Tiffanie Wong's husband may be annoying, but hopefully he's got a good job -- because she could soon be unemployed.
This morning on CBS's ratings-anemic Early Show, the Brooklyn-based husband and wife blogging team of Mark Joyella and the aforementioned Wong did a guest segment in which they pushed Wong's novelty blog, My Husband is Annoying. If you haven't seen the site for yourself, you're not missing too much. On it, Wong chronicles every little dumb-ass thing her husband does, portraying him as a lazy but harmless doofus who wouldn't be able to find his ass with a funnel and axle grease were it not for her -- basically taking the meme popularized by TV commercials and bad sitcoms and running it into the digital age. Wong even solicits and prints testimonials from other women eager to publicly emasculate their own husbands and, one would imagine, risk being smothered with a pillow in the middle of the night. Think of it as Stuff Obnoxious White Women Don't Like.
Here's the thing, though: Tiffanie Wong is a technical director at CNN.
As in the same CNN that fired me for blogging without my having gone on national television to boast about what I was doing.
Wong and Joyella say they hope to parlay the success of the blog into a book deal or, continuing the Ouroborial cycle of pop culture mediocrity in this country, yes, a sitcom. Yeah, good luck with that. I can tell them from experience that these days bloggers, even ones with good ideas, are a dime-a-dozen -- and that 15 minutes runs out damn quick. Being on network television and drawing a lot of people to the site you put together in your spare time looks great on paper, but it sure as hell doesn't pay the bills. Trust me. I've already said that I don't regret anything I've done -- not a bit. But if all the publicity I received when I first got canned and this site really took off had correlated to actual cash flow, I wouldn't be bothering with pledge drives every few months.
What's going to happen to Tiffanie Wong? I'm betting she'll be fired in a matter of days if not hours. Rick Davis, CNN's napoleonic head of standards and practices, probably already has his hand on the lever that will drop Wong into a shark tank beneath her feet (unless he gave her prior approval to blog on her off hours, which is certainly possible but seems unlikely given CNN's draconian stance on social networking). None of this will matter as long as her writing aspirations turn a profit -- and I certainly wouldn't be hypocritical and claim that keeping a torturous gig in cable news is preferrable to following your dreams. But Newsblues.com is already calling Wong and Joyella, "The latest favorite flavor in New York's dangerous echo chamber of manufactured self-importance."
Hey, at least someone's talking about them, though -- right? That's all it takes to bring the dough pouring in -- right? Right?
By the way, for what it's worth, I've worked with Mark Joyella. He really is kind of annoying.
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