The Shady Marketing Scheme That’s Buying Off Your Favorite Bloggers →

Man, this is creepy. And obviously, if you’re a journalist, working expressly in your capacity as a journalist (I know a few who do ad copywriting on the side to pay the bills, which is a different thing), then you’ve got no place being paid under the table to plug products on the sites that you’re working for. It’s just a shady deal all together.

I get why this works, though. So, this marketing company pays $130 a shot if you mention Dell, with a link, in a post about Lindsay Lohan or something, right? I’ve written for the Internet a lot, and $130 for a quick post is often more than the site itself is paying you. (Some big-name outlets with obvious money behind them pay 20% of that for starting writers.) So if you’re a person who is new to blogging for pay, or trying to transition to full-time freelancing, and you’ve got this marketing company breathing down your neck, I can understand the temptation to blow up your income by 500% by being all, “Lindsay Lohan, the most annoying celebrity since the ‘Dude, You’re Getting A Dell’ guy, is gonna be in Playboy!” in the post you’re being paid crappily for. Especially at sites that pay poorly, but have strong traffic and recognizable brands (I won’t mention names), I get the temptation to try to make your rent money on the sneaky side. Well, hell, you might have linked to Dell anyway for free, so what’s the harm…?

Besides the “if you’re working for Dell while you’re getting paid by Gawker (or whoever), then you’re selling the integrity of an outlet that you didn’t build” ethics of it, there’s another problem, which is this: you’re using your access to Gawker, or Huffington Post, or Business Insider, or whatever, to sell under-the-table ads on those sites. The brand who buys ‘em is paying less than they’d pay if they bought advertising proper from the site, and it throws everybody’s integrity into question. A paid ad looks like a paid ad, but these links are designed specifically not to, so editors don’t flip. But if you’re getting paid for ads sold on Gawker, and let’s say I write for Gawker (I don’t), then you’re taking money that could conceivably go to me, in the form of a higher freelance rate as the companies buy legit ads and the site becomes more profitable. You’re getting paid extra money, and keeping my wage lower, while I may be the one whose posts are getting the most traffic (rarely actually the case, but you get the idea).

And that is shitty. But I think it’s also highlights a responsibility that the outlets themselves have, which is to keep their wages as high as possible for their writers. (Convenient that a writer for websites would come to that conclusion, right?) If I’m working for a Major Multinational Media Conglomerate Whose Name I Won’t Mention Because Some Of Their Properties Pay Well And Are Nice To Work For, Even If Others Aren’t, and I’m getting $25 a post, then the ethics of selling access on that site can feel a bit hazier. And if I get caught, and get fired, then what the hell? I’m out my $25 a post job, but maybe I sold ten links before anyone noticed, so it was probably worth the risk.

But if I’m paid professionally, then I feel like a professional, and thus am probably less inclined to look for ways to capitalize on my access to well-trafficked websites to make an extra buck. I’m also probably eager to do a good job, because I don’t want to end up losing work that pays my bills, or pissing off editors who offer me well-paying assignments.

I’ve no idea what Gawker pays, or what Business Insider offers. I know Huffington Post is not a particularly ethical company. I’d suspect that the fact that the Gawker write who posted the expose here did that, instead of sneaking in the links, suggests that Gawker treats its writers professionally. Maybe that’s one of the lessons to draw here?

Down and Distance

(I kept a football column on the hip-hop/politics/culture website Troubl.org a few years ago. It was called Down and Distance, and it was about the places where football, politics, pop culture, and the other parts of contemporary American culture intersect. The site was down for a long while, but recently relaunched — albeit without archives. I need to have some of the old columns online at the moment, and this seemed like a good place to keep them. This one is from October 13, 2008.)

I spent Saturday at the Three Points Ranch, just outside of Marble Falls, TX, for a wedding ceremony. Evan, a college friend of my wife’s, was getting married to his boyfriend, Addison. They’re both Manhattanites, upwardly-mobile members of a social class I rarely spend time with. The ceremony was conducted in Texas, as that’s where both of their families hail from, but the actual wedding papers, by law, were to be filed in Massachusetts- except the day before the wedding, Connecticut ruled that gay folks could get married in their state, saving them a trip further north.

It made for some interesting table-talk at the reception, let me tell you. My wife and I sat at a table with six well-dressed, well-coifed men, all couples, as well as an elderly uncle, a widower who wore his cowboy hat, boots, and belt buckle emblazoned with the words right to bear arms without a trace of irony.

So, where are you from? I asked the dude sitting next to me.

Memphis, he said. Originally, Memphis. I live in New York now.

Ooh, Tennessee? a young fella across the table said. Have you been to Dollywood?

The rest of the table looked at him with stark interest, and he nodded profusely. Only four times! He laughed.

Oh, god, I want to go so bad, the man seated next to my wife said, his voice thick with an Australian accent. I just love her.

I kicked my wife under the table, delighted to have a stereotype as innocuous as a group of gay men’s devotion to Dolly Parton validated, when the old cowboy spoke. That woman is a national treasure, he said with a thick West Texas drawl, something like Couch Taylor on Friday Night Lights mixed with a hint of Sam Elliott.

I turned to the guy who started this, the one from Tennessee, aware that the novelty of this conversation would quickly wear off. Enough about Dolly Parton, I implored, what do you think of the Titans this year?

Oh my god, they’re so good, he squealed, we’re going all the way this year. Definitely.

No way, his boyfriend shook his head. It’s a Giants repeat!

At this point, the old Texan glared at the young gay Manhattan socialite. Now boy, he said, there are some things that just aren’t okay in Texas.

My wife tried desperately to steer the topic of conversation back to Dolly Parton, even bringing up the fact that she briefly met Madonna at a theatre in London earlier in the year, but it was no use. This was football season, and we were all American men. We were lucky that the shouting match over Vince Young, Eli Manning, and Tony Romo didn’t end up coming to blows.

[something to celebrate] After the cake was cut, my wife approached the old cowboy to ask what he thought of the ceremony.

I got choked up, he said. I don’t usually get teary at weddings, but this was something. I never saw nobody get gay-married before.

And it was strange, watching these two people celebrate a powerful, touching milestone in their lives together as a vastly disparate group of family and friends cheered them on… only to realize that it’s actually illegal.

It’s fucked up, and we’ve all known that it’s fucked up for some time, but it didn’t connect with me until I saw firsthand what a joyous occasion it was for everybody involved, from aged West Texans to young Manhattan hipsters, and realized that the very thing we were all celebrating was illegal for no goddamn reason. But it wasn’t political, not that Saturday. It was just a Good Thing.

It was the last good thing there was.

[then, on sunday…] Lord, fuck the NFL. Every one of us gathered around the televisions in the ranch the following day, straining to catch updates on our various games, had our hearts broken. Whether it was my pathetic Chicago Bears giving up a hard-earned single point lead after a kickoff with eleven seconds on the clock, or the Dallas Cowboys getting clobbered by the Arizona Cardinals in overtime, or the Redskins coughing up blood and allowing the Rams to claim their first win of the season, football looks like a dire game to follow this year.

Yeah, the parity the league is based upon works, but that sure equals a lot of broken hearts on Sunday. Monday, too- as of this writing, the miserable Cleveland Browns are two minutes away from claiming victory over the undefeated New York Giants. Of the 14 games played this week, five of them were decided within the final thirty seconds of play. And every heavy-hitter favorite in the league, from the Giants and the Cowboys and the Redskins to the Brady-less Patriots, went down to a team they had no business losing to. When they say any given Sunday, what they’re really talking about was October 12, 2008.

It was a rough weekend, with the stuffing showing through the shoulder pads of even the mightiest names in the game- we learned that Peyton Manning had a secret second surgery, that Tony Romo would be out for at least a month with a broken pinky, that Adrian Peterson could be contained by a team as godawful as the fucking Detroit Lions, that Brian Urlacher and Lance Briggs could be made to look like goddamn college ballplayers against Matt Ryan… All of which means that any attempt to define the power rankings in the NFL right now is pointless. No one has any idea how good anybody is. Right now it looks like Tennessee and Indianapolis will make a run for the AFC title in January, while New York and Tampa battle it out to represent the NFC, but who the hell knows? Any team not based in Cincinnati or Detroit has at least a 50/50 shot of winning the Super Bowl right now. Hell, Kansas City and St. Louis have both proven their ability to win games, so long as they’re up against good teams- a few lucky turns and you could see an all-Missouri Super Bowl!

We fled the ranch to head back to Austin before Sunday night’s embarrassing match-up between the Patriots and the Chargers- Loser Bowl ‘08, a grotesque, Bizarro-world parody of last year’s AFC Championship Game. The fake New England Patriots lost by 20 to the fake San Diego Chargers, but I was not there to see it. It’s for the best- the occasion was meant to be joyous, if illegal. But think for a second how fucked-up that is: it’s goddamn criminal for two dudes to get married, but there’s no legislation that would outlaw a week of football as shitty as Week 6 of the 2008 NFL season?

On privilege and being a freelance writer.

