News You Can't Use

GQ The Magazine
September 2010

News You Can't Use By Jim Nelson
Photograph by Nathaniel Goldberg

THIS ARTICLE IS bound to be the most frequently viewed article on this page, and I predict its exploding popularity has just begun. By the time you read this, it will be enshrined in Digg history, the most thumbed-up and mass-forwarded article of the Internet Era. There at Digg, where choosy users vote for their favorite news, it will join other most popular features, such as "Woman Pukes on Herself at Wedding" and the "6 Best Places to Pee on Campus."

I welcome my soaring popularity on such places as the Internet and this amazing page. But I'm starting to worry a bit about what the Web and viral/mobile/news-aggregatin' sites are doing to our sense of what is news and what ain't. Me, I get all my news from Captivate, the trusted source in high-rise-elevator information, where the other day I learned that 74 percent of Americans like their dogs "a lot" as opposed to "a little," which showed that this generation's pet reporters are not afraid to ask the tough questions. Sometimes the news is so…captivating, I'll spend half an hour riding the elevator; by the time I've made my third round to the twenty-seventh floor, what I know about Icelandic volcanoes will blow your mind.

Of course, that's not my only news source. Here in New York I can always jump in a cab, because the taxis all have touch screens, and the touch screens all have news crawls. I can hardly make out what the headlines are telling me—they're kind of surreal in a way that fits our times—but the crawl is comforting, like the passing flicker of traffic lights. I'll look down at them for a little dose of Dada poetry. (Meg Ryan Getting "More Than Enough" Gluten…. "That's Not My Finger," Claims GOP's Boehner…. Lindsay Gal Pal: "I'm Just Sayin'!"…) Occasionally, the words are so disorienting, so context-free, that I'll have to whip out my Huffington Post app and search "lindsay + gal pal" until I know what the hell is going on in this dark and complicated world.

People say Americans don't "manufacture" anything anymore, but clearly they haven't picked up a newspaper or stood around in an elevator lately. We're making more news than ever! Who, I've always wondered, does all this hard labor? Then I stumbled upon this ripe little exposé in The New York Times: It seems young people who work at news and gossip Web sites (and sure, maybe it's getting hard to tell the difference between the two) are feeling burned-out at a younger and younger age. Many of them work feverishly from dawn to dusk and get paid approximately squat.

"Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe," says the story, "are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be the first to report even the smallest nugget of news—anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way." Bloggers are the new slaves! Over at sites like Gawker, where writers are paid in part based on how much Web traffic they generate, there's actually a giant screen looming above the indentured bloggers, linking their fortunes to the media empire's 10 most viewed articles. Who's the boss? The algorithms.

Don't get me wrong: Our Web site plays right along with the game. (As I write, "Fo' Sizzle: GQ's 50 Hottest Fashion Photos" is moving up the Most Popular chart, and I do very much wish you'd add your eyeballs to its surging appeal.) But the obsession with page views and "metrics" and chasing traffic has a way of driving journalists to distraction and even dejuicing gossip into blather. It's cool that there are a zillion more options for news, opinion, and 'tude besides your local boring newspaper (or taxicab), but why are so many of them starting to bleed together, one massive, churning, self-feeding bland-o-sphere?

It reminds me of the way local TV news, despite regional differences and geographic distances, all starts to look and sound the same. Funny how quickly the Web followed its own viral path to blandness. These days I'm noticing that even my favorite sites—dear, dear Huffington Post, why have you betrayed me?—are doing more pie charts and polls and "The 8 Sexiest Subway Systems in the World." (I'm not making that up, and I swear I didn't vote for Toronto.) Even "real" news is starting to feel ginned up—brought to you by the Web to feed the Web. That woman who got fired from the Agriculture Dept. because a blog decided she was racist but then she wasn't? That was meta. I can't wait till she writes a book that sets the record straight and I can read about it on Captivate.

Maybe there's just not enough genuine news to spread around all the Internets, so we have to make more. But hey, HuffPo! That seventeen-part slideshow on "The Most Terrifying Crap Your Parents Own"? That was priceless.

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