Why Vanity Fair Sucks and Old Media Needs to Die
There is something uniquely satisfying in watching a magazine like Vanity Fair, one with so much money and history behind it, absolutely shoot themselves in the foot with the wrong group of people. It is satisfying, but entirely infuriating, to watch so-called “traditional” media botch coverage of things like internet culture, video games, or really just technology in general.
You would think newspapers or magazines would just get it at some point. That eventually a light bulb would go off and they would understand that their models are ancient, that they aren’t evolving fast enough, and that they are held back by their traditional and establishment trained journalists. Instead, the same old crap is filtered steadily through the airwaves and through print in bite sized buzzword chunks.
Spoiler Alert: They won’t get it. Ever.
Now before I go any further, I should point out that writing this doesn’t necessarily make me a hypocrite. I’ve always said the number two most annoying thing to me in this world is video game journalists writing about video game journalism. I don’t think you can swing a dead cat without hitting an opinion piece on why video game journalism sucks now or has always sucked or will suck in the future. Articles like that are just self aggrandizing to me. I’ve found that the only people that give a crap what game journalists think about game journalism is other game journalists.
Sure, I think there are problems that need to be fixed. I disagree with 90% of the advice gaming writers give to new writers. I don’t think people should be told to adhere to certain guidelines or styles with their reviews and editorials outside of making sure they aren’t making crap up. I think we need diversity, and that readers should be encouraged to give their loyalty to specific writers above specific websites. That is why I like Ripten so much, but I’m not going to pretend that just because I do things differently than most that I should be a model for improvement. I digress, the reason writing this article isn’t hypocritical is that it isn’t about gaming journalism. It is about old media. The number one most annoying thing to me in this world is traditional journalism. Archaic and crumbling as it may be, it is still the number one place the majority goes. The most recent glaring example of why this is terrible has come from Vanity Fair.
Vanity Fair recently ran an article about women in Twitter and this crazy new media trend. It came off just as bad as you would think a publication like Vanity Fair, which I don’t think has been relevant since I learned how to dial people up to play Duke Nukem, would represent it. The infuriating part to most people isn’t that they got everything wrong or used words like “twilebrity” and other embarrassing lingo in order to give it good ole fashioned punch, no, it was how thick the condescension was from the journalist’s pen actually was.
I guess I have a fairly unique view on this subject. I won’t get into how condescending this article was towards women since I’m not one, I’ll save that for one of the talented female writers of our site to rip into. They have a lot of ammo though, my personal favorite part being in the very beginning where the writer loosely implies that someone like Felicia Day has gained her fame through twittering. Although in the interest of full disclosure , at one point, I was pretty far into becoming a “classically trained” journalist. I’ve dealt with professors and editors try to take my style and my voice and turn it into something pre-packaged and easily malleable for the all important copy. Seeing how that industry was geared to work, and how poorly someone like me would have ended up doing because of it, is one of the reasons I stopped caring about my degree. It is one of the reasons I call myself a writer and not a journalist.
To me, journalist is a dirty word. Journalists are the people who make all of us in independent media scratch our heads and curse our day jobs. Journalists make the money, not much, but more than most of us around these parts make. Journalists are people who care more about hyperbole, drama, and attention in order to garner awards than they do about representing their subjects correctly.
Journalists are people like Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Grigoriadis is a perfect example of why old media is floundering and why everyone in charge is standing around scratching their heads and asking each other why this patchwork of “amateurs” on this new fangled thing called the internet are diverting so much wind out of their sails. The name might not seem familiar to you, but she is the person who has her fingerprints all over the aforementioned trainwreck of an article in Vanity Fair. She is notorious for her condescending tone, she made sure she put herself above everything she wrote about during her tenure at Rolling Stone, and now she does it with our little niche culture.
The worst thing? The industry doesn’t see anything wrong with her.
That is a tragedy, an absolute inexcusable tragedy. A writer that has botched articles on everything from Taylor Swift to Facebook, a writer who has written overblown pieces on “eco-terrorism” that read like a How-To guide from a Journalism 101 class, a writer that cut her teeth with profiles on vapid celebrities and meaningless pop culture icons, and a writer with a style that is as prevalent in every corner of traditional media as gingerbread man cookie cutters in our moms baking drawer is considered something unique. Her portfolio is 100 times more impressive than any of ours because of the places she has gotten her foot into. She is rewarded despite the rage she seems to cause. I can guarantee you that even with the backlash against this garbage in Vanity Fair, nothing will change. Old media doesn’t give a crap what a bunch of kids on the internet think about their business, they apparently know better.
And yet they constantly try to cater to us. They cater to us with journalists who probably put less work into their research than they do their image like Vanessa Grigoriadis, and journalists who came from a background of fluff entertainment pieces instead of anything resembling a unique perspective. They cater to us with articles about video games riddled with factual errors and shallow opinions. They snowball the same tired media meme back and forth to each other’s mouths like they are a scene between the lovely and brilliant Joanna Angel and Jessie Lee and then have the gall to turn to the blogging world and complain about its journalistic practices. I ask you, nay- I beg you traditional media, stop trying to cater to us. It isn’t helping.
Old media would never listen though. They are dinosaurs, and just like dinosaurs they are too damned dumb to realize that the reason it is so dark today is because there is a gigantic fucking meteor coming to kill them. Even if they did, even if one of them evolved and suddenly stood on their hind legs, pointed at the growing sphere and said “We need to do something” they couldn’t do a thing about it. From political analysis to tech journalism, if it is related to print or television establishments it seems as doomed as the majestic raptor. And why?
Because Vanessa Grigoriadis and her “tweeples” and “twilebrities” are the norm and not the exception. Someday soon, that is going to change, and it will never be soon enough.