I read Tolly Moseley’s post on Austin Eavesdropper on “5 tips to becoming a freelance writer,” and I was struck by something: if I were making a list like that, not only would I not include most of the things she suggests, some of my tips would expressly contradict what worked for Tolly. (Internships, working for free, and choosing a specialty are all things I’ve tried my best to avoid, with few exceptions.) That’s not to say that the Eavesdropper post offers bad advice, or that she’s wrong — mostly, it’s noteworthy to me to realize that there is no right or wrong way to build a freelance writing career. There’s only the one that works for you.

I write about music a lot, because it’s easy for me to get that sort of work right now, and because it’s often a lot of fun. (The story I’m most excited about at the moment is a music story, which isn’t often the case.) But I never sat down to be a Music Writer, and I’ve worked really hard to make sure that I don’t end up defined as one of those, at least not to the exclusion of other work. I thought about writing my own set of tips to follow, but as I started to jot down some ideas, I started thinking about the extent to which the privileges I enjoy as a white dude have impacted my career.

I can’t say “blow off internships and just starting pitching ideas!” and expect that it’ll work for everybody. One of my first regular gigs was at a (now-defunct) hip hop site called Troubl.org. I was kind of the novelty white writer, and I had a column that focused on the intersection of football, politics, and social justice. (P.S., if anyone wants to revisit that this fall, drop me a line!) And maybe it’s just me, but it seems like there’s probably a lot more opportunities for a token white writer at a mostly-black site than vice-versa. So, score one for white privilege.

Most of the editors I’ve worked with have been dudes — probably a 70/30 skew in that direction, if I had to guess. With very few exceptions, they’ve been men of integrity with a passion for good writing who work hard to get the best possible content for their publication, and I’m very fortunate to be at a point in my career now where I don’t have to work with anyone I don’t trust as an editor or respect as a person. However! When I meet a new editor, I also don’t have to worry that he’s going to be turned off by my ideas because he doesn’t want to sleep with me, or that he’ll lose interest in working with me because I won’t sleep with him. My value as a writer exists independently as my value in any physical capacity. That’s not true for everyone. Additionally, if I’m working with an older editor and he’s deciding to take a chance on me, I suspect that part of what might be at play in that situation is that I remind him a little of himself at some point in the past. And while I’m grateful, it’s also a privilege that I enjoy because it’s easy to remind people of themselves when you’re all white dudes who wear the same kind of glasses.

It extends to interview subjects, too. For instance, I was in Northwest Alabama for a story a few weeks ago. And everyone there was very friendly to me, and I felt like the hurdle you had to jump to build a rapport was especially low. That’s how people can be in that part of the country — and that’s especially true when you’re just another white person like them. I never had to worry that people were going to give me weird looks. As a music writer, I am exactly what you would expect. You should see the number of plaid shirts in my closet. Staggering! I never have to prove that I actually know what I’m talking about, because one glance assures anybody in a band that I spent my formative years listening to Wilco and Modest Mouse and Bob Dylan and Joy Division. People are never surprised when I speak authoritatively about music from any genre. They’re used to dudes like me speaking authoritatively.

But there’s another part of all of this, too: And it’s that I have worked very hard to get to a point where I can pay my bills by doing mostly just writing that I find interesting. And that’s a point about privilege that I suspect white dudes need to get over — the fact that you possess it doesn’t negate your achievements. Not every white guy who walks in the door gets what you have. Maybe the first time an editor takes a chance on an untested writer he meets at a party, he’s influenced by some subtle factors that you didn’t have to work for — but when he takes idea number two, it’s because you did a good job on the first one. Maybe an editor can glance at my Facebook profile and tell, “Yeah, this dude probably is an authority on indie rock,” but I also had to send emails and cold pitches and make myself known to get them to care.

Because talking about privilege isn’t the same as talking about how a person got everything handed to him or her, or how they didn’t have to earn anything for themselves. It’s acknowledging that a confluence of factors — some of which you worked hard for, and some of which you didn’t — are what got you where you are. It doesn’t take anything away from the former to acknowledge the latter. If you didn’t also work hard, then the easier pathway wouldn’t have got you anywhere.

And with all of that in mind, I have no idea what tips would be useful to an aspiring freelance writer. I know that I didn’t need internships, or to write for “exposure,” or to seek out and own a particular niche, in order to build a career that I really hope will prove to be sustainable. But I can’t say that what I did will work for anyone else — I’ve had a few advantages along the way.

