Good week at work:
- Getting to know more coworkers, and the others are getting cooler the more I know them.
- The boss came through big today with the praise and the financial incentives. Not gonna lie, that was awesome. Looks like I may need to move to NYC sooner than expected. (Kevin follows me here, shouts out if you see this.)
- An old story of ours landed on Reddit and got outrageous traffic, which is fun to watch, and seems to put management in a good mood.
- Got the logins to our Chartbeat and Google Analytics, which are addictive. Now using them to plot new strategies in SEO-baiting, other dark arts.
- Work actually offered to fly me out to NYC and put me up for a long weekend (uncharacteristically — we don’t really travel or throw money around at all). This will be for our office Festivus party (of course) in early December.
- This is big: It’s getting easier to write quickly. Feeling the heat less. Starting to realize it’s not the end of the world if your argument isn’t all that sound in a snarky blog post, or if you miss some angle that the better bloggers would’ve nailed. Fuck it: It’s blogging.
- I can honestly say I”m grateful to be working at a business and finance site at a time when business is on the ropes and a world-historic populist movement is rising up against the financial system. I don’t know dick about these very important topics, but it’s fascinating to edit and research the stuff all day and chip away at my ignorance. Plus I’m gonna get to report on Occupy Detroit in a couple weeks, possibly make a video, and maybe even go report on Occupy Wall Street if I play my cards right. (Kevin, I’ll make it a cheap trip.)
Been a little weird working my way into a company entirely via IM and emails from home 600 miles away, but I guess that’s modern employment for you. At any rate, these people have been really good to me.
fek:
villagevoice:
Bitchez, we back. And this time with a theme song.
My name is Averie Timm and I will be taking over this mission. Join us on our voyage, or don’t. Either way I’m going to continue posting things that make you laugh, things that make you cry, things that make you want to punch your expensive Mac computer screen, and things that only occasionally involve the word hipster.
YO. BIG MUFUHN ANNOUNCEMENT. LISTEN:
Averie Timm is another intern I basically stole from BlackBook (sorry guys, I love you, but you need to share). I didn’t steal her because I enjoy stealing things from BlackBook (though there’s something to be said for that time I came back for my booze collection and literally ALL OF IT BUT HALF A BOTTLE OF SVEDKA was gone, you fuckers). I stole her because she’s a smart, funny young lady and a great writer with the kind of intuitive sense needed from someone doing this: a sense of what people want to read, what people didn’t know they wanted to read, and how to package it. She was the one who took the BlackBook Tumblr from me - for the record, the first media outlet to “officially” have a Tumblr, what’s up - and increased its following by like, four times what it was when I had it in about, like, a month (BlackBook Assistant Ed. Cayte Grieve is still and has been doing a solid job growing and running it for a while, now, as well).
She’s going to be manning the Village Voice Tumblr, which I set up about a week before I got here in March, and have barely touched since. It will not be her only responsibility, she will not be its sole contributor, and yes, she is getting college credit for Tumbling. Don’t be “jels.” The idea, of course, is to provide anything but a place to feed our content into, and of course, to interact with a lot of people. If they choose to read the Voice from there, rad. If not, no big deal. But part of Averie’s very smart strategy was to engage people other than, you know, the people everyone else reads. [Someone recently ranted against, I don’t know, print publications on Tumblr sucking. (INJUSTICE! HORROR!) Naturally, BlackBook, who did it right, didn’t make it into his case.]
(…)
For those asking why I suddenly wanna use my tumblr … just preparing for the day The New Republic hires an associate editor for tumblelogging.
The most popular post, though, was one from last December, “Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author,” the seed of her current manuscript. It’s a list of dozens of authors, each with a brief description of his or her stereotypical readership. A few of the entries have the specificity of truth (“Nicole Krauss: Girls who intern at Nylon but end up moving back to the Midwest for their real job”), but most are on the random side, like “Stieg Larsson: Girls who are too frightened to go skydiving” or “Friedrich Nietzsche: Sommeliers.”
There’s something resentful and defensive about the nearly endless post, especially when you take into account that she wrote it before she’d moved to New York. It’s all about not being “from here,” either geographically or intellectually. It’s a project that simultaneously broadcasts her knowledge and prevents any real discussion of it: “Dislike.”
The fabulous New York life of Lauren Leto, by Zachary Woolfe: Capital New York
Mee-ow! Sounds like some writer (for a heretofore unknown NYC website) is jealous of another writer (thingsthatscarelaurenleto)’s major book deal(s).
The rest of the (nearly endless!) profile piles on more oddly bitchy chronicling of the personal blogs, conversational tics and casual dating lives of hard-working Webby writers at the start of their careers. Not exactly “Wall Street Times” material.
Side note: Article misspells Grosse Pointe, putting Capital NY among a class of publications whose editors don’t read French or Google proper nouns. These guys may yet have a future in “old media journalism.”
