{"id":10482,"date":"2015-07-04T10:24:45","date_gmt":"2015-07-04T17:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=10482"},"modified":"2015-07-08T14:04:48","modified_gmt":"2015-07-08T21:04:48","slug":"7-ways-your-brazilian-girlfriend-is-cheating-on-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/04\/7-ways-your-brazilian-girlfriend-is-cheating-on-you\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Ways Your Brazilian Girlfriend is Cheating On You"},"content":{"rendered":"

Limited time value media wonkishness ahead. You can read this, or hey, for a better use of your time, read this story<\/a><\/span><\/span> by Clementine\u00a0 Wamiraya who fled the Rwanda massacres. Man, what a read.<\/em> <\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve seen worse contributor plans than Hearst Publishing’s The Mix<\/a>. You apply to be a contributor and if you’re approved, you’re added to the program’s mailing list. You get a daily email with suggested topics and if one of them sparks your interest, you log in and write a piece. If the editors like your submission, you get paid and the piece goes out to one of Hearst’s properties — and they’ve got a lot of them. Elle. Cosmo. Road and Track. More. If the piece takes off and you get a lot of traffic on it, you get a bonus.<\/p>\n

I don’t remember what the payouts look like. I submitted once — my piece was not accepted — and then, after about two months of reviewing the topics, I unsubscribed from the emails. The suggested subjects were making me sad. When I looked at the website this morning, there were eight listed; they included Things Not to Say to the Parent of a Special Needs Child and I Struggle to Enjoy Sex.<\/p>\n

Does my pain match the buzzworthy topic of the day? It might if the topics up for grab ever include I Damaged My Career with Excessive Media Deconstruction.<\/p>\n

\u00a7<\/p>\n

Last winter, I watched the The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s series on the state of the media and, well, a lot of other things. In season four, there’s a subplot where one of the characters, web correspondent Hallie Shea, takes a job for terms not unlike those offered by The Mix. Hallie fights with her boyfriend, Jim Harper, a senior news producer, about her contract. He doesn’t like the traffic bonuses. I watched this plot arc again before I sat down to write this; it was as I remembered it.<\/p>\n

“They’re not incentives. They’re bonuses.”<\/em>
\n “For page views.”
\n“Yeah.”<\/em>
\n “The more page views you get, the more money you’re paid.”<\/em>
\n “Welcome to capitalism. We’re happy to have you. They’re bonuses. They’re not incentives.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s lots here about the tension between “new” and “old” media, about what drives a story, about the validity of personal experience as raw material, about what, exactly, is being created under the traffic driven model.\u00a0 No one gets off easy in the script. The “old media” guy is clearly in denial about the unstoppable realities of the media marketplace, the “new media” gal uses her relationship as fodder for a column without vetting it with the boyfriend first.<\/p>\n

Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well, neither party gets the respect they feel they deserve, though the script is (unfairly, I think) kinder to the “old media” guy than to Hallie. When she publishes a story about her relationship with Jim, we’re left to feel like she knows<\/em> she’s exploited it as raw material for her new gig, even while she stands behind the value of lifestyle content. He accuses her of knowing exactly what she’s doing while pretending it’s something else.<\/p>\n

“I have spent time with hardcore drug movers, and they don’t pretend they’re selling medicine.<\/span>“<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyone who’s got the tiniest bit of skin in the media these days understands that this argument is really about the tension between creating work that’s popular (as in it generates traffic) and work that’s good. They’re not mutually exclusive, but if the goal is popularity first, then the way you approach a story is very, very different.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a7<\/p>\n

“I thought it was a parody at first, but then I got to the comments, and it’s real.”<\/p>\n

This was a friend on Facebook about an article on Elle Decor, an article that came through The Mix. “I Made a Huge Sacrifice to Buy My Dream Home,<\/a>” the headline declares, and the writer goes on to tell us how much she and her husband want a third child but can’t afford it.<\/p>\n

…we can only afford to have two children. We are able to afford one family vacation a year (using a timeshare that we purchased in full as newlyweds). We kept to a budget for other large expenses that came with our latest move like a ride-on lawnmower, gardening supplies, a fenced in yard for our dogs, and a generator. Our happy children have everything they need (not everything they want) and I am able to stay home with them while they are young because of the carefully premeditated financial choices we have made.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh, the humanity.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, the comments are wildly unsympathetic, and in some cases, quite funny.\u00a0 I think this is my favorite one, but I haven’t read them all — there were 1,065 when I last looked.<\/p>\n

Josh Feierman \u00b7 Top Commenter \u00b7 Durham, North Carolina<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

