CafePress Would Like You To Know That T-Shirt Sales are Serious Political News(TM)
One of the nice things about being a professional media outlet, or at least a widely-known blog, is that you’re on the mailing list for basically any story that someone wants you to believe is “news.”
This is not actually seen as a nice thing by most professional media outlets, but that is because they are not sifting through the dross for gold, like the press release and handy graphic from CafePress that Wonkette gleefully highlighted today, announcing that Ron Paul and Barack Obama are neck-and-neck in that all-important political metric, custom T-shirt printing:
“With an average of over 130,000 new designs uploaded every week, CafePress is often seen as a Cultural Barometer®,” writes the Park Avenue-officed PR flunky who spammed media outlets this “story” and also apparently registered “Cultural Barometer,” which CafePress is seen as, as a trademark.
CafePress, for those that don’t know, pretty much just prints custom T-shirts, like that guy in the trailer with the airbrush at the county fair only for the entire Internet and therefore way scuzzier. 
(It is kind of a telling revelation about the CafePress-shopping demographic that a statistically-significant portion of them apparently support Gary Johnson for President, unless maybe that was just confusion caused by retro-hipsters ordering replica LBJ T-shirts).
The real hilarity, of course, and Wonkette notes it faithfully, is not that the above-mentioned PR flunky tried to pawn T-shirt printing off as a valuable metric for Real News Sources (TM) to cover, but that a few of them (naming no names, New York Daily News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram) actually did cover it:
With Romney’s focus now on the general election, time will tell whether former Paul t-shirt buuyers [sic] will switch camps. Overall, 59 percent of purchases were against Obama, but Romney will likely need purchases from Paul supporters to sew up the gap.
Journalism!
I would say “I see what you did there” for the line about “sew up the gap,” but the NYN seems so serious about the whole thing I’m not sure it was intentional.
Anyway, getting on the mailing lists for these adorably desperate sorts of press releases is one of the biggest temptations to “go pro,” let me tell you. We all spend hours reading stupid shit on the internet already; I might as well get paid for it.
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