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January 28th, 2008 | by Paul |Sorry about the misleading headline - just trying to get more hits. But that does lead us into a discussion of the Internet and misleading information.
The Internet is an amazing tool for communication, research and buying lots and lots of crap. Although I am quite proud of some of my Internet purchases (Filipino bootleg of “Alyas Batman en Robin,” anyone?) it’s rarely needed. It’s just taking off all geographic limits on my taste for junk. And Filipino musicals.
According to Shop.org, online retail is expected to reach $258 billion this year and $316 billion by 2010. That’s if you trust those - seven minutes of trying to think of acceptable euphemism - people. I don’t trust them. They’re the folks who made up Cyber Monday.
That link above is to a National Retail Federation press release. Keep in mind that Shop.org is the online arm of the NRF.
I’m sure we’ve all seen the stories about Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the supposed busiest shopping day of the year. A nice little story, an easy post-Thanksgiving space filler for lazy newspaper editors and sort of fun in a “Miracle on 34th Street” sort of way. And the good old NRF has glommed onto that in press releases like this one here.
Granted, back in real life, the International Council of Shopping Centers routinely reports that the busiest shopping day of the year is actually the Saturday before Christmas.
In 2005, the NRF and Shop.org decided it wasn’t enough just to have one made-up day of massive sales, so they made up Cyber Monday, promoting it as a magic day when people all go online, using their faster work computers to go online and shop their little consumer hearts out.
News coverage was mixed back in 2005. The writer of this San Francisco Chronicle article was fooled that year, writing a glorious story about the e-commerce history marketers spun for him. Also fooled was Al Tompkins, columnist for Poynter Online, a publication of the Poynter Institute. The Poynter Institute is a continuing education group for journalists, editors and teachers of journalism.
The group, whose motto is “everything you need to be a better journalist,” should have taken a lesson from BusinessWeek, which released this article two days after Tompkins put out Cyber Monday in his “Al’s Morning Meeting” column. That column, by the by, purports to give newspaper editors across the nation solid ideas for news stories.
Just listen to this quote from the BusinessWeek story of Nov. 29, 2005:
“Do a Google search on ‘Cyber Monday,’ and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago to describe the jump in online shopping activity following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.”
I don’t say this enough, BusinessWeek, but I love you.
Coverage since that bounty year of 2005 has deviated toward a weird middle. An article about Cyber Monday that appeared in USA Today just last year talked about how Cyber Monday was sort of made up, but they put off mentioning that fact until the fifth paragraph. In the sixth paragraph, they had a quote about how it was really just “symbolic.”
You know, symbolism. Like how a “skull” can mean death, an “eight-spoked wheel” can mean Buddha’s noble eight-fold path and how “not the busiest online shopping day of the year” can mean the busiest online shopping day of the year.
Perhaps the most disturbing recent article about Cyber Monday came from Poynter’s Tompkins. In that article, headlined “Cyber Monday Hoax Coming True,” Tompkins wrote about the BusinessWeek article and the general scammy nature of Cyber Monday. Then, in the interest of balance and alternate point of views, he quoted a source talking about how Cyber Monday was actually picking up momentum.
That source was the National Retail Federation, the people who made up the lie in the first place.
Just to remind you, Tompkins’ column goes to news editors looking for story ideas across the nation.
Good luck, America. You’re going to need it.