All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Today’s the day. “I Am America (And So Can You!)” – the first book by Stephen Colbert’s alter ego – is out today in bookstores across America. (What? You never read “Wigfield?” Get thee to a Border’s!) A Washington Post slightly-humorless review came out today – why even mention verifying his truthiness? -- and it’s lukewarm on the book:

[N]one of "I Am America" rings as uncomfortably true as Colbert's blistering speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, which is reprinted as an appendix here. While the humor in the book at times feels blunted and overly general, at the dinner he had a specific target: President Bush sitting just a few feet away from him and the journalists and politicians in the tables before him…Reading it now, you also can get a sense of the political convictions behind the comedian, the convictions that sharpened his jokes and that emboldened him to make them at such a historically cozy event. Funny as "I Am America" is, it lacks that critical force.

There are myriad reasons why Stephen Colbert is fascinating: his razor-sharp satire; his deadpan delivery; his speed-of-light quick wit.

But I’ve got my own reason for being fascinated by Colbert: He’s an enigma.

That’s right. The guy who’s seemingly ubiquitous from magazine covers to ice cream containers to presenting Emmy Awards?

An enigma.

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Want to know the future of Internet news? (The fact that you’re reading Public Eye leads me to think you might have considered it.)

Predications come cheap, but here’s a new one: You know now a lot of web browsers – or sites, even, like Google Maps – have a function where you can zoom in or zoom out, according to a sliding scale? Imagine being able to do that for the “weight” of your news content.

Michael Wolff has a fascinating read in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, where he discusses how, historically, each new medium has created its own version of news. – and that we’re still waiting for how the Internet is going to “do” news. He talks about how software types and media people have regular conference calls to try to wrap their heads around the future of online news.

Yet I understand that these incredibly unresponsive people may well possess untapped magic that, if they wanted to, could make for all sorts of wondrous tricks which might save the news.

"What about a sliding bar?" Mike Wu, a software engineer, offers just a little grudgingly. "Like from hard to soft news. So you can set it where you want to?"

"Really? From serious broadsheet to scandalous tabloid?" I wonder if this plasticity is miraculous or ludicrous. "From Ben Bernanke to Paris Hilton. And could this work, from unreconstructed crypto-Fascist religious right to loony absolutist left?"

"If we get the algorithm right."

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