Mailbag for May 17, 2024
Silence on Bennifer, an actual divorce, Anya Taylor-Joy’s curious NYT answer, nerves about The Office reboot, evolving towards critique, why videos and paid social posts matter, and Sebastian Stan.
Dear Squawkers,
So everyone’s been asking about Bennifer and whether or not – sob, gasp, noooo! – V2.0 is going the way of the OG. You may have noticed that we have not covered it at LaineyGossip. And this is why we love The Squawk, because here is where we can explain the editorial decisions behind what we do and don’t cover or, more precisely, WHEN we do and don’t cover.
All the Bennifer business this week originated with In Touch Weekly. I can’t remember when In Touch Weekly got something right. It is true that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have not been photographed together in over a month. But that’s often all it takes for outlets like In Touch to make up a story – they don’t have to actually have any solid sourcing, they can build a not-legitimately-sourced story based on speculation, like a shot in the dark, because what are the consequences? Clearly, in these times, they don’t lose when they get it wrong (being wrong has never hurt the Daily Mail or Fox News or every amateur gossip and lipreader on TikTok) and if they’re right, they get to pretend that what started out as a guess luckily came true.
For us though, we don’t want to amplify that kind of reporting. Because the way the brain works, the more you hear something, even if it’s bullshit, it starts to FEEL like it could be true. So we ignored it, but the gossip ecosystem couldn’t. And then there were more pap shots of JLo out on her own looking at houses and Ben on his own, supposedly staying at another house, and it got to the point where other entertainment outlets couldn’t sit out the story so the speculation has continued to grow, with people wondering about why Ben wasn’t at the Met Gala with JLo in New York even though he decided to go to Tom Brady’s roast in LA.
PEOPLE posted a story with no insider reporting, meaning that they haven’t been able to get any sourcing from those directly associated with Bennifer on what the situation really is. Given that PEOPLE is usually so celebrity-friendly, that set off more alarm bells. Same goes with TMZ – they’ve been able to use paparazzi photos in their reporting, suggesting that there are signs of discord between Bennifer but nothing from sources either confirming or denying that there is indeed something to the speculation. So if PEOPLE and TMZ can’t get anyone to talk to them about the situation…does it mean there is indeed a situation? Neither one is a stranger to placing a source quote in PEOPLE or TMZ or Entertainment Tonight to dismiss rumours.
Meanwhile Ben and JLo continue to get papped wearing their wedding rings. But there are also people paying attention to her social media activity and she’s supposedly liking Instagram posts about toxic relationships and when to leave them.
To go back to our editorial decision about whether or not to address this at LaineyGossip, we ultimately have decided, at least at the time of this writing (Friday morning, May 17, 2024), to wait and see. Because of the timing. JLo has a movie coming out, Atlas, next Friday. I mean, sure, promotion is promotion – would it work in the movie’s favour to have the focus be so much on her personal life and marital issues? The cynical answer here would be yes. JLo the lonely astronaut trying to survive in space, mirroring JLo the lovelorn, once again. And right before her tour, as she soon heads out on the road, now and forever always the hustler who can only rely on herself. The less cynical answer would be that, as she shared with us in her recent documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, the heartbreaks are real for her, she’s just so good at putting on a glow face and facing the world, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel the pain or embarrassment – would she really willingly exploit that?
But also, there’s timing to consider because to go back to Atlas and the movie’s release next Friday, today is also a Friday. On Fridays we brace for a news dump. Old school gossip rules, if there’s something shitty to announce, Friday afternoon, after the work day is over, you bury it in the weekend rush. But also…next Friday is the start of a long weekend in the US. Long weekends are even better than regular weekends when you want to bury bad news.
Editorially then, our decision is to be on standby, with the Friday pattern in mind, to see how this plays out.
So let’s move on to an actual confirmed divorce instead, a story that originated as an editorial suggestion from Jacek. He will be puffy about it, but it’s about gossip strategy involving a conveniently timed divorce announcement by an athlete. A golfer, actually. But wait! Don’t run away yet – because you don’t have to care about WHO it is, you’ll care about the what, the how, the where, and the why.
Rory McIlroy, one of the most famous active players on tour, filed for divorce earlier this week from his wife of seven years, Erica Stoll. Rory filed on Monday. But on Sunday, just 24 hours earlier? He came from behind to win at Wells Fargo, pretty much right after he won the Zurich Classic team event the week before. And all this is just one week ahead of the PGA Championship which started yesterday, and he played well, tied for fifth at the time of this post so he’s definitely in contention position. Per Golf.com:
“The last time McIlroy won his last two starts heading into a major was before his most recent major title at the 2014 PGA Championship, played at Valhalla, this year’s host site.”
