I read the NYTimes piece by the CollegeHumor.com editor, and I have to say that you've put a particularly cynical spin on what he wrote. I don't know if he has a lot of respect for his customers, that's true, but is it any surprise that advertisers are targeting 18- to 24-year-old men above everyone else? Or that what makes for a successful viral video is a mystery, even to someone whose job it is to discover and promote such things? Or that the investors behind the site would rather that he discover and promote videos, however shallow or puerile, that catch the attention of those 18- to 24-year-olds, and make the advertisers happy?

How, exactly, this makes him a sociopath, I'm not sure I understand.

I take it as another piece of evidence that "new" media is going to have the same problems as "old" media, and his lament is the same as any television programmer or newspaper editor of years gone by: That what people say they want and what they actually consume are rarely the same, and that the good is almost always shoved aside to make way for the profitable

His is also the sad realization that what at first blush appears to be a dream job is, ultimately, just a job, and something you have to do day after day, whether you want to or not. His role isn't to discover great veins of untapped talent on the web as much as it is to keep up the page hits, generate the ad revenue, and make everyone money.

I guess I'd rather read the doubts of someone who wonders about the worth of what he is doing and the compromises he thinks he's made than to read one more rah-rah piece about how internet videos of cats using toilets and skateboarders doing face plants on asphalt will end the "tyranny" of scripted network television once and for all, because it's all user-generated or socially-networked or some such thing.

Jason responds: Guilty as charged -- I do tend to interpret the things mentioned in my link entries as cynically as possible. Gerard is most likely right here, and I most likely wrong.