10 Comments Add your own

• 1. Jason  |  July 30th, 2008 at 5:22 pm

  her music has a soul and r&b mix to it that hasn’t been heard i awhile… other than than that she is a typical rock star with rock star problems.. at least listen to her music before you display your ignorance

• 2. FreudianSlip  |  July 30th, 2008 at 7:06 pm

  Thre is no reason to care about her. Amy Winehouse is an extremely overrated singer from England. She gets tons of press, especially on the BBC, for some unknown reason. She has been alledgedly boozed or drugged up so much that she misses concerts, and many of her actions seem to back up that allegation. In my opinion, she makes Lindsey Lohan look like an angel.

• 3. Rick Ram  |  July 30th, 2008 at 7:25 pm

  Your total dismissal of pop culture is insulting to your readers…she may have no impact on your life, but claiming you know nothing about her kind of lets everyone know you are not really a well rounded person who should be trusted for intelligent commentary. I can name dozens of people from different walks of life who have no impact on your life..how about David Beckham? Marilyn Manson? Jason Alexander? ..yet, if you do nto know who they are, you are not the trusted source of information that a newspaper reporter should be. You are a dinosaur, Chuckles Sweeney. And you wonder why young people are turning their backs on newspapers?

• 4. Chris  |  July 31st, 2008 at 6:58 am

  Why young people are turning their backs on news in general? It’s because the media seems to care Way Too Much about things like what idiot star did what fool thing and why we should care more about it than we do about, oh, I dunno… anything. Bravo Chuck. Please talk about real news and ignore that tabloid trash stuff that’s ruining our culture.

  Our society values the wrong things when excrement-quality information like that makes the front page and say, the breakthrough medicines they just discovered for AIDS and Alzheimers don’t.

  Say no to false idols, say no to celebrity.

• 5. redrover  |  July 31st, 2008 at 8:32 am

  Mr. Sweeny,

  If you care about keeping your job as a newspaperman, then you should care about celebrities like Amy Winehouse because news about her and others of her persuasion are thought to be the key to getting young people to read (and perhaps buy) newspapers.

  Or at least something that sort of looks like a newspaper.

  Here’s a quote from a Salon.com article on this topic from a couple of years ago:

  “Newspaper executives have decided that if America’s youth, with their short attention spans, flagging interest in the news, and obsession with celebrity and sports, won’t come to newspapers, the papers will come to them.”

  This phenomenon is not without its consequences:

  “Polling data show that in the 1950s and 1960s people under 40 were almost as well informed about the world as their parents. But today, Americans under 40 generally know a lot less than their elders.”

  SOURCE:
  All the news stuff that’s fit to print
  Facing a slow death, newspapers are desperately trying to reach young readers with dumbed-down tabloids full of stories about Kobe, Britney and dental bling.
  By Farhad Manjoo
  http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/17/newspapers/print.html

  PS. This piece contains a rather lengthy quote from your ex-boss, Mary Stier.

• 6. Chuck Sweeny  |  July 31st, 2008 at 9:19 am

  I learned of Ms. Winehouse from reading –too much — about her in The Guardian, a London paper I read online everyday, along with several other London papers and newspapers from Australia, India, South Africa and Canada.

  I do not consider Ms. Winehouse or her music to be news. We have supermarket tabs to cover these kinds of people, and Rolling Stone. That should be sufficient. Paris, Lindsay, Amy, and even ol’ Madonna, are not news. Nothing that happens in the world depends on anything that happens to them.

• 7. yay movies  |  July 31st, 2008 at 5:36 pm

  i never noticed until recently that Amy Winehouse has astoundingly huge hair

• 8. Pat Cunningham  |  August 1st, 2008 at 9:18 am

  I’ll say this for Amy Winehouse: She’s really quite attractive, as you can see here:
  http://www.yourcelebritystuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/amy-winehouse_arrested-again.jpg

• 9. hokumboy  |  August 1st, 2008 at 9:49 am

  Chuck,

  “I do not consider Ms. Winehouse or her music to be news.”

  And yet you found time to whine about her?

• 10. Q Jordon  |  August 1st, 2008 at 11:42 am

  Perhaps, Mr. Sweeny is making a social commentary on Amy Winehouse. He is showing us the unglamorous side of show business that we usually see in our own tabloids.

  I am far from a prude, but to hold Amy Winehouse in such high esteem as some on here have - makes me wonder where they get their medication, or where they should be getting their medication.

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