasn’t been published either. It takes a long time for this type of thing to go through for a magazine, but I doubt it will make the cut anyway. I originally thought that it would be rejected because it criticizes some one who rides for several of their major advertisers, but this is a magazine that used to publish articles ripping dudes apart right next to full page ads of the same guy so I don’t think that would be the problem. The really problems are, as with the other letter, timliness, and length. After looking through a few of my old copies of Thrasher, I noticed that the letters published in the magazine are usually extremely short.

Well I was wrong. While I usually love anything that disgusts my girlfriend, this was an unfortunate exception. She was right, Fred is an awful, awful thing. Now I know that you said not to hate, so I’m going to try to hold back and be objective, as a journalist I should be learning to do so anyhow. But honestly, what the hell? This is becoming a Nickelodeon movie? Really? I know that some of my favorite cartoons growing up were a little ridiculous (eg. Rocco’s Modern Life/ Angry Beavers) but at least they were strange in an endearing way. Maybe that’s just the nostalgia talking, but there is certainly nothing endearing about Fred, and I’ve been struggling to understand the appeal of his videos for some time.

The closest I came come to explaining it is to compare it to a train-wreck or major accident on the news. Nobody really wants to see it, but everyone looks, and everyone checks the news for the latest updates. Still, rubberneckers can’t possibly explain the millions upon millions of views he’s gotten, and the millions who actually subscribe to his channel to stay updated on his latest verbal diarrhea updates.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a great majority of Fred’s viewers are from a young demographic, I’d guess around 11-15 for most of them. Fred’s actor and creator, Lucas Cruikshank Has said that the show is “programming for kids by kids.” (Independent) Knowing that this is the demographic for Fred’s audience makes it much easier to understand Fred’s rise to fame. In this day and age kids are getting on the internet earlier than ever, and certainly make up a large portion of the people browsing the funny section of Youtube. It’s also clear that Fred’s style of humor resonates with this sort of audience. Ridiculous will always be in style for 12-year-olds and Fred fits the bill perfectly. I’m not trying to say that he’s this generations Ren & Stimpy, but his basic technique isn’t so different. It’s insane, it’s annoying, and the kids love it.

That being said, Fred has also been very successful at marketing himself. He’s got his own website where you can watch his videos and buy Fred paraphernalia and recently broke into the mainstream media with “Fred: The Movie” to be aired on Nickelodeon. I’ll admit, I’m a little curious to see how the network handles some of Fred’s topics such as his drug-addicted mother or implied child abuse. I don’t think I’ll see the movie though, sitting through 3 minutes of Fred is hard enough. Can you imagine having to watch the Fred movie with your kids? Oh god that’s what it must have been like when I forced my parents to take me to the Power Rangers movie. I should probably apologize…

Anyways, even though I don’t like Fred’s clips (they probably used this stuff on prisoners a Guantanamo bay) I suppose I can see how he became so popular, and I respect him for doing his own this and finding a way to make good money off of Youtube fame.

The first step that I took was to tag the video with as many popular things as I could think of. Well actually I just tagged it with Tiger Woods, skateboarding, and Amherst, but this was when Tiger was still all over the news so I thought it might help. The next step I took was to have my roommate post the video on his reddit account, which has a fairly good reputation. While I got about 30 views form this endeavor, I didn’t get any comments. I think this is because reddit users want to comment only on reddit where others can up-vote them, since this is the only way many of them get any sense of self-worth. Just kidding. My video was down voted and forgotten in a couple of hours.
By this time I’d gathered a couple comments from friends who saw the video, and I considered putting it on Facebook, thinking that it might lead to more comments. However, I thought that it would be kind of cheap to get all my comments from friends so I didn’t take that route. I did make one last attempt at gaining a few more comments before throwing in the towel. I did what so many youtubers have done before and commented on other videos, asking for people to view and comment on mine. I decided that it would be best to comment on reviews of the Ipod nano video camera, since that was what I filmed my video with and people could get a good look at the video quality from my video. I commented on a couple videos, but got nothing in return.

I posted two amazing links and nobody cared. Not one single up vote on either link or any of my comments. From what I’ve gathered during my week of Reddit, the website is full of cliques. The tech guys, the anti-Palin crew, and the atheists are among the more popular of the groups, I’m sure there are many more that I didn’t stick around to find out about. Though there are certain redeeming qualities, such as the occasional funny or interesting link, a large portion of Reddit users seem to be bent on indoctrinating other users with their own political, social and religious beliefs. Of course this can be said about a huge array of media sources so I don’t know why this was surprising to me.

