James King

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“I Saw Basic Journalism Standards And Ethics Casually And Routinely Ignored”

March 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Figuring out the future of paid journalism isn’t just about making the economics work but by doing so while actually turning out original and intelligent reporting that has integrity. That’s something often lost on media analysts eager to bury the legacy of twentieth-century journalism, a mixed bag, sure, but an era that saw the best of reportage reach never-before-seen heights. We live in a fuller and deeper time because everyone is potentially a citizen journalist (a good thing), but we shouldn’t reflexively accept Buzzfeed and the like as the way forward simply because of page views or ad sales. From James King’s Gawker post, “My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online“:

The eager paradigm-proclaimer Michael Wolff used his USA Today media column last August to praise the Mail’s business model as having succeeded where other, better-funded and more prestigious publications have failed. Under the headline “Daily Mail Solves Internet Paradox,” Wolff lauded the publication’s “180 million unique visitors a month” and suggested that if other publications want to survive the “digital migration” they should adopt a model similar to that of the Mail’s.

What Wolff failed to acknowledge: the Mail’s editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication.

Yes, most outlets regularly aggregate other publications’ work in the quest for readership and material, and yes, papers throughout history have strived for the grabbiest headlines facts will allow. But what DailyMail.com does goes beyond anything practiced by anything else calling itself a newspaper. In a little more than a year of working in the Mail’s New York newsroom, I saw basic journalism standards and ethics casually and routinely ignored. I saw other publications’ work lifted wholesale. I watched editors at the most highly trafficked English-language online newspaper in the world publish information they knew to be inaccurate.

“We do things a little differently than you might be used to,” U.S. editor Katherine Thomson told me, early in my time there.

She was right. …

The production process was simple. During a day shift—8 a.m. to about 6 p.m—four news editors stationed together near Clarke’s desk assigned stories to reporters from a continually updated list of other publications’ articles, to which I did not have access. Throughout the day, they would monitor the website’s traffic to determine what was getting clicked on and what to remove from the homepage.

When a writer was free to write a story, he or she simply would shout “I’m free” and an editor would assign a link to an article on the list. In many cases, it would be accompanied by a sensationalized headline—one that may or may not have been accurate—for the writer to use.

During a typical 10-hour shift, I would catch four to seven articles this way. Unlike at other publications for which I’ve worked, writers weren’t tasked with finding their own stories or calling sources. We were simply given stories written by other publications and essentially told to rewrite them. And unlike at other publications where aggregation writers are encouraged to find a unique angle or to add some information missing from an original report, the way to make a story your own at the Mail is to pass off someone else’s work as your own.•

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“Time Drifts By On A Languorous Haze Of Smoke And Hair Spray And Blow-Dryer Heat”

June 6, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I read the 1996 New York Time Magazine article “James Is a Girl” some time ago but hadn’t recalled that it was written by Jennifer Egan, who has, of course, since become a hugely acclaimed novelist. The titular girl with the boy’s name was the 16-year-old Nebraska-born model James King, a scary mix of adult and child, who is known today as the actress Jaime King. Unmentioned in the piece was that the teen already had a raging heroin habit. An excerpt:

“When James has finished her breakfast — tea, a small pain au chocolat and a chain of Marlboros — I walk with her and Samersova to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where the Galliano show is to take place. Despite the balmy weather, Paris has been a mess — a general strike and the resulting gridlock have filled the air with a throat-scorching smog; the proliferation of terrorist bombs in subways and garbage cans has led to a heavy police presence on the streets. Yet the fashion world feels eerily removed from all this. At the backstage entrance to the Galliano show, the most pressing question is who will get in and who won’t. Fashion shows used to be sedate affairs catering mostly to magazine editors and department-store buyers. Now that models have become icons, the shows have about them an air of exquisite urgency: they’re cultural high-low events, like a Stones concert in the 1970’s.

Though the show isn’t scheduled to start until 6:30 P.M., models like James who aren’t yet stars are summoned hours ahead to have their hair and makeup done, so that the top models can arrive last and enjoy the full attention of the staff members. In a windowless backstage area, time drifts by on a languorous haze of smoke and hair spray and blow-dryer heat. A dance beat throbs unnoticed, like a pulse. James sips a can of Heineken and smokes. She picked up a horrible cough in Milan and developed shingles on her back from stress — a wide brush stroke of tiny purple blisters that she takes obvious glee in showing people. Samersova nags at her to take her medicine.

James likes to tell people that she and Samersova are Tauruses. ‘I mean she is the second me,’ James says. ‘That’s why I bring her here, because I know that when I’m too frazzled to make a rational decision I can trust her because we think exactly the same. I mean she’s like a boyfriend but not.’

James seems quite childlike at times — she’s easily distracted, prone to slouching and staring into space, then snapping to attention in a fit of enthusiasm. She’s physically affectionate in a sweet, unself-conscious way, always hugging people and leaning against them. She can be insecure, like the time she accused a Company Management driver of preferring to drive another model rather than herself, then stalked away, looking as if she might cry. Yet other moments she seems much older than 16, so jaded as to be unshockable. She has a pierced nipple, a large tattoo of a winged fairy on her lower back, refers to people in their 20’s as ‘kids’ and frequently invokes her ‘whole life,’ as if this were an endless expanse of time. These contradictions are all present, somehow, in her face, which looks freshly minted in its innocence yet, somehow, knowing.”

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