Welcome to the fifth edition of Off The Fence: our fortnightly newsletter-slash-propaganda arm. Today’s ‘insider’ number: a slice of clickbait hell from Ralph Jones, who survived working in the content coalface. Next, to celebrate Hugh Grant’s sixtieth birthday, we’re republishing his entry from our Issue Three cover feature about London’s rudest people. There’s a short piece on Keir Starmer and the IRA, while we finish with a desperate plea to the public: we need information about James O’Brien and the Second Summer of Love.
Wipe, Wipe and Wipe Again: Life in the Click Mines
I won't name the website I used to work for. But I'll tell you some of the suggested titles we could have launched with: Badass Cookie. Cheeky Tap. Neon Union. Daily Wipe.
If these seem like unrelated words thrown out by middle-aged men like wet tissues at a wall, that's because they were. But the company’s senior management were so proud of these godawful titles that they couldn’t wait to unveil them. Imagine working for a website that had considered all of the worldly options available and then decided to call itself Daily Wipe. ‘And what do you do?’ ‘I write for a website called Daily W- ah forget it.’
Fortunately, senior management chose none of these horrific names. But I'll call it Daily Wipe anyway.
Once I had finished my Magazine Journalism MA at City University, I raced down every potential employment avenue. I thought that all jobs with ‘Writer’ in the title, no matter how irrelevant to my interests, badly paid or tedious, were worth chasing.
I met a woman near Sloane Square for a coffee and told her that yes, writing for her website about French businesswomen was pretty much why I had planned to go into journalism in the first place, please give me money, please give me the money that you have. She didn’t seem convinced for some reason.
So I was overjoyed when finally I got a call from the Daily Wipe editor and he offered me a full-time job. For a non-negotiable £18,000 salary Daily Wipe had asked for article ideas over the phone, during an interview that included a written test asking questions about fractions among other things, and also a three-day trial period, in which I wrote articles for the website and prayed that people read them. Looking back, it was more like applying for a job at Google.
This would go on to be one of the problems: that the company modelled itself on employers like Google but also claimed to be a start-up. Given that start-ups are supposed to be young companies, and this company had existed for close to a decade, ‘start-up’ seemed to be a synonym for ‘company with not a lot of money’. I’ve not worked at Google but I’m struggling to picture having to fight for weeks, as one editor did, for the right for the office to have a fruit bowl.
It became clear at some point that the company was losing and replacing employees with impressive speed. This applied almost exclusively to the sales department. On Monday you'd chat to a new employee by the kettle; by Friday he'd have disappeared, as though he had never really existed. This rapid regeneration didn't extend to the creative side of Daily Wipe, which – in the early days, when we were too naïve to leave – retained its staff relatively well. But not for all that long.
Treating BuzzFeed as our primary rival, our pieces were almost exclusively listicles about relatable experiences for our audience of late teens and twenty-somethings. My job was less 'writer' and more ‘journalism graduate who trawls the internet for Mean Girls gifs'. Every week I had a meeting with my editor, in which I had to invent five goals for myself. Given that my job involved literally nothing other than creating listicles, writing these targets was the most creativity I exhibited all week.
Every Friday the entire team – around 30 people – would gather in the communal kitchen, each of us expected to announce one thing we had achieved that week. We then received a round of applause as though we were schoolchildren. The ghosts of recently dismissed staff sat like Banquo on the multicoloured chairs. At a similar gathering, one of the team played a four-minute-and-nineteen-seconds-long recording set to music, featuring the repetition of the line ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’ I went back to my desk and continued to work on my piece about texts that the Harry Potter characters might have written if they'd had phones.
The organisation was run by a delicious mix of sociopaths and psychopaths. One boasted of how he had made his money selling knock-off charity wristbands on eBay – and not giving any of the money to the charity in question. This was the same man who would say, ‘I understand,’ approximately 35 times while listening to complaints about the company not offering sick pay. Another of the bosses would forever stand at the end of the work stations, talking to one of his team, blissfully unaware that his stocky frame was blocking the walkway for anyone who might want to use it as a walkway. He also told one of his sales team to take business cards when she used her annual leave to go to Glastonbury. If you went to your grandma's funeral, you had money taken away from you – or, in the case of one employee, you were called by your boss twice to talk about work while at the funeral. The sales team's motto was 'Just Fucking Do It' – like an early, drunken version of the Nike slogan.
Anonymised feedback was so non-anonymous that people were cornered to explain what they meant by their criticism. Daily Wipe's reviews on Glassdoor are so scathing that senior management seem to have tried to set up a new page in which they tell people not to listen to the bad reviews.
By no means was the website unsuccessful. Most of our traffic came through our Facebook page, which was one of the most popular in the youth content market, despite being unknown to anyone who wasn’t seventeen. Its success often derived from posting viral videos other people had made and pretending this was a strategy. Like everything else we did, it was OK: everyone else was doing it. BuzzFeed, Ladbible etc. were chasing Facebook video views in the days when we believed this would solve all our problems. To most of the hundreds of thousands of people who ‘liked’ our page, the articles themselves may have largely been white noise, but our reach was decent and we had devoted readers. When some of the writing team hit one million views for a piece, they were given a £200 bonus (but not the trip to Europe which they had been promised). Despite this success, and for reasons that are still mysterious, one day our editor was fired out of the blue, packing his things, never to be seen again. I had been at risk of failing my six-month probation period: in a flash, his departure meant I stayed. For some reason.
