What a brutal month for the media. Almost every day, publications announce layoffs and business closures. sports illustrated The company just fired nearly its entire staff after overcoming an embarrassing scandal involving AI-generated articles. It's unclear what the future holds for defunct magazines, but the sad fate of another once-great medium is a foreshadowing of what lies ahead for fallen media properties.
In 2018, indie women's website The Hairpin shut down, along with its sister site The Owl. This year, Hairpin is back like Frankenstein, packed with reckless AI-generated articles to attract search engine traffic. (Example headings: “When you remember a dream, what does it mean?” and “White Town's 'Your Lady' Explained.”) Some of the original articles survive, but have been reformatted in strange ways and the author's byline has been replaced with: A common male name for people who don't seem to exist. Author Kelly Conaboy's articles about celebrity teeth are currently published under the name “James Nolen,” but no trace of him can be found online.
This would be a terrible outcome for independent media properties. In the case of The Hairpin, this was particularly offensive because the site was the antithesis of a content mill. It never attracted a large audience or followed trending topics. It was an author-driven website that found an audience by being experimental, intimate, and weird.It served as a launching pad for the bona fide stars of the past. new york times Reporter Jazmyn Hughes bojack horseman With designer Lisa Hanawalt new yorker Because writer Gia Tolentino isn't about optimizing revenue per click, she's about nurturing fresh ideas and getting people to tell jokes.
In an attempt to understand the future of the medium, I tracked down The Hairpin's new owner, a Serbian DJ named Nebojša Vujinovic Vujo. He says this site is just the latest title of his more than 2,000 websites, and admits that the majority of new posts on The Hairpin are actually generated by AI. . “We buy new websites almost every day,” he says.
Vjinović Vujo was drawn to The Hairpin because of its “great reputation and great backlinks,” which he values because it helps with Google rankings. “That's common on the Internet today.” He said he plans to “add all previous authors to the website” in the future. But his top priority is launching more new algorithm-generated content.
Vujo was able to purchase The Hairpin because the original owner let the domain expire.
Choire Sicha currently works as a journalist. new york Magazine is one of its former owners and has accepted responsibility for losing control of the domain. “Traditionally, when independent media companies go out of business, succession and estate planning is not well handled, and I think that was definitely the case for us,” Sicha says. “We definitely weren't as careful as we could or should have been.”
This type of domain occupation is likely to become more common in the future, so distressed media assets will need to prioritize estate planning. “The fact that anyone can easily launch a site containing his 100 or so AI-generated blog posts based on a corpus of their own choosing is a game-changer for expired domain scavengers. I'm sure there are,” said John Mahoney. The Awl's Spam Digital Media Business Dynamics. “As always, the conversation about the AI revolution. [insert-industry-of-choice]”” overlooks the true pioneers of the web: spammers and SEO scammers. ”
When the Hairpin's original human staff members ask about the site's fate, they are understandably upset. “If there is this word, Death by a thousand paper cuts Then you're probably missing a phrase that matches this experience,” says former editor Haley Mrotek. “Zombified by a thousand bots, Probably, I don't know if it has the same resonance. ”
