Magazine Editor Retrained as 'Google Trends' Watcher
Lois Draegin was an editor at TV Guide before she got laid off—now she has an internship to help her build internet skills. That's admirable! But the internship's kind of awful. We should know!
Draegin, who is 55, is now an intern at Liz Smith-publishing older women's site Wowowowowowowow.com. Her boss is 24. We find that inspiring—someone who reached the top of the publishing profession, got laid off, and, with no trace of entitlement or snobbishness, put her head down and took a shitty internship to learn new skills to build her career back up again. It's nice! But as you can see, the internet has already eaten any shred of editorial dignity she had left:
Arriving before 8 one day, her immediate task was to look for story ideas and mash together information from other websites into a brief news item for the "Wow Watch" column. Finding topics was easy enough — Draegin fits WOW's demographic and instinctively understands the interests of its savvy readers.
But she repeatedly had to check her gut instincts against that all-important tool — Google Trends — to make sure her ideas would attract readers to the website. That morning, she chose to put yet another angle on a story about the California mother of octuplets who has been omnipresent on the Web.
Draegin quickly cranked out four paragraphs emphasizing that the "octomom" had decided to give all eight babies the same middle name — Angel.
Keep trucking, Lois; there's still quite a ways to fall on the internet.
[LAT. Unrelated: Brian Bosworth, Jessie Logan, adenoid cystic carcinoma.]