Former editor, Marc
Ritter, recalls the afternoon when he returned to Quisling's
SoHo, NY, offices to find burly men repossessing computer equipment
and furniture, and instinctively knew that the era of the online
media conglomerate was over:
“A sea change was taking
place in front of me. I was literally watching a paradigm being
dismantled piece-by-piece before my eyes. When one of the departing
repo-men handed me a form to sign, I told him how humbled I was to
have been given a front row seat at such a pivotal moment in the
history of mass-media communications.”
In the aftermath, while
panicked Quisling creditors attempted to establish the
whereabouts of their investment, and redundant staff resigned
themselves to the prospect of a grim future, where even an 8oz
steamed soy latte, with extra wheatgrass essence, might lie beyond
their financial means, Ritter was able to observe the situation with
a cool detachment:
“As a clickbait media
website we lost our way when we tied ourselves down to a premises,
beanbag chairs and ping-pong tables. Online celebrity journalism
needed to get back to its seamy origins and that meant a return to
the gutter.”
Since July, Ritter has run
Hoblo - one of a growing number of online editorials at the
vanguard of an edgy new trend in pop-up blogging.
“It feels right and it
feels now,” he tells me when we meet, appropriately enough, at a
pop-up restaurant in up-and-coming Washington Heights, NY, where a
dressed down hipster clientèle await the ladling of a nondescript
opaque brown soup into waxed paper cups.
As we shuffle along the
queue, he tells me more about his role in the rise of the street
blog:
“The location of Hoblo
changes on a daily, or sometimes even hourly
basis, depending on environmental factors, which is what makes it so
exciting. I could be blogging from a branch of McDonalds, a shop
doorway, or a park bench. The only limits are the proximity of free
wi-fi and the battery life on my iPod.”
A freedom from the
constraints of office life has given Ritter the opportunity to
reconnect with the city that gave birth to Quisling in
the carefree summer of 2008:
“Last week I was sitting
in Central Park watching as some fallen leaves caught by the breeze
chased after a young female jogger. It really brought home to me
something I think Laurie Penny said about 90% of all vegetation on
the earth being constructs of the patriarchy.
“Unfortunately my
electronics were dead so I wrote my article on a piece of cardboard
and paraded around Times Square offering to read it to people for a
small sum.”
Ritter was later arrested
by the police and his article confiscated.
“There are still certain
topics in this country that people aren't comfortable discussing. You
can tell when you've hit a nerve,” he says conspiratorially, wiping
a glistening brown smear of congealing soup from his week-old
moustache with the back of his gloved hand.
Hoblo, he
tells me, is a leaner product than Quisling. A
conscious attempt has been made to bring down overheads:
“I told my former
interns at Quisling not
to worry. There are other companies out
there where someone with a grossly-inflated sense of their own
importance will shout at you for getting their coffee order slightly
wrong. And the good news is that they'll pay you exactly the same
amount as we did.”
In addition to downsizing
staff costs, Hoblo, has also
significantly reduced expenditure on premises and I.T:
“Ask me where my company
servers are. I don't know. I've delegated that part of the operation
to LiveJournal and Instagram. I log-on to their sites with my user
details and post my content. They take care of the rest.”
As the business model for
online media content delivery changes, so too have its sources of
revenue:
“Previously our company
was heavily reliant on sponsors and income derived from advertising.
In hindsight this approach put barriers between ourselves and our
readers. Now my subscribers are able to pay me directly for content
by simply depositing a few coins in the paper cup that I keep with
me.”
Attempts at opening new
revenue streams have met with mixed results: In the past month Ritter
has been arrested twice – on one occasion for trash theft and, on
another, for stealing a pair of cashmere fingerless gloves from an
upmarket boutique:
“I was allowed to keep
them,” he boasts, proudly holding up his hands for my inspection.
The gloves are already showing signs of considerable wear.
More recently Ritter was
cautioned by police after he was observed peering in through the
ground floor window of a Brooklyn residence.
Explaining his most recent
run in with the law he tells me:
“I am methodically
checking all residences in the New York area until I locate the
dwelling of one Mr Hulk Hogan. Journalism is all about leg work and
I've got two of them.”
It is late evening when
Ritter and I finally part company on West 13th Street, in
the heart of Manhattan's meatpacking district. Darkness has fallen
and the cold is already beginning to bite. I slip him a few dollars
to pay for the content I have accessed on Hoblo and advise him
to find somewhere warm to stay the night. He thanks me graciously.
As I turn around and head
for the bright lights of Lexington Avenue I hear him call out behind
me:
“I'll be alright. I just
need... You know that Rebecca kicked me out..."
Mercifully, at this point,
I round the corner and am suddenly beyond the range of his broken
monologue.
As Malvin Wald once
concluded “There are eight million stories in the naked city.”
Most of them concern the amusing activities of cats, but some are sob
stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment