Volume 5, Issue 80: How We Are Hungry

"Sometimes I only want this feeling to stay and last."

The book is out. People tend to like it, I think. I hope you have bought your copy. If you have not, there is no time like the present: Buy now. If you have already bought the book, you are encouraged to leave it a review on Goodreads or Amazon, or both. It helps.

This week: You can find me in Los Angeles, California, at Book Soup, Wednesday, July 16, 7 p.m. PT. Find full details here.

It’s free, come on out, we’ll have a blast.

This week, my colleague Charlotte Klein at New York wrote a long piece titled “Inside the Media’s Traffic Apocalypse.” The premise of the story was that in a world where Google—the main driver of most Internet traffic—was no longer prioritizing exterior links, when its primary search results were AI-written and internal (while of course still swiping the information from the primary sources), and where most social media either has throttled news links and is now driven entirely by video, Web publishers were finding their numbers plummeting, with no real solution in sight. Quoth Kline:

“It all amounts to a kind of traffic apocalypse in which it seems all spigots for traffic are being turned off, affecting news organizations big and small, new and old. It hurts outlets heavily reliant on digital advertising but also those that draw revenue from product recommendations and subscriptions. The whole premise of internet publishing — that you could reach audiences far and wide — is starting to crumble.

I find it telling that the first anecdote in the story comes from the site Bustle, whose CEO Bryan Goldberg, is someone who has had a lot of very stupid opinions about Web publishing for a very long time. Bustle, because a “handful” of their stories had traffic spikes, hired a whole team of people to try to duplicate the “success” of those stories by “cranking” out similar content. This was their only real strategy, and it was hardly just them. “When a one-off article performed well, we’d zero in on that conceit and write ten more articles on it,” one former staffer at Business Insider told Klein. “And despite that, nothing was hitting.” (Eventually Bustle dissolved its team.)

If this is what Web publishing has become, if your only response to a well-read story is to write 10 more exactly like it, perhaps it is, in fact, time for it to die.

*****************

It is difficult to describe, to a younger person or, really, anyone who wasn’t there, what the emergence of the Internet—this thing that had not been there your entire life, that you had no idea existed, that was suddenly just everywhere—meant to someone who wanted to write. When I graduated college in 1997, the expectation for me, and most wanna-be writers, was that we had two options: Start on the bottom rung of a print publication and toil away for years, hoping that enough people with jobs above you would retire or die in time for you to get a real byline by the time you were 40, or write a brilliant novel or memoir that turned you into Dave Eggers or Elizabeth Wurtzel. That was pretty much it! Then, suddenly, from the sky, there was this place where you could:

• Write whatever you wanted.

• Write as long as you wanted.

• Have your work available to read by anyone, anywhere on the entire freaking planet.

This was—and still is—magical. Roger Ebert once wrote that it was at the Daily Illini where he learned his three favorite words of the English language: “By Roger Ebert.” That sounds egotistical, but what it means is that he fell in love with the act of creation, with the simple act of putting something into the world that didn’t exist before, putting your name next to it and saying, “here it is, world.” This remains my primary addiction—really, the driving force of my life—still today: The physical act of putting something out into the world that wasn’t there an hour ago. Of making something. I do not know what my lasting impression on this world will be, how I will thought of when I am gone, how the world will or will not be different because of my presence. But I know that, every day, something that wasn’t there before is there now because I made it and put it there. Whether it’s a column for New York or The Washington Post, whether it’s a book I wrote, whether it’s the newsletter I’m typing for you right now, it exists in the world. It wasn’t there. And now it is.

That was, and remains, the central allure of Web publishing. When I learned the Internet existed, I was excited to get to write stuff for it, not just because what I wrote could be beamed around the planet (and even to space!) in a matter of seconds, but because there was an infinite amount of canvas on which to paint. The Internet became not just a place to publish, but a place to improve. I could write something, and if it didn’t work, that was OK, because I could just write something else. It was a place to get reps. It was a place to get better.

You weren’t replacing anyone, you weren’t taking anyone’s spot, you weren’t carving out a corner in the newspaper or magazine and then hoarding it for decades because there was now … space for everyone! To write on the Internet was to be able to make something for yourself that the rest of the world could enjoy if it wanted to, or ignore if it wanted to do that too. And—and this was the best part—it was free! It made the entire publishing world—a place that had been closed off and resolutely guarded by people who didn’t want to give an inch to anyone else for decades—open to whoever wanted to be a part. Was there a business plan? Of course there wasn’t a business plan. Who gave a shit about a business plan? You could write whatever you wanted. To have your mind go immediately to how you were going to monetize it was to despoil it. It was like discovering an entire new continent—this was land!

