MSN never got into real hot water for messing up a headline or story, which was a minor miracle but was at least the goal. This record of successful blandness, combined with the internal head-slapping after the Little Mix-up, does not bode well for the future-or the present-of news. I never had to elucidate it like this, though it came up once or twice I just showed up and worked and that was it as long as no one was embarrassed. For my part, at least, being in the Money vertical allowed me to run as much left-leaning content as I wanted, given that the entirety of the rest of the section skewed right. It will not surprise you that virtually everyone I worked with was vaguely center-left, politically, and it will shock you even less that some of the smarmier full-time employees were sure to remind us not to let it affect our coverage. (By far the best one of these was a multimillionaire yacht owner whose boat had ended up in our photo system saying his ship was a nation unto itself that he did not allow to be photographed, so we needed to remove it.) Occasionally articles deemed too left- or right-wing would come down at the request of an editor, but there was such a deluge of content that you never needed to worry about finding a softer-edged replacement for them. This is theoretically absurd, given the scale of things, but it happened rarely enough not to be too much of a bother. Like any operation of a certain size, MSN professes to be non-partisan but is in fact aggressively non-confrontational, to the point where a single user comment on any of our stories that raised a red flag would be brought to us at once. Here is where I’d like to get into salacious details about the politics of our programming, but they’re disappointingly bland. It was way more of a job than a career just as smaller news operations feed off Microsoft, so do hundreds of companies and tens of thousands of individuals like myself, all happy enough to cash a check to push news around. It was a volume business with a skeleton staff, but it kept people-a lot of them-connected to the world, even though I had never really met these people. Imagine a lone old-time phone operator in a room where the ringing never stopped, and that’s pretty much what it felt like. One thing about creating a morning news section by yourself for a site that gets more than six billion hits per year (and that’s just MSN Money, in America), is that you tend to be a bit peripatetic I checked and rechecked my work repeatedly like a news junkie and full-blown digital addict. I fucked up the same way the algorithm did when it misidentified the Little Mix member more times than I can count, but I either never got caught or, more likely, caught it myself. My job was to create the MSN Money section every morning from these stories and monitor it, a job I called “fantasy newspaper” because of its relation to the pick-and-choose games of fantasy sports.
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