ALTERTAINMENT

Welcome to ALTERTAINMENT.

Look I didn’t come up with the name, the owner did.  And he’s really really rich so we’re all going to pretend it’s a genius name — a play on ENTERTAINMENT and… well let’s go with ALTERNATIVE for now — that completely captures this moment in time where popular culture is massively shifting from the old to the new, from the the few to the many.  It’s a time of huge changes in what we play, watch, and listen to.  I guess what we read too — really the owner insisted we include “words” and apparently comics wasn’t “word-y” enough so…

Mostly it’s a time where it’s really challenging to make a living.  I have always managed to scratch out a living as a journalist: in newspapers; on radio; even television for awhile.  But this twenty-first century media environment is topsy-turvy all the way around.  The old distributors of all kinds of media are hurting a lot because this Internet thing — this series of tubular trucks – is the best goddamn distribution system humankind will ever invent.  So there’s not much of a business plan left in leveraging control of a limited means of distribution.  But that doesn’t stop them fighting and suing and making a lot of wrong decisions until someone learns how to properly unscramble this egg.

Wait where was I again.  Oh yeah. It’s not easy making a decent living anymore. Radio and television are cutting back, newspapers are losing money, even the New York Times is apparently in big-time trouble.  So  even an AWARD WINNING journalist, such as myself, has to be open to new opportunities, including indulging the whims of a seriously eccentric multi-billionaire in starting up a new arts and culture magazine for the web.  This guy is working on building elevators to the moon and lassoing asteroids.  He normally doesn’t go for small ideas.

But I was interviewing him earlier this year for a feature story for DO SCIENCE! Magazine and while we were talking he said, “I have enough wealth to buy every single media property in the United States combined several dozen times over.  But I don’t do conventional things, I reinvent the whole damn box. And if I had time aside from recreating the entire energy infrastructure of the world, building elevators to the moon and my stamp collection, I might spend a few minutes on creating the next media empire for the twenty-first century.”

We didn’t actually talk about it anymore during the interview but it must have planted an idea for him because weeks later his people’s people called me up and asked me if I wanted to work on this.  Honestly I have no idea how we’re going to make this work other than this guy is so loaded and so busy that we probably can’t lose enough money fast enough for him to actually be bothered to pay attention to us.

We’re doing a “soft launch” for the site although I don’t really get that term.  This is rocky going — I’m still trying to hire people, we’ve got to create a whole new infrastructure to support this propject and not enough time to do it.  But like I said I don’t think the owner is going to check in on us much so you know… whatever.

I guess if I do have to take any of this seriously let’s call “altertainment” entertainment that is outside of the packaged, processed, old school means of delivery. Entertainment that is more of a conversation between creators and audience… and others creating on top and around of it.  I’ve lived through the birth of the Internet, the World Wide Web, webcomics, podcasting… while it has messed up my career plans and destroyed my retirement account I have to admit it has been interesting.

I guess I should circle back to the title of this post since all I really wanted to do this morning was create an excuse to post this classic Jam song: