Loo.me

Back in 2008, Qloud got acquired by BuzzMedia and Toby and I were assigned to running the product and engineering divisions of the company.  Buzz owned at the time around 50 blogs around music and celebrities such as Stereogum and TheSuperficial. I wasn’t that familiar with many of the blogs, but i quickly realized that some of them were really good and pretty funny.  

Probably my favorite of the bunch was a blog called WWTDD which stands for “What Would Tyler Durden Do” which is named after the main character in Flight Club.  The site is not what you would call an example of journalistic excellence. He would post a picture of a celebrity – often a very good looking woman – and usually make fun of her.  The difference here is that he’d do it in a really funny and clever way.  He did this all day, every day, 365 days a year.  It was sort of incredible. 

I’m writing about this because the writer of WWTDD wrote a blog post yesterday that the days of doing what he does are over. He doesn’t think it works anymore.  He writes: 

When I wrote Superficial and then co-created Tyler, there were like 3 other sites (Pink is the new Blog, Perez, called Page 666 at the time, and Defamer). Now every dickhead who’s ever gotten an “LOL” on a message board thinks he can write a website, and almost every single one follows that exact model that I created.

And it does not work anymore. It simply does not. It’s 2013 and that old shit is not good enough. I know what to do and I have been begging to change things. It’s frustrating, and I apologize to people who read the page as I got more and more bored and annoyed.

Unfortunately he doesn’t say what the new model is but he implies that it’s coming. I really quite curious. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. 

Read this post this morning by a former editor of the Chicago Times.  He writes: 

Several years ago, the Washington Post convened a series of focus groups to learn why most individuals under the age of 45 did not subscribe to the newspaper. It’s not that people didn’t like the Post, reported the American Journalism Review in an article describing the research project in 2005. The problem was that the respondents – many of whom happily consumed news on digital devices – drew the line at piles of old newspapers cluttering up their lives.  According to a Post executive quoted by the AJR, more than one respondent declared: “I don’t want that hulking thing in my house.” 

Totally true. I don’t want the actual paper showing up every day and creating another task for me to do.  I’d rather just read it somewhere and then forget about it.   A few other facts listed that i thought were interesting:

• Print newspaper readership ranged from 16% of forty-somethings to only 6% of those in their twenties (survey by Pew).  By contrast, Pew found that 30% of Americans aged 50-64 and 48% of those over the age of 65 had read a newspaper on the prior day.
• Pew found that only 29% of the American population read a newspaper in 2012, as compared with 56% in 1991 – the first time researchers asked the question.

The newspaper is totally dead.  People like me and my age are not reading it at all. The USA Today given to me at the hotel is totally ignored.  This is part of a general trend of things we like as stated by Mary Meeker in this 2012 report.  Such as: 

• We don’t want to own CDs, haul around books, buy cars, carry cash, or do our own chores  
• We will use smartphones to buy, borrow or steal media
• We will rent shared cars at home or book shared rooms when traveling
• We will hire people to buy groceries or cut the grass
• We will use apps from Starbuck’s and Target to pay for lattes or redeem coupons.  
• We prefer short-term gigs that allow us to arrange work around ours lives, rather than arrange their lives around our work. 

This isn’t 100% true for everyone, but it’s not not far off

I get tired of remembering and also tired of writing.

My new desire is to just speak stuff and have it appear.  Twitter was easier than blogging but talking is even easier than that.

Henry James dictated his novels to his secretaries and it seemed to work out ok for him.  I was always hesitant of voice recognition but it’s now so good in fact that I just dictated this entire blog post via the Dragon app on my iPhone. It was a total joy.  I’m able to talk at 300 words a minute but I can only type and 50. It’s actually a no-brainer and I’m now wishing there’s a version of Dragon I can just leave running all day and have a text archives of my conversations in the office. I want everything I talk about be captured.

The web is already filled with tons of useless babble – and it’s about to be filled with a lot more of it. 

Last week I spoke at the NYC Hacks/Hackers conference which was a pretty great gettogether of journalists and technology folks. I spoke about all the editorial tools that Kapost provides and got a pretty good response.

One other company that was there was a company called Narrative Science and they sort of blew my mind. This company takes formatted data – think of a baseball box score or census results – and algorithmically turns that data into a news story. So, a boxscore that used to just be 9 innings with numbers in it becomes this:

Michigan held off Iowa for a 7-5 win on Saturday. The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.

Whoa.

They are doing 1000 stories a week, and now that they have the template for baseball nailed, they are going into census data, crime information and other avenues that typically just produce data. It’s only a matter of time before SkyNet appears.