Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
brucester001 wrote:
Who's subscribing??
After a few weeks of "wtf am I going to do now?" I've decided I'm not all that keen on working for yet another outlet, and the opportunities are few and far between, anyway. So, like many of my more talented and successful peers, I'll be launching a newsletter in the coming days.
No idea what it'll be called, but I hope you'll consider subscribing!
"I'm launching a newsletter! I mean I don't have a launch date to give you, I don't know what it's going to be called, and I'm not too sure what it's going to be covering, so good luck to you or anyone else in finding it. See you soon!"
I'm glad Julie absorbed the important lessons from that time her employer folded and terminated everyone because they couldn't generate revenue from people finding and sharing their content after she proudly posted about not writing her articles with SEO in mind and choosing not to focus on hot topics of the day and disliking her bosses telling her to write attention grabbing headlines.
Semi-off topic here, but the revisionist history around Gawker and Deadspin being this exquisite walled garden of "writing what
they wanted to write" and not bowing to the whims of SEO is a load of horseshit. Two things:
1) Gawker had a guy named Neetzan Zimmerman for a long time whose entire stock-in-trade was mindless clickbait. He would scour the internet for what was trending and write about it, and he routinely got the most traffic on the whole network. I can't find any of it now because of the Gawker.com IP getting passed around between people who foolishly think they can still make money off it, but I think it was a lot of funny cat videos. In this way, Zimmerman was kind of an intellectual loss leader for the network, drawing people into the site with useless crap so that Barry Petchesky could write "Why LeBron James Could Be A Fighter Pilot" or whatever. But that traffic was important for everyone, not just him, because
2) THEY PAID BY THE PAGEVIEW. Did we all forget this? Did we all just block out that Nick Denton was an SEO-obsessed psychopath who had giant monitors around the office displaying every writer's traffic? and when a writer's traffic got too low, they'd be like "hey, I'm having trouble sending emails" and Denton would be like "oh, that's because you got fired, I guess you missed the email, well, bye"? It was an absolute boiler room of clickbait and yet the media class talks about the place as the platonic ideal of journalism, why, because they broke the Manti Teo catfish story and gave Ray Ratto a job when the SF Chronicle laid him off? Deadspin did some occasional good longform sportswriting. So does pretty much everybody else. Most of what they did was ephemeral, superficial, trend-chasing garbage, not journalistic brilliance unencumbered by populist demand.
And that goes for Julie's Zombie Deadspin, too. How, pray tell, can you be the hall monitor of the internet, this giant raw throbbing nerve of indignation and moral clarity, if you are not constantly refreshing Twitter and reacting to everything happening there?
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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