Monthly Archive for May, 2011

On February 6, 2011, the Huffington Post published what has become one of the most infamous and emblematic stories of the internet journalism age. The story concerned the starting time of Super Bowl XLV. Its headline was: “What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?” and it still owns the top Google ranking for the query.

Consider this overly obvious, if oddly formal intro sentence: “Super Bowl 2011 takes place on Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time and 3:30 p.m. Pacific Time.”

The sentence defies the perception that news in the digital era must be as direct and succinct as possible: the year (2011) appears twice, the time zones are written out rather than abbreviated, and the gameday is included even though the previous forty-four Super Bowls have been played on a Sunday. The title of the story contains no information – only the exact search term most people are likely to type into Google. The story continues with four more paragraphs of information unrelated to the Super Bowl kickoff time. This is “news” that doesn’t exist to be read. It was created as a lure to boost web traffic, which drives advertising revenue.

Continue reading ‘What time does the Super Bowl start? Or, internet journalism after content farms’

The continuity of fish

The questions from the cold fish
confound me
-María de Miguel

The fisherman was two hundred hours in the river. Waiting. The tourists paraded on the hotel terrace, and the security guard had already done twenty rounds of the building. The Roman bridge was his company throughout. But for how long? He didn’t go to university anymore. Sometimes his classmates came down with their notes, sat on the bank in the sun and played cards beside him. But he continued flattening the reeds, waiting for fish. Beetles crawled over his face and birds made their nests on his head.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us.

Continue reading ‘Three stories’

I originally intended to submit an introduction I wrote to a book that doesn’t exist. The book was a four-volume biography of Stewart Jessop (b.1894 d.1968) – histologist, philatelist, prominent/ controversial politician, father. Jessop, who did not exist, was loosely based on a mixture of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones (one of Freud’s Committee members), medical practitioners around the late Victorian period, and some engineering lecturers whose lectures I would have attended in college during the mid- to late-1990s. Jessop, in this fictional introduction, is described as a man of extreme and earnest rigour, who, through his heroic scientific efforts, finds a cure for defective parathyroids. However, two incidents contributed to an about-turn, and I subsequently decided to write and submit this work, rather than the introduction to the fabricated book about the fabricated person, to this esteemed, or at least existent, literary journal.

Continue reading ‘Submission’