Is Mr NYC Rude Enough?

These days, thanks to the Internet, newstands don't sell that many newspapers anymore, they're mainly just places to get soda, gum, candy, or water. But when I was a kid, on the streets of NYC, there were myriad newstands bursting with piles and piles of the big daily periodicals, practically falling onto the  sidewalks -- The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post, Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today. There were even foreign-language newspapers -- Chinese, Russian, Arabic. This is where you went to buy "serious" papers for "serious news" but, if you wanted to read something that spit in the face of serious news and contained articles that were unapologetically nasty and controversial, you could, for free, get the "alt-weekly" like the Village Voice or New York Press in the single-standing kiosks on the streets.

Then the Internet came along and the alt-weeklies went into sharp decline as the "alt-press" went online. The most infamous of these online "rude" new sites was Gawker followed by other such sites as Vice, Deadspin, and others. For them, no one and nothing was precious, they didn't play the "inside game" of mainstream news reporting, they published the real dirt on politicians and celebrities, their "news" content was unabashedly voyeuristic, trashy, and mean. And, of course, there were blogs, where ordinary schmoes like yours truly could type away with giddy abandonment, being as rude and insulting to anyone and everyone as they wished.

But now these online sites are vanishing, either through declining readership, mismanagement, or lawsuits. And, according to some, so are blogs -- because social media rules our world now and is where all the "rude" content now lives, blogs have become passe, they are a relic of the mid-2000s. Blogs, apparently, aren't rude enough to exist.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

That got me thinking. Would this blog get more traffic, get more hits, be more popular, even get some kind of media attention, if it was really really mean? If, instead blogging about the spirit and psyche of this town, I "went medieval" of people and said nasty stuff about them and just became, quite frankly, another digital prick? Or, as Mick Jagger might croon: "Ain't I hot enough? Ain't I rough enough? Ain't I rich enough?"

Well, I can answer the last one - I ain't rich enough but, for the last two, I'll let you, the dear readers, to decide.