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Random, (Mostly) Unfiltered Thoughts on Hits, Quality and Online Writing

I’ve been thinking recently about online entertainment journalism, and pageviews, and the responsibilities and realities and everything involved. To explain what started this train of thought it something that’d get me more hassle than it’s worth – Suffice to say, it was the discovery that a site I used to work for wasn’t covering a particularly important news story because it was presumed it wouldn’t get hits – but, thinking about the subject over and over again, I find myself depressingly out of step with the way that the Internet works, it feels like.

I mean, I get that it’s all about the hits. I worked for Gawker Media for two years, and that really gets drummed into you there, or at least it did for me: The eyeballs are what matter, the clicks and the important clicks, not just any clicks. It’s a number that constantly gets whittled down: At first, it was hits, then it was “unique visitors,” then it was “new unique visitors” (Eventually, it’ll be “People who’ve never even been online before, but bought a laptop just to read your piece,” and then people will get fired for not inspiring at least one MacBook purchase every week). That’s not just the case at Gawker sites, though; elsewhere, I’ve had series killed because the hits weren’t good enough, pitches approved based solely on how much traffic they would likely bring even if they were weaker ideas than other ones vying for attention, the whole thing. The internet exists to get your attention, after all.

And yet, that all seems curiously, unhealthily, short-term thinking to me. “Content is King” was the mantra of the Internet for awhile, the idea of “If you build it, they will come” made into something resembling a business plan. It was… optimistic, naive, maybe? There was a sense of good work will find an audience because it’s the Internet – which, come to think of it, feels like part of the thinking behind Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing ideas nowadays. Hmm – that was ultimately replaced by “Content is Content,” which translated into something along the lines of “Fuck it, we can get people to write for us for free and who cares whether or not it’s good as long as it drives traffic, right?” The quality of the work became secondary – if even that – to the fact that the work existed. Curation became more along the lines of “Will this get hits?” than “Is this any good?” because everyone had to earn their keep, and so sites became less about an editorial voice or vision, and more interchangeable as a result with everyone chasing after the same exclusives, the same images and videos and interviews and with the same formula to write it all up.

Surely, if you’re looking to make your site stand out, it makes more sense to decide to actually have its own voice and viewpoint? Have a sense of. Okay, this doesn’t get good traffic but it’s something we should be covering, so we’re going to take the hit on it? Comics Alliance feels like a good example of this; consider the way that the site followed Laura’s passions to the point where it became known for doing so, and for having smart, nuanced writing on gender and webcomics and other subjects that weren’t being covered by other comic sites. It’s a return to “If you build it, they will come,” definitely, but – and this is where I find myself out of step with the Internet – what’s so wrong with that? If you wait long enough, they will come.

Weirdly, surprisingly, Gawker may have the best solution to this issue (That’s Gawker.com, not all of Gawker Media); the idea of traffic-whoring to offset more important, more individual and quieter pieces felt like the closest to an elegant solution to the problem that we could get, short of someone having the guts to say “Screw it, let’s just do good work we believe in and hope for the best.” It feels like it’s a way for sites to fulfill hit/financial responsibilities to their owners, while also the responsibility to readers of something worth reading. I wonder how that experiment worked out…?

Ramble ramble ramble. I should come back to this when I know what it’s clearer in my head.

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366 Songs 183: Ode To The Big Sea

Normally, I am not a fan of jazz noodling and music that goes nowhere fast, but there’s something about the Cinematic Orchestra’s “Ode to The Big Sea” that wins me over, every single time. It’s the loneliness and searching of the central riff, which comes and goes throughout the song, I think. It’s something that’s classically “jazzy,” but when happening over that particular perpetually shuffling drumbeat, becomes something weirdly contemporized in my head. The original recorded version might explain what I mean, more, with the obviousness of the samples underscoring the “acid jazz”-ness of the whole thing, with the atonal riff feeling as if they’re as Sun-Ra inspired as anything else; it suddenly seems less trad fusion jazz, and more something that you could imagine coming from Mocean Worker.

It’s that tension between timeframes that fascinates me, I think.

