New York Times

Hot takes are dead… here’s why

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About six months ago, I wrote an email that for some reason I never sent. In that email, I wondered what had happened to James Altucher’s writing.

The background is this:

James Altucher is an online personality, a podcaster and also writer who used to write daily.

James is one of few people whose daily writing I enjoyed reading. Plus I’ve gotten multiple really valuable ideas from James that have transformed how I work.

James used to write regularly on his own site.

But his last post there came on June 15 2021. Since then he’s published a few pieces on other sites including LinkedIn, but his writing has largely disappeared.

There aren’t many people online that I would miss if they got swallowed by a sinkhole.

But James Altucher is one, largely because I’ve found his writing both insightful and valuable.

So I was wondering what happened to his writing and wishing somebody could tell me.

Well, I found out. James revealed it himself on a recent podcast.

Back in August 2020, he wrote an article titled, “New York City is dead forever… here’s why.”

James lived most of his life in NYC, but in that article, he predicted the death of the city based on the effects of the corona pandemic.

That article went very viral. It got a huge amount of readership, and also a huge amount of blowback.

And maybe most painful to James, who used to own a comedy club, “The New York is dead” piece got Jerry Seinfeld to write a trolling response in the lying New York Times in which he only referred to James as “some putz on LinkedIn.”

With all that blowback, and the personal attack by Jerry Seinfeld, James gradually retreated from writing. Maybe he will get his courage back to write daily. Or maybe he won’t.

I’m not sure what my point is. I guess there are many.

Such as, it’s harder to not care what people think that most of us would like.

Such as, don’t pick on people who are known to be combative (New Yorkers as a group, who knew about Jerry Seinfeld).

Such as, writing hot takes can burn you as well. And putting your own attitudes into your writing makes you vulnerable to personal attacks.

If you agree with me on these points, then what can you do?

Well, develop a tougher skin… only pick on people who will take it… or find some other way to get readership and attention than by writing hot takes and sharing your own personal attitudes.

I can’t help you with the skin part or with finding meek targets to pick on.

As for that last part, about other ways to get readership and attention, I can remind you of my Most Valuable Email trick.

A few of the emails I’ve written using my Most Valuable Email trick have gone semi-viral — they got unexpected forwards and shares in the small direct marketing community.

And using the Most Valuable Email trick allows me to write in a way that’s separate from what I believe personally. And yet my readers don’t mind this lack of “authenticity” — in fact, they even seem to enjoy it.

Maybe it’s not too clear how this can possibly be true.

If you’re curious, try out my email newsletter and witness it for yourself. Click here to sign up.

My guilty-pleasure morning ritual gets an ugly update

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I sat down a few moments ago for my guilty-pleasure morning ritual. The coffee was ready, I flipped open my laptop and—

“Oh what the hell is this,” I said out loud.

The game was still the same. But the background of the site had changed from dark gray to white.

I checked the URL. It was no longer some weird .co.uk domain. It was now nytimes.com.

Perhaps you’ve seen the same.

After all, millions of people around the world have all been playing this game each day, and millions more have been joining them week by week.

The game is a word-guessing game, called Wordle, created by a guy named Josh Wardle.

Wardle created Wordle some time ago as a game that just he and his girlfriend could play together. His friends and family got in on it too. Then Wardle released Wordle publicly on his website last October.

That first month, a total of 90 people played it.

Two months later, in December, the number of people playing Wordle each day had grown to 300,000.

By January, it was millions each day.

On February 1st, the New York Times bought Wordle from Wardle, for a “low 7 figures” sum. And today, here we are, with the stupid, white, failing NYT background.

Oh well. In the end, the corporations absorb everything. But let’s talk influence:

I can see many things that went into making Wordle a success. I want to point out just one. It might be relevant to you if you are interested in the creative or marketing side of reality.

Like, I said, Wordle is my guilty-pleasure morning ritual.

That’s because there’s only one Wordle puzzle each day.

Once you play — whether you win or lose — that’s it. You gotta wait until tomorrow, when the next one comes out.

This has a few key consequences:

One of course is scarcity. It makes each Wordle puzzle feel more valuable and interesting. It keeps you coming back day after day.

Two is that you can’t glut yourself.

With most games – and with things other than games too — I often keep playing to the point where I start to feel disgusted.

