![]() One of the best ways to get a job there is to demonstrate your unique ability to add value to the site as a commenter, first. Readers offer the kind of insight that adds value to the article, or an alternative perspective, the staff participates in that conversation, and the whole thing is so useful to everyone involved that it also attracts car designers, race car drivers, engineers, and other people with unique insight to the conversation. Today, one of the things Jalopnik is known for is its strong community. More of them started to actually talk about cars, I started to regularly chat with them, and slowly but surely a sense of community began to develop. And Charles started to act like an advocate for me, encouraging other commenters to knock off the fanfic, and treat me like a human. Over the next few weeks, we began to chat in the comments sections, sometimes even about the cars I was reviewing. That commenter’s name was Charles Bartlett. They responded immediately with profuse apologies, explaining that they never thought I, let alone a car company, would see that stuff. Basically I said thank you, and explained that while I didn’t really understand the author’s obsession with me, and I was flattered, it was beginning to compromise my work. So, one day, I responded to one of the heavily sexualized comments. Me: “We’re a super-serious, heavily-legitimate website you can’t afford not to work with.”Ī Very Stern German Person: *Turns a Hewlett Packard laptop running Windows XP around to reveal a buggy, distorted version of our website complete with a 5,000-word work of tentacle porn, about me, appearing in the same exact piece as a review of one of their cars. And you can imagine how that played in meetings with very conservative car companies. Maybe because one of our sister sites under the Gawker umbrella covered the porn industry, or just because the nature of the Internet at the time gave voice to weirdos, but one of the unifying themes that quickly developed in our comments section was heavily sexualized fan fiction about yours truly. So, they came up any time we would try to convince a car company that we weren’t just a bunch of assholes in our twenties trying to scam free cars. The maxim at the time was, “never read the comments,” but there they were, picking up just after the actual article I’d written left off. The conversations we were having with the car manufacturers weren’t about readership numbers so much as they were about the outright legitimacy of the publication. So, my job was brand building more than it was car writing. The biggest hurdle to reviewing new cars was not, surprisingly, my complete and utter lack of expertise, but rather the relationships with car manufacturers that could grant me access to things more exciting than a Ford Taurus X, and on any sort of timeline that might make us able to compete with the established titles for readers. I was uniquely qualified to do this because, like I said, I’d worked at an actual print magazine before, and somehow that still held enough gravitas that I was able to borrow test cars from car companies. ![]() And also as you’d expect, the comments section was a gaping chasm of unspeakable horror. There was never any unifying thought process behind this feature you got the feeling it was more a box one of the Hungarian developers didn’t know they were supposed to check to disable when they copy and pasted whatever code they used to put the sites together. Like the other sites owned by Gawker Media, there was a function where readers could leave something called a “comment,” under articles. I was 25 or 26 when I started there, and was brought on as the voice of experience, and a sign of legitimacy, since I’d actually had a job at an actual magazine before. That was brand new at the time, and more of an experiment in trying not to be another boring car website than it was a viable business. Way back in the mid-2000s, I was working as Road Test Editor for a little blog called Jalopnik. Since the point of this little project is to restore a sense of community around my work, it might be relevant to tell you how I discovered the value of online communities for the first time. ![]()
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