I interviewed Henry Rollins. About snakes. →

Interviews are weird! When I was learning to do them, I was mostly interviewing people in small indie rock bands, who were not used to being interviewed, and who were kinda weird and shy and awkward. Every so often, I would interview someone and connect really immediately, and get kind of sad about it — because we’d have this really interesting conversation for half an hour, talking about all sorts of things, but we weren’t actually friends. (I’m sure that this is a strange, lonely thing for the person being interviewed, too.) So many of the interviews I do for arts/entertainment places are ones in which I am the 9th person they’re talking to that day, with another 8 to go after we hang up the phone. I’m much better at this in person than on the phone, but I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it over the phone, too, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to earn a living. I’m always super awkward when it’s time to hang up, though.

Anyway: Henry Rollins. This was the first interview I’d been nervous for in a really, really long time. Because there is not a figure who looms larger in my life, outside of my actual friends and family and people I love, than Henry Rollins. When I was eighteen, I read Get In The Van, his memoir of being on tour with Black Flag, and it made me immediately drop out of college and pursue writing as an avocation. I taught myself how to perform on stage by ripping off his material at open mics. His work shaped a lot of how I viewed the world at the age when I was figuring all of that stuff out. I’m a person who engages verbally, and more than anyone else, it was Henry Rollins’ words that I engaged with, especially in those formative, post-high school years when I really had the opportunity to figure out who I wanted to be. For at least a few of those years, I wanted to be him.

I grew out of that at some point. His books stopped being interesting to me, and I had to poke holes in his persona just in order to be my own person and not a dude who wanted to be Henry Rollins — kill your idols, etc. Some of his stand-up recordings started to get exhausting, running on for 3 hours, though I still am pretty sure I’ve heard every single one of them he’s released as of 4/28/11. It stopped being a personal identification with the guy, in other words, though it didn’t mean I wasn’t a fan anymore.

Last week, I got an email from a publicist I know at National Geographic Wild informing me that Rollins had a special about to air on the channel about snakes, and that he was available for interviews. I had been in touch with an editor at a site MTV runs called Clutch, which is a lot like my old gig at Asylum.com used to be, and it seemed like a good one to pitch. He was really into it, and so I set up the interview.

I didn’t say anything about the fact that I had every single one of his records, from Damaged to Henrietta Collins and the Wife-Beating Child-Haters to this weird EP he put out with some Australian band where they covered “Franklin’s Tower” by the Grateful Dead right on down to The Only Way To Know For Sure, his final live double-album with the much-maligned Mother Superior lineup of the Rollins Band. I didn’t tell him that I got the guts to say that I didn’t want to be a student, and I didn’t want to try and pick out some career, and I wanted to try writing all the time and traveling around the country telling stories to people with a microphone, because of things he had written or examples he had set. (I didn’t do that for the same reason Troy didn’t want to meet Levar in person; what if he was disappointed that I’d taken that example and was doing phoners for MTV? You can’t disappoint a picture!) I decided that the best way to talk to someone who meant that much to me would be to do so like a professional: we would talk about snakes.

And we did! That is literally all we talked about. I picked up on something that I’d felt before in other interviews, but which was really clear to me in this one. And that is — the person you are talking to, often, does not know who you are or if you know what you’re talking about. They don’t know if you’re familiar at all with the work they are trying to promote. I have been present for group interviews where I had some pretty detailed questions for the person being interviewed, and some TV idiot would be there asking, “So what’s this movie about?” A smart person who values his or her time, therefore, will treat all interviewers as though they aren’t familiar with the material in order to avoid having to offer endless clarifications.

It took about five minutes — two or three questions — before I put this together properly, and asked a question that he actually engaged with, that he hadn’t answered five times already that morning, and that he seemed interested in talking about. (It was about what happens in Florida if there’s a hurricane and people are evacuating and these snakes get out — it didn’t make the final cut.) Suddenly, everything changes about the interview. The person you are talking to starts to treat this as a conversation, instead of as responses they are giving to a questions-asking robot. Questions that they would have been bored by before suddenly get thoughtful answers. It’s a moment of connection, and it’s what makes this job actually rewarding and interesting.

And, in this case, it was really important to me. Because Henry Rollins has loomed so large for me, and talking to him was really a strange experience. Finding that point of connection — even if we only ever talked about snakes for twenty minutes — was really nice. I mean, I could have asked him really detailed questions about all sorts of things. “So, on your 1992 Japanese-exclusive live EP Electroconvulsive Therapy, you do a 27-minute version of ‘Move Right In’ that leads into ‘Obscene,’ and you lead the band through a riff they borrowed from a Beastie Boys song — did you ever consider recording any of the jam-based material you would play on stage during that period of your career in the studio?” But mostly, it was just a cool thing for me to have a decent conversation with the guy, without trying to prove something to the person I’d been a decade ago. So sure — why not talk about snakes?

