A Waitress, A Pastor, And A Bill Walk Into An Applebee’s...

What sounds like the worst opening for a joke, maybe ever, has turned into a thoroughly unpleasant experience for at least two people. Last month’s Applebee’s controversy surrounding a non-tipping St. Louis pastor and a fired waitress is entirely baffling in scope. By itself, the picture of the check with a snarky note written on it is an amusing reminder of how arrogant people can be. Add the Internet and, suddenly, it’s not just newsworthy. It’s sensational.

My first reaction to the story is “holy heck, Reddit is officially mainstream!” For the past several years, news organizations have been busily trying to make the happenings of Facebook and Twitter newsworthy. Easy human-interest pieces abound. Funny pictures making the rounds on Facebook or the Twitter reactions of celebrities to events can fill a paper at a minimal cost. More recently, however, it seems that reporters are looking beyond the confines of Facebook and Twitter, to the more dangerous realms of Reddit and 4chan. The latter has forced itself into the spotlight with the Anonymous hacking circle.

But both contain content of a broad variety, from the hilarious to the incredibly disturbing. Maybe that’s why this development amuses me so much: the image of a veteran news editor at his or her desk, stumbling around Reddit, clicking on the wrong section, and finding something truly horrifying. In this case pastor Alois Bell and ex-waitress Chelsea Welch seem to have been particularly unlucky. The Internet is full of funny pictures of identifiable people doing stupid things. Somehow this one made it viral. I’m interested to see what future story dredged from the bottom of the Internet will make it viral in quite the same way.