I woke up this morning and went through my usual rounds of news. I was surprised to see little t-shirt icons next to some headlines on CNN.com

It turns out CNN has a new service (a “beta” one, for effective Web 2.0 cred), CNN T-Shirts. You can order a t-shirt with the headline of choice, along with the date it ran.

I want to think this is clever, but I can’t make myself. Perhaps if the headlines were biting like Diesel Sweeties or effectively captured cultural moments like Busted Tees. Perhaps I’m wrong though, and wearing weird one-liners like Expired Food Sold at Low Prices or Courtroom Razor Attack Caught on Tape will become hipster heroin chic, Von Dutch-style.

How do you think the subjects of the news stories — like the guy who unsuspectingly gave his kid an alcoholic lemonade at a ballgame — feel about being sloganized into t-shirts? How should they react? Should they get royalties? What are the privacy issues associated with having the publicized events of your life sold as gimmickery?

published April 30, 2008

Comments

  1. geeky Heather

    Zowzers! Some marketing guy got a raise for that, too, I bet….