Confessions of a Fake News Writer
I just wanted to write for a living
It’s Christmas Day. While everyone else is sat at home drinking eggnog and watching Die Hard, I’m in the fancy office of a popular clickbait farm. It’s a converted warehouse littered with MacBooks, freebies sent from companies desperate for their product to be plugged, and the pingpong tables, game consoles, and bar you’ll find in every office that wants you to be there as much as possible.
There are four writers on the evening shift today, and we’re all swigging Jack Daniels straight from the bottle. Everyone’s a bit agitated because it’s Christmas Day, and not enough people are reading our atrocious 300-word blog posts with titles like “5 Things You Won’t Believe About Kanye West, Number 4 Will Really Shock You” because, unlike us, they’re spending the holidays with people they love and have forgotten about reading trash online.
The work in our content mill (situated, ironically enough, in an old mill) is not for the faint-hearted. Each writer has to produce eight articles a day, five days a week. If you don’t get decent traffic, you’ll be summoned to the shiny boardroom and told, “Look, it’s not good enough. If you can’t do the job, we’ll get people who can.” This happens routinely. Things get very tense.
“Fuck it, let’s make it up.”