But there’s no risk of that with Wordle. It’s like a Spartan marriage. The two sides meet only rarely, and are full of desire for each other.

But maybe the most important thing is that each Wordle puzzle feels unique and real.

Wordle grew so quickly because players shared their results on Twitter. (Through a clever design, Wardle allowed people to share their results without giving away the puzzle.)

That worked because there is only one puzzle a day. Everybody in the world who played Wordle on a given day had that same puzzle.

In other words, it made sense to brag about your results, because other Wordle players actually shared your experience. It even created a sense of connection to other people playing Wordle.

But maybe you haven’t played Wordle yet, and you’re getting lost in what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’re wondering what this might mean for you, or how can you use this.

I’ll give you just one idea bouncing around in my head:

For a long time, I’ve been writing these daily emails, and then posting them to my website as an archive. This has helped me in the past because these blog archives were the main way people found me and my newsletter.

But that’s slowly changing. And so today I remembered an idea I had a while ago:

To scrap the archive, and simply post the latest daily email on my site. Each day, the email on the front page would be updated, and the previous email would disappear. Plus there would be a newsletter optin form for people who don’t want to miss out.

I’m not sure if this is smart. I’m not sure whether I will do it. But maybe.

Because Wardle’s Wordle success shows that in a world where everybody’s working hard to get you as addicted and engaged as possible… less can be more.

Anyways, if you have any advice for me on the technical side of how I could easily implement my latest-email-front-page idea on my WordPress site, please write in and let me know.

And if you haven’t played Wordle yet, you can find it on the white-background page at the link below. (I got today’s puzzle in two tries only — my best score yet.)

https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

Tom Cleveland continues his productive NYT snooping

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How do veterans of #vanlife feel about all the newbies? Can you make a statement about your gender, when there’s no one there to watch you? And is that “maskne” on your face, or is it plain old acne?

In case you want answers to any of these questions, head on over to the New York Times website. As I write, these stories are all up on the home page.

A guy named Tom Cleveland has been snooping on the Times. I wrote about him a few weeks ago. Through his snooping, he discovered how the NYT makes its headlines more dramatic through A/B testing.

Now Cleveland has put out a part two to his research. It’s about which stories linger on the Times digital front page. And the breakdown is this:

News: 46.6%
Opinion: 22.2%
Feature: 31.1%

“Categories and numbers, huh?” Let me translate what I think this means.

“News” you’re probably familiar with. “U.S. Adds 916,000 Jobs in Sign of Surging Labor Market.” No thrills there.

“Opinion” is a little more fluid. It includes hard-hitting editorial such as “The unsettling power of Easter” (also on the NYT front page right now) as well as the “If a gender falls in the forest” piece above.

And then there’s “Features.” This is apparently an industry term for pure fluff — your typical #vanlife and maskne pieces.

So adding up Opinion and Feature, we get that the NY Times shows this type of content 54.3% of the time on its front page. In other words, this is most of what they show — because it’s most of what people want to see.

Please believe me:

This is not my ant-sized attack on the elephant that is the New York Times. Instead, I just want to point out that people always want human-interest stuff, first and foremost.

If you’re in the business of feeding people whatever, just to sell subscriptions and ads, they you might as well stick to fluff or tabloid content.

On the other hand, perhaps you have an important message to share with the world. But you worry that your topic puts people to sleep. Or gives them a headache.

Don’t worry. It’s an easy problem to fix. Just wrap your dry, complex topic in a thick human-interest sandwich. People will happily devour it, all the way to the end. ​​Here’s an example from an email I wrote last year:

“It’s a story of family betrayal… of breakthrough ideas, conceived in prison… of a small group of desperate visionaries who took an almost occult science… and combined it with a strange, untested new technology… to create the foundations of an industry worth over a quarter trillion dollars.”

Do you know what that paragraph was about? It’s about dry, technical topic. Namely, direct marketing, told through the colorful characters who dun it — Claude Hopkins, Gary Halbert, Ken McCarthy. And if you want to know how that story developed, you might like to sign up to my very human-friendly email newsletter.

“Coke and hookers”: Meghan Markle NYT story proves evergreen copywriting truth

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Back in 2016, I got a job writing a bunch of political fundraising advertorials. I was helping raise funds for Hillary Clinton, for Ted Cruz, and for Donald Trump.

