At CNet, executive editor Molly Wood chronicles the bizarre use of stereotypes of women in the Samsung GS4 launch:

The Brazilian woman was hot (duh). A bride-to-be arrives on stage with a chirpy, “check out the ring!” The Air Gestures that let you control the phone without touching it are presented as a boon to giggly women with annoying voices whose nails are wet and who don’t want to put down their drinks. The comically alcoholic one, DeeDee, then proceeds to demo how eye tracking can pause a video when you look away from the screen… as she looks away at a hunky gardener type who proceeds to take off his shirt.
“While the women are cooling down,” says the emcee, “why don’t you tell us about S Health?” By then, it’s almost too easy to have there be a joke about marrying a doctor and then the one about eating too much cheesecake ohyeahthatoneIshouldhaveseenthatcoming. Of course those jokes are in there. Why would those jokes not be in there? We already had a tap-dancing tow-headed kid and a hot Brazilian girl.

What I’m really curious about is whether this latest example of corporate stupidity when it comes to going to the laziest bits of the gender humor well was developed in-house by Samsung or by an outside advertising agency? If the latter, which ad agency? And on what basis did they recommend the use of stereotypes as hooks? I’d be really curious about the market research on which those decisions are based, given how many ads seem to be doing well by defying gender stereotypes. From Super Bowl ads featuring princesses who lead armies and laundry-doing ladies who are passionate and sneaky sports fans to the Kindle ad that treats gay married couple as if they’re a totally normal part of the mix, a lot of companies seem to want to treat women as actual people, or gay couples and the people who are friends with them as actual consumers. My bet is that tech companies in particular want to seem forward-looking in their gender politics as part of projecting a general sense that if you buy their products, you will be part of the future. But that just makes Samsung’s presentation more bizarre.

I’ve been in a state of nostalgia since yesterday when word came down from publisher Stephen Mindich that the Boston Phoenix, which any teenager growing up in Boston or the suburbs thereof worth her or his salt should have loved, will no longer publish. The Phoenix was distributed for free rather than on a subscription model, and the reasons for its demise are correspondingly probably different than the ones that have contributed to the long decline of the Boston Globe, which is currently up for sale. It’s one thing to ask people to continue to pay for home delivery of a product, which is a significant investment of money to bring in something that takes up space in the home. And it’s another to have people get out of the hobby of picking up a paper even when it’s free, because they’re reading on devices or their phones, and the idea of

But there’s something sad about the idea that Boston, a metropolitan area that prides itself on its literacy and its history of contributions to journalism and literature, as well as on its high concentration of academics, students, and other brain workers, couldn’t keep an alternative weekly alive. It’s sad, too, that the parts of the Globe worth reading have essentially been whittled down to their Sports and Ideas section. We can’t count on local culture, or literate pride, to save alternative newspapers, much less to support non-alternative publishing.

Over at Vulture, David Edelstein, who started his career as a movie critic at the Phoenix, makes a point about what else we’re losing other than a vibrant media environment when alternative outlets close:

There wasn’t a single hack at the Phoenix when I was there — no one who didn’t care deeply about his or her prose. My first editors, Carolyn Clay (theater) and Stephen Schiff (film) still rank among the best I’ve ever had. The Phoenix (and Real Paper) had been a place for critics like Janet Maslin and David Denby and Jon Landau to shine. Lloyd Schwartz was and is brilliant on classical music. Charlie Pierce — now a superlative political blogger for Esquire — was there, along with writers I deeply admire such as Gail Caldwell, Caroline Knapp, Laura Jacobs, Michael Sragow, Scott Rosenberg, Josh Kornbluth. I’m forgetting many others, but not my colleague on the film desk, Owen Gleiberman, who was among the most generous and convivial I’ve ever known.

In his writing about blogging for free, Ta-Nehisi Coates has also talked about the importance of his work on the Washington City Paper in his future career. Alternative outlets are critical incubators for people with ideas, perspectives, or interests that don’t fit neatly into the slots national publications have available. Those papers provide not just opportunities for those people to write, something that remains available on the internet today, albeit for less money, but opportunities for those people to write and get edited by strong editors. Probably the most critical place I worked in my career before coming to ThinkProgress was Government Executive, a trade publication where I covered federal personnel policy, and got edited by people like Anne Laurent and Tom Shoop. Even though I’m not still writing about the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (which: shockingly interesting), I still rely heavily on their lessons about everything from which kind of music is most conducive to writing features to what kinds of details grab readers. But I’ve spent a lot of time learning culture writing on the fly, and by doing, and without the oversight of a former critic. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing it that way, or with anyone else starting your own blog, or writing for Tiny Mixtapes, or whoever else will have you. But I do think that it’s a real loss when outlets where people can get extensive editing and professional training in criticism, in local reporting, and in a lot of other skills, close. Diffusing the structure by which people get opportunities has a lot of advantages. But removing places where it’s possible to get a lot of professional education and improvement isn’t one of them.

Austin Cunningham’s “The Girls On Fox News Song” may not be the most important contribution to the country music songbook in recent memory, but it’s a terrific explication of how Fox News built the element of its brand that’s reliant on very attractive women to draw in audiences:

“Honey sure beats vinegar to wash down the news we need,” Cunningham sings, and that’s part of the point. Fox News is selling the attractiveness of its anchors and commentators as much as it’s selling actual information. When the network is literally designing sets to make sure its female anchors’ legs will be visible on-air—not to mention sending Megyn Kelly on a long loop around the studio in high heels on election night—no matter the seriousness of the news at hand, it’s hard to argue that sex isn’t one of their products. And as an entertainment company, that’s certainly their prerogative to pick the products they’re interested in selling.

That said, I always wonder what it must be like to be a woman at the network and to be aware that your looks might easily overshadow the actual information you’re trying to convey. When Cunningham asks us to “Save some love for Greta, she’s the smartest of them all. Bet when she’s off the record, she’s the wildest one of all,” it kind of belies the idea that he’s interested in “beauty with brains.” And if I were Megyn Kelly, I’d be gritting my teeth and hoping that Fox had a plan to move me to Fox proper in primetime, or that Jeff Zucker’s CNN might be interested in hiring me and letting me wear a blazer.