Justice For Bad Writing

My freelancing career began, in earnest, when I was a sophomore in college. Someone I knew from Twitter had been hired at Vice, and he asked me to pitch stories to Noisey—the company's ill-fated music vertical, which still exists today in a depressing, fossilized form. The negotiations were straightforward. No matter the length or scale, I would get paid $50 for every post I wrote, and the checks for that labor were delivered months, (sometimes years,) after submitting the invoices. Those rates are obviously criminal, but if you are living rent-free in a dorm—and therefore ledgering your financial solvency based solely on how much beer you can drink—then 50 bucks is, indeed, a lot of money. Vice would later become infamous for uncommonly venal working conditions, even for the harsh standards of the industry, and I would eventually recognize the exploitation more acutely once I had graduated and was forced to allocate my net revenue towards health insurance and security deposits. But at that tender station in life, (young, drunk, perhaps a bit too excited to tell others in my college that I wrote for Vice,) the world was my oyster.

No guardrails were in place at Vice. The chain of command in those salad days typically consisted of 19-year olds, reporting to 23-year olds, usually overseen by a 25-year old "managing editor." I pitched the bulk of my stories via Gchat—Gchat!—and they'd appear on the homepage hours later almost entirely unedited. These are not the conditions for high-quality journalism, and I doubt I'm shocking anyone when I say that my early Vice oeuvre was terrible. Those blogs still exist in the benthic deeps of the website's archive, and all of them are scented with the market demands of the digital media boom; a blend of Buzzfeed-ish engagement chum ("Indie Bands And Their Limited Edition Fast Food Menu Item Counterparts,") and irresponsible big swings where I attempted to triangulate some sort of authoritative New Yorker posture before immediately pratfalling, (I believe we once published a story with the headline, "The Problem With Rock And Roll.") 

But the checks kept clearing, and the traffic kept percolating. I was given a column before my 21st birthday and—miraculously—a South-by-Southwest badge. For one shining moment, it seemed like it was genuinely possible to make it big with 1,200 words. That was what paradise looked like in 2013.

None of this was sustainable, of course. The Vice Media enterprise was eventually revealed to be an elaborate shell game, operated by a braintrust of fraudulent managers who made a series of dead-on-arrival strategic pivots that could reasonably be mistaken for a money laundering scheme. (They went all in on cable television. In 2016.) The staff unionized, after coming to the conclusion that $29,000 a year for a dozen blogs a week is no way to live in central Brooklyn. Leadership would continue to change hands throughout the remainder of the decade, while the company hit all the funereal checkpoints of febrile, late-period digital media. There was a mysterious infusion of Saudi money, a fatal shortening of ambition, and, last but not least, a SPAC scam that never got off the ground. Vice formally declared bankruptcy last year, laying off the majority of its employees save for a handful of big wigs, and in its newly zombified form, it appears like the site is once again interfacing with that lucrative fascist-chic Gavin McInnes demographic—further proof that the trove of funding available in right-wing broadcasting remains the final salvation for all desperate publishing tycoons. In June, Vice announced it was partnering with Bill Maher's Club Random Studios on a video podcast starring Vice emeritus/cosmic charlatan Shane Smith. The debut episode of the project attempts to uncover, once and for all, whether or not the Deep State wants to kill Donald Trump.

These sagas have all ended the same way. Swathes of BuzzFeed's homepage has been cordoned off for free-associative AI slop; Refinery29 seems to get sold to a new regime every quarter at a rapidly depreciating numerical value; Mic.com still exists, which is fucking insane, while Deadspin, now on its fourth(?) owner, is exclusively publishing bloodless gambling content—somehow overleveraged in yet another rapidly winnowing financial sector. To be clear, I'm not exactly nostalgic for those bygone peak years. $50 a post was actually pretty rich compared to the rates I was reeling in when the industry was allegedly flush with cash. I've written $10 record reviews, $5 blog posts, and $150 features replete with treacly section breaks. (Gawker, a company that would later become a champion for Writer's Rights, once asked me to file around 2,000 words for free.) The demystification of the media business—which could only be brought about by its humbling—allowed me and a fleet of other freelancers and staffers to begin regarding this work as a job, rather than a club with conditional membership, or a boat that must never be rocked.

