Whatâs your favorite story youâve ever written, and why?
I worked at Jezebel in two different stints, and the first time, in 2018, almost all of us were women. Deadspin had a majority-male staff with a few women on staff, and I guess in order to dispel this idea that these two websites were filled with people who have nothing in commonâyou know, âmenâs site,â âwomenâs site,â whatever, weâre doing all the same stupid and smart shitâ there would be this crossover week where we would work together on stuff. For mine, I donât know why they allowed this, but I pitched something where I basically just was like, âIâm going throw a football to every man on the Deadspin staff, and if they catch it, theyâre my dad now.â
To me, that is just emblematic of the last period in digital media when you could do dumb shit and people would like it or read it or engage with it or hate it, but with theâ¦gigification, I guess you could call it, of media, where increasingly, everyoneâs either a freelancer or is going to be a freelancer again shortly following a layoff, or their website shutting down, or whatever, I donât think you can really pitch stuff like that. You can have something that fits a more conventional form, like a funny essay or a personal essay or a critical essay or a review or an interview or a profile, but it has to be digestible and legible to an editor. I miss that period 10 years ago, when we got to do so much stupid shit.
Weâve both done a lot of aggregated blogging. How do you think that experience has changed your relationship to news consumption?
Thatâs interesting. I think, at least for the period when social media actually functioned as news dissemination rather than the purposeful scrambling of information and spreading of misinformation, which is more the status quo right now, I definitely started to get a lot more of my information straight from social mediaâat least when it came to celebrity news and entertainment news. I was like, as someone who makes the blogs that are being promoted through these tweets, I know that basically all the essential information is here, and I donât need to read 10 different websites saying the same thing in the same aggregated blog voice when weâre all ultimately sourcing from AP News and then putting our own individual, âvoiceyâ spins on it that all start to sound like weâre singing in unison or something. It definitely made me yearn for whoeverâs making decisions at every publication to make different choices for their online presence. Iâm sure a lot of these decisions have to do with, like, What is the metric that the sales team is selling to advertisers? But I yearn for a time that is probably, like most forms of nostalgia, more made-up, where every single publication isnât just competing to ultimately produce the same thing. Itâs a very 21st-century problem: Youâre flooded with more and more options than ever, but these options are actually making what we can experience more uniform.