Jake Brennan: Pop-ed Idol
If we had Boston.com-type money to throw around, this is the kind of ponzi scheme we'd be proud to concoct: pay your local hardcore-folkie to compose, record, and film a video for an original song based on the news of the day -- every day. JAKE BRENNAN (ex-Cast Iron Hike, ex-Confidence Men) has a little time on his hands between record deals, so he cooked up the aforementioned concept, which he calls "Pop Ed" (it's a pun, see?), along with Handcranked Productions, as a way to pay the bills until someone picks up his solo album. (Until that happens, we'll be referring to Jake by a new nickname: what's up, CRONKITE?) In the meantime, the Boston.com folks have given Brennan a homepage, a blog, a shitload of bandwidth, one of those pricey Brightcove flash players (yes, we're jealous), and some nifty interactive tools that allow readers to help him write lyrics. And even if, as we suspect, he's being used as a lab-rat for the Globe's user-contributed video strategy -- take that, BostonNOW! -- it's still about five times smarter than anything else the Boston.commies sling at soccer moms on the rest of the site. Lightweight corporate synergists like OTD can only marvel at the marketing prowess of the Globe, which had the foresight to turn Jake's song-of-the-day into both an interactive empire and also an old-media promo horse, by running the song nightly on WBOS. Now -- if only our newspaper had a close working relationship with a radio station . . .
Up first, and embedded up above: Cronkite's take on a recent baseball headline.
VISIT: Jake Brennan's Pop Ed