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In September, when it wasn’t quite autumn in New York but after the long hot summer had ended, I rode up an elevator in New York’s Flat Iron district to the offices of First Look Media to meet with the guerrilla editors of The Racket. The Racket has since folded, without ever launching. Which is a shame, not only because it had built a great team full of interesting writers, but also because it was going to be a lot of fun.
The Racket was to be a showcase for Matt Taibbi,the Rolling Stone reporter who made a name for himself running a newspaper in Russia before becoming one of the financial industry’s harshest critics. Taibbi hired great, voicey, no-bullshit editors like Alex Pareene and Edith Zimmerman. The plan was to make an Internet magazine that mixed hard-hitting reporting and in-depth features with wicked, Spy magazine-style satire. And the occasional kitten video.
But The Racket is dead now. Its parent, First Look Media, put a bullet in it and dumped the body with a short blog post. Buh-bye. First Look is financed by Pierre Omidyar, an eBay founder, who last year announced he was dropping hundreds of millions into a new media organization. It was to be built around strong talents and voices. First, Omidyar lured Edward Snowden’s scribe, Glenn Greenwald, away from The Guardian to start The Intercept, and poached John Cook, the editor-in-chief of Gawker and an amazing investigative journalist in his own right, to edit it. It launched in February, and enjoyed a few scoops. The Racket was going to be act two.
And for sure, over the summer and into the fall, The Racket was cruising along with the kind of editorial independence only a billionaire can buy you. It had no immediate deliverables: no traffic goals, no revenue plan, not even an ad sales team. The only plan was to build an audience. Sure, it would have to find a business model eventually, Taibbi admitted (you can’t depend on a benevolent billionaire forever). But in September, they were focused solely on breathing life into it, and letting it exist.
Insurgent journalism
“We’re going to be launching the full site probably in January, but in October there’s going to be a soft launch,” Taibbi told me. “There’s going to be a bit of an insurgent quality to it, where we may—in not an entirely welcome way—appear on somebody else’s site, and start publishing on it.”
“We’re just going to take over BuzzFeed Community Content for like a week and go nuts on it, and then disappear,” interjected Alex Pareene, The Racket’s deputy editor.
“Then we’ll go someplace else!” Taibbi shot back, excited now, as they started finishing each others’ sentences. “We’ll show up in the comments of somebody else’s site.”
“I think the idea is to break some news in the comments section of someone else’s site,” quipped Pareene.
“Or to, like, advance the reporting of a story in its comments,” said Taibbi, finishing the thought.
The prank was meant to drum up some initial attention. It was the sugar to go with the spinach of its serious reporting and longer features, but reporting and research would be the backbone of the publication. Ken Silverstein, who runs Harper’s Magazine‘s D.C. bureau, signed on to contribute a story. Taibbi had his own major story to unleash, one that would serve up evidence of criminal wrongdoing by one of the country’s largest banks. The Racket wanted to be prankish and fun. But all that lampooning would be in the service of satirizing what they saw as bad journalism.
Bad journalism, in The Racket’s eyes, was a publication like The New Republic. While TNR has managed to outlast The Racket by about 100 years, it’s had its own turmoil recently, after its owner (Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes) clumsily canned editor-in-chief Franklin Foer in order to replace him with an editor who once ran Gawker, then watched as two thirds of the staff and writers walked out in protest.
But way back in September, and really throughout this past summer, The Racket already was going at Foer in its own quiet, yet suitably obnoxious, way. After noticing that he had fewer than 10,000 followers on Twitter, they bought him 100,000 in chunks of a few thousand at a time—although the number was in constant flux because Twitter kept zapping the bot accounts. The point to all of it was … well … They didn’t really seem to have one? Other than that Foer represented the kind of conventional thinking and anodyne voice that was at the helm of too many old media properties. So the plan, they said, was to mess with him by buying him the kind of large following the editor of something like The New Republic deserved—and then some. “We want to make him the Justin Bieber of centrist beltway journalism,” said Taibbi.
The Racket, on the other hand, was to be provocative and outrageous. It would be your loud friend at a dinner party, taking chances.
Flaunting bias
“The whole site is a reaction to the clickbait, robotic, aggregating direction to journalism that’s the direction everything’s going on the Internet. We want readers to feel like everything they see on the site was the creation of an individual human being,” said Taibbi. A big part of that was going to be an emphasis on voice. The Racket was going to reject the dry, third-person style of the traditional media for strongly opinionated writing that, rather attempting to hide its biases, would flaunt them. It would be a way to connect with the audience and even drive its own reporting.
“Why did Ed Snowden go to Glenn Greenwald?” asked Taibbi. “He felt like he knew Glenn, just from reading Glenn. He had a sense of him as a person and trusted him. Voice is one of those ways that helps readers trust you a little bit more because they have a sense of you as a person.”
