Gourmet, Modern Bride & Print Media

Gourmet and Modern Bride are gone. This is not good.

I was one of the first “content providers” trained by the Los Angeles Times to write for the internet.

Years ago, ok?

Keep it short and sweet, they told us. Nobody wants to wade through more than a hundred words.

Over a decade of writing content for online news sites, I moderated a message board for Cox Interactive Media.

In depth? Hardly.

In its first foray into online news, the LA Times hired a whole bunch of people, trained them and then fired them. One morning, with a story assigned by each in the works, I called three of my editors who had been in their offices the day before and was told that each was “no longer with the company.”

And that was before breakfast.

There are so many kinds of viral media these days that wading into the melee has become a full-time occupation. Sneeze, and you miss the juicy news of the second. But in this new democracy that encourages everyone to be a critic, anyone with a computer qualifies.

The more free content the viral sites attract, the more they can charge for advertsing. Write hundreds of reviews and you get to be an “elite” reviewer. No matter that you don’t know a truffle from tartufo.

Sauces? Who needs ’em? Or at least who needs to be electrified by descriptions of what’s in them, or how they’re made.

Nobody, evidently.