I find myself really interested in this story, and the idea that Gawker.com is using its traditionally-low traffic periods (Weekends) to publish off-topic longform writing that it values in general. Especially because the longer essays seem to be finding an audience, and are helping redefine what Gawker “is” as a site. That AJ Daulerio, the site’s editor, describes the decision to run the essays in non-peak viewing times by saying “Good is good, regardless as to whether it’s supposed to fit in with what the site is supposed to be or not,” feels particularly heartening; he’s really turning into someone worth paying attention to, with the various decisions he’s made since taking over the site at the start of the year. If Gawker can push quality and hits at the same time, then maybe enough people will take notice and realize that the choice doesn’t have to be made between the two. Consider this entirely relevant to my interests.
Ask Me Things And I Might Answer, Maybe
I started doing Fanboy Rampage!!! – which was kind of comics journalism, maybe, I guess? – because I was bored and had access to the internet at my day job, and that was a real time/place kind of thing; it found an audience, and when I quit doing that, Matt Brady approached me about writing for the then-in-the-process-of-beginning Newsarama blog. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I remember that it was Fanboy Rampage!!! that also caught the eye of Annalee Newitz, who was local to me at the time and we met up at some book reading she was doing after saying hello on the internets, and that got me an invite to io9 when that was being prepared. I feel like I kind of fell into it, if that makes sense? I wanted to write and be a journalist, but that all really started happening after I had done something that I didn’t think of as journalism at the time for a couple of years. Maybe there was something in my voice that people liked, or perhaps it was just that I’d proven that I could consistently put out content on a daily basis for a sustained amount of time. Who knows?
(If I hadn’t started Fanboy Rampage!!! when I did, I don’t think anything would’ve happened the way it did, had it happened at all. I think I really gained from the fact that it was the early days of the comics internet, as we now call it, and there just weren’t that many people out there doing what I did. There was me, Kevin Melrose, John Jakala, Alan David Doane… I’m sure there were others, but my memory is failing me. I remember it being more about message boards than blogs at the time.)
Because I have free time, I got myself a Formspring. That’s me above, answering a question from David Goblitz about how I got started in journalism, but you can ask me your own questions over here, dear reader. Part of me hopes that I’ll get asked questions by Tom Brevoort, considering how often I raid his Formspring for material for Newsarama.
Be warned: I will likely raid questions/answers for material for this blog.
“Even the Music has got a Serious Hygiene Problem”
Tonight, the city wears dirty slut perfume and matching outfit. The rain has stopped, leaving the streets with wet greasy hair, strands of pulp blocking the drainage. All the flyers of every party of all time have gathered at the plughole of life. I’m standing on the balcony of Dubtek’s nightclub, holding my hand over my mouth. High above me, projected from the roof, lasers paint a dark cloud with colour, chameleon to the beat. I’ve come out for some air, but even the music has got a serious hygiene problem and there’s no escaping it. It’s my first ever gig in Manchester, and the place is one giant filthy arse-wipe loudspeaker, zero panache. There’s no sign of my challenger. When I walk to the edge, look down, I can see waves of people streaming out of the club, lit by stuttering lights. A purified canal runs back of the club. Some tables, chairs, a couple of sun umbrellas, all wet and soggy but no matter; it’s the small gaps between the rain that count, and learning how to live amongst them. Clouds of cheap shop-bought hormones lift from the young bodies.
From here, an excerpt of “Homo Karaoke” from Pixel Juice by Jeff Noon.
Noon was one of those writers whom I was madly in love with, back in the late ’90s, when I was also mainlining Philip K. Dick, The Invisibles and Bill Drummond like there was no tomorrow. Weirdly – perhaps because he kind of dropped off the face of the world? – I ended up entirely forgetting about him until he recently re-appeared on Twitter to promote the re-releases of his earlier work and his first new novel in over a decade. When remembering him, I had one of those How could I have forgotten? moments; Noon’s use of language and literal metaphor – for want of a better way of putting it; lines like “clouds of cheap shop-bought hormones” to describe perfume, and the like – were amazingly influential to me, shaping the way I wrote back then. Noon was amazingly important to me as a writer, although you can’t see it now. I’m glad he’s back, and I’m embarrassed that I forgot about him for so long.
(I should find some of that earlier writing for this site, sometime.)
