So. On Monday, Massive Twitterlebrity Ashton Kutcher issued a challenge to CNN: a race to one million followers. “I just thought that was just kind of an amazing comment on the state of our media,” Kutcher said in a video message, referring to the fact that a kid from Iowa could be up there with the likes of CNN in contention for the million-follower honors. “And I said that, if I beat CNN to one million viewers, then I would ding-dong ditch Ted Turner — because I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
Well, happen it has. “Last night, just after midnight mountain time,” Poynter’s Amy Gahran reports, “actor Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter user to accumulate more than 1 million followers.” @CNNbrk–the network’s breaking-news Twitter account–had “just over 998,000 followers.”
Yikes. Larry King is gonna be…not pleased. In a video response to @aplusk earlier this week, The Suspendered One scoffed,
Are you kidding? Do you think you can take on an entire network? Do you know how big we are? Do you know what CNN is? Kutcher, you’re playing out of your field. You’re in another time zone. This ain’t gonna work. CNN will bury you!
Sorry, Larry, looks like you and your net have been–how do the kids say it?–Punk’d.
Update: Here’s unnecessarily long video of Kutcher (along with Demi Moore, and a whole entourage) learning of his victory. It includes Kutcher toasting Ted Turner (“you are a pioneer in media”)–before promising, again, to “ding-dong ditch him”–and giving a speech about the Future of Media: “The old guard is past, and the new guard is here,” Kutcher says. “We have shown the world that the new wave is here, it is present, and it is ready to explode. You guys are all of it, because I can’t follow me.”
And then they all dance to “Celebration.”
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.