Wednesday Buzz: Everyone Loves Complaining About Politicians

If you’re looking for something unopinionated, don’t click this link  (opens in a new tab).

Behind it is a lengthy, somewhat profane roundup of the worst politicians in the country, including big names (four governors, a couple of senators, Donald Trump) and small (county sheriffs, state senators, city council members). What do they have in common? Easy—they were gathered by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia from a wide array of AAN’s member publications.

It’s a fun read, one totally in the wheelhouse of the alt-weeklies—26 of them will publish it in their pages—and full of irreverent commentary and political corruption.

“And there’s more than just the usual stodgy Washington losers,” the association’s Chuck Strouse promises in a blog post on the effort  (opens in a new tab).

In a brilliant example of crowdsourcing, more than 50 journalists took part in forming the list—which shows what you can do if you can get everyone on the same page.

Don’t Just Serve Cupcakes

Two Important Lessons from Crumbled Crumbs Bake Shop: Little Crumbs Bake Shop failure gives all business leade… http://t.co/adTrjy9w0u  (opens in a new tab)

— adam_hartung (@adam_hartung) July 8, 2014  (opens in a new tab)

Your appetite might disagree, but your waistline might find this assessment on-point: You can’t eat cupcakes all day, every day.

The dramatic death of the popular cupcake chain Crumbs, the nation’s largest, came without warning Monday night, but there are certainly important lessons from the shutdown. According to Forbes contributor Adam Hartung  (opens in a new tab), there are two big ones that translate to any part of the business world: Don’t let your passion get in the way of your business goals, and be ready to diversify when trends shift.

Hartung argues that the company’s downfall was avoidable.

“Leadership needed to overcome its passion for cupcakes and [should have] taken a much larger look at customer needs to find alternative products,” he writes. “It wasn’t hard to identify that some diversification was going to be necessary. And that would have been much easier if they had put in place a system to track trends, observing (and admitting) that their ‘core’ market was stalled and they needed to move into a new trend category. Which with a good planning system they could have identified.”

That may not be an easy cupcake to swallow, but sometimes you need to take the first bite. (ht @adam_hartung  (opens in a new tab))

Other good reads

Firefox isn’t dead, but its browser share is certainly on the decline, according to recent stats from Net Applications  (opens in a new tab).

There’s plenty of room for your events to intersect with your publications, says Write Publications’ Kim Howard, CAE  (opens in a new tab).

The event app space is packed to the gills with interesting players. Event Manager Blog has a few contenders for your business  (opens in a new tab).

Donald Trump made this list of worst politicians despite not being an elected official. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images/Thinkstock)