Zen and the Art of Text Asset Submission

by Virginia Heffernan | @YahooTech

The other day, for the first time, my boss asked me to “submit” a “text asset.”

Ha.

He meant an article. Or what, in the newspaper business, they used to call an “article,” where such things were “filed,” rather than “submitted.” Simultaneously, in the magazine business, the very same fistful of prose might be called a “piece”; there, you’d be asked to “turn in” the “piece,” as you would have turned in an essay in college. Indeed, as a humanities major, you “turned in” “essays” on things like Anita Hill or “The Real World,” in semi-conscious preparation for the happy day you’d be paid to do precisely this for Newsweek or Mirabella.

That is the media world as I choose to recall it, anyway, when Michael Musto ruled the Village and The Village Voice; Janet Malcolm published psycho tone-poem masterpieces in The New Yorker; and Tom Junod wrote creepily grand profiles for GQ and Esquire.

Now, working for all-digital media, I was being asked to submit a text asset. As a weird-girl poetry reader, optimistic English major, unstable English graduate student and lifelong writer, I would say I’ve spent sickening amounts of time contemplating the production and consumption of words. So I couldn’t help but pause, mid-career, over my re-classificiation from “writer” to “text-asset submitter.”

I was not hurt. I was closer to delighted.

“Text asset” hearkened back to a decent vein of jokes from ten years ago. That was the moment that aspiring laureates across the land were demoted en masse to “content providers,” during the first dotcom interlude. What we gave posterity was in an instant transformed to an inchoate mass noun, content—something to fill, stuff and take up space, like packing peanuts or gravel.

Content provider. There were jokes among fellow scribes that the romance of garrets and Keats and and 1947 Underwoods—the blurry, boozy romance of being a writer—had grounded out just in time for our own debuts as faceless providers of content (listicles, charticles, deep captions). The idea with “content provider” was that it seemed people wanted to point their faces at screens featuring the World Wide Web; enterprising types wanted to get something, anything, in front of those faces that they’d really stare at, and that would lead those faces—maybe now, maybe never—to pay.

Early Web opportunists were like the original Warner brothers, nés Wonskolaser, with their brand-new projector in 1900. They had acquired this eccentric chunk of engineering, holy as a taxi medallion, that beamed a generously proportioned square of colored, dancing light, and hauled it from Canada to New Castle, Penn., where they opened the Cascade Theater in 1903. A theater with chairs for gazers and a screen where they could beam their light. Shucks! Now they needed some meaningful shapes—some content—to ride the photons. Enter movie-making.

But how will we shade and make symbols of these abundant pixels, asked the editors of webzines Feed and Salon and Slate and, my favorite, Stim, in the 1990s? Just as the Warners bent their light beams to look like stage plays, the early Web editors shaped their beams to look like indie zines and The New Republic.

As we all know, in both cases, the beams, the pixels—the medium—took on poltergeist lives of their own. They seemed to want different things, make different demands, have different capabilities, than stageplays and print magazines and newspapers. That’s what the old Marshall McLuhan rune, “the medium is the message,” still means. That a movie is, above all, a movie—not a play that happens to exist in light and shadow on a scrim. And a Website is, above all, a Website—not a daily broadsheet with all the news that’s fit to print that happens to appear on desktop screens.

But that all happened—the move from writing to content-providing—in the days when information wanted to be free. So the packing peanuts we were spinning out was just to stuff the pixel-waves and see what kept the eyes glued to it. The absurd end of that project of content-providing was content-farming—the hideous practice of working writers like non-unionized factory-workers and tasking them with churning out nonsense prose, studded with search bait (“Tina Fey’s scar,” “Obama’s birthplace”), on 25-minute deadlines. Fortunately, the search engines changed their algorithms so as not to feature farmed prose so high in their returns; most of the farms have changed their ways and now publish more useful and meaningful and valuable stuff.

That’s right—valuable. And not just valuable because the output of writers might trick a Web user into looking at it for a quarter second, or even monopolize that attention for an hour but do nothing with it. But because writers, with massive assists from technologists and producers and marketers, could enchant readers from the open Web and keep them focused one place long enough to take in an ad. And maybe get inspired to try a Neuro drink or call Charles Schwab.

So that’s what Internet prose is for! The same thing it really was for at the birth of newspapers and magazines. Something to put an ad near, or in, or on. It’s a thing that can be sold. It’s not art, OK. It’s not literature. But it’s also not stuffing. It’s not content. It’s...an asset.

“When is the text asset arriving?” my boss asked again. “Soon, soon,” I said, like every deadline writer, ever. I labored for a minute longer over the “text,” as I’ve done nearly every day of my life, forever. For this package we were making at Yahoo News, the visual assets and graphic assets and video assets were already in. And suddenly mine was too. Something in the phrase “text asset” had quickened my pace, and brought more joy to the project. At least it’s an asset, I thought with pride. And until it’s a liability, we writers should keep making it.