And yet! And yet, I can't help but feel like we've lost something in this world we've inherited. This business has never been healthy, but surely it was at its healthiest when overzealous 19-year olds could email one of approximately 12 million Vice editors, promising to turn in an overcooked essay about the problems with rock and roll. What I'm saying here is there must always be a repository for bad articles, because it is a fact of life that in order to become a good writer, one must first spend years being flagrantly shitty at the craft.

I know this more than anyone, trust me. Scroll further into my Vice portfolio and you will find "Fifty Reasons Why Red Is Album Of The Year," "I Interviewed My Dad About His Favorite Rap Songs," and a short story in which Paul Simon eats Art Garfunkel alive. (I'm still sorta proud of that one.) There are certain facets of this job that journalism school can teach you; basic mechanics that will help upstart reporters avoid getting fired or sued. But to unlock the metaphysical flourishes of writing articles—the instincts to know what is interesting and what is boring, the fine line one must walk between solipsistic trolling and adversarial trolling, the psychic equilibrium to sense that you've included one adjective too many—well, that can only be internalized by failing those tests, over and over again, ideally when your 23-year old editor is asleep at the wheel.

Alas, no such venue for this process exists in 2024. Digital media's expansion was predicated on underpaying and overworking a very green, easily hoodwinked coterie of twentysomethings, and right now it is being righteously punished for those sins. (There is no schadenfreude quite like Jonah Peretti hysterically trying to offload Hot Ones for anything he can get while the creditors close in. Buzzfeed stock is trading for around two bucks, by the way.) But the ongoing contraction has taken with it the chance for any young writer, regardless of talent, to incubate a bad idea, and take a swing that would be turned down instantly by The Atlantic, The New York Times, and every other legacy institution—who ironically are the only survivors of this downturn. Along the way, some of us figured out what we were doing, and those bad ideas slowly became mediocre, or even good. (Case in point: I pitched Slate, where I currently work, dozens of times in college. Every single one of them was rejected. That’s growth baby!)

Do opportunities like that exist for the bloggers in our wake? There is Substack, I suppose, and it is heartening to see so many young writers use the platform to make a name for themselves independent of media’s curdling economic trends. But personally speaking, if the first lesson I learned in journalism was that I needed to self-publish my way towards absolution—with all of the extratextual influencer-ish hustling that entails—it'd make me want to quit on the spot. Unfortunately the other options are just as grim. The orthodoxy in the ownership class is that people simply don't read websites for fun anymore, and that has funneled a generation into the most torpid and soul-crushing SEO traps; churning out lists of leaked Fortnite skins, Mets/Dodgers wagers, and the post-credit scenes in Deadpool & Wolverine—like a piece of flypaper wedged in the Google index. (Imagine getting a job at GoodHousekeeping.com and being told to write, exclusively, about the MCU. I’d want to jump off a bridge!) It clarifies why so many of these companies are investing heavily in AI. The market value on thesis statements, or even mere points of view, has never been lower.

A few weeks ago Vice announced a return to the publishing business. The magazine, in all of its "sprawling and salacious glory"—stacked up waist-high next to the bathrooms at Union Pool—is apparently back. I imagine this will coalesce into a nakedly counterfeit estimation of its mid-2000s identity, perhaps alloyed with some crypto bullshit, or Joe Rogan-style political unalignment, to accentuate the thirstiness of the comeback. But if the new barons of Vice actually want to right some ancient wrongs, I have the perfect recipe. Let a few teenagers fill the pages to the brim with bad writing. I promise, it won't cost more than 50 bucks.