News Hybrid

My first job out of Journalism school was at a tech startup, a blog dedicated to business, entrepreneurship, and innovation in Boston. My title was City News Writer and my beat included breaking news, transportation, and real estate. The editorial staff was a small operation, with never more than eight full-time writers covering a variety of beats. During my time, there were never more than three full-time writers covering business or tech, exclusively. Nothing much made sense in terms of branding.

The site’s mission was to celebrate the city’s “movers, shakers, and disruptors.” At the time, the tech and innovation community was still a relatively niche demographic. Most were white, affluent, and educated. These were not people who warranted press coverage in a traditional sense. Because of their status, they were able to turn their cheeks towards most of the issues impacting the average Bostonian. What this relatively small population possessed was capital and a solid understanding of how to use jargon.

This was objectively a tough group to relate to. Most of the time, I had no idea what someone was talking about when it came to VC, fundraising, assets, liquidity, etc. But that was sort of the point: every conversation felt like a sales pitch that I densely nodded my head to because I was too dumb to ask any questions.

The tech and innovation community needed a platform to be seen as relatable. The site’s founders had backgrounds in business and were venture capitalists themselves, using their networks to champion entrepreneurship.The site made money off sponsorships from local companies and VC’s who paid for access to our platform and readership. It was a hybrid of marketing and news that extended beyond business and into city government. It was access to information in exchange for good press and potentially a mutually beneficial relationship.

The average reader who visited the site to read our content had no idea how the sausage was made or why certain companies were deemed newsworthy or important (and frankly, neither did I). These readers provided the bulk of the pageviews that were sold to potential sponsors as incentive to pay for space. In certain cases, it seemed some companies were only noteworthy because we wrote about them in the first place.

It was a game. It was legal. And I hated it. It confused the hell out of me. I felt like I had very little control and my brain eventually started behaving accordingly.

I felt like I was actively contributing to an ignorance epidemic in public discourse that relied on microdosing content addicts with, at the worst of times, entirely unfiltered PR from people theoretically paid to report truths. The game being played was Time, and the people winning knew most didn’t have enough of it.