The Ballad Of The Sad Clickbait Monkey

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! I don't have a lot to say to you this week. I'm very sorry about that. Well, I mean, I do have an essay below, due to the whole format-of-the-newsletter thing, but honestly I don't know that I have tons more to give currently. It happens.

I did read a good piece recently and I'm not going to pretend it's going to be for everyone but, on the off-chance that it could be your thing - here are, I would say, roughly 4,000 words on John Updike, by Patricia Lockwood. She actually wrote the piece a few years ago but I only got to it recently, as I finally read my first Updike and, presumably like every woman before me, found myself in urgent need of Thoughts About Updike And Women, ideally written by a woman. That really hit the spot.

If somehow - somehow! - that doesn't feel like your jam, I also enjoyed this short but v compelling little piece on Lobsang Rampa, the man who pretended to be a Tibetan lama, with limited success. It's really fun.

That is all. Thank you. I will now show you some posts. Good bye.

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A column

For a long time, being a young or new journalist meant doing the jobs no-one else wanted to do in the newsroom. You'd tackle the really minor news stories, go knock on the doors of recent widows, all of that. It probably wasn't pleasant, but I wouldn't know.

For my generation, being a young or new journalist meant being a clickbait monkey for a while, or possibly forever, if you couldn't escape. I worked at a few different places in my early twenties, back when the internet felt bewildering to execs and editors. I was hired to write pieces that would "go viral" - a novel concept, at the time - and I was pretty good at it.

In practice, though, it was awful. There was this one website I worked at, which I won't name, which needed us to write seven articles a day. We were never told not to make any calls and do any original reporting per se, but we didn't have the time to do it anyway, so it was a moot point.

Instead, we were sent links to MailOnline stories, sometimes from other places too, and our job was to rewrite those pieces, using words and sentences that were different enough that we couldn't get done for plagiarism. Again, that last bit was never said out loud, but we knew. We weren't stupid.

It was, in a way, quite an interesting intellectual exercise. In retrospect, I wonder if it made me a better writer, purely by accident. Spending eight hours a day trying to swiftly come up with synonyms is quite good practice, especially if English is your second language. In any case, I ended up jumping out of that particular ship after a year and a half, and got myself a job which actually felt and tasted like journalism. My clickbait monkey days started in 2013 and ended in 2015, and I've not returned to them since. What a beautiful decade it's been.

That doesn't mean I never think about those months, even now. Soul-sucking jobs tend to burrow under your skin, and you just can't quite get rid of them. I was so bored by the end: so bored! I felt like a sad little robot, probably because the job I was doing could have been done by one.