…. to PWAKs (People Who Actually Know Stuff).
Here’s a transcript on Smart-Wing Radio of an interview with Thomas de Zengotita, who is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, teaches journalism at Columbia University, and is coming out with a book in the spring of 2005 titled either Media-ted or The Flattered Self: The Effects of Media on People, Places and Things
From the interview:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thomas de Zengotita says Progress Media’s Mark Walsh has the wrong strategy. Don’t pitch to the center. Fill the airwaves with an array of niche programs for gays, blacks, feminists, anti-globalists and so on. Zengotita lays all this out in November’s Harper’s Magazine and even pitches a show for a particular niche.
THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: So I’ve picked a niche that I think is a significant tipping point niche with enormous leverage in the culture as a whole, thinking long term, and that’s the niche of people from 19 to 30, they’re really well-educated, they know who Foucault is, they’ve read Derrida, they’ve read some Nietzsche — these same people are as immersed in, you know, websites that talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the X-Men and what their super powers stand for — young people who are, by and large, alienated from politics, too ironic, too fragmented into their various identity groups, too hip to really care about a general progressive resurgence in this country.
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