Elsewhere On The Internet…
Sounds pretty deep, right? And also, to those who enjoyed the original Arnold Schwarzenegger movie back in 1990, somewhat unlike the source material (Well, a source material; the original Total Recall was loosely based on a Philip K. Dick short story, which I’ll get to in a minute). Yes, Arnold discovered that his memories had been tampered with, and yes, that theoretically left him in a situation where he was as much a mystery to himself as he was to the audience… but only up to a point. After all, this was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie; you could pretty much predict what he would end up doing before the movie had even started with a degree of certainty (Spoiler: It likely involved some level of violence and no small amount of puns and quips, the latter of which, sadly, will be missing from the new version. Colin Farrell has already told reporters “I don’t have one-liners” in the 2012 movie). The original Total Recall didn’t ask “Who is this man?” as much as yell “We don’t know who this man is necessarily, but boy, can he kick ass – in space!”
More cut-from-the-final-draft (although, in this case, it was reworked and reappeared) from my Time work; this comes from today’s piece, which didn’t really come together the way I wanted it to, sadly. Ah, well.
The Gravity of His Position
The news that Jonah Lehrer is resigning from the New Yorker having been revealed to have made up “quotes” from (and about) Bob Dylan in his most recent book Imagine: How Creativity Works (Oh, irony of ironies, that title) is as depressing as it is surprising. This statement from Lehrer on the matter, just depressing:
The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan [Matt Moynihan, the journalist who uncovered that the quotes were fake]. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.
The thing I just don’t understand about this is… there was no way this was never going to be discovered. Even if we didn’t live in a world where the Internet has made it amazingly easy to fact-check things, Lehrer was writing about a musician who fans are obsessive about, so the discovery of “new” quotes was always going to be of interest – and looked into – for/by them. It’s one of those “I don’t understand why he’s done it” things, because he had to have known that he was going to be found out. It’s as if there’s some epic self-sabotage going on here.
I had – back when it seemed as if Lehrer was simply stealing from himself and recycling without telling anyone – a lot of sympathy for him, knowing just what it’s like to have to continually come up with new thoughts over and over again. But this… this is just sad. He’s killed his career with this. People will never take him seriously again.
The Headline Wasn’t Mine
In which my Time piece from this week has a Sally Field moment. Really, I’m just doing these now because history has taught me that one day I will no longer be writing these and I’ll want to remember that people liked them once*; next week’s piece – Thankfully, not about Batman because I am done with that guy for awhile – promises to be esoteric enough to not even make it into the top 20, never mind the top 10, don’t worry.
(* That’s not actually a joke; I remember writing some things for io9 that were popular and I liked, and now I wouldn’t even vaguely be able to tell you what they were. I just remember that period as one where I wasn’t popular enough, depressingly.)
Can You Crowdfund Journalism?
Under increasing financial pressure from the Web and the decline of print advertising, newspapers and other traditional media outlets have been laying off staff and trying to fill the gap with services such as Journatic—the hyper-local aggregator that uses offshore workers— or simply doing without such things as copy editing. Are there further solutions to that reporting gap? Crowdsourcing journalism through sites like Reddit could be one, but crowdfunding could be another: One journalist in Michigan has raised funding through a Kickstarter campaign so he can travel around the U.S. interviewing people about the upcoming election. Could crowdfunding allow other journalists to do investigative or in-depth projects as well?
From here.
I have, no joke, been thinking about this on and off pretty much since I first discovered Kickstarter, as much from a selfish point-of-view as the high-minded theoretical sense. I have done internal math in my head about how much it would take for me to be an independent comics journalist for a year, writing for myself and my own site – whatever that site might be – and whether or not I thought I could raise enough money to do it, leaving the writing gigs for Newsarama, Comics Alliance and Robot 6 (and SpinoffOnline, which isn’t a comic site but does take enough of my time each month that I’d need to drop it if I was to do this properly) without just crippling myself financially in the process. For me, I don’t think the money’s there; I’m not enough of a name, without enough of a readerbase with the kind of disposable income to fund what I’d really need for that period of time, especially because they get enough of me for free online as is (Whether or not my online ubiquity has damaged my “brand” is something else I think about, a lot; that’s something for another day, though). But in the wider, theoretical sense…? I think crowdfunding is definitely a future for journalism, if not the future.
We’re moving away from crowdfunding being some kind of novelty and spectacle to just a fact of the modern Internet, and as soon as that happens, then we’re likely to see crowdfunding for all manner of projects, both creative and otherwise. Whatever you can manage to sell to the Internet at large, in fact.
