It's on, Yahoo. It is so on.
Listen, Yahoo, you can do whatever you want with your stupid little news aggregator blog thing (but written by real people, really, you swear, right?) that you’ve got going on over there. But listen up, Jimmy Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo media, you can’t call it “The Upshot.”
We write “The Upshot.” We’ve been writing “The Upshot.” The name’s ours. We came up with it first. Take your annoying algorithmic search-engine news machine and call it something else. “Top Stories As Determined By A Machine,” or “Other People’s Products” (OPP for short). How about, “Don’t Think (We Don’t), Just Read This”?
This isn’t news “ripped from the headlines,” it’s news ripped off from the headlines, our headlines. That’s bad enough, but then you go and rip off our name, too.
Now, granted, we don’t go around trying to market our column. We don’t do cutesy little interviews with Kara Swisher at the “Yahoo Center” promoting our stupid little blog (our blog, incidentally, isn’t stupid. Yours is.) Maybe we should. But, we’re too busy, you know, writing our column, and writing our blog for that matter. Maybe we should just have a search engine pick the topics for us. And write it. Then we could go on Conan, or Leno, or LeBron (doesn’t he have a TV show now? Seems like it.) Change the name. Change it now.
(By the way, I’m no marketing executive, but here’s one little tip I’ll pass along free of charge: you want to promote your idiotic blog? Put it on your homepage, for crying out loud. Who the hell can even find the thing?)
And while we’re at it, would you please, finally, remove that idiotic exclamation point from your name? You’re not fooling anybody. Nobody’s excited about your second-rate search engine and your useless little features. If you do have a little team of actual, live, real editors over there writing your blog, like you claim, then maybe one of them can point out the grammatical error you are committing. It’s like nails on a chalkboard.
You will be hearing from our lawyers.