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366 Songs 182: My Mind’s Eye

One of my favorite things about this song is that it was apparently released despite the Small Faces’ wishes; the version that everyone knows was a demo that management put out as a single because they wanted a follow-up to the band’s previous single sooner than the band could come up with. That might explain why it’s really only half a song, with the other half being what’s essentially a rip off of “Ding Dong Merrily On High” with “In my mind’s eye” replacing “Hosannah in excelsis” (This was the band’s 1966 Christmas single, amusingly enough; clearly, someone had a sense of humor) And yet… This is a great little psych pop song, even in unfinished two-minute form, as much because of the energy in the performance and the spectacular organ that the Faces had going on back then. It makes you wonder what other greatness we’ve missed from the band because it never went past the demo stage, doesn’t it?

Strange but true, I first heard the song as a (far inferior) cover from Britpop wannabes, Northern Uproar:

They totally butcher it with their sub-Oasis clodstepping, don’t they? So much so that, when I first heard the Small Faces version later that year, I didn’t even make the connection that they were in fact the same song. Just imagine how much musical greatness we have lost because Oasis were so popular back in the 1990s…

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366 Songs 181: Accelerator

I still love this song from Primal Scream’s “seminal” XTMNTR album from 2000, which does all the MC5 posturing that you’d want but doesn’t forget to try to be awesome in the process.

The guitar solo alone is worth the mental price of admission, but really: the whole thing is pretty spectacular, no matter where or when you slice it. It’s entirely retro, but feels contemporary even twelve years later, purely through force of will and some wonderfully intense performances (There’s something enjoyable about the fact there are actually harmony vocals on the “Come on! Come on!” parts, as if shouty agit-rock needed a Supremes influence in there). The production is suitably grimy – Can you imagine a version of this with a grunge-esque mix or without the feedback, which is a large part of the architecture of the song? – and, really, the only slip-up anywhere is the fade at the end. If ever a song needed to go until it just… broke down, then this is that song. “Into the future! Into the future!” indeed.

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San Diego Syndrome

Have you ever seen Hearts of Darkness, about the filming of Apocalypse Now? In it, one of the actors talks about the experience of filming, and how deeply life-altering it was for all of them. Obviously this is a very extreme and prolonged example of the kind of experience we’re talking about, but back when I saw it, it was the first time that I’d ever heard someone talk about this kind of emotional upheaval outside of a therapeutic context. It opened my eyes to what is possible when people come together and, for a short period of time, agree to live in a reality that is completely saturated with something outside of their daily lives.

– From here.

That comes from a piece about San Diego Comic-Con, which officially opens tonight. It doesn’t directly connect the making of Apocalypse Now with the mindset of SDCC in terms of “the horror… the horror,” but that’s a connection that I admit to tenuously making in the past. Every single SDCC I’ve covered as a journalist has had that kind of weird disassociation with reality at some point along the way – A sense of “I know this isn’t what life is really like, but it’s all I can remember now, and that’s not a good thing” – that, even when you know it’s happening, is astonishingly unsettling. It’s like comic convention as Stockholm Syndrome or something.

When people ask me whether or not I miss going to San Diego, that always comes to mind. I think I do… but is that really me thinking it…?

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War, Huh? What Is It Good For?

Not every staffer is so happy to dive in to the comments, not the least of whom is Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio, who described Gawker comments in April as “a tar pit of hell.” Any journalist writing for a highly trafficked website knows what a miserable time suck that can be. But that’s their job now. Gawker staffers are essentially professional commenters now — or maybe commenters are amateur bloggers. [Gawker boss, Nick] Denton does not even like the word “comments.” Supposedly he imposed a $5 penalty for any employee heard using the word. “These are posts,” Denton told the Observer in June.

(From here.)

That sound you’re hearing might be me screaming in frustration. I feel, sometimes, like my feelings towards comments mirrors comic creators’ feelings towards blogs in general, creating some kind of weird Internet hierarchy by accident, but I can’t help it; while the best comments sections can illuminate and expand the conversations and ideas coming from any particular online piece, all too often – by which I mean, “almost always” – they devolve astonishingly quickly into vitriol and ignorance, namecalling and side-taking. I genuinely wouldn’t lose that much sleep if I could remove the comments from almost every venue I write for*; seeing Denton allegedly fine people for not referring to them as posts is astonishingly depressing to me, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I feel it devalues the actual posts that the comments appear under, by suggesting that they’re the same thing, and secondly, it underscores how much of the Gawker business model is built upon essentially selling the unpaid writing from each site’s fan community, which gives me all kinds of depressed Huffington Post flashbacks.

