Is Wonkette Dead Yet? A Wonkvestigation!

Welp.

Photo by Dieter K on Unsplash

Oh hello there, dear reader! Snippets in particular have caught our eye in Helen Lewis’s thoughtpiece in The Atlantic about Lindy West’s memoir. Would you like to hear our mommyblogged thoughts about the first couple of paragraphs? Yes, yes, you already know we don’t give a shit, and our piece is already written.

First the opener, the ball-grabber, in industry parlance, which would have turned us off immediately had it not been a Forward From Rebecca:

“Lindy West is the most successful feminist writer of her (and my) generation.”

What generation? Am I this generation? Full disclosure, as a feminist … her name is barely familiar to me. Is she the one with the brown hair and grey streak?

“She embraced adjectives that were meant to demean her: loud, fat, shrill.” Oh, so the one who said everybody should quit being mean to fat women? Based, approved.

“Sure, #MeToo was a witch-hunt, she wrote in the Times: ‘I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.’”

We are in the saddle, and this Lindy West person is double-stamp approved!

Then record scratch, Helen Lewis describes West’s book as:

…. the tombstone for Millennial Feminism—that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write “welp!” in copy.

What the fuck, who is this Helen Lewis bitch? Whoever. Wonkette is right here still making cheese, still snarking on the breeze, and you can WELP on these! We have always been Lena Dunham neutral, though the reaction to her has always been revealing, and shall Stan that Girls is timeless art. Wonkette has never given a shit how fat your ass is one way or another, as long as you bring us along with you to the snack shack.

And really, boring straight people are identifying as queer through accounting tricks?

How did that conversation go?

“Hey Bob, like your rainbow shirt, are you queer?”

“Funny you should ask! I was doing some accounting last night, and when I factored in the time I tongued Gary’s asshole on that camping trip … I think I am!”

“Yeah, well, you’re still boring.”

Oh, Helen Lewis, au contraire, ma sœur. Sit down by us while our lady-editor waits, softly weeping. We get that you are trying to write about feminism things for an older man’s editorial eye, how hard it is, many times before we have had to do that ourselves.

Let’s go back, back in time, to the turn of the century, when yr young Wonkette’s trajectory had gone Econ degree → business newsletter managing editor and content → traditional business and law newspaper’s design and layout department to both design/features while getting an MA, then designer / writer of the features section.

Traditional newspaper journalism has strict rules, indeedy. The vast majority of reporters had a journalism-school or English degree or above, plus a degree for their specialty sections (like JDs for reporters and editors in the Law section), and everybody in the building but the photogs, janitorial, and delivery crew had at least a BA.

All the writing was AP style in bottom-bite structure with a ballgrabber open with nut of story. Never ever insert oneself into the story, keep a passive and impersonal style, use quotes for emotion. Never call a reader to any action other than consuming more media on a subject. Keep to a 6th grade level or below to be accessible to the majority of readers. Any big or technical words, define them. Anything for print must have at least six editorial passes by five different people.

Every morning, any typos or errors would be circled in red and left on one’s desk if the morning editor liked you, or tacked to the Wall of Shame if they did not (or were funny). There are no takebacks in print! And a writer would never back-edit anything but the most obvious typo without all of the copy going through the section editor, copy editor, lockup editor, and sometimes the chief, like if it was a big-deal edit that involved racial, legal and/or stock price sensitivity. Layer up and CYA!

Editorial staff could not take any comped gifts or trips, not even a box of Krispy Kremes, though they did have expense accounts to go dutch on interviews at lunches, and if someone picked the doughnut box out of the trash after the editor closed his door, nobody saw. On the other hand, though, features could take any treats as long as one was going to write about the thing anyway and didn’t try to hide the take. Also always save receipts when you charge on any of the paper’s many local expense accounts, and always knock and wait before entering the photographer’s darkroom, AKA the Fuck Closet.

Surely you, dear reader, can spot the structural flaws that have been and are bringing traditional media down like dead trees in the decades that came after! How the internet and president pussgrab changed it all! Remember when Tipper Gore lost her shit at 2 Live Crew expressing a desire for pussy on their albums and in 18+ only performances? No wonder Uncle Luke was so scandalized by the youth of the female guests cavorting at Mar-a-Lago!