Cutting Room Floor, Etc.
Who is John Blake?
Well, as anyone who’s seen The Dark Knight Rises already knows, he’s the true moral center of Gotham City with more impassioned belief in justice than either Commissioner Gordon and Bruce Wayne seemingly put together, and more detective skills than either, as well. More to the point, as anyone who’s seen The Dark Knight Rises already knows, his name isn’t even John; it’s Robin. You know, as in Batman And…? There’s a reason – beyond the need for a last minute twist, the “ahhhhh” that comes from recognition and realizing that you’ve been outsmarted all along (even if the last minute twist seems to come from nowhere) – that The Dark Knight Rises saves the true identity of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character until the very end of the movie, after all. It’s not just that identifying his character as Robin from the get-go would’ve left you spending the entire movie waiting for him to put on his own mask and tights at some point, wading into the action to kick-ass and save Batman’s butt in some surprise denouement, either (That role, instead, is filled with Catwoman, with a quip about gunplay that feels curiously off-color, considering recent events). No, the reason that Christopher Nolan and cohorts needed to keep the identity of the latest Robin a secret is this: It apparently sucks to be Robin.
That’s the opening to an entirely different version from this week’s essay for Time’s Entertainment section than the one you’ll see. It was another of those weeks where I wrote the thing, thinking that it was one thing, only to discover many hours later – Seriously, the first version took me most of Monday – that I was entirely wrong and I needed to start from scratch and angle it an entirely different way altogether.
Part of that comes from the fact that this was one of those times when Stephanie Abrahams, my fine fine editor, pitched me the story instead of the other way around, and I didn’t necessarily have a good enough handle on it when I started writing the first time. Another part comes from the fact that I started it within an hour or so after leaving The Dark Knight Rises at the theater, and that is actually a stupidly short amount of time to try and process what I’d just watched – I have to say, I think I liked TDKR as much as I disliked The Dark Knight, which is saying something – but, really? Most of it comes from the fact that, I thought this story was Thing A, only to discover in the process of writing the final paragraph, that it was actually Thing B all along. Literally, even as I was writing the end of the first version, I was thinking “Oh shit, oh shit, this is what I should’ve said instead!” I got up from the desk after finishing, trying to work out if I really wanted to junk 1500+ words worth of effort, and immediately started outlining the version of the piece you can actually read on Time Entertainment by hand, knowing that I was going to end up doing it.
(I wrote the outline by hand, then went to the gym to give myself some space to consider whether it was worth throwing away everything I’d done and starting over, knowing that it’d mean I’d be writing until midnight most likely, and then having to start again the next morning at something like 6am in order to meet the deadline. Depressingly, I just ended up more convinced that it was exactly the right thing to do; in my favor, it turned out that I only needed to start work at 7am on Tuesday to make it happen.)
There’s something to be said, for me and my process at least, in knowing when you’re defeated and need to start again. I find a value in writing things that end up entirely discarded, even if they’re just roadmaps about where not to go the next time around – although, I admit, I’d rather find pieces of writing I can lift wholescale and put into something else later. Mind you, if I could know when to cut and run earlier, I wouldn’t have any real problem with that.
“I’ve Come To Think That Overinterpretation of Data is The Curse of The Modern World”
My belief in data has been shaken. In fact, I’ve come to think that overinterpretation of data is the curse of the modern world. In the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the value-at-risk models were internally consistent but lacked all sense of history. They could not account for a black swan — or a Mule.
And anybody running a web publication or a web marketing campaign is equally blinded by data. A publisher maximize pageviews only to realize that they’ve locked themselves into a passionate group of readers that will defect at the slightest provocation. Advertising agencies attempt to bring down the average CPM — and in so doing turn web sites into an obstacle course of ineffective banners. Or they track performance (yes, even now) and reward sites with the least attractive audience.
That’s Gawker boss Nick Denton, from here.
It makes me wonder what, exactly, the new metric for blog success is going to become, if pageviews and chasing advertisers is suddenly being disregarded like that. When I was at Gawker, that was very definitely the way that success was measured, and the idea that the company has changed that makes me interested and just a little apprehensive. After all, as much as everyone who isn’t Gawker would love to pretend otherwise, the company still tends to set the latest trend in blog business logic, for better or worse. If success is suddenly going to be measured in terms of – God forbid! – quality of writing, that’d be the kind of thing that changes the game more than a little bit. But, of course, what are the odds of that happening…?
