The writer Clay Shirky tipped us off to a morbid bit of slang used in the dying business of print newspapers, where obituaries are referred to as subscriber countdowns. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Subscriber Countdowns”
I was reading Clay Shirky, who writes about journalism and the future of news and so forth.
And he had a little black humor in there from the journalism world where everyone knows that newspapers are dying, but they’re kind of unwilling to admit it. It turns out that in some newspapers, they don’t call it the obituary column anymore. In-house, they call it the subscriber countdown.
Let’s hear your jokes about your business or industry.
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