Your decision not to have a third child will gnaw away at you as you while away the hours in your mausoleum of a dream home. You’ll resent your husband for not providing you with the perfect life. Next will come the fights, the affairs, the self-harm, the recriminations. Your two children will get older and leave the home as you and your husband marinate in a private hell of your own making. As you said, it’ll be well-earned.<\/em><\/p>\n

HAVEN’T YOU EVER WATCHED LIFETIME TV?????<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Lots of people posted links to this article, which, in internet parlance, translates to page views which, for the writer, Sarah Scott, should translate to a nice traffic bonus. There’s commentary about this piece on EOnline, on The Daily Mail, on Pop Sugar, on Facebook, from people like me who read it and thought, “What the actual fuck is this?”<\/p>\n

I clicked through a few of the commentary pieces; they all included links to the article on Elle Decor. Web nerds like me may have added a “no follow” attribute to the link in hopes that they won’t contribute further to the rewards Sarah Scott will receive for producing such a popular piece of self-indulgent, completely unaware rubbish, but I suspect the traffic bonus on this will be sizable. Not enough to fund a third child, perhaps, but sizable.<\/p>\n

I feel a little bit bad for the vitriol unleashed on the writer. A little<\/em> bit. I’m sure her feelings are genuine and I don’t typically wish ill upon strangers just because they’ve said stupid things in public. Oops. It happens.<\/p>\n

What angers me about this piece is that it’s in the world under a commercial masthead at all. The only editors I know that would publish this are those who anticipated the traffic it could provide. No credible editor focused on the value of the story itself would have approved this poor little rich girl pity fest.\u00a0 I would love to know if Elle went back to Ms. Scott and said, “We’d like to run this story but we need to warn you. This has the potential to go viral, but for all the wrong reasons. People are going to say things about you that are not very nice. Are you ready for that? Do you want to reconsider?”<\/p>\n

This piece is popular for its irony potential, for its embodiment of privilege. It’s not the worst piece of writing, as self-indulgent introspection goes, but it’s hardly a remarkable bit of literature. I can’t comment on the relateability of it to those that wish they could have more kids, but I’d argue that as soon as you start inventorying your paid-in-full time share and your riding mower and your ability to raise your kids on a single income whilst comfortably nested in your dream home, you narrow the field of sympathetic audience members considerably.<\/p>\n

Christina Anderson \u00b7 Top Commenter \u00b7 UMKC<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

I do not often say this in response to an article, but here it is: FUCK. YOU.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a7<\/p>\n

I’ve been working on a media survey project for about two weeks now and it’s got me rather depressed. There are successful business models out there, but with a few notable exceptions, they appear to implement one of two strategies.<\/p>\n

One is the “conflict of interest be damned” model where advertising masquerades as editorial, where a junk piece that generates more traffic is of more value than one that’s got its own merit, where buzz beats out… well, it beats out everything.<\/p>\n

The other model is where there is no conflict of interest, where a company produces its own content, so there’s no pretense — the content is designed to sell the company’s product. I prefer this, I hate the pretense behind advertorial, I’d rather write an American summer road trip guide for a mid-level hotel chain directly than do it as advertorial on a third party site, it’s so much more honest that way. And it can be good, too.<\/p>\n

There’s been some evolution, as well. Properties like BuzzFeed, once known purely for junk, appear to be reinvesting the money they made publishing articles like Which Disney Grandparent Should Be Your Next F**k Buddy? or 14 Butts that Love America So Much or 7 Ways Your Brazilian Girlfriend is Cheating on You with real reporting<\/a>. (I only made one of those headlines up. Guess which one). They haven’t given up publishing rubbish, but that stuff supports some worthwhile writing.<\/p>\n

This seems like a good thing, but I feel unsettled by the idea of an expensive house built on a foundation of garbage. Especially if I have to sacrifice my non-existent third child to live there.<\/p>\n

\u00a7<\/p>\n

I made up 7 Ways Your Brazilian Girlfriend is Cheating on You. I’d been reviewing a site that is full of these kinds of headlines. 12 Reasons You Should Never Date a Rock Climber. 14 Reasons Why Texas BBQ Is Just the Worst. It goes on like this. And on and on. We Asked 22 BMX Riders About The Saddest Place They Ever Did A Wheelie. Oh, wait, that last one is from Clickhole<\/a>, a site that mocks exactly this style of publishing.<\/p>\n

I mentioned my fake headline in a conversation I had with an editor a few days ago.<\/p>\n

“That’s good,” the editor said. “Is that real? It could be real.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Limited time value media wonkishness ahead. You can read this, or hey, for a better use of your time, read this story by Clementine\u00a0 Wamiraya who fled the Rwanda massacres. Man, what a read. I’ve seen worse contributor plans than Hearst Publishing’s The Mix. You apply to be a contributor and if you’re approved, you’re … <\/p>\n


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