If that title got you reading this, then please, calmly put that cat I mentioned back on the floor before I reveal to you that I will not be dishing out the best yoga pose for Scorpio's. No not for Leo's either. Stop. Put the cat back down.
What I'm really here to talk about is my frustration freelancing for Elite Daily, and my continued disgruntlement with major media platforms, as they persevere in their apparent goal of dumming down my own generation.
Now this criticism is coming from an admittedly hypocritical point of view.
There is nothing I can do to not seem ungrateful for the opportunity to publish some of my writing on national sites. I'm extremely hypocritical in dishing out personal criticism for these places when on my own website, I proudly display them under a tab of "Published Work." I understand that. As I've pointed out before, there is nothing perfect in demanding more; you're almost always determined to dig your own grave. We must always be willing to critical, even if it means I never get "published" again.
Hand me the shovel, please.
A Very Sassy and Opinionated Criticism of Elite Daily
When I was a junior in journalism school, I was getting so involved with extra curricular activities on campus that I found my writing skills beginning to rust. I searched out a platform that was simple and easy to get published on, just somewhere that would help me keep my work out there and brush up on what it felt like to work on a piece. Back then I still had Facebook, so naturally, one of the first sites that popped up on my feed was Elite Daily.
Elite Daily was an increasingly popular medium that was spreading like an infectious disease across social media networks. I'm sorry but seriously, that's what it was like. It was freaking everywhere; and just when you thought you'd taken enough antibiotics to wipe that thing out, another cancerous post popped up.
At first I was intrigued, because I saw a couple of posts that really appealed to my fast-food-news conditioned brain. I'm talking about the part that produces "guilty pleasures" and consumes a 140-character Twitter feed. In all honesty, I clicked on a couple of those posts. I believe I even shared (face palm) one about being, yes, an extroverted introvert. Oh god why.
Shortly after having discovered this site, I filled out an application. I should have known better, but I was young and searching for experience: the perfect target.
Not long after I submitted that application, I was accepted as a contributing writer. I sent in my first piece. It was about inter-faith learning between college students, spurred by my recent experience at the InterFaith Youth Core Conference in Atlanta a few months earlier. I knew it wasn't a typical Elite Daily topic in that it didn't involve ex-boyfriends, horoscopes or Pretty Little Liars, but at the time I was passionate in believing that we could change the media megaphone from the inside. This was the beginning of my arrogantly led crusade as a content focused vigilante. Yes, I was determined to be the Batman of in-depth topics. Let's throw another face palm in here for old times' sake.
Over the course of that semester, I submitted two more articles to Elite Daily. One was about the Imposter Syndrome, the other focused on the essence of charity when celebrities get involved. I guess I thought if I could throw Taylor Swift into one of my articles then maybe I could trick more than one person into accidentally reading about the definition of charity.
If you've made it this far into the post, I commend you. It is not easy listening to someone rant about past mistakes. If I wanted to do that for a career I would properly apply at Elite Daily as a permanent staff writer.
Let me continue this particular rant with bringing in the sort of "parent" to Elite Daily: Buzzfeed News.
A Very Sassy and Opinionated Criticism of BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed did for 20-40 year old's what Elite Daily did for 15-25 year olds: it offered quick, simple media in the most palatable way of consumption. I have to say, I envy the kind of futuristic thinking BuzzFeed had when it comes to predicting where media was heading. They accomplished long before many other sites what is commonplace today: fast-food news. And cat memes. BuzzFeed invented cat memes people. Don't fight it.
Take a quick look at these two sites and compare them. They're pretty similar in that they both offer something no newspaper can. They give your brain the quick fix of stupid it desires. Seriously, this is not meant to offend people who like their news broken down into bullet points. This is about a major media platform fronting trending topics as "news," with such classics as "What's the Most Annoying Moment from Gilmore Girls?" and "Parents on Twitter are Sharing the White Lies They Told Their Kids and now I'm Questioning Everything."
I'm not saying we can't enjoy these lazy reads! Just like I'm not saying you can never ever enjoy a quick bite at McDonalds. I'm saying we cannot seriously be living in a wold where McDonalds is encouraged as all six districts of the food pyramid for suggested diet. If that were true of our eating habits, we would find ourselves in an incredibly sick and congested population of lethargic bodies.
It is literally the exact same with our minds and our ability to be informed. If we continue to indulge ourselves with easy-to-read trending topic articles that consist of quick, bulleted bites instead of treating our intellect to an in-depth, researched, perhaps even difficult read, we will find ourselves in a generation of extremely bright people who are now addicted to whatever's easiest.
And unfortunately for us, what tends to follow a generation of people taking the easy way out is more generations of people choosing the path frequently traveled on for much more dangerous issues, like politics, education, and human rights.
Beating a Dead Horse with a Bedazzled Yardstick
It's at this point in writing I must ask myself, "What's so different about what BuzzFeed does and what I'm doing right now? Isn't this post simply someone's opinion, begging to be read as a serious article?" And I find myself once again doubting, or perhaps not understanding, online journalism. I also find myself wanting to delete all of this. It's just depressing.
No one is perfect. No media is perfect. There will literally never be a platform that perfectly blends hard news with soft news, happy news with sad news, biased news with un-biased news. It just can't exist.
I'm obviously cynical in nature, but this fact is actually not meant to be cynical. It's not always a bad thing to be engaged in the struggle. It's what makes us human and what forces us to expand our knowledge of things that differ from what we believe in. Elite Daily and Buzzfeed weren't technically the first, and they certainly won't be the last. At the end of the day, it's not on them to change what they're doing at an expense, it's up to us to tweek the demand to their supply. It's up to us to tell them what we want, and more importantly in their eyes, what will make them money.
I suppose I should end this not-so-little rant with an apology to anyone reading. If you're depressed, please don't be. If you're tired of reading my vent-session, understandable. If you want to pick your cat back up again, please do so.
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