I was once in a meeting with a senior executive at...

Sunday, July 24, 2011

I was once in a meeting with a senior executive at a company I used to work for during which he suggested that the two things that did the best on the internet were lists and obituaries. (What were the ten commandments, he asked, but a list? What was the bible but one long litany of death?) He encouraged us, the bloggers in the room, to try and do more of both. Later, I joked to a colleague that the end rationale of that kind of thinking was actually staging a murder ourselves—first documenting the process step by step, then crafting a heartfelt farewell to our victim.

In practice, of course, what this attitude translated to was writing tons and tons of obituaries, more than I could even keep count of. Toward the end of the job I began to refuse on principle to write them since it seemed like the technology and the pageview incentives bent so inexorably to the dead that our need for them to die was actually killing them.

I don’t have that job anymore, but yesterday, I found myself writing another one anyway. I can’t say I felt any better about it.