It's "multicultural LDA Zillennials" at the turn
A Fingers special report on the Buzzwords of The Week of the Year (so far)
Editor’s note: Your fearless Fingers editor is celebrating his 36th birthday this weekend, so in place of the standard Weekender, please enjoy the special edition below. We’ll return to regular programming next week.—Dave.
My inbox probably averages 50 pitches a day, five days a week. That’s 13,000 pitches a year. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests I’ve received something in the ballpark of 185,000 pitches since I became a journalist nearly 15 years ago.
I don’t know why anybody pitches me anything. I mean, I do—people want attention, and they pay other people to get it for them. Maybe this works? There are plenty of journalists who will just write stories based wholly on the angles and quotes served up to them in press releases, because they are lazy, or overworked, or “brand-friendly” and in it for the junkets and swag. Or all of the above, or some other reason entirely. I don’t know, not my business. Thanks in no small part to the support of the nearly 600 (!!!) paying Friends of Fingers, my business is: I don’t do that.
Still, I try to read every pitch that comes across the transom here at Fingers HQ, because an old editor of mine told me it was a good habit to get in. Turns out he was extremely incorrect, but I only realized that once I got in the habit, and it has proven surprisingly hard to break! As a result, my brain has absorbed a tremendous amount of garbagio over the years. Patterns emerge. After nearly a decade and a half on the beverage-alcohol beat, I can say with some confidence that I really only get three types of pitches: