Pop candy

Infobox Website
name = Pop Candy
favicon =
caption =
url = http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/
commercial = Yes
type = Blog
registration =
owner = USA Today
author = Whitney Matheson
launch date = 1999
current status = Active

Whitney Matheson's blog, Pop Candy, delves into the television, movies, comic books and music that fuel popular culture, with an eye for the unique and unknown.

Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek [http://royal.reliaserve.com/eppy/winners2008.html awarded Pop Candy an EPpy award] for the Best Entertainment Blog in 2008. In 2006, [http://2006.weblogawards.org/ the Weblog Awards honored Pop Candy] as the Best Culture Blog.

Pop Candy has been cited in "Wired", "Slate", "The Rough Guide to Blogging" and on virtually every entertainment blog, including Stereogum, "Entertainment Weekly"'s PopWatch and RollingStone.com.

Daily posts, weekly features and a stream of fresh content cover everything from mix tape nostalgia to mustache adoration. Matheson digs for the undiscovered, underrated and unexplored, and invites readers to share in the conversation, and connect to the virtual community that thrives around Pop Candy.

Features

Pop Candy begins every morning with the "Early buzz," a roundup of entertainment news, and a daily feature called "Pop forum: Talk amongst yourselves." Each day the Pop Forum highlights a Pop Candy reader and their favorite things - a spotlight which spurs thousands of comments and discussion by Pop Candy community members. Pop Candy fills the rest of your work day with a hip perspective on an eclectic range of current events - keeping readers one step ahead of their peers with exclusive previews of upcoming music, book and movie releases.

Every Tuesday, Matheson narrows down the best DVD releases of the week, so you can quickly rearrange your Netflix queue. "This week in Pop: My favorite things" is a standing Friday feature that highlights the best of what Matheson watched, read and listened to during the week, and asks readers to do the same in the comments.

Each week Matheson produces a Pop Candy podcast, which includes her conversations with celebrities like John Waters, Rainn Wilson and Aimee Mann, as well as new music gems Matheson finds while searching amid the noise. [http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=184131691 Subscribe to the Pop Candy podcast on iTunes] .

The Pop Candy blog thrives off reader participation, and two features, "The Candy mailbag" and the "Pop Candy hotline" specifically aim to foster more of that interaction. "The Candy mailbag" answers readers questions about anything from the production status of the rumored Arrested Development movie to inquiries into the existence of Chuck Taylor inspired coffee table books. The "Pop Candy hotline" accepts reader questions, in addition to providing a forum for readers to call and chat with the author behind the blog.

History

Pop Candy is the offspring of the weekly online column, Pop Candy, and daily blog, Hip Clicks, which Whitney Matheson created when she joined USA Today in 1999. As her web audience grew, Matheson merged Hip Clicks and Pop Candy in 2005 to form the Pop Candy blog as many know and enjoy it today.

External links

* [http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/ Pop Candy]
* [http://twitter.com/popcandy Follow Pop Candy tweets on Twitter] .
* [http://groups.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=groups.groupProfile&groupid=106180290&redirect=1&Mytoken=0F405B85-6DD8-4D16-81E23570971484A480822773 Connect with other Pop Candy Whitnesses on MySpace] .
* [http://asp.usatoday.com/marketing/rss/rsstrans.aspx?feedId=life8 Subscribe to Pop Candy's RSS feed] .
*Pop Candy [http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=4997209894&ref=s delivers the latest headlines directly to your Facebook profile] .
*You can also have Pop Candy [http://blogs.usatoday.com/popcandy/2008/06/another-way-to.html feed headlines to your instant messenger] .
* [http://www.usatoday.com/community/widgets/popcandy.htm Add the Pop Candy widget] to your MySpace, Pageflakes, iGoogle, Blogger, etc.
*Visit Whitney on [http://www.myspace.com/whitneymatheson MySpace] , [http://www.facebook.com/people/Whitney_Matheson/507349873 Facebook] , [http://www.jango.com/users/16704916?l=0 Jango] and [http://www.finetune.com/ Finetune] .
*Add yourself to the Pop Candy map at [http://www.frappr.com/popcandy Frappr] .