Where snark meets media criticism

If there’s a literary wing of Xer culture, its headquarters is surely McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, where pop nostalgia meets cultural criticism until they become practically the same thing... until they end up proving the point that the Xer character is intimately tied up parsing the sea of media we’re all almost drowning in.

Check out the piece "Anecdotal Leads for News Stories Reporting the End of the World". It’s a perfect example of the site’s Sahara-dry wit, and it wouldn’t be funny if the mainstream media wasn’t doing such a poor job of reporting the news -- eschewing fact-based reporting and in-depth analysis in favor of the easy and obvious human-interest story -- that bloggers have had to take over that role.

One sample from the piece:

Nine-year-old Joshua Harding didn't plan to miss classes Tuesday at West Monroe Elementary School. Nobody did.

But dismissed were his classes -- for good.

As the Net gets better and better at telling the personal stories, will so-called "real" journalists start doing their jobs again? Nah, I don’t think so, either.