So it’s been a whole decade since Rory has won a major. Which I’m sure you can imagine, even if you don’t follow golf, that it’s the thing that comes up alllll the time. This is a lot of pressure – and golf is already a lot of pressure.
But then, after his victory at the tournament leading into the PGA Championship, Rory wakes up and decides, yeah, today seems like it might be a good time to file for divorce…?!
This made headlines everywhere. TMZ broke the news, PEOPLE covered it, so did Page Six, Us Weekly, this news was not relegated to the sports pages, it was front page celebrity coverage. And, again, I have to stress, when a major is happening in golf, a player like Rory is already a heatscore. There are cameras allllll over Rory in the quietest of times. At a major? It’s laser tracking, and on top of all that he just made his personal life part of the narrative, knowing the PGA was starting in three days.
So we’ve covered the what, where, how, and when… but as usual it’s the WHY that’s the mysterious bitch here. WHY would he do this now? Why wouldn’t he just wait one week?
Was it a deflection? Was it so that people would get off his ass about winning the major (not gonna happen) or the mess between the PGA and LIV? Or was it really so bad with the marriage that they couldn’t hold off just a few more days? Erica, by the way, used to WORK FOR THE PGA! Like of all the golf partners out there who understand the game and the tour and how it works, IT WOULD BE HER.
I like Rory very, very, very much. Whenever there’s a golf tournament on, he’s on my cheer list (in this order):
Tony Finau, Tom Kim, Rory McIlroy, Hideki Matsuyama, Xander Schauffele), so now I’m kind of obsessed with this divorce story. And I can’t decide if it’s super calculated or super messy! Please weigh in below.
Mailbag questions next.
Question from Erin (in on of the daily chats): Anya Taylor-Joy’s NYT interview and “ask me about it in 20 years”…..what’s THAT about?
Lainey’s Answer:
The piece in the NYT, by Kyle Buchanan, made a lot of headlines this week ahead of the Furiosa premiere, because throughout the article, it seemed like there was so much that Anya Taylor-Joy wouldn’t say or couldn’t say. Here, though, is the passage that raised eyebrows:
“I’ve never been more alone than making that movie,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.”
Her reticence reminded me of when I first spoke to the actors who had made “Fury Road”: During that shoot, the desperation of the characters bled into their real lives, and unpacking that experience took a very long time. Sensing that she was skirting a sensitive issue, I asked Taylor-Joy what exactly it was about “Furiosa” that had proved more difficult than she expected. For five long seconds, she contemplated giving me an answer.
“Next question, sorry,” she said. There was a faraway look in her eyes, as if a part of her had been left behind in that wasteland. “Talk to me in 20 years,” she said. “Talk to me in 20 years.”
This, on its own, would be noteworthy – but what’s taking it to another level is that it lives in the legacy of Mad Max: Fury Road, and I’m pretty sure we all know what happened on that set between Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy. They hated each other, it was ugly, like full-blown screaming matches and producers flown in to basically babysit Tom and protect Charlize.
So now that Anya’s talking like this, automatically people are like… OK so was the same shit going down on the set of Furiosa, too?
I don’t know that there is any evidence to suggest that it’s a Chris Hemsworth issue right now. Like when Charlize and Tom were shooting together, we heard about it while they were on production – it was so hostile, they could not contain it. None of that was happening during filming on Furiosa, and there’s been nothing sus so far while they’ve been promoting it. At the Cannes premiere the other night, they were seen holding hands, in a group, up the stairs. (Charlize and Tom could barely look at each other when they were in Cannes.) They’ve been posing companionably together on other press occasions. They were paired for the junket. And that, to me, in my experience, is significant. If there is trouble between co-stars, you likely won’t see them paired together for interviews that last days on end, one after the other, because you cannot take the chance that after a long afternoon, when someone is tired and cranky, there won’t be a slip-up and someone snaps, and that becomes the story.
So, based on what we know and have seen so far? I’m not looking at Chris Hemsworth like Tom Hardy. And that might actually be the easier assumption. In that NYT article, Anya talks about her creative differences with director George Miller. There’s one part where she talks about how he insisted that her face be covered with only her eyes showing and she conceded with him on that point but then continues:
Taylor-Joy took Miller’s point but still felt Furiosa was owed an eruption. “I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” she said, noting that in too many films, female characters are made to endure all manner of hardships while crying only a single delicate tear.