I did eventually escape, into the outstretched arms of a writing job that could legitimately be called journalistic. At Daily Wipe I knew I had been trapped in something that felt weirdly like a cult: people mysteriously disappeared; its leaders were unpredictable; it made little sense to outsiders. I remember seeing sales people who were in so deep, so terrified of being fired, that they would have done anything – shaved off all their body hair; covered up a murder; walked to India – in order to stay with the company. Even for me, a certain amount of Stockholm Syndrome set in.
Like so many brands in the digital media landscape, Daily Wipe’s days were numbered. After a while, people clearly didn’t need to wipe every day. And, although the website no longer exists, maybe in among the Lord of the Rings GIFs it taught me something. Maybe I could only tell what a good company looked like by spending nine months at a hilariously bad one. The website had a good run but in retrospect it was too chaotic to survive. Now it exists mainly in the memories of the people who worked there. Unfortunately for Daily Wipe, these memories are almost exclusively bad.
Sir Keir’s Secrets
Last week, the Prime Minister infuriated the Leader of the Opposition by insisting that he supported terrorism. Starmer pointed to his five years as Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008-2013; when he was working daily on the gravest matters of national security: the PM refused to apologise (despite admonishment from the Speaker of the House).
Commentators were quick to point out the grim irony: Claire Fox, who defended the Warrington bombing in 1993, is currently measuring her ermine for the House of Lords, courtesy of Boris Johnson’s nomination.
Another of Starmer’s appointments could perhaps explain his dignified rage with Johnson’s prevaricating non-apology. From 2003-2008, he was the human rights advisor to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, who supervised the activities of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
Now, most aspects of this position are purposefully opaque, yet this astonishing article gives vivid detail on what might have been Starmer’s most sensitive task: advising the police investigation into Stormontgate.
The devolved government in Belfast had collapsed, after the PSNI had tried to bag the IRA’s director of intelligence: Bobby Storey. They missed him, instead arresting Sinn Fein administrator Denis Donaldson. After three years, the charges were dropped in December 2005, but then Donaldson was revealed to be a British spy all along. He was then murdered in a case that is still unsolved.
(From 2003-2005, the current Prime Minister denied then admitted to an affair with Petronella Wyatt, accused the city of Liverpool of ‘wallowing in grief’ in an editorial for The Spectator and published his first novel: 72 Virgins: A Comedy of Errors.)
Many Happy Returns of the Day!
In spring of this year, we published a list of London’s rudest people, giving examples of what they’d done to earn their position. Pride of place went to yesterday’s birthday boy, Hugh Grant. We’re republishing his entry, to celebrate Hugh’s journey into his seventh decade. To read the full list, buy Issue Three here.
One of Grant’s most famous roles was the lovestruck Prime Minister he played in Richard Curtis’ awww-along Love, Actually. Off-camera, Hugh’s festive cheer is somewhat less in evidence. One correspondent, who had a part-time job selling Christmas trees in West London, relays the following tale: ‘I tried to sell a tree to Hugh Grant last year and he refused to pay full price. He then told me that my job was shit and that buying trees was a waste of time. He finished by writing down his details. On reaching the line labeled name, he just looked up and said, “Well, you know that of course.” It made my skin crawl.’
If you recall, Grant also played the lead in About a Boy, in which he struggles to get to grips with the reality of dating a woman who has a child. This brings us a little closer to the truth. At a school prize-giving, one reader found themselves seated behind him. Hugh spent the entire ceremony telling the woman next to him that not only did he not want to be there, but also that having kids was a waste of time, adding that it had ruined the lives of all his friends. He was telling her how much he personally hated children when she started clapping loudly – her eight-year-old son was receiving an award. (Of course, this happened before 2011, the year Grant fathered the first of the five children that now make up his brood.)
Meanwhile, at The Fence
For Laughs: ‘Evelyn Waugh: The spectre of God’s grace haunts your attempts to hang out with people posher than yourself.’ Our guide to the paint-by-numbers plots of literary giants.
Also for laughs, sort of: ‘Ideas, causes, dreams, go to die in Oxford.’ Fergus Butler-Gallie on the elephant’s graveyard of English idealism.
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James O’Brien: Reach for the Lasers!
It’s astonishing that James O’Brien has found the time to write another book: How Not To Be Wrong hits stores on October 22nd. In anticipation of this pulsating volume, we would like to share this video of O’Brien celebrating how club culture ‘made him’. Within, O’Brien relays his times at the legendary Hacienda club in Manchester in the Second Summer of Love, way back in 1988.
James would have then been sixteen years old, and a pupil at Ampleforth College, the strict Catholic boarding school, isolated in a valley deep in the North Yorkshire Moors. O’Brien then relays how he went to London, where ‘Ministry of Sound opened a few years later and then Fabric a few years after that’. (Ministry of Sound opened in 1991; Fabric in 1999).
Now, we don’t take the LBC presenter to be someone who indulges in fantasy just for exposure, so if you have footage, photos or accounts of our favourite centrist shock-jock dancing to a four-to-the-floor beat, then be advised: The Fence would like to hear from you.
Wishing you all the best as we re-enter plague season,
Yours,
TF
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