The Angry Czeck

Recently, the ad agency I work for conducted a focus group comprised of teenagers. The topic centered around a website geared to their demographic. The comments made were enlightening.

Many said that the site featured “too much copy.” More expressed a preference for added video. One respondent suggested that we should incorporate a video that would “read aloud the copy on the website.”

That rusty, creaking sound you hear is the curtain being drawn on the Angry Czeck’s final act.

Too bad, I’m not pulling the plug on The Czeck. It’s not written for you, let alone knuckle-headed teenagers. But still, the research underscores what I have longed suspected.

The Age of Long-Copy Blogging is dead.

Like poetry before it, long-copy blogging will become a fondly remembered but little-practiced art form. We’ll continue to pretend to enjoy long-format sites, but privately we’ll ditch them in favor of reader-provided content blogs like People of Walmart, Fail Blog and Awkward Family Photos.

The sad thing is, it’s not that we can’t make time for Mabel’s House or Notes to Self. We just don’t. Why bother? Why wade through paragraphs of penetrating insight when Fail Blog offers guffaws with a single image (and word)?

I’m not an old man screaming “get off my grass.” Times change. I wish I had thought of a “Collect-Wacky-Photos/Write-Funny-Caption” gimmick too. Advertising dollars ahoy! And to be fair, not all short-format blogs are that lazy. The Sloganeerist* and Labmonkie are short-format, original-content blogs that liberally sprinkle wit and wisdom. But boy, think of the hits they’d receive if they only had readers sending them snap shots of people getting punched in the apple sack.

A long time ago, writers wrote stuff that rhymed.
More amazing, people actually read it.

Talk to any Web head, and they will tell you that video is the not just the future of the Internet, but the present as well. As Web users, we like to sit and take it. Pressing play is a hell of a lot easier than moving our eyes from left to right, diligently processing words into entertainment. Does it make us idiots? We didn’t return to our caves after abandoning poetry. The world will move on without The Angry Czeck and long-copy blogs.

I’ll have to be content** with writing for nobody.

*It is noteworthy to mention that the Sloganeerist, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, has created a more condensed version of his already succinct content here.

** By “content” I mean “furious”

Related posts:

1. Brief but penetrating: J.D. Salinger is dead.