So Matt Drudge is indulging in his frequent and misguided RO over the fact that CNN is offering for sale a t-shirt featuring their somewhat-fellative headline about Obama’s inauguration.
The much larger RO question: what makes CNN think anyone is going to pay money for, and repeatedly wear, a black t-shirt featuring the text of a tagline from cnn.com? The one currently featured for t-shirt treatment is “Wall Street Defends Bonuses.”
The headlines selected seem to be random.
Most of the stories will be forgotten by the time your t-shirt arrives.
Many of them will be opaque without the text of the story.
Do the CNN headline writers think their prose is so deathless that it deserves being worn on chests across the country? The Onion just about manages that on its good days, but CNN?
I know this smacks of RO in its own right, and I’m not really upset, just genuinely curious at why CNN thinks anyone wants this, and whether they are in fact right.
I’ve thought the whole idea was ridiculous ever since I first saw it. Random CNN headlines just seem like such an incredibly inane thing to put on a T-shirt, and I have frequently wondered exactly how many people actually buy those things.
That said, it has occasionally had its moments. I seem to recall one headline T-shirt that said: “Bear attack victim: it’s eating my brain!” or something along those lines.
It seems to me that there’s a market for them, or else CNN would have given up by now. If they’re still selling them, then there are still folks buying them.
That said, there used to be (is there still?) a bug on the CNN site, where you could create your own headline text to be printed along with CNN logo. I’m sure some folks got a kick out of that, if the sales were ever completed.
I don’t get it either. CNN’s audience skews older, and most people over 40 or so y.o.a., at least in my experience, refuse to wear any kind of logo apparel (except maybe for identifiable brand marks on jeans and such).
I might wear a logo T while working out, but that would be it.
That seems like one of the few places they could have gotten the idea from. Except it makes them morons, for the reason you alluded to: Fark’s moderators actively select headlines that would work on shirts, by picking funny or strange or otherwise noteworthy (well, shirt-worthy) lines from a pool of submissions for each story.
CNN’s headlines are pretty boring and not shirt-worthy in most cases. On the other hand, I bet a lot of people would pay for some famous tabloid zingers. “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,” anyone?
Some of the headlines are strange enough that I could see someone thinking they were funny and wanting them on a t-shirt. People love “Engrish” shirts just because they are so random and nonsensical.
It also probably costs CNN very little to offer the option. I assume that they have the website setup so that the text is automatically shown on a t-shirt and they only probably actually print it on a t-shirt if someone places an order for that headline. Hey, why not see if anyone bites?
I was thinking this when I saw that Fark was doing it. Without context almost all of them would make really stupid t-shirts. But it still makes more sense than CNN headline shirts.
I remember it well. There was a thread alerting us to the bug, and several posters created gems that we could link to. My favorite was “Larry King is a Demented Old Man.” Wish I could remember which poster came up with that.
