Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?
The most consequential journalism becomes just another unit of content in a single stream of music videos, movie trailers, updates from friends and relatives, advertisements, and viral tidbits from sites adept at gaming fast-changing algorithms and behaviors. Readerships that seem large now will turn out to be as ephemeral as Snapchats.
“I think John tends to be ahead of these things because he reads them as science fiction of the present,” Buchanan says. “That’s a lot of what The Awl does now,” Herrman agrees. “Our entire economy is just a giant science fiction writing prompt.”
.. Soon cities will be stratified into classes of on-demand laborers, Herrman says, “app playgrounds” zoned by service radii. It’s going to get more interesting when you replace those people with robots, Buchanan says, adding that everyone will be eating soylent while the rich eat solid foods in surge-priced restaurants.
.. He writes with the tone of an anthropologist studying the bewildering behaviors of the content industry: the “sacred ritual” of embedding John Oliver clips that every site performs on Mondays ..
.. Publications like Upworthyand spammier clones grow rapidly using formats tailored for Facebook’s News Feed, only to plummet with every opaque tweak to the platform’s algorithm.
.. Herrman later says of the shift to platforms. “If in the process of adapting to it you also lost track of what you were intending to do, then you are just an instrument attached to someone else’s machine, this little weirdly adapted thing that will be disposed of once someone gets around to fixing it.”
.. People share content that confirms something they believe or that they want people to believe about them. More arbitrarily, certain forms thrive according to the changing metrics of Facebook’s algorithm: time spent off site, or comments.
.. Insofar as the site had any kind of founding principle, it was that writers should only write about things they care about and not waste readers’ time. Its motto was “Be Less Stupid.” Would it make readers smarter? Vanity Fair asked Sicha at the time. “I realized that we just don’t really want any stupid people reading it — which sounds mean, but they have plenty of reading material already,” Sicha said. “I want to disinvite them.”
.. Sicha’s first paycheck warranted a column by the late David Carr, who joked that if you were going to launch a site, you’d look at everything The Awl did — its hard-to-pronounce name, its eclectic mix of content, its literate but minuscule audience — and do the exact opposite.
.. Ortberg compares him to Tom Bombadil, the friendly magical being from Lord of The Rings who’s immune to the ring’s warping power. “A lot of folks who work in media are like, ‘God, I have to carry the ring. Doesn’t this suck?’ We all have to have the same fights. Tom Bombadil is… kind of untouched by all of it. He puts on the ring and doesn’t care. He’s just leaping around the woods merrily being like, ‘I own myself. I own these woods. No one can harm me.’ That to me is kind of Choire. He will choose what parts of the conversation he’s going to engage in, and he’ll choose how to talk about it, but you can’t make him do it.”
.. The Awl makes a virtue out of its narrow audience when talking to advertisers, calling their readers “indielectuals,” a term coined by former publisher John Shankman and which Sicha uses with an exaggerated shudder. According to Sicha, 29 percent of the site’s readers have graduate degrees.
.. If the content apocalypse comes, Herrman is cautiously optimistic that The Awl will survive it. “We’ll be the cockroaches who don’t die but who are and will remain cockroaches,” he says, laughing.