In the summer of 2015 I heard that the TWoP site was under new copyright, now owned by Tribune Media — the 200-year-old media giant. I did my research, mostly to make sure my little project of remastering recaps wasn’t going to get me into trouble. I wrote a few letters to some people I had researched in connection with whatever shift was going on there.
Tribune was developing a new vertical, Screener, which was meant to combine and revitalize all of their owned and recently acquired TV-related properties. And they needed “somebody like Jacob from TWoP” for an Editor-at-Large.
That’s me. So we had a few calls and then I was an at-large part of a writing staff of six, with another freelancer editorial budget. Again we did good work, again conscious diversity. This was also my trip to LA for a week, a week in which it rained almost nonstop and I got to meet my favorite freelancers in person and see all the spots I’d been writing about in Wasted. One of my favorite weeks for sure.
I lurked for a few months getting to know the LA writing staff, their quirks and interests and talents, before debuting among them as Deputy Editor. I introduced an even more successful editorial calendar built on the in-house writers’ strengths, redesigned their workday and workflow, and saw all of my plans develop to be wildly successful. (For about a week, as we’ll see.)
Less successful was my interaction with one of the two editors above me, who had what I think of as a Pelosi’s Heel, which is when you have been doing something so long you know you’re doing the best that can be done, and spend most of your time lobbying against changes or improvements because they won’t work, and because you’re so used to compromising yourself to impress the guys upstairs. She was a big fan of “permalancer” culture, if that tells you anything (or everything, frankly).
It sucked because she was a woman in technology and had been the main editorial person on the site’s predecessor for about a hundred years, and I was coming in under somebody new who was coming in under somebody new: A lineage of white tech bros coming in to tell her how to run something she’d been running for about a hundred years. It felt very gendered! But mostly it made me mad at her, for putting me in that position for no real reason in the first place.
On the very much other end of the spectrum was my partner-boss Eric, who I came to really love and respect during phone calls on his commute from Hollywood to Santa Clarita. He supported and encouraged me wholeheartedly and I know that’s why it worked out so well. A magical relationship and a magical time.
So anyway, I put down this new editorial strategy and got the kids hype about it. I’m still convinced it was a shining perfect jewel that could be adapted to any work environment and change the way work is done in our modern world. I also devised and sold a concept called “TWoP Vintage” whereby past writers could remaster their work like I’d done, and receive publication royalties on the work. I mean it was golden times.
So after a couple days of hundred-year-record traffic and some intense phone calls to the boss of my boss’s boss regarding the ongoing office bullshit, we were all summoned to a March Zoom meeting comprising everyone at Tribune being told that we had been sold to Sinclair, were all immediately fired, and would be getting substantial offramp.
I didn’t fight for my job or anything — Sinclair is as close to evil as you can get, and they only wanted us for our local stations to work their evil magic on — and I tried to ignore the bizarre pattern developing: Hired in the fall, company dead by spring.
I moved into this beautiful bungalow in 2010 and I’ve held onto it by tooth and nail ever since. My relationship with the owner of the property meant that I could pay double-rent for the half-year I was employed to make up for the half-year no money was coming in. This, of course, saved my life several years in a row, and is my version of family wealth-as-secret weapon. My first patron.
Things took a turn in my personal life after that, relationship stuff that was exciting but exhausting and the sort of drama that you usually reserve for your thirties, if not twenties. And the upshot of that is when the depression came this time, I was not only unprepared for it but completely open and ready for it — a banquet for the shadows. Kind of like my underlying health problems would make me Covid’s most beloved prey in a few years, I was an open list of ways for wolves to get me.
I also stopped writing. Cold turkey. The very idea of writing, fiction or otherwise, sent me into near-panic attacks. It was just a flat no from me, no greater thought or purpose behind it. One funny thing about this sort of free-fall is that everything is up for debate: When your personality is disintegrating you can kind of pick and choose what remains. So I became a not-writer. My name wasn’t on anything, my face wasn’t the face of anything. Glorious.
This is when I quit my Zen-Buddhist trauma-based therapy and went to a new lady who would, as I required, “make me do worksheets and simple exercises about the basics of how to live and stay alive.” (She became a little Facebook famous based on my quotations from our sessions, if you remember that period). I started climbing back, even thinking about writing again.
And I got a new job, this time working for Facebook. I had required that we not repeat my Gawker experience of sitting at the lower-class table, but that promise wasn’t fulfilled. We were content moderators, literally canaries in a trauma mine. I loved it. I loved being on the vanguard of hunting down white power militias and kid-hurters; I loved being right up against the beating heart of America and helping it stay healthy.
What made it suck wasn’t the work itself, but the ass-headed way it was managed, which we learned later was because of our managers being in the middle of the real world on one side and Zuckerberg’s personal concepts on the other side. It really was that simple. He made impossible demands and consultants and managers did what they did.
Meanwhile I’m creating spreadsheets to show mathematically what they’re doing wrong — how management were making it impossible to accomplish their own goals. It was maddening. I knew I wasn’t going to last, no matter how much I loved the work — and my coworkers. Very important part of the job: My young fellow moderators, who I developed obsessions with basically. I loved going to work, I loved doing the work, and I hated everything else.
I crossed my fingers — as we edged closer to 2018 and the actual fall of our democracy based on the stuff we were trying to fix and being kept from fixing — that my curse would kick in and Facebook would fall apart in the spring, just like my last three jobs.
Then came the werewolves.