Matt Taibbi

yeah, Matt Taibbi didn't recruit those folx to do Racket Teen. I think they were supposed to make the NSA implode, more like.

it was perhaps the nicest, most meta bit of journo-narcissism i've seen in a long time.

it was fun how u cld tell they were just hanging around drinking waiting to be fired

tbh anytime i read about racket the vision seemed really muddy and unclear to me, like they weren't even sure what it was supposed to be, so i can't say i'm shocked that it didn't really work out

i'm happy that pareene has been liberated though, assuming someone snaps him up quickly. he's one of the best politics writers, it sucked not hearing from him for half a year or whatever.

except for when he filled in for andrew sullivan lol

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/life-and-death-of-the-racket/

“The whole site is a reaction to the clickbait, robotic, aggregating direction to journalism that’s the direction everything’s going on the Internet. We want readers to feel like everything they see on the site was the creation of an individual human being,” said Taibbi. A big part of that was going to be an emphasis on voice. The Racket was going to reject the dry, third-person style of the traditional media for strongly opinionated writing that, rather attempting to hide its biases, would flaunt them. It would be a way to connect with the audience and even drive its own reporting.

Man, this site would have been pretty fun, at least.

The Intercept is actually really good though. The dry third person style of traditional media is being avoided every day.

wanna read those outsourced tom friedman columns

yeah i'm kinda gutted now tbh. friedman gag so otm.

not sure where on the internet to turn for my strongly voiced opinon writing that, rather attempting to hide its biases, would flaunt them now

so you're saying... pareene was a mole and denton blew them up from the inside

its all connected

there were some very funny ideas in that piece and i def wldve liked to see what racket cld do cause they had some cool ppl on staff even if reading two consecutive matt taibbi sentences is painful for me, but having voice and being opinionated and hating clickbait are not really anything that sets you apart from a lot of people on the net

tho they did seem like they were prepared to ratchet up the obnoxiousness to rarified heights lol buying franklin foer twitter follower

tho im not sure if any of those funny ideas wldve been good for anything past the initial joke

its really too bad they didnt just give it to pareene and edith zimmerman after taibbi left that wldve been the best possible outcome

tbh i would give them all my lunch money to just troll friedman, brooks, and dowd every week

wld be cool to be all we are launching this exciting new journalism project that will have high quality content and also be sort of prankish but then its 100% pranks

i will crowdfund u

cool ty

glad to see some good come of all this

amen

“We also have an idea we’re calling Apartment 538, a Facebook community of people who look like Nate Silver, and we’re just going to poll them on things,” said Taibbi. “Instead of having a Nate Silver-produced poll we’re just going to poll 87 people who look like Nate Silver.”

Jesus, I wish this had happened.

More Racket / Intercept fallout:

http://jimromenesko.com/2015/02/22/ken-silverstein-resigns-from-pierre-omidyars-first-look-media-blasts-dishonest-leadership/

So now NVC & KS have both left after having pt.2 of their Serial interview held back for a week

lol I was hoping never to think about that Serial thing again

the guy omidyar like why did he even want to do this

Investigative reporter Ken Silverstein has resigned from First Look Media’s The Intercept after 14 months, saying he and others were hired “under what were essentially false pretenses [by being] told we would be given all the financial and other support we needed to do independent, important journalism, but instead found ourselves blocked at every step of the way by management’s incompetence and bad faith.”

independent, important journalism = pt.2 of a Serial interview?

xp spectacular conceit. just a guess tho.

i mean cry me a river about 19th-rate-hunter-thompson-misogynist-half-smart-at-best-brodude poor beleaguered paragon of integrity matt taibbi being forced out of any job, but damn this sounds like a shit place to work

something potentially beneficial about this kerfuffle is that, after "accidentally" sitting out the 2014 midterms, say taibbi and pareene have platforms in time, they might come out guns blazing at bush the younger and/or "not that" scott walker or whoever the GOP ticket is. not to be partisan

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-baltimore-blew-up-20150526

This is a good (and maddening) summary of the attempts to try and figure out what happened on the Garner grand jury:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-year-later-the-eric-garner-grand-jury-decision-still-stings-20151203

ON TRUMP:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224

Long article, worth reading if you like feeling a creeping horror and bile rising in your throat.

there are some good grafs in there but was it edited? by anyone? it reads at times like someone cut all the grafs out and shook them up in a hat and started laying them down one after the other at random.

I had to skim it. Tracer OTM, it gets close to free association at points. Possibly from listening to too much Trump.

The number of predictable "he's got a real shot at this you guys" pieces between now and September is going to get really mind-numbing

gonzo writing sort of falls down when everyone already gets how nutty everything is.

on how the NYT gutted their 'positive' Sanders profile online

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-new-york-times-sandbagged-bernie-sanders-20160315?page=2

interesting

it's about time someone with (successful parents) a voice spelled it out ~

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/trump-isnt-the-campaign-medias-first-mistake-20160519?page=3

i think he gives the media too much credit. it's not like they were tricking americans into voting for these plutocrats. america elected reagan twice and liked it so much they elected his vp too. donald trump is a strange aberration and taibbi's "you should've seen it all along" is v self-congratulatory. now it makes sense to me that ppl should vote in their self-interest, but they didn't do that for so long that thomas frank wrote an entire book on the topic. taibbi understands the self-interest part but he has no explanation for why now.

whenever i read this guy's name all i can think of is how fucked up and misogynistic the eXile was

i don't think he's giving the media credit so much as admitting their class bias is so steep few up top can see what's going on down below where the majority of america (without successful parents) scrambles to survive: "The tone of American political coverage for some time hasn't matched the reality of what voters have been going through. Even as America lost its manufacturing base and tens of millions of people were put out of good jobs, the campaign story for years remained the same weirdly celebratory soap opera." it's not the media who sets reagan, bush, bush, romney, and trump up to run; the (increasingly privileged) media is too class-blind to point out the plutocratic BS is his thesis i think

xpost

whenever i read this guy's name all i can think of is how fucked up and misogynistic the eXile was

I think the dude grew up, it happens sometimes.

i'm not saying it should be held against him, really. i just have a hard time looking past it personally. it's not like he was sixteen years old in those days he was like, the age i am now.

i also realize mark ames was worse than taibbi

It's almost like he's a lurker

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609