Lying Liars, Journalists, Manipulation, etc.
When the news is decided not by what is important but by what readers are clicking; when the cycle is so fast that the news cannot be anything else but consistently and regularly incomplete; when dubious scandals scuttle election bids or knock billions from the market caps of publicly traded companies; when the news frequently covers itself in stories about ‘how the story unfolded’—media manipulation is the status quo. It becomes, as Daniel Boorstin, author The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, once put it, a “thicket …which stands between us and the facts of life.
Today the media—driven by blogs—is assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of their business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you’re the Huffington Post or CNN or some tiny blog. They warp everything you read online—and let me tell you, thumbnail-cheating YouTube videos and paid-edit Wikipedia articles are only the beginning.
That’s Ryan Holiday, self-styled “media manipulator,” writing about the reason it’s so easy to detourn the media these days, in Forbes. He’s so skilled at it, he says, he’s even written a book about his experiences, called Trust Me, I’m A Liar – as well as being the subject, two days later, of a profile… in Forbes:
Holiday does it for the attention, the opportunity to point out some of the excesses of the modern blogosphere, and the LOLs. Empires will not fall because he claimed someone once sneezed on him. Still, it gives one reason to stop and think about what the quest for traffic and eyeballs does to news. Depending on how you look at it, stunts like this either erode the trust a reader has in a publication, or point out that it may have been misplaced to begin with. It’s not a big leap to imagine somebody using those same tools for more nefarious purposes.
“A well made article and a poorly made article both do clicks the same way,” says Holiday. “There’s no incentive to do good work. We know that quotas make cops do shitty things, or academic admissions offices do shitty things, and they make bloggers do shitty things too.”
His theory is that, with so much output expected of journalists and writers these days, sources can easily lie and get away with it because the time to fact check is at a minimum, and the need to be “first” is king. There’s definitely something to these criticisms – Look at the Healthcare reporting or, on a far smaller scale, Kate Kotler’s misreporting of a San Diego Comic-Con press conference and then vehement defense of said before reality and an editor forced an awkward apology for proof (The Kotler thing has been in my brain for a few days now; there’s something to be written about it, but I’m not sure what just yet) – but I can’t escape the fact that what is actually happening here is that someone is saying “These people are under pressure so I am breaking trust just to prove that I can, aren’t I a hero?” And the answer, for me, is “No, you’re a dick.”
This whole subject is a hot topic right now, thanks to Greenpeace’s ArcticReady campaign, in which they have created social media accounts and websites pretending to be Shell oil, and gone about pretending to be inept, mean and generally pathetic. As a prank, it’s working; lots and lots of people are sharing links about how terrible Shell is, and ha ha they don’t get how Twitter works. But, thing is, none of those people know they’re being lied to. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but my reaction to this isn’t “Yay, you’re proving a point!” but “You are lying to people for your own amusement, and that’s not actually okay.” Martin Robins at the New Statesman put it best for me:
The real villain here is Greenpeace. This is an NGO that thinks it is acceptable to lie to the public, to lie to bloggers and journalists, and to then intimidate writers with threatening emails warning of legal action. This absolutely is not okay. I don’t care if you’re saving the Arctic, rescuing kittens from YouTube’s vicious pet-celebrity training camps, or training pandas to pull famine-ridden children out of earthquake debris; to behave in this deceitful way demonstrates an astonishing amount of contempt for the public – not least for environmentalist supporters who spread their message in good faith only to find themselves forced into embarrassing retractions.
And for what? It’s not like there’s any shortage of real scandals to draw attention to. As I write this, Reuters have just reported that Shell could face a US$5 billion fine for a major oil spill off the Nigerian coast that affected 950 square kilometres of water and caused serious harm to local communities. An analysis published last year by the United Nation’s Environment Programme estimated that it could take thirty years to clean up damage to the Ogonil and region in the Niger Delta, pollution caused in part by Shell’s activities in the area. With real scandals like this to cover, inventing fake ones isn’t just unnecessary but actually quite crass.
The defense of “The media are lazy” doesn’t actually hold water here; the media are covering that the Arctic Ready campaign is a lie – I wrote about it for Digital Trends on Monday – but “the media” is outpaced by social media, and the fact that people want to believe the Arctic Ready campaign… which, for me, brings it back to the fact that those whole think they’re lying to expose something are really just exposing the bad sides of themselves and those who listen to them.