Posts Tagged ‘pr’
“I’m more American than apple pie. I’m like apple pie, with a hot dog in it.”*…
From Kelsey McKinney and the invaluable Defector.com, investigative reporting at its most trenchant: just how many hot dogs do Americans eat?…
Last summer, my friend Dana brought me a very important question. She and some friends had been debating all weekend whether or not a certain officially reported number could possibly be true. Could I report it out? Could I find out whether there were lies afoot and frauds being perpetrated? As a good friend, I promised that I would try. And here I am, a mere 10 months later, trying.
The issue is this: The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council puts out a figure each year claiming to be the number of hot dogs an American eats annually.
I will give you a second to think about how many hot dogs this might be.
…
have asked this question at every party I have been to in the last 10 months, and most people give an answer somewhere between five and 25. I, a lover of hot dogs, guessed 30 when first faced with this question. It is still nowhere near the number the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council claims.
The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (from here on out referred to as Big Hot Dog) claims that the average American eats … 70 hot dogs a year… To be clear, this number includes only hot dogs. It does not include bratwursts or sausages or those mini dogs that can be rolled up in pigs-in-a-blanket. It does not include veggie dogs. It is only hot dogs that Big Hot Dog claims we are each eating 70 of every single year…
I emailed Eric Mittenthal, president of Big Hot Dog, last May to ask him where this number comes from and he said, “The number is an estimate based on the sales data we have.” OK, yes. I figured that much. I tried to ask follow-up questions, but they were left unanswered. So we are forced to try to confirm this figure using our powers of deduction. It is important that we do because this number is cited left and right. In the past five years, Big Hot Dog’s numbers have been quoted by Newsweek, and USA Today, and Time and a dozen other major publications. But are they … real?
Seventy hot dogs per American x 341,362,543 Americans = nearly 23.9 BILLION hot dogs per year…
How many dogs do Americans down? Read on to find out: “Big Hot Dog Must Tell The Truth,” (gift article) @mckinneykelsey @DefectorMedia.
* Stephen Colbert
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As we pass the mustard, we might note that today is “New Beers Eve,” the day before National Beer Day in the U.S.– a commemoration of the date (in 1933) that the Cullen–Harrison Act came into effect, legalizing the sale of 3.2% alcohol beer in the U.S.– which presaged the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment (on December 5, 1933) via the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, and the end of Prohibition.
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”*…
In his invaluable newsletter, Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick unpacks the full– and forlorn— story of the online travails of Kate Middleton (AKA Catherine, the Princess of Wales) and considers its implications…
… As Charlie Warzel wrote, “It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested.” But this also wasn’t a simple case of the unruly masses being Bad Online.
Yes, the #WhereIsKate hashtag was initially spread by the Sussex Squad, a royal fandom subculture that hates Prince William and believes Kate is, at best, sort of racist. And a lot of the early gossip was motivated by an impulse to give Kate a taste of what Meghan Markle is still experiencing at the hands of the UK media. But if you’re looking for someone to blame all of this on, it’s clearly Kate’s press team and, by extension, everyone in her life that supposedly cares about her. There were countless moments where her press team could have squashed all this, but they didn’t. Instead, they let a woman who had just discovered she has cancer become a global laughing stock and, at one point, made her apologize for it! Absolute sicko shit.
But this is also just how our various institutions work — or more accurately do not work — now. Over the last 25 years we have slowly uploaded every part of our lives to a system of platforms run by algorithms that make money off our worst impulses. Well, the ones brands are comfortable advertising around. And for years we have wondered what the world might look like when we crossed the threshold into a fully online world. Well, we did. We crossed it. This is what it looks like. And it is already too vast and complicated and all-encompassing to blame any one individual for how it functions. If we want something new, we’d have to smash the whole thing and I don’t think that’s going to happen. So let’s hope PR people, at the very least, can figure out how to deal with it going forward…
Those of us in post-colonial North America, might ponder the implications of this sad tale for matters closer to home– public health, meme stocks, and perhaps especially our looming elections…
The saga of #WhereIsKate: “How we got here,” from @broderick.
* Eleanor Roosevelt
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As we lean back and think, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a celebrated hoaxster took on partners: “P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth” joined forces with James Bailey and James Hutchinson. By 1887, the re-branded circus went by the name “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.”
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