Leaders of a New School: Hip-Hop in Universities →

Also on MTVHive, I have this story about the unexpected trend in universities to hire rappers on as faculty. I saw lots of jokes on various blogs about the fact that Bun B was teaching Hip Hop And Religion at Rice, and I knew that 9th Wonder had some experience teaching in North Carolina, and I started looking into it more closely.

I really loved putting this story together, because it gave me a chance to talk to a lot of fairly brilliant people about topics I was keen to discuss. I spent a week talking to professors like Mark Anthony Neal and Anthony Pinn and Adam Bradley (who was super thoughtful and insightful in our exchanges, and who helped inform every aspect of the story, but whose quotes were cut for space reasons); as well as rappers like 9th Wonder and Dessa, about the way hip hop is changing and the role of rap in higher education that isn’t just, like, a “The Meaning Of Tupac” elective or something.

Even on days when I’m not working on anything particular exciting, I’m still aware that I’m very lucky to have this job, because compiling events picks or writing dumb jokes for some blog are both way better than most other jobs I am qualified for. But the week I spent putting this story together, I realized just what an incredible privilege it is to have the opportunity to talk to all of these insightful people about a topic that all of us are deeply passionate about. I hope some of that comes through in this story.

Thoughts on 'Where Have All the Dude Blogs Gone?' →

Tim Donnelly at Thought Catalog ponders the question of why there are blogs ranging from Jezebel to The Frisky to Hairpin that are for women, but all of the blogs for men are just full of pictures of naked women and reviews of watches and shit like that. He points to the now-defunct Asylum, among others, as shallow men’s blogs that didn’t give him what he wanted.

And I hear what he’s talking about, I do. I tried, occasionally, to contribute stories back when Asylum was running that got at the same things he wants to talk about — male identity in reality as opposed to in media and things that talked about gay dudes in a dudely manner and stuff like that. I liked the idea of a sort-of male equivalent to Jezebel — a site that was smart and curious and wanted to talk about what it meant to be a man in the 21st century, with all the tit-shots and what to buy to get laid and seriously, all you care about is beer and TV, right, dudes-type posts left behind. But the more I’ve come to work elsewhere, the more I’ve realized that there’s no real point to that.

The reason that there are so many woman-specific blogs on the Internet is because most “gender-unspecific” sites are deeply woman-unfriendly. I had to restrain myself yesterday from getting into a flame war on the A.V. Club comments section about whether punching women in the face was wrong. And that’s a site with a number of woman writers and editors! We don’t need our own spaces because every space is, by default, ours. We don’t have to worry about being marginalized or threatened or ignored when we post on “gender-unspecific” sites, we don’t have to deal with the casual sexism of tit-shots on articles that have no need for a tit-shot, we don’t have to even think about it. Why would we create these male blogs? If a dude wants to talk about music, he doesn’t need to create a Male Music Blog, he can just go to Pitchfork. And advertisers know this, too. Asylum didn’t get its plug pulled because it was a fabulously lucrative property for AOL. I had a great time writing for the site (one of the few I’ve worked for, incidentally, where my direct editor was a woman — funny, that), but at the end of the day, there wasn’t a lot of dude-specific content that the site required. It was a general interest site that talked about video games and funny videos and music and whatever else we were interested in — all in the same voice that exists throughout the Internet.

I like Donnelly’s points, for the most part — I like the idea of a smart, engaged, audience of dudes talking about what manhood means. But I’ve also found that those conversations are mostly welcome in the feminist corners of the Internet.

At the end of his post, Donnelly tosses up a list of ideas he’d like to see on this smart, man-centric blog. They’re good ideas — some of them very good — but I can also think of any number of “gender-unspecific” sites that would buy most of the stories he lists, and that would not ever tell him, “Hey, we’ve got to tailor this for an audience that includes women.” Being able to define ourselves by our specific interests — movies, or sports, or politics, or fashion — without first having to check that through a gender-identity lens is a luxury that men possess. When sites try to do filter it through that lens first, it just ends up being redundant. We had a fun thing going at Asylum, but almost every idea I’ve had that I would have pitched to them since they went under, it took me no time at all to find another outlet who’d be interested. And that’s why there aren’t more dude blogs. Because if people want to read about why The Big Lebowski is the sum of all human wisdom, they can go to any number of non-dude blog to read it.

A quick note to myself:

If you can’t yet write the pitch succinctly and coherently, you wouldn’t have a prayer of writing the story that way.