(* Despite that, I find myself longing for comments on this blog, sometimes; it’s weird, it started as me writing in secret in public, if that makes any sense, but occasionally I find myself wanting to know who reads it.)

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366 Songs 180: Zoom!

This is a spectacularly overblown song that should, by all rights, collapse under its own weight – especially as the choir(s) come in at 3:58, and the whole thing starts sounding like a stoned take on a Bond theme from Bizarro World – but somehow the momentum keeps it going even as things start falling apart (I’d say around 5:11 is where it really starts shedding pieces, and feeling like a rocket that’s trying to achieve orbit). But what this song has always been about for me, is the electric piano. Seriously, by the time you reach 6:24 and there’s just the awesome jamming/collapsing piano solo, I’m gone, man. I love that so, so much. More songs should be ready to give you the full breakfast that this one does.

(Somewhat randomly, but worth pointing out: This is the lead track from Super Furry Animals’ Love Kraft album, and it definitely puts you in the mood to expect something epic. If you are listening to the album for the first time as a result of this song, I have a word of advice for you: Stop after this song. Everything else on the album is a terrible letdown after this.)

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366 Songs 179: Suckers

There’s something to be said for a good song that builds before your ears, adding instruments and depth as if unfolding before you. Super Furry Animals’ “Suckers” is a fine example of this, adding a particularly plaintive vocal from Gruff Rhys and the occasional aural joke as it grows into full bloom by its end (The showy guitar effect at 2:41 after the lyric about “power ballad songs”), but underneath it all, a simple little heartbroken song about the end of a love affair. “It’s over/And we’d just begun,” Rhys sings somewhere between tongue-in-cheek showmanship and sincerity, “Oh, we’d just begun.”

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On Owning It (Or Not, As The Case May Be)

I actually came across this in a different way recently — a startup, Hyperink, wanted to publish an eBook that was a collection of my previous posts. No brainer, until I realized that technically AOL now owns a majority of the things I’ve written online (after their purchase of TechCrunch in 2010). They were totally cool with me repurposing the content — kudos to them — but it’s interesting that I did have to ask. And it makes sense — they paid me to write those words.

I guess my point is that while I do actually value owning my own words, I’ve also spent the majority of my career not actually owning my own words.

– MG Siegler, from here. This is something I’ve been thinking about since my Feb-May rush of looking for work and wondering where my career was going. Almost everything I’ve written since… what, Fanboy Rampage!!! (which was a linkblog, and as such not original-content-heavy), has been the property of someone else. Certainly, the work I’m most proud of doesn’t belong to me in any legal sense. That’s depressing and worrying, but I can’t necessarily see a way past that right now; I can’t afford (financially) to take the time to write something that I do own, and I don’t have the clout to build in a rights-reversal clause into contracts with outlets that I’m working for these days. But it’s something I think about, often. Here’s Gina Trapani, from the same conversation thread:

Similar to what MG said about TechCrunch, it’s been difficult for me watching 4 years of my daily work on Lifehacker suffer from linkrot and broken images over the years. Gawker owns that content and I got paid for it, but it’s something I think about when I’m *not* getting paid to produce content.

Sometimes, I get depressed when I think about some of the things I created for io9. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot – a lot – of content I wrote for that site that was so of-the-moment or of-the-quality that I wouldn’t be too upset if it disappeared in the memory hole and was never seen again (It helps/hurts that, the more I look back on that time, the more I feel like it was bad for my development as a writer, but that’s another complaint for another day), but there were also plenty of stories/posts/essays/justplainideas that I wish that I had some ownership over. At the time, I didn’t think too much about it because (a) I had to come up with new ideas on a regular basis to hit deadlines and quotas, and (b) I had a sense of equity in the site, stupidly, because I’d been there since Day One (Since before Day One, even; I was part of the team writing for the beta version of the site before it had a name or went live), but now…? Yeah. There’s a bunch of things I wrote for io9 that I feel sad about not being able to use/recycle elsewhere.