provide us no content

To you from Garrison Keillor. For those of us who believe that the news-industry-as-we-knew-it began its slow trek to hell in a handbasket the day that we began to use "content" as a catch-all for anything that appears on a screen that strings more than a couple of sentences together:

"I sure wish we could get rid of that word 'content' to refer to writing, photography, drawing, and design online. The very word breathes indifference--why would one bother about the quality of work when it's referred to as 'content'? I'm sorry to respond to your good question with a cranky diatribe, but this word has crept from New Media over to Radio Broadcasting where I live in my little cave and now my Show has become Content and is sent around to stations in a nice digital package that squashes the sound. Public radio, which holds itself up as a believer in quality, is cutting corners on all sides and I see this perfidious word 'content' as part of the downward slide. I loathe the word. It's like referring to Omaha as a 'development.'"

--Garrison Keillor, radio curmudgeon, in response to a listener question about how he develops "content" for his radio show, "The Prairie Home Companion," 2009