John Kenney - Talk to Me

On the walls, high-resolution photos of Orson Welles’s character in Citizen Kane. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday . Peter Finch as Howard Beale, looking insane, from Network. Why it was just fictional characters no one ever questioned.

And above it all, the scheisse mantra: NO RULES. JUST CLICKS.

The stories on scheisse were the result of research that in some cases took almost thirty minutes, based, often, on reading something on another website and repackaging it. Story length usually topped out around two hundred words and almost all stories were accompanied by a link to a video, thereby allowing a fifteen-second commercial to run before it. Bylines claimed that twenty-six-year-olds with two months of writing experience were “senior political correspondents,” though most would be hard-pressed to tell you the meaning of the word “gerrymander.”

The site had originally been called Gertrude&Alice , a small New York blog on culture, art, music, and the rich and famous in the 212 area code. It had been started by two women from Princeton, Upper East Side kids with connections. It was buzzy and hip, one of the early websites that generated notice. It also made money. Which attracted buyers, one of whom was the only son of a German industrialist, a thirty-four-year-old billionaire named Henke Tessmer.

Henke bought the site, charming the women who started it, making them rich, and promising to keep the “mission” the same. He fired both of them within a week of taking over, several of the writers quitting in protest when Henke put up a giant poster of Virginia Woolf’s head rather expertly photoshopped onto Kim Kardashian’s body in the office. Thus was born scheisse .

Henke’s mission in life was to shock. Nothing more. To shock in his appearance, his words, his actions. He spoke openly about his sexuality, flirting with women and men equally. “Gender is a construct of the West,” he liked to say. He would barge into the women’s room at scheisse to wash his hands. In the early days harassment suits were filed, settled, the employees long gone.

He claimed he had gone to Oxford and done graduate work at the London School of Economics, though he also claimed to have quit because he was bored. He inhabited a world of half-truths and gauzy reality. When the spirit moved him, he said he’d also done graduate work at MIT, Stanford, and the Sorbonne, all of which he’d apparently quit. There was little the world could teach him.

In almost every serious endeavor in life there are standard operating procedures. Not merely technical but moral, ethical. Law, medicine, journalism, plumbing. A code of conduct. A manual, codified over years of careful thought and experience. Henke did not hold to this worldview. He believed the world had changed in ways so radical that most people still hadn’t grasped them. That facts were dead. That today you could write and say anything you wanted. He believed the internet generation would write the rules as they went along. Had he been in Philadelphia in 1776, he would have said, “Fuck the Constitution. Let’s just see what happens.”

This, he believed, was the essential difference between a place like scheisse and mainstream media. The old guard didn’t get it and they never would. Fake news? There was no such thing. There was only what you could get people to click on. End of story. Perfect example: a story recently about an intern at Procter & Gamble who, while working on the P&G product Dawn dishwashing liquid, posted a tweet that read, We’re going to war with Greece. Who’s with us? The poor kid’s autocorrect marring his thin resume for years to come. The typo was retweeted 1.5 million times in twenty-eight hours. Within three days, protests against the nation of Greece had broken out in a dozen cities around the world. Scheisse ran stories about P&G being a company that unfairly bullied a poor nation, knowing full well it was a typo. They stayed on the story for a week. The hits were spectacular.

Now. Let’s talk about journalistic responsibility. The scheisse worldview assumed that everyone was an adult and as such had a responsibility to find the whole story. Scheisse had no interest in telling you the whole story and if you for some reason (say, the history of responsible journalism for much of the twentieth century) were under the impression that the words on the site were carefully chosen and vetted, reported, and sourced twice ( The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Guardian , etc.), then you were a fool. Because what you didn’t understand was the mission. The mission wasn’t to inform. The mission was to sell to advertisers. Click, friend, at your own peril. Clickeat emptor (Henke’s words).

He’d caused a stir at a TED Talk last year (titled God is dead. And so is The New York Times) by saying nothing was out of bounds. He demanded that the TED audience suggest stories or images too far gone.

Sex? Please.

Private moments in one’s home that had nothing to do with news? Grow up. Everything is news.

The Pope on the toilet? I would pay a million dollars for that photo.

In his talk, Henke said, in part:

“There is a quote that guides me. It was said by digital media thinker Danah Boyd. She said, ‘In the tech sector, we imagined that decentralized networks would bring people together for a healthier democracy. We hung on to this belief even as we saw that this wasn’t playing out. We built the structures for hate to flow along the same pathways as knowledge, but we kept hoping that this wasn’t really happening. We aided and abetted the media’s suicide.’ Now, I agree with every word except one. The last one. I would change the word ‘suicide’ to ‘rebirth.’ Mark this date. Remember this talk. Because you are alive at the birth of new media. Like any birth, it is messy. It screams and cries. It is afraid and cold. It knows nothing. Yet . But it will learn. It is the birth of an entirely new way of communicating. And I am not talking here about the digital age. That is a vehicle no different than the printing press and it bores me. I am talking of a far more profound shift in how we talk to each other, of what is allowable, of what is real and true. Because it is no longer the same. Empiricism is for dead men with beards in bas-relief on university library walls. I can prove or disprove anything. Because there are no more rules. No more guides. To some, it is profoundly disturbing. To me, to the people who work for me, it is liberating.”

There was stunned silence, a few boos, and a smattering of confused applause. Wired magazine recently put Henke on its cover and called him the future of news.

Burrowed in a far corner, a view of the Hudson River on one side, a wooden bookshelf she’d found at a flea market blocking her view of her colleagues on the other side, sat Frances Ford, née Frances Ford Grayson. Franny was a seasoned veteran at age twenty-seven. She was the head of features (stories that could run almost a thousand words as long as they had photos and accompanying video). She had decided a few years ago to refer to herself in print as Frances. Her mother and a few old friends were allowed to call her Franny. She’d dropped her surname, initially because she wanted to make her own career and later out of sheer rage.

At present, Franny was trying to breathe. Her palms were sweaty. Her stomach nurtured a small bubble of tension. She wasn’t sleeping well or enough. Her diet lacked fruits and vegetables. She’d stopped going to SoulCycle and hadn’t played squash in months. Mostly she watched Netflix, ordered in sushi, and drank too much white wine.