9/9/2016 0 Comments Venti FeelingsOn NPR's Marketplace this morning, there was an interview with Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz. He was explaining how the megacorporation was moving laterally into media and content production. What was missing, out of the gate of this interview, was the fact that Schultz pushed hard (way back when I worked for Starbucks myself) to create Joe Magazine, dedicated to coffee and talking point. And he seems to forget that he once pushed baristas to have uncomfortable conversations with customers about race. So Schultz doesn't have a great track record of "starting conversations," as he claims his new media outlet will do.
Nobody remembers Joe magazine. For good reason. It was glossy and relatively contentless. It was linked to the brand, even as the company insisted it was quasi-autonomous. But what does it mean, that Starbucks is pushing (back) into content production? Schultz stresses that the new magazine will be largely digital (because Web whatever-point-whatever) and not linked to the brand in any explicit ways. It is to be full of "inspirational" stories of "ordinary Americans." (So it isn't any different from hosts of similar media making similar claims.) So why would Starbucks do it?
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AuthorJames Arnett is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Archives
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