In your hacked Wednesday media column: Rachel Maddow's less fascinating, 4Chan's smarter than Time, online news fails, and newspaper layoffs reported not in newspapers:

Heroic television short-hair Rachel Maddow has been losing viewers, ever since the election! What the hell, America? Too busy watching Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior to care about public affairs? Cause that's what I'm doing. Deadliest Warrior.

Ha, the young internet idiots at 4Chan hacked Time.com's "100 Most Influential People" online poll and voted 4Chan's founder up to #1 and also, we quote, "the hackers apparently rearranged the top 21 names so that the first letter of their names-looking down the list-spelled out the phrase 'Marblecake Also the Game.'" Joke's on you, hackers. There is no way to make Time's list of Influential People any more bullshit than it already is.


More on today's Chicago Tribune layoffs, via Facebook updates:

10:45am [redeacted]: "Two people who sit at adjacent desks just got laid off. Good, good people. We're all waiting at our desks hoping not to be called next."
10:47am [redacted]: "A lot of tears..."
13 minutes ago [redacted]: "I was told to stop writing about this, because it was upsetting some people. OK, I'll stop. But this is bigger than work. This is about real people and real friends."

New-media-overtaking-old-media-symbolism-UGH.


Elsewhere in declining audiences: the Seattle P-I. They killed the print paper and went online-only, but now their online traffic is down 23% from a year ago. There's no good angle on that whatsoever.