And this was how I treated it, and always have, from Ironminds (the first site I ever wrote for) to The Black Table to Deadspin to New York to this newsletter, as a place to make things, plant them and see if they grew. I did not treat it as something to sell, or as something to trick people into clicking on through spicy headlines or provocative hot-take insta-reacts. I treated it as something special. Because it is. To have the opportunity to make something, to put your name next to it, to present it to the world, to say “I made this and I hope you like it but more important is that I made it and I stand behind it,” is to be sainted and blessed and glorious: It is the most wonderful feeling in the world. To despoil this by turning it into a game where you try to make artificial numbers artificially go up, to manipulate a search engine to look at your stuff rather than someone else’s stuff, to, for crissakes, see one thing succeed and respond to it by writing the exact same thing 10 freaking times, is to debase yourself and your place in this world. We have been granted an infinite canvas! And you are treating it like this?

I understand that there are business realities: We live in the real planet, in America, in a place where there is an implicit understanding that you must be constantly and ravenously growing or you are somehow not living at all. I write a whole bunch of things, and I am paid for them, and that requires a complex series of weights and pulleys that must move water from one well to another. But that complex series of weights and pulleys are not the industry itself; the work is the industry. The work is what it’s about, not the selling of the work. It has been remarkable to watch how allowing “business people”—most of whom have no actual understanding of how publishing works but at some point got a reputation for being good on Zoom calls and therefore are now somehow “executives”—into the room in the first place (there was a reason newsroom people and advertising people used to work on different floors) led to them elbowing their way to the front of the table to make the primary decisions, which led to the tail wagging the dog: The numbers went from being a helpful data point to the engine driving the whole machine. And if you only look at the numbers, all that will matter to you is trying to make them go up. Which makes you the bad guy.

That the industry gave so much power and influence to Google, or search engine optimization, or Headlines That Click, in the first place, that’s the problem, not that the spigot that was those supposed avenues for profit has now been shut off. That the first reaction to this miracle of Web publishing was “Let’s Make It An Industry And Get Rich!” is the original sin, why doofuses like Bryan Goldberg were able to get such a foothold in this world despite not knowing or caring about what the magic of such free and open publishing ever meant from the get-go. (Never trust someone who discovers a miracle and responds with “how do I package and sell this?”) I might argue that one of the reasons I am able to keep writing and making a living doing this—for now, I guess!—is that I chose to ignore that world, that I left Deadspin before it got professionalized, that I never looked at the traffic numbers (and still don’t), that I still think of the Internet as this incredible place where you can make stuff and meet people and connect to the outside world in a way that was impossible for most of human history. Because, even with all the ugliness and madness it has wrought, it still kind of is.

There are many reasons to worry about Web publishing, and the ability to make a living doing it: It is possible, surely likely, that the period in which so many could, when Gawker Media had hundreds of staffers, when Buzzfeed could hire Michael Hastings, when Found magazine could launch its publication with a huge cruise ship full of drunk twentysomethings floating a big lap around Manhattan, when Vice was whatever the hell Vice was, will be seen as an odd, short blip in which everyone’s eyes got cartoonishly bigger than their stomachs. But that does not mean that Web publishing—that writing on the Internet, the pure pleasure of putting something out in the world and having it be yours, of discovering other people who are doing the same thing—itself is somehow dead, or any less magical than it was in the first place. Because it is magical. It still is. It always was.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. DC Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Superman.

2. Scarlett Johansson Movies, Ranked, Vulture. Updated with Jurassic World Rebirth.

3. So, What’s Up With the Braves? MLB.com. A question a lot of my friends are currently asking!

4. Who Will Win the Home Run Derby? MLB.com. Berman doesn’t do these anymore.

5. MLB Power Rankings, MLB.com. Making donuts, every Sunday.

6. Ten Worthy Candidates to Make Their First All-Star Game, MLB.com. This one was dated really fast.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Jurassic World Rebirth” and then each gave our six favorite movies from the first half of the year.

Morning Lineup, I did Thursday’s show.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I try to make some sense of all this.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Here's the math and data that prove why the NCAA Tournament doesn't need to expand,” Matt Norlander, CBS Sports. The NCAA Tournament did not expand this week, but it still very much might. Matt Norlander makes the definitive case why it’s stupid and shouldn’t happen.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Catch These Fists,” Wet Leg. They’re back with their second album, they’re still super fun.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Seriously, Los Angelenos: Come out to Book Soup this Wednesday, we’ll have a blast. And have a great weekend, all.

Best,
Will