Son of the Bronx

» see sonofthebronx.blogspot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Douglas Pucci had been an intern at VH1 and he had a nickname, Son of the Bronx, and in 2011 he put both on a free Blogger account and started posting Nielsen numbers. Not summaries of them. The actual tables, channel by channel, for the networks the trade press mostly could not be bothered with, from Cartoon Network and the Hub down through the sports cables.

Within a year the people whose job this was were citing him. Robert Seidman and Bill Gorman at TV by the Numbers credited his data in their own cable reports. The Futon Critic republished his tables. His Adult Swim and Hub Network figures turned up in TV Media Insights, where he also wrote, and reporters at papers from the Dayton Daily News to Yahoo Sports pulled his numbers when they needed to say how many people had watched something.

The whole operation ran on one person's evenings. American cable ratings are about as far from where I was sitting as a subject can get, and I find the thing fascinating anyway, because the shape is familiar to anyone who was on a forum in 2003: somebody decides to do the boring work nightly for free, and within eighteen months the professionals are citing him.

~ the dossier ~

~ the nightly numbers ~

Every post cited Nielsen Media Research. That was the point of them, and it was also the problem. A ratings table is a fact about the world and it is also somebody's product, sold at a price to networks and agencies who prefer that it stay behind their invoice. A blog that reprints the table in full every night is useful to everybody except the company that owns the table.

Pucci kept going at that pace for three years. The last ordinary posts went up on 17 and 20 May 2014, the usual weekly tables for the Disney channels and the news networks, the same format as always, no sign in them of what was happening on the other end of the account.

~ the takedown ~

On 22 May he posted the explanation under the heading "It has been a pleasure!" and it is worth reading as written, because it is the whole record of this death:

"I love TV ratings. And I love to post those TV ratings as well. However, Blogger has recently began removing my recent blog posts because they allege to infringe on copyrights, with more removals to come. Despite numerous references to sources of ratings information (included in every single blog post), it seems they are not enough grounds to counter these removals."

There was no lawsuit and no counterparty with a name. A complaint arrived at Google, Google removed the posts, and the only available response was to stop before the rest of the archive went. He pointed people at his Twitter account and said they could ask him there for a specific number.

The blog never came down. It is open right now at the same address, frozen on the farewell with three years of ratings underneath, the Blogger template still offering to share each post to Pinterest.

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