HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED GONE

Pitchfork is going away, so why not Sports Illustrated, too?

“The publisher of Sports Illustrated has notified employees it is planning to lay off a significant portion – possibly all – of the outlet’s staff after its license to use the iconic brand’s name in print and digital was revoked.”

Absolutely wild that this wasn’t actually the company, but the name was licensed.

(via, ESPN)

MUSIC IS A BATTLEFIELD

So this happened today.

“Condé Nast is merging Pitchfork, the digital music publication it bought in 2015, with men’s magazine GQ — a move that will result in layoffs at Pitchfork, including the exit of editor-in-chief Puja Patel.”

As Ted Gioia wrote in response, “Put faith in the music, not the business.”

In the early 2000s we had music blogs, today we’ve got AI generated playlists.

Not sure how this gets any better.

ALSO:

“In 2017 Vulture called Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist “the most influential playlist in music.” Among other things, it’s credited for launching the career of Cardi B.

But as Ashley Carman reported at Bloomberg this month, even RapCaviar’s influence is now on the wane. The reason, of course, is artificial intelligence.”

From “How platforms killed Pitchfork‘

In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.

Jan 2008 – Oct 2008

After a year at Field and Stream I went back to AOL. I took a pay cut, but I wanted to be around more “internet people,” and in hindsight it absolutely worked out (as you’ll see in my next entry).

I worked a bunch with GameDaily and Asylum.com, helping get their content linked from websites and blogs.

I also helped with the launch of Urlesque.com, which was a lot of fun.

WEB PRODUCER AT FIELD AND STREAM MAGAZINE

I found this job on Craigslist in late 2006, and worked here all of 2007. It was $35/hr contract work – the most I had ever made at the time.

I took copy from the magazine’s Quark / InDesign files and repurposed them as web content. Lots of fishing poles, guns, and models. Yeah.

I hand-coded a bunch of online features like polls, quizzes, and weekly newsletters. No HTML editor, just straight up text editor. Times were simpler back then!

I edited some video with Final Cut Pro, and a few of those videos got uploaded to YouTube – those were the early days of the service.

I built and maintained several TypePad blogs, one of which appeared on The Colbert Report because one of the authors pissed off a bunch of people, and it created a bit 2nd amendment debate. The blog post was removed, then re-posted, I think. Details are fuzzy, but it I sure do remember perking up when Stephen Colbert flashed the magazine cover on the screen.

AOL CONTENT OPTIMIZATION

Soon after my stint with AOL Music, I joined the “Content Optimization” team. Around 2006 is when AOL decided to move away from their “walled garden” system, and get out there on the open web.

The problem was no one on the open web – the bloggers – really knew about the CONTENT we were making.

I remember we had a sports vertical called Yardbarker, and they made features about NFL teams. My job was to reach out to bloggers and get them to link back to us. For real, I’d spend all day digging around for NY Giants blogs, and get them to link back to our photo gallery of some Giants feature.

We also added stuff to Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and Netscape (which was a user-generated news site at one time), all so people could find our AOL content.

I remember I helped increase the Technorati ranking of the Fanhouse Sports blog from 50,000 to 3,473, and now here we are 18 years later social media absolutely destroyed blogs and Technorati. I was on this team through the rest of 2006 I think, and I think I was making about $20/hr or so as a freelancer.

AOL MUSIC WEB PRODUCER

In April of 2006 I started my very first for-real web job, as a web producer at AOL Music. It was just a three month contract gig, covering for someone on maternity leave, with zero guarantee of anything afterwards.

I got this gig because I put my music blog (Buzzgrinder) on my Monster dot com resume, and a headhunter found me. I left a full time job with five weeks paid vacation for this gig, and looking back it was one of the best moves I ever made.

This was someone else’s set up, but I was able to plug in my iPod and listen to my own music while I worked. I wrote copy for weekly new songs and videos features, built and scheduled music main page graphical elements, and wrote daily headlines for Music Main news section.

Some of the people that worked at AOL Music recognized me from the referral traffic that Buzzgrinder sent them, which blew me away.

I remember seeing artists come in and perform acoustic in conference rooms, which was sort of the start of AOL Sessions.

I had typos on pages that were seen by millions. This is where I learned a valuable lesson from a co-worker, when he was sitting beside me while I got “talked to” for my mistake – “we’re not saving lives!”

Oh yeah, I auditioned to host The DL, which was AOL Music’s “music show,” but Sara Schaefer got the job and MURDERED IT. They picked the right person for the job on that one.

My time with AOL Music music last just 3-4 months (I can’t really remember how long it was), but I met a lot of amazing people along the way.

Oh yeah, around this time in 2006 the #1 music site on the internet was MySpace. Wild, right?

SHOW DON’T TELL

I’d imagine one reason people don’t sign up for email newsletters is because if they can’t see your email newsletter, they’re going to assume it looks like all the other shit newsletters out there, so why sign up?

This is why something like Substack works so well. It’s literally the secret sauce. You see what you’re going to get before you sign up.

Not so with Mailchimp or the countless other shit newsletters we sign up for from artists we like.

We blindly sign up and get tossed a product catalog every few weeks.

Meanwhile, the same artist shovels 19 posts a week up on social media, filled with jokes, rants, photos, and stories.

Email subscribers are only worth sales, apparently.

BIG SKIES

WordPress is telling me I’ve published 1,000 posts.

A few hundred people a month read things I write here.

No likes, no comments, no “engagement.” Just me posting for the sake of posting. It’s a digital journal of sorts, I guess.

I’ve been publishing things on the internet since 1995 or so, which is about my earliest memories of the “commercial web.”

I had a Packard-Bell computer that I bought at Sears on credit, and it was about $3,000. Had Windows 3.1, and I think I had mIRC on there.

Met a lot of people via #pasxe.

We’d find out about shows like that back in the day. We’d make plans there to hang out and meet at diners. Then AOL Instant Messenger came along and fucked everything up.

I’m so frustrated by all the platforms these days. The tie-in. Streaming music services where you rent music. My Photos app has over 300GB of photos, and my new laptop has just a 512GB HD. I moved my photo library to my external HD, but now it won’t do the iCloud Photos thing.

This is why I go for walks. Today I walked about six miles, spread across three jaunts. “When in doubt, go for a walk” is my mantra for 2024.

SHARE ART

Since I deleted Instagram at the start of 2024, I wondered how I’d find random bits of amazing artwork. Well, from blogs, of course.

Wait, not just blogs. From people.

It’s people that write these things and find these things.

Social media platforms get rich on the unpaid effort of all these artists and creative curators, while limiting reach, and making people think “who even has a website anymore?”

Fuck Zuck. Fuck Musk.

Go buy something from Old Made Good. Found via Swiss Miss.

WHERE I WRITE

My desk is on wheels, so sometimes it faces east; sometimes, I swing it around so I can look west.

I use a standing desk that I bought in 2019 or so, before the pandemic. Attaching the power strip to the leg was a recent move, to make it easier to wheel around, with the cords getting caught under the wheels.

Yeah, the cords take away from the “minimal aesthetic,” but I need power, and my external HD plugged in, so whatever. This really works for me. I can’t stand having a lot of stuff on my desk while working, so having a small desk makes that easier.

Thanks to @Beth Kempton for these #meetthewriter prompts.