“We’re animals, and there’s a point where somebody just snaps,” she said. “There’s one scream in that movie, and I am not joking when I tell you that I fought for that scream for three months.”
That’s not to say necessarily that her relationship with George was a problem – she emphasises twice in the NYT interview that “I love George and if you’re going to do something like this, you want to be in the hands of someone like George Miller”, but those creative debates do seem like they were overwhelming for her. And, until we know more, in 20 years I guess, I don’t think we can speculate much more.
It is, however, a good time to do a Show Your Work on this kind of situation, coming out of this comment that Anya makes that can be applied to more than just the entertainment industry but it’s worth keeping in mind for a better understanding of that industry:
“I wanted to make sure that I was never insolent in any way, that it was always a conversation,” she said. “At the end of the day, this is [George’s] vision. I can present everything that I have, but his word goes.”
The director is the boss. We see actors more, they are the faces of the project, so the familiarity and the recognisability sometimes can lead us to believe they’re the most important people on a project, but it begins and ends with the director. The director might be wrong, just like your manager or whoever you report to at your job might be wrong, but ultimately, it’s their call. And in a creative environment like this, where an actor like Anya is so deeply invested in her character, it can get emotional and creative differences can feel personal. Maybe this is what she’s alluding to with what she’s holding back. Not really all that scandalous but profoundly impactful all the same for an artist.
Before we move on from the Mad Max Universe though, can we just go back to Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy? Because George Miller gave his own interview this week and talked about the chaos on the Fury Road set, confirming that Tom was a fucking PROBLEM:
“Tom has a damage to him but also a brilliance that comes with it, and whatever was going on with him at the time, he had to be coaxed out of his trailer. Whereas Charlize was incredibly disciplined – a dancer by training, which told in the precision of her performance – and always the first one on set. I’m an optimist, so I saw their behavior as mirroring their characters, where they had to learn to co-operate in order to ensure mutual survival,” Miller added. “There’s no excuse for it, and I think there’s a tendency in this business to use great performances as an excuse for other disruption that could be avoided.”
You should read this Variety article from this week if you haven’t already that sums up George’s interview and includes more documented detail from the oral history of Fury Road that illuminates just how big of a fucking prick Tom was. Charlize was punctual, arriving in full costume – which is heavy and hot! – and she’d have to wait THREE HOURS for him to get his ass to set, with some crew members theorising that he did it on purpose, like a power play because he knew it would piss her off.
Both Charlize and Tom have taken responsibility for their behaviour but, like, I don’t see why SHE would have to, other than to be gracious. She was prepared to work, and then she was provoked, and she had to endure the fuckery of a goddamn manchild who later would say:
“In hindsight, I was in over my head in many ways. The pressure on both of us was overwhelming at times. What she needed was a better, perhaps more experienced partner in me. I’d like to think that now that I’m older and uglier, I could rise to that occasion.”
Him being over his head was not her fucking problem. He made it her problem. Not sure why she has to eat an equal amount of shit for a toxic environment that originated out of his insecurity. And while sure, it’s over now, and everybody has supposedly made peace with it, my question is the aftermath. This is public record, Tom Hardy being a fucking nightmare to Charlize Theron is corroborated by several people who worked on the film, with their names attached, including THE DIRECTOR. And at one point, after he had a threatening outburst, she said she did not feel safe. Again, a producer had to be flown in from LA to supervise, in part because Charlize wanted “protection”.
But still, we go around talking about him like he's cool as shit, a badass motherfucker.
And also? Why aren’t we making TikToks about what a piece of shit he was to work with? Holding up hundreds of crew members – one person disrespecting the contributions of an ENTIRE production team – because he was having a suck attack in his trailer over having to wake up and go to work too early, and getting so aggressive a co-star felt “unsafe”… seriously? If this was Jennifer Lopez, TikTok would rename itself “The JLO HATE TOK” and shit bomb her every day. Which is what they’re doing over there anyway, they might as well make it official. Hating JLo has been consistently trending at the top of TikTok now for weeks over old rumours and shit people claim she did a while ago. If that’s the move, then why not Tom Hardy?
Question from Betts: Sarah, I’m curious on your take on The Office reboot. I’m glad that they are defining “reboot” loosely and the plot seems substantially different. However, I’m also worried about some of the things that made The Office great - particularly the longer seasons that allowed characters and relations to grow, and the relatively cohesive writers room that really seemed to grow with and know the story - are incompatible with modern models of television. I am one of the few people who watched Greg Daniels’ Upload. I thought the premise and casting were great, but the writing was a mess and full of threads that were never revisited.
