Ex-Aol writer dishes about the media company’s shoddy ‘editorial process’
He reviewed TV shows he never watched and turned around stories in 25 minutes. This, PR professionals, is the looming future of the media.
Oliver Miller, to whom Alec Baldwin once referred as “an eighth degree, black belt idiot,” details his 10-month experience as an Aol TV writer in a jaw-dropping post for The Faster Times. To sum up, it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience.
First, his bosses told him to lie when he was essentially asked to produce articles about shows that he had never watched. Then, there were the ludicrous deadlines:
“My ‘ideal’ turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen. … Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.
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