First in a series in which one former magazine writer looks back on his zany misadventures in the Netroots. Cross-posted at ASSME.org, the Web site of the American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites.
- Like Don Henley, I got the call that I didn't want to hear, but I knew that it would come.
It was Mark Karlin, the Matt Drudge of the Left. This Chicago enigma had been paying me to write news headlines for his baby, Buzzflash.com: a screaming anti-Bush site modeled after The Drudge Report, only without the weather obsession or brevity. Now my contract editorial services were no longer needed. He did leave me with a kind compliment: "You had no problem learning the Buzzflash style of writing," he said.
An amazing example of the Web's early adopter syndrome is that a site like Buzzflash.com--look at this thing!--rooted in the Geocities age can pull 300K visitors a month and raise an alleged $30,000 every few weeks in fundraising drives, while you struggle to get anyone to read your hipster blog.
In 2005, looking for a way to pay rent while I wrote a book about Republicans, I was hooked up with the weekend gig by a friend, a reporter for one of the big liberal magazines who, like a handful of others (including AmericaBlog's John Aravosis) quietly took the Buzzflash bucks. I looked at it as like paying for college by advertising under "Erotic Services" as a sensual masseuse.
So on Saturdays I would rise, make coffee, wake up the laptop and flinch at Buzzflash's latest top "headline"--typically longer than a Twitter tweet and as far from AP style as Earth and Jupiter:
"Do The Busheviks Have No Shame? Lock Up Cheney And The War Criminals. George Orwell Is Not Just Rolling In His Grave He Is Spinning. Read This Article If You Want To Understand Why Tom DeLay Is Buzzflash's GOP Hypocrite of the Week."
Then, to work: writing 50-60 new headlines, linking to breaking news items. Bulk was everything.
But I tried to buck the system and write proper news heds. Sometimes I'd pretend I was working for Talking Points Memo. I'd try to be all austere about Dusty Foggo or whoever the latest war criminal was, like I was Jim Lehrer or Alistair Cooke or someone. Other times I'd treat it as a copywriting punching bag...a pithy headline workout. If the site was going to be lurid, couldn't we be tasteless in a cool way, like the New York Post? And at least once, linking to a story on "sick MDs" who advised Guantanamo torturers, I relied on the slogan from the movie poster for Dr. Giggles: "THE DOCTOR IS OUT (OF HIS MIND)."
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After spending the weekend undoing the rants about "Chimpy" and replacing them with informative phrases that I would want to click on, the rock would roll back down the hill. Someone besides me had logged on; the sun was setting over Park Slope and new headlines about "Rethuglican Shills" were going up. Back at the helm, Mark Karlin was setting the controls for Bushevik Doomsday. The Monday stories were rolling in from the big papers, and maybe Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had written something crazy about Diebold, and Buzzflash was fighting back against the darkness of our twilight struggle, in which the attorney general was rewiring the election machines so that all they could compute was George W. Bush as god-emperor:
"Cindy Sheehan Is A True American Patriot. Cindy, You Are A Mensch And We Thank You From The Bottom Of Our Hearts And That Is Why You Are The Winner Of This Week's Buzzflash 'Wings Of Justice Award.' Keep Speaking Truth To The Power Of The Busheviks!: A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS"
To this day, even with Obama elected, Buzzflash remains a one-click stop for asteroid-hitting-the-earth heights of hysteria. Half of the time you go there, there's this red fundraising thermometer on the top, with the mercury rising towards the $30,000 mark. The pitch is to worried, older readers who haven't discovered TPM and imagine that the rest of the Web is like Little Green Footballs links forwarded to them by relatives concerned about AYSO's plans to enact sharia law. One day in the inbox I saw that our boss, disagreeing with one of them, had written a crisp e-mail back:
you must have a rock for a brain
...and I tried not to remember that people younger than me were like editing The New Republic.
All last week Buzzflash was on fire, as usual, with a desperate appeal: "IF PROGRESSIVE COMMENTARY DISAPPEARS, YOU'LL BE LEFT WITH WALL-TO-WALL SEAN HANNITY--GAG ON THAT ONE!" Karlin had always presented his site as all that stood between the restoration of America and Cheney stamping on a human head forever. In the last few days, Buzzflash has even gone full-Oral Roberts, literally posting a mad request that readers "CONTRIBUTE NOW TO BUZZFLASH, BEFORE THE LIGHTS ARE TURNED OUT IN AMERICA BY THE FORCES OF DARKNESS."
It was never clear why an overheated links page required so much overhead. Now that there hasn't been a war with Iran, Bush hasn't fled to a bunker in Paraguay and Air America is asking for donations, how will all the Kerry-era kitsch survive "in such a graceless age"?
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Mark Karlin responds at ASSME.org.