Sarah’s answer:
If you haven’t heard, Greg Daniels, who adapted The Office for US TV and served as the remake’s first showrunner, has created a spin-off to be set in the same universe. The new show is co-created by Michael Koman and will star internet boyfriend Domhnall Gleeson and White Lotus breakout Sabrina Impacciatore.
Betts, your concerns are valid. The Office is one of those shows that didn’t hit right away. After a mixed reception in its first season, Daniels and the writers re-tooled the tone of the show and specifically the Michael Scott character to be more appealing/likeable (Parks & Rec underwent a similar sophomore season refresh). These days, though, shows don’t have that kind of time. They have to hit right away, or they get cancelled. On top of that, network TV isn’t exactly healthy, so it’s always a worry when they launch a new show.
That said! The Good Place, Brooklyn 99, and Abbott Elementary are strong reminders that network sitcoms can still be good, that those writers can still be given the time and space to make something great. And Daniels’ co-creator, Michael Koman, has one hell of a resume. He’s written for Conan, for SNL, he’s Nathan Fielder’s writing partner and co-created and produced Nathan For You. Michael Koman came up with the Walker, Texas Ranger Lever for Conan! Also, he’s married to Ellie Kemper, which is a fun fact given he’s going to work in The Office universe.
I am nervous about this spin-off simply because network TV makes me nervous for anything other than live sports and reality shows. And I’m not convinced we need more of The Office, even if the setup of an Office-style show set in a dying Midwestern newspaper’s office is a good one, which it is. But The Office is consistently one of the most popular shows on streaming, and at this point, you’re not getting stars like John Krasinski and Steve Carell back for new seasons, so they have to pivot to something else. So I get why this is happening, and given the talent involved, particularly Koman, it has potential. But network TV is like building your house on sand. There’s so little stability.
Question from Caitlin M: I’m not sure how exactly to phrase this question for Lainey, but here goes: it feels like the site (and now the Squawk) has evolved in several ways over the years, but one of the ways is the change in straight celebrity gossip (which I think still has its place!) toward art criticism. I’m thinking of the RM article from the other day & all the breakdowns of Bey’s music, presentation, etc. How much of that kind of writing has just come naturally with cultural evolution writ large of more serious think pieces and how much of it is being driven by your own show-your-work interest in the behind the scenes stuff? Or potentially, how much is coming from having a legit critic now as your partner with Sarah onboard? Hope that makes sense - I’m always interested in how personal writing changes over time.
Lainey’s Answer:
Not sure when you started visiting LG, but the site has been heavier on the analysis side for a majority of its existence now, considering we are over 20 years old. In the early, early years, like between 2003/4 to 2007-ish, it was pretty grimy, and the “straight celebrity gossip” was mean and offensive, consistent with what many other gossip blogs were like back then.
The site evolved because I was evolving, and I was learning, and really coming into my crusade about gossip and its value – that it is an essential part of the human condition, we all gossip, and gossip is a form of communication. So when I was talking about Brange or TomKat or whatever, it wasn’t just the obsession with them, full stop, but what that obsession told us about ourselves.
And that, also, is the purpose of art, right? The films and television series and books and music that we consume illuminate the discussions and frustrations and conflicts we’re having in our own lives, in our own communities. So for us at the site, the gossip and the art criticism are inextricably linked. I can’t pinpoint a specific day when that happened but Sarah joining our team was definitely one of the turning points in an ongoing plan to expand what we had been doing in the initial years of the site to make it more than “I hate that bitch, she sucks” and further push it into the territory of “I hate that asshole, but why, and what does that say about me?”
I don’t think we could have continued for this long if we hadn’t organically taken the site in this direction which also happens to be, as individuals, where we were also headed. And not just because the culture was moving beyond the old flavour but because, well, it’s kinda boring to just be straight up, like, these two people are dating, or they broke up.
Let me give you a more specific example: PEOPLE Magazine. That’s “straight celebrity gossip”, right? If two celebrities are revealed to be dating, a PEOPLE.com article will read like this:
“Sources tell PEOPLE that X and Y are in the early stages of dating. The musician, 24, and the star of Whatever Netflix Series, 29, were seen at Craig’s on Saturday night. Insiders tell PEOPLE that they sat in a back booth and enjoyed steak tartare and martinis. X wore a black dress with white trim; Y had on a baseball cap, jeans, and sneakers. They stayed two hours before heading into the same SUV.
X’s last relationship with Z, the star of Whatever NBC series, ended 18 months ago. They were together for three years before mutually and amicably breaking it off. Her last album, Too Much Of Nothing, was released in 2022 and won five Grammys. The Too Much Of Nothing Tour kicked off last June and grossed $450 million, with stops in four countries over six months.
Three weeks ago, X posted on Instagram that she was working on new music. Fans flooded the comments, speculating that a new album might arrive before the end of the year.”
I’m bored now, so I’m stopping, but you get the idea. The first paragraph is what they’re reporting as new, right? It’s 75 words. The rest of it is filler, because a 75-word article is too short. But because PEOPLE doesn’t trade in analysis, they have to populate the rest with Wikipedia information.
I don’t want LaineyGossip to be like this. I want every post to have something to say, an opinion, a perspective, a curiosity. This is why it takes us longer to write our posts, because if we’re writing a post, we’re sharing our thoughts. These thoughts are not forced, they are things that are actually on our minds, on topics that we do want to discuss. With you!
Question from Monika T (in daily chat): Is this an ad? Or does Lainey actually like this boba? Its squawk so its a safe space to be honest😉
Lainey’s Answer:
Monika is referring to an Instagram story I posted earlier this week. Here is the image:
As Jacek answered in the chat, this was not an ad for the tea I was drinking but it was promotion for an event I co-wrote, co-produced, co-directed, and co-hosted yesterday with my friends, Ann Pornel and Hannah Sung, in celebration of Asian Heritage Month at Hot Docs. We put on a BTS appreciation fangirl show, lol. It went great, felt like a rock concert, we are very proud. But we had help.
The Alley provided a donation of tea to the first 100 people who showed up. So my Instagram stories were a thank you to them for helping to make our event special by treating our audience members to refreshments. And yes, the drinks are DELICIOUS. In addition to the teas, though, we also gave away prizes and other bonuses to people who bought tickets because, well, we’re Asian and we know Asians. Asians love free shit, that’s often how you get them out of the house, LOL. All of the items that were given away last night were donated by sponsors.
Anyway, the reason I included this question in the mailbag is because it gives me an opportunity to talk about being an influencer and branded posts. From time to time, I do branded posts on social media and on those occasions, they are clearly marked as such. We always try to work with brands that we can build connections with, that suit my personality, that align with the interests of LaineyGossip.com. If you’ve been visiting the site over the years, you might have noticed how desperado I am to associate myself with Oreo or Cheetos, because they are always in my cupboard… and they clearly don’t see any reason to pay me since I’m all up in their shit for free.
The branded posts are, at this point, pretty much a necessity for anyone who wants to maintain an online presence. You remember Reesa Teesa who went viral earlier this year for her TikTok series “Who TF Did I Marry?” Reesa’s covering magazines now, she’s been invited to go on trips, resort experiences, she is here, there, and everywhere, and she just last week launched her own online store. Reesa is getting paid, and good for her!
In my case, I’m not just an influencer, I’m a publisher, we publish a website, aka a small business, and any branded posts on my social media accounts directly support LaineyGossip. Because as Jacek has previously shared, ad income on websites these days is volatile, so we have to diversify our income streams. Instagram is one of them. Paid subscriptions to The Squawk are another.
I really, really appreciate that many of you here at The Squawk are interested in the business administrative side of the site, giving us an opportunity to provide some insight on how we differentiate our approach to social media from standard influencing in that our branded posts have a direct relationship with how we are able to continue posting content at LaineyGossip.com. And we’d rather do it that way, with clearly marked sponsored posts, than what is happening elsewhere in the industry.
The reality is, some publishers are in desperate positions. And in some cases, they are resorting to desperate practices. Not sure if you saw this but there are a few major publishers who’ve been accused of some shady shit. They are denying that they deliberately misled their advertisers and have shut down the questionable operations – you can read more about the situation here – but this is the kind of thing that falls under Jacek’s job description to monitor in our industry. Including a huge story that just broke this week about Google using “new AI-infused search” that has the potential of seriously undermining the viability of online publishers and their ability to amplify the work of the writers and journalists they employ. Here’s an article about how that will affect many if not most of the websites you visit and how all of us will be accessing online content.
Question from Virginia M: Thank you for the article on Sebastian Stan today--one of my forever faves. <3 Shocked to learn that he is *still* under that contract. Sarah, maybe this is a mailbag question, but is there no room for him to renegotiate something like that after all this time (presuming he would want to)? I would have thought Falcon and the Winter Soldier counted for at least a couple of those films... Kinda seems like they took advantage of his youth and his financial situation at the time (not that he hasn't benefitted from it in the long run.) As much as I love Bucky as a character, he hasn't been well served since Civil War. I also prefer Sebastian's other indie work. Hope this is the last time we see him.
Sarah’s answer:
Those deals are blueprints, basically. They don’t HAVE to build the house. The brain trust at Marvel could decide they’re done with Stan after Thunderbolts*, even though he’ll still have three films left on his deal. It just gives the lawyers a framework to work from every time they pull an actor into a new movie. Like, Stan is definitely getting paid more now than he was ten years ago, though he wouldn’t have a chance to make REAL money until he could renegotiate. Everyone who got really rich off Marvel did so because their contracts ended, and the studio had to renegotiate to bring them back after their initial 3 or 4 picture deal (this is how RDJ and ScarJo made out like bandits—short deals that allowed them to renegotiate several times over the decade).
Also, as a TV show, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier almost certainly didn’t count, it would be a separate contract (renegotiation!). TV and movies have different union terms. Crew members, for instance, can work for the exact same production companies on a film and a TV show filming in the exact same locations within the same fiscal year and have totally different contracts for each gig. TFATWS was undoubtedly a carve-out, but that’s good for Stan because that gives him leverage to get a bigger bag.
I think what they took advantage of was knowing Stan was a talented actor who was young enough and hungry enough to lock into a long deal. Also, the Winter Soldier is a popular character with comic nerds, he EXPLODED onto the scene in the mid-2000s in the Civil War comics and I think Kevin Feige and his team had a very long vision of what they could do, and knew they’d need Bucky somewhere, sometime. So they made SURE they had Stan on lock, just in case. But yeah, I’d love to see him move on from Marvel, they’ve done very little worth Stan’s effort. He’s better served elsewhere.
Question from Ketri: Very random site question, probably for Jacek and/or Emily. I was just curious about those AnyClip videos that pop up on the site when you’re reading an article—how are they put together? Is it purely AI picking up images and text from the article (if so, wow) or is someone curating it?
Jacek’s Answer:
Thanks for the question Ketri. We’re always happy to shed a little bit of light on what makes the site tick from a functionality/revenue standpoint because I find that a lot of people have become so accustomed to surfing sites for ‘free’ (i.e. in exchange for data) over the years and don’t think too much about what goes into putting the content in front of them.
The quick answer to this question is that the videos are curated, in fact, and not generated by AI or some automated function. I’ve had discussions with firms that specialize in this kind of thing (including Anyclip) where AI models scan articles and create a video-fied story based on written content. I haven’t seen it done well, however, so I made the decision to keep this process manual. It’s not difficult to do (I’ve used Adobe Express and Premiere in the past and currently use Techsmith’s Camtasia), and obviously doing it manually gives us full control over which articles we convert to video and how we want it done. It’s also one of the few ways that I can get involved with the editorial process on the site because Emily is busy enough already with site editing and photo selection that this would probably make her lose her mind. And I enjoy it because most of my day is spent on non-editorial administrative tasks other than when Emily is off, so it helps me stay engaged with what’s going on with our content, The Squawk aside.
The idea behind these units is to re-circulate visits to articles that might be highlights of that day/the previous day, and this is one of the ways in which we try to encourage folks to jump around the site. And it’s also a pretty important revenue driver because we do run ads in between the slideshow slides, so if you want to help us out, please let that video run. We’ve tried to find a nice balance between having it be visible enough to view while not taking up too much of the screen, especially on mobile devices, and so far, it has worked very well.
Thanks for reading this very, very long mailbag. That’s another reason we love The Squawk and Substack – people here can stick with someone for longer than 15 goddamn seconds! Your questions are such a great source of writing inspiration for us – please please please keep them coming! Thank you so much for supporting us here.
Keep squawking and keep gossiping,
Lainey and Sarah
Just a note of gratitude for The Squawk! I love the in-depth responses, the insight behind-the-scenes about all the business pieces, and the chance to share all my random comments and questions with people as interested as I am. Thanks LG team and all my Squawkers!
Thanks for the insight on the video clips! I love hearing about the work behind the site. I thought they were too well put together to be AI generated but it’s so hard to know these days. I’m much more of a reader than a watcher but I will look at those videos differently now!
I think waiting out the JLo and Ben story makes sense. For me the coverage of it by other publications is more interesting to discuss than the possibility of “are they or aren’t they?”