Questions for you, reader, do features count as journalism?

Why would anybody want to be editorial, I wondered, speeding the BMW I was test-driving for the weekend to the Inn at Perry Cabin with my photographer boyfriend, and again while playing croquet as a butler served us gin and tonics, while I eased myself into the mind of my paper’s demographic while at rest and feeling spendy.

Does it count as journalism when it’s a citizen filming and posting a beatdown? How about when it’s James O’Keefe, stalking people, approaching under false pretenses and selectively editing gotchas? Is Wonkette Real News Journalism, given we mostly report from secondary sources and don’t follow The Rules?

One issue, the strictures of traditional journalism means the writing style is easy for AI robots to replicate. Now the computer is doing the Turing Test on us, and we are all doing it to each other! Is the Baltimore Sun journalism if they use AI to write stories?

And nowadays the AP uses mostly secondary sources too. Back in the day they had 13 journalists physically in Baltimore city, and now there are zero. Now there is only one physically in the whole state, in Annapolis, that hardworking Brian Witte, and the AP is shut out of White House circles while Matt Gaetz is let in. Who is press? Is a podcast a press? We are so confused. Maybe we are dead.

At least with Wonkette’s typos and human flaws, and Trump’s, for that matter, you know the words are from a flawed human source, as a waitress in Santa Cruz once said when I found half a worm in my salad. Yeah, it’s organic.

First-hand sources are better, sure, one gets so much more context and depth. But unless you give equal time to everyone, is BIAS! That is fine if you want people calling you demanding space for a rebuttal, but interview-style reporting is the most time consuming too, even with AI transcription these days.

Why be in papers? Why go to night school? Things might be different this time … The pay has always been shit. I left for a job doing SEO-friendly content at a tech company for double my salary. Newspaper hours were shit, with shifts that ended at midnight sometimes because of meticulous editors. And then I left the tech company because they all were unstable dicks, scootering around shooting each other with nerf guns, who wouldn’t shut up to let me get anything done until I reminded them they were going bald. Then to PR for an art college, where I got to drive David Byrne around town before the opening of his show of photographs of jellybeans, looking for a Lake Trout sandwich and learning about art.

Why be in papers, traditional media? Credibility, authenticity, a stepping stone. As I later told my corporate-consulting clients at the Kimberly-Clark offices of Huggies(R) brand disposable diapers, you can’t buy authenticity. But you can pay an authentic mom by the word for her voice!

But for access to power, and the outsized power that brings, you can’t top a job in mainstream media, giving voice to the powerless and making the powerful quiver, those grown men with three houses, four kids in private school and two mistresses apiece begging your 20-something self with tears in their eyes to please not print some racial slur they’d blurted out into your tape recorder, as you eat your ramen at your desk and live in an apartment with three roommates and one toilet.

It got better, it got worse. Today, still, forever, we have Wonkette. The journalisisming mommyblogging world has actually become more like us, really. Though few have had the ‘nads to go full ad-free. Most writers work at home, a work darkroom sex closet has become as rare as a CMYK plate.

From Wonkette’s Wikipedia page which we read before starting here, while mulling the voice, trying to hear and parse it to Blade-Runner-bot replicate humanly (shoulda just read Lindy West?):

Alex Nichols, writing in The Outline in 2017, described Wonkette, saying, “This is why I love Wonkette, the gossip blog that refuses to die. Wonkette is Bush-era liberalism frozen in amber, motionless and immortal, forced to passively observe a changing world until the end of time. Why does it still exist? Hard to say. But as long as it is here, we must celebrate its inanity.

But “motionless and immortal, forced to passively observe a changing world until the end of time” describes the whole of the written word in human history, doesn’t it, Alex? That’s what we all do. We observe, reflect. Were Wonkette inane, we wouldn’t still be here like Rocky. Here we still are! No advertisers, no Helens — this whole thing, by the way, is because Rebecca said Helen said we aren’t allowed to say “welp” — no waiting, just service writing, all day long.

It’s pretty great.

[The Atlantic archive link]