(I found out later that the guy who had hired me was a big-time scammer. Almost none of the money he raised was ever used for any political purpose. But it was used for the purpose of coke and hookers in Las Vegas. Which you might think is a more noble goal than furthering the political careers of any of the above faces.)

Anyways, as part of this job, I had to constantly read a bunch of news articles for research. Politico… Fox… WSJ… and of course The New York Times.

It was then that I developed my contempt for The New York Times.

I guess I still had higher expectations of the NYT. Fox News was clearly an inflammatory tabloid, but the NYT still sold itself as classy and respectable and trustworthy.

But that’s not what I saw. Not when I read each story carefully, compared it with the headline, and then compared the whole with the same story covered in other media.

Whatever. I only bring up this episode from my life because I just came across a fascinating article and a resource on the exact same topic. The article and the resource can be useful to you whether or not you support the New York Times point of view.

So:

A guy named Tom Cleveland wanted to see exactly how the NYT A/B tests its headlines. He wrote up a script to pull in the data from the NYT site, and he started looking for insights. You can head over to Tom’s Substack if you’re interested in the full story. But here’s one quick tidbit, which should be old hat if you’re interested in copywriting:

NYT headlines tend to get more dramatic through A/B testing.

Tom gives a few examples. For example, a recent story about Meghan Markle started its career with the headline:

“Saying her life was less than a fairy tale, Meghan Markle described the cruel loss of her freedom and identity”

Come on Meghan. Every angsty teenager complains of loss of freedom and identity. Sure enough, the editors at the NYT tested ways to raise the stakes. The eventual winner:

“‘I just didn’t want to be alive anymore’: Meghan Markle says life as a royal made her suicidal”

A second example, this about Trump:

“Trump, addressing conservatives, plans to claim leadership of GOP”

Trump, ok. Always a solid way to get engagement. But “addressing conservatives, plans to claim leadership”? It sounds like the overture of a long and boring opera. Compare it to the winning “Tarantino-ized” headline:

“Trump’s Republican hit list at CPAC is a warning shot to his party”

Like I said, this will be old hat to you if you’ve been writing sales copy for a while. But it’s still interesting to see when backed up with the massive data behind the New York Times… and when dealing with the supposedly sophisticated and intellectual readers of the Times.

There’s much more to Tom’s data, including stuff that’s both obvious and not so obvious for copywriters. He goes into more detail about it on his blog. But he has also made all his data available online, in real time, in a very easy-to-use format. If you’d like to see it:

https://nyt.tjcx.me/

A three-act election story

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I broke my long-standing rule of not reading the New York Times to bring you the following:

In Povalikhino, a tiny village in the Russian heartland, the incumbent mayor was running for re-election. But there was a problem:

He had no opposition candidate.

According to the NYT article, Russian elections always need an opposition candidate. That’s to make it appear fair, because the ruling party candidate always wins. Well, almost always.

In this case, the political machine went in search of a patsy to run against the mayor. They asked the local butcher, cobbler, and the high school chemistry teacher.

Nobody was willing to get roped in.

Fortunately, Marina Udgodskaya, the janitor at the mayor’s office, finally accepted the role of running against her own boss.

And she won. In a landslide.

Nobody’s quite sure where it all went wrong. But the fact is that the villagers of Povalikhino voted Udgodskaya into office. She now sits behind the mayor’s desk in the office she used to clean. She said her first priority will be to fix the public lighting in the village.

Meanwhile, the old mayor refuses to speak to the media. According to his wife, he never even wanted the job himself. He finds the topic of losing to the cleaning woman painful… and blames his wife. “You got me into this,” Mrs. Former Mayor reported her husband as saying.

I’m not sharing this story with you to illustrate the importance of voting. I’m of the school that voting doesn’t matter (well, unless you’re voting in a village of three hundred people).

Instead, I just thought this was a good story.

It’s got an Act 1, an Act 2, an Act 3. It’s got tension, drama, and surprise.

I bring this up because I often see people telling “stories” in copy that don’t have these basic elements.

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, but cannot find one. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, gets a local lawyer to run against, and then the mayor wins as usual. The end.”