After looking through the various different Reddits and their most popular stories for an hour or so I decided to give it a shot and post my own links, which I thought catered to the interests of a good amount of users. The first link that I posted was a rather disgusting, yet hilairous story of a very naive man’s quest to obtain an Ipad. I posted it in the funny section and thought that because it was both funny and timely (the Ipad had just been released) it would be fairly popular. Nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did get several comments on the name of the submission (New Nominee for the Darwin awards.) pointing out that one must die in order to receive a Darwin award.
The next link was slightly more successful, It got one “like” and no comments. This was the one that I found most perplexing. I post a video on how to glitch out of the newly released demo for the newest game in a wildly popular video game series, on a video game Reddit and nobody cares? What? At first I thought that the video must have been posted before, so I checked, it wasn’t. This was when I came to my conclusion that Reddit is not quite as democratic as it may seem. Clearly if you aren’t already well know you’re going to have a hard time breaking onto the scene, unless you’re catering to the anti-Palin or atheist crowds.
There was one thing that I did think was a positive about reddit, and that was the ask:reddit function, where users can ask the entire community a question which will then be answered via comments. This serves as an interesting way for users to share experiences and opinions, though it can easily degenerate to an argument between two opposing points of view.

As far as promoting the clip goes I tagged it with tiger woods so that should ensure a good amount of views. Also my roommate posted it on Reddit, where it didn’t fare too well. As of now I think there’s about 50 views, 4-5 of which come from me and my roommate. Any way I suppose I’ll comment on other people’s channels urging them to comment on my video, maybe I’ll even put the link on facebook.

Some genius decided to combine Nike’s controversial new advert featuring Tiger Woods with audio from the extremely rediculous (and often extremely annoying) Tim & Eric show. It’s timely and silly, and I think it’s hilarious.

The most ignorant of callers are often showcased by hosts, who tout them as exemplifying the stupidity of their ideological opponents. The angry caller to Democracy Now is an excellent example of this, the host says something to the effect of “If you don’t pledge, this is what you’re supporting.” He goes on to accuse the caller of both abusing drugs and being mentally unstable. While the caller was certainly very angry and quite ridiculous, I think it’s a bit over the top to use her to characterize all those whose ideologies differ from yours.

Even the most respectful and seemingly informed of callers often cannot escape the rage of the host if they disagree. The caller to the Steve Douglas show made several very simple and, in my opinion, harmless suggestions about illegal immigration, was put down and ridiculed by Douglas, who was obviously angered by the call. It seems strange to me that he would be so rude to refuse to even consider his caller’s opinions but I suppose that it is the nature of the beast. Perhaps he would lose credibility to his listeners if he offered any sort of amicable conversation to a liberal caller.

Because I don’t have a working car radio, nor a radio in my home I was stuck listening to what I could find streaming on the internet, which limited me mainly to inflammatory conservative shows such as Schnitts and Hannitys. Though I had planned on calling conservation shows because I thought I would have more to argue with the hosts about (anger is the objective after all…) I probably would have opted for smaller, local shows had they been available to me. I believe that I would have experienced greater success with my call-ins if this were the case.

Though I initially thought that I would constantly be motivated to call and argue against the host’s views, I was surprised to find that this wasn’t the case. Not to say that I didn’t disagree with a great majority of what Schnitt and Hannity were saying, I did, but the way that they responded to callers who disagreed was very discouraging. After listening to Schnitt repeatedly cut-off and talk over his ideological opponents it became increasingly obvious that these sort of shows were meant to be a one-sided argument. I cannot count how many times I heard these hosts talk over a caller until there was no time left for the caller to make a coherent argument. However I was required to call in, so that’s what I did.

Every time I heard something I felt strongly about, or wanted to call the host out on I would call in repeatedly. Over and over I got dial tones and endless ringing. I stayed on the line for over five minutes the first time, but after that I would hang up and try again after about a minute or so of ringing. I called the Schnitt show so many times that I saved the number into my contacts so I wouldn’t have to dial it every time. Even so, out of all the calls that I made, I only got through to a screener once.

After hearing Todd Schnitt claim that the Hutaree Christian terrorist group raided by the FBI represented only a tiny fringe group “unlike Muslims” (essentially suggesting that a large amount of Muslims are supportive of terrorism.) I was ready to give him a piece of my mind. I dialed his number and was extremely surprised when someone picked up on the other end after only 2 or 3 tries. I proceeded to explain to the screener that I intended to point out the prejudice connotations of Schnitt’s remark and remind him of our countries sordid history with a Christian terrorist group known as the Klu Klux Klan. Apparently that wasn’t enough, I was told that they weren’t taking calls on that subject anymore, oddly enough about ten minutes later they aired someone who called in to agree with Schnitt on that subject.

I was angered by my experience to say the least, but I can’t say that I didn’t expect things to go that way. I suppose If I ever have to do this sort of thing again I’ll call smaller shows whose phone lines aren’t so busy. Maybe I’ll call someone I agree with, it seems like I’d have a better chance of getting on air that way.