BEST
SUMMER
EVER
HUFFINGTON
05.26.13
L
news month.” You hear about it
every year. “Oh,” pundits opine,
“this is the slow-news month.” As if
things are just not going to happen.
Of course, things do happen,
and as it turns out, things can
often happen a lot, in August. Last
year, as Zachary Seward pointed
out, August was a month of peak
things-happening. Libya had this
whole big civil war, and Londoners rioted in the streets, and Hurricane Irene pounded the East
Coast, so lots of people missed the
memo that it was supposed to be
a slow news month. When it was
all over, Seward took a look at
Factiva and determined that August of 2012 was pretty newsy, at
least compared to other Augusts:
“It turns out that 7.85% more
news was published in August
than would normally be expected,
the largest such jump over the
past ten years. The only other
August that comes close was in
2004, which saw a 5.37% increase in August news ahead of
the presidential election.”
Nevertheless, year over year,
August has been fairly inconsistently newsy, lending some credence to the whole “slow news
month” concept. But there’s an-
LINKINS: LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
LIFESTYLE
TRAVEL
other noteworthy aspect to August apart from its reputation for
slowness, and that’s its reputation
for being the month that everyone
acts like a complete idiot.
The other name for August, in
media circles, is “silly season,” because it’s the period of time where
There’s another noteworthy
aspect to August apart from its
reputation for slowness, and
that’s its reputation for being the
month that everyone acts like a
complete idiot.”
stupidity seems to overtake everyone. And it seems to be something
of a global phenomenon.
According to Wikipedia there
are “comparable periods” in other
nations. The French, poetically,
refer to it as la morte-saison.
The Germans call it Sommerloch
(which means “summer hole”). The
Swedes have this awesome deathmetal sounding term for it called
nyhetstorka. As in, “Good evening
Stockholm, we are Nyhetstorka and
we are about to rock you with our
crushing disappointment!” I have