“They can tell you’re an enormous asshole,” explained Pareene, and everyone laughed. “’I can tell that he’s not trying to hide the fact that he’s just a tremendous dick,’”
It was striking how much laughter there was. Others in the First Look office told me that again and again throughout the days and weeks, there would be sudden loud bursts of laughter from the back corner of the office where The Racket staff was plotting its future, one that revolved around an irreverent voice.
“So much of the news sites that are launching just seem bloodless, like 538 and Vox in particular,” said Pareene. “They’re technocratic,” finished Taibbi.
“They do good work but the voice of the site is just so dry and neutral,” said Pareene. “We want to be loudly shouting opinions at people until they get mad at us.”
“Yesterday I went to the occult bookstore in Bushwick,” said Pareene. “The guy who owns the shop throws runes. I wanted to get someone who reads animal entrails. We’re going to predict who is going to take the Senate with occult practices—we’re only going to use occult practices to predict things. Edith is also making us a Tarot deck.”
“We also have an idea we’re calling Apartment 538, a Facebook community of people who look like Nate Silver, and we’re just going to poll them on things,” said Taibbi. “Instead of having a Nate Silver-produced poll we’re just going to poll 87 people who look like Nate Silver.”
“That’s why we were looking for people who looked like Nate Silver,” explained Pareene, as if that explained anything. He pulled up his laptop.
“We outsourced Thomas Friedman to an Indian content farm, where they produce for pennies a word, any kind of material you want. Really, it’s terrible and I felt kind of guilty after I did this. But you hire them to write a blog post or an article, and I hired this company to write ten stories about globalization and the economy. I basically told them I wanted them to write a Thomas Friedman article, I told them I wanted then to write an article about globalization and its effect on the workforce that’s positive about globalization, speaks about the challenges, but in the end works out for everyone. I told them to quote a cab driver. I just gave them Friedman’s theses, and asked them to write 800 words, and they did.”
“The joke here is that Thomas Friedman is always talking about the benefits of globalization,” says Taibbi.
“And so instead of paying Thomas Friedman whatever the New York Times pays him, I paid a couple hundred bucks and got a month’s worth of columns,” said Pareene.
“To show the effects of globalization,” laughed Taibbi.
“Exactly!” agreed Pareene.
“We can have Thomas Friedman for 1,000 times less the cost,” said Taibbi, with his brow furrowed seriously now.
New media fluency
There would be videos to go along with the meatier stories—like Taibbi’s planned launch feature—both to help people understand the more complicated aspects of financial story, and to stand alone as free agents on the Internet, getting passed around on Facebook and Tumblr and other places and driving people back to the original story.
“Everybody wants to use tools to try to figure out a way to create viral content. Good writing, making good videos—it’s all intuitive. You shouldn’t be using machines,” said Taibbi.
“When you have the viral prediction machine, then you start reverse engineering it, and the end result of that is fucking Upworthy, where everything is manipulative. You end up defeating the reader when you try to force something on Facebook,” explained Pareene.
“We want to have a thing on a site where you click a button and it goes to a webcam of Felix Salmon just free associating about something,” said Taibbi. Or maybe it was Pareene. It didn’t even matter anymore. They were fully of one mind by now.
“We want to feed him Adderall.”
“Yeah, feed him Adderall. Click here for 40 seconds of Felix Salmon free associating on Adderall.”
“We want to have a box that pops up and says, ‘what does an Australian teen think about this,’ because Elle is obsessed with Australian Tumblr teens. She says they’re the funniest people in the world, Australian Tumblr teens, and why not have those easter eggs for your story, when the Web allows you to do that?”
“You’re 3,000 words through this long piece about whatever and if you don’t want to continue reading you can just click here and see Australian Tumblr teens talking about something.”
“It’s like an escape hatch.”
“Exactly!”
They’re really getting worked up now, and it’s hilarious. I’m even laughing. It’s all a sham. Everything is terrible. Advertising can’t work unless it’s evil. You’re getting actively stupider. (Is stupider a word?) You could just see how it would all work.
Gone before it started
And then, just like that, it ended. Over. Done.
In late October, New York Magazine broke the news that Taibbi was leaving The Racket. According to multiple accounts, Taibbi couldn’t work in the confines that First Look wanted him to—he balked at communicating in Asana instead of email, or coming up with a responsibility assignment matrix for every project. When First Look tried to wedge him into a lesser role, he walked away. His first big bombshell feature, the one that The Racket was planning to launch with, showed up in Rolling Stone shortly thereafter. A few days after that, John Cook announced he was leaving The Intercept.
By the time First Look finally formally killed The Racket, not even clicking on an Australian Teen Tumblr could make it any better. But at least Foer still enjoys quite a large following on Twitter.
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