And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [46]
DR. KARL ROVE’S
FOX NEWS
SNAKE OIL AND MEAT WAGON
“See, it’s a meat wagon,” Gary said. “You can see the meat hanging from it.” I looked even more closely, and indeed I could.
KNOCKOUT
Tremors portending the quake that would upend the competition were felt first, I was surprised to learn after the fact, in the sedate seaside city of La Serena, Chile, founded in 1544 as a port link between Santiago and Lima and reputed still for its handsome sixteenth-century churches. On a hill called Colina el Pino at the city’s eastern edge, in the compound of the Gemini Observatory—which maintains one of the world’s most powerful telescopes at Cerro Tololo, farther up the Andean ridge—a thirty-seven-year-old American named Rob Norris was employed as a software engineer. As he told me later, at 4:38 p.m. local time (the same, in August, as Eastern time) on August 17, he took a break from remotely debugging some telescope code and to read the latest news at the Huffington Post. There he saw a link to the Right-Wing New York Times, and read it.
Two minutes later, Rob passed along the link in an instant message to his friend Chet Farmer, in Houston, Texas. Chet is from Hattiesburg, where he and Rob became friends in the fifth grade. Chet, too, is in the software business, working at a seven-person startup whose employees all work from home. Before Chile, Rob had lived in Austin, and the two would sometimes get together; “but with IM and the fact that he still has an Austin phone number (via the magic of voice-over-IP phones),” Chet remarked to me later via e-mail, “I almost have to GO to Austin to notice he’s not there.” In addition to being a self-described “arts geek” and “leftie (obviously),” Chet also is a “hobby blogger,” maintaining a blog entitled Miscellaneous Heathen. After receiving the link from Rob, he posted the Right-Wing New York Times to his blog at 4:43 p.m. with a note reading: “Hilarious. Hat tip to Rob.”
The readership of Miscellaneous Heathen is negligible, but it did then have at least one extremely powerful reader: Chris Mohney, Chet’s college friend from the University of Alabama who was then the managing editor of the New York gossip site Gawker. Rankings of the nation’s blogs are notoriously inexact, but in one well-respected tally, known as the TTLB Ecosystem, Gawker is the seventh-most-read blog on the entire Internet. Within New York culture-industry circles, Gawker has come to occupy roughly the same place that Spy magazine did in the late 1980s: darkly comical, brutally mean, it crows over the foibles of the city’s most powerful or fashionable. Gawker’s offices were in SoHo, just a few hundred yards from the Huffington Post and six or so blocks south of the print magazine where Will Murphy’s alter ego toiled away his days. And yet the Right-Wing New York Times took a trail leading from Chile through Texas to arrive so near where it started, on the front page of Gawker—where it was posted the next morning, August 18—and soon thereafter at the top of the Contagious Festival.
By the end of that day, Friday, August 18, the Right-Wing New York Times had become one of those websites that was linked wherever you looked. At its peak that morning it was receiving eight thousand visits per hour. It had been featured on BoingBoing, posted to MetaFilter, voted up on Reddit, bookmarked on del.icio.us. In the official rankings its climb was steep and staggering, as this chart of just thirty hours’ traffic will attest:
FIG. 3-6—THE BLOWUP
On surveying the rise in retrospect, I concluded that my strategy—to succeed by playing to multiple audiences—had worked. In the first and most core group, represented by the leftist blogosphere, citations of the site tended to be brief and without comment; to them the condemnation of