“Mayor needs an opposition candidate, which is how things go in Russia, for example this other time there was a second election and…”

Those are events, yes. But they are not stories — at least the kind that suck readers in and sell something.

Incidentally, if you want an education in how to write good stories in your copy… you can’t go wrong by reading the New York Times. Not for the facts. But to observe the outrage they evoke in their readers, and for the subtle sales techniques.

Or you can just sign up for my daily email newsletter. It’s not as outrageous as the New York Times. But it can teach you something about sales and storytelling. If you’re willing to take the risk, click here to subscribe.

Hidden razor blades as a powerful marketing angle

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Here’s the scary lead from an influential New York Times story, titled “Those Treats May Be Tricks,” which ran Oct. 28, 1970:

Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick‐or‐treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness.

Take, for example, that plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block. It may have a razor blade hidden inside. The chocolate “candy” bar may be a laxative, the bubble gum may be sprinkled with lye, the pop corn balls may be coated with camphor, the candy may turn out to be packets containing sleeping pills.

According to social scientists who study this sort of thing, this story played a big part in creating the “poisoned candy” myth that eventually swept the country.

Then and now, no kids were ever actually injured from tampered Halloween candy given by strangers.

Yes, there were some cases of candy tampering. But those were all by adults looking to get financial compensation, or by kids looking for attention. Everything else was purely made up.

Even so…

What parent today would let their kid accept an apple from a stranger — without wondering if there’s a razor blade inside?

One big reason for this are people like journalists and politicians.

I’ve heard them described as “availability entrepreneurs.” They make it a business to have scary images (like hidden razor blades) available to the public mind.

Maybe you think that’s terrible and fake newsish.

In that case, you’re a better person than me.

Because when I hear “availability entrepreneur,” I think “marketing angle.”

If somebody like the NY Times is going to all the trouble of stirring up paranoia in the public, I figure I might as well ride on their coattails a bit.

Think climate change… The immigration crisis… Gluten intolerance… School shootings… Zika 2019 (or whatever this year’s epidemic is)… The evils of Facebook.

With a bit of thought, and by picking a side for or against these highly available ideas, you should be able to get a lot of powerful, free marketing support.

And if you want, you can even use it to sell a solid, helpful product, which makes the world a better place.

If that’s what you’re doing, and you want some specific examples of how to make your marketing better by tying into the latest available trend, then check out the following:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

The bland conspiracy behind the Great Awokening

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I saw some statistics today about the use of certain phrases in the New York Times.

Woke terms and concepts such as “patriarchy,” “mansplaining,” “Islamophobia,” and “toxic masculinity.”

The trend is best illustrated by the term “racism,” which has been in widespread use for much longer than the others.

Various NYT articles referenced racism at a fairly even clip throughout the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and up to the early 2010s.

And then, there was a sharp spike.

So for comparison, in 2010, there were on average 5-6 articles in the NYT each day that mentioned racism.

Since 2016, it’s been more like 20-30.

What explains this explosion?

Well, there’s a conspiracy theory floating around that’s straight out of the 70s movie Network.

It says that the rich got nervous about all the attention being given to economic disparities in US society (remember Occupy Wall Street?). So godlike business magnates called in their big-media lackeys, and they said,

“Why do we pay you? So you can report on the growing revolt of the hundreds of millions of poor people in this country? No! Do something else and do it now. Focus on the blacks or the gays or the Mexicans, but not the poor!”

So there’s that explanation. And then there’s the much more bland non-conspiracy theory:

Throughout the 2000s, the print circulation of the NYT was steadily dropping.

At the same time, the newspaper was moving more of its content online.

But unlike a bunch of sheets of paper, a website will happily speak up and tell you what people read and what they respond to.

And just like with Faye Dunaway’s character in Network, it probably took only one intelligent, ambitious, and ruthless editor to take this information and conclude, “Give the people what they want! Give them polarizing stories. Reinforce their already-held beliefs. That’s how we’ll quadruple our digital subscribers.”

Whichever theory is true, I think there are lots of lessons here for you if you’re doing any kind of marketing online.

Particularly if you’re in anything resembling a mass or commodity market. Which is what I’ve been doing a lot of lately. And if you want my insights on how to write polarizing copy that quadruples your mass-market buyers, you might like the following:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/