Cranky curmudgeon Mark ‘Copyranter‘ Duffy (nobody’s favorite coworker) tells Gawker the “TOP 10 BEST EVER WTF OMG REASONS BUZZFEED FIRED ME, LOL!”:
I achieved the near-impossible Monday morning, October 7, at approximately 9:30 am. I got fired from BuzzFeed…
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith called me into his office via GChat and said something like, “This is just not working out, your stuff. Let’s just say, it’s ‘creative differences.'” (I paraphrase, but he most certainly used the c and d words.)…
I was “officially” fired at my apartment on Halloween, via a letter delivered by UPS. Inside the envelope were two copies of the legal document, one to sign and return and another for my records. Both copies had CUTE stickers affixed to the first page.
I did not LOL.
I know for a fact that there are more appropriate varieties of sticky notes in the BuzzFeed office supply cabinet that do not have “CUTE” printed on them, including white ones with a ghosted red BuzzFeed logo.
A 53-year-old man, BuzzFeed’s oldest ever employee, jobless and without health insurance? CUTE as a fucking bug’s ear. Not as CUTE: Making your advertising critic disappear posts that criticize the advertisements of big advertisers, which Ben Smith did to me on at least one occasion. BuzzFeed has a “no haters” hiring policy and an overweening desire to draw big-name advertisers into its “community” of users, in exchange for money. Which makes ranting about ads professionally for the site a complicated endeavor. At which I FAILed…
So… Whatever the tribulations of your life, at least you do not work for Ben Smith, former Politico cheerleader and, according to Yasha Levine, dedicated Kochsucker. Who probably congratulates himself on having measurably increased mindshare for the brand with Duffy’s latest rant, because if one could literally show one’s arse in the Media Village, Smith would get a trampstamp reading BROUGHT TO YOU BY ____________ . Previous generations might complain ‘I owe my soul to the company store’; our new Social Betters have solved that problem by not having souls to sell.
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Apart from tryptophan comas and yelling at clouds, what’s on the agenda for the evening?