I don’t have a deep or clever intro to this mailbag planned. Both Sarah and Lainey often start this feature with some business of Hollywood type of observation or anecdote, but I’m going to dive a right into our questions for this week. Lainey was scheduled to do this mailbag this week, but the week went a little bit sideways on her so I’m stepping in to pinch hit for a week as Emily and I do on occasion. Thank you to those of you who submitted questions for “The Substitute” to answer.
One of those questions was about the Beagles, hence the hero image for this post. Barney and Elvis are doing well at the moment. At fifteen and a half and ten and a half respectively, that always comes with a “knock on wood” health-wise, but at this very moment both are well and snoring behind me as I write this.
Let’s dive into this week’s mailbag….
Question from Caitlin:
Jacek, beyond all of your work on LG, are you personally interested in gossip and, if so, what are some stories/topics that you have been particularly interested in?
To avoid being super boring and saying that I’m not really into celebrity the way my wife has always been, or even remotely close to it, I’ll say that what I’m most interested in is the reactions our readers have to certain topics and how Lainey’s perspectives on certain celebs have changed over the years. I’ve said to her that IMO, it would make for a very interesting feature from time to time: “Why I eventually flipped on __________”. She tells me it’s a terrible idea and that no one cares why her opinions on certain celebs have evolved over the years, but I think it would be an interesting exercise in pop culture analysis and how a certain celeb’s moves over time, whether strategic or not, have helped them either resurrect or soil their image with at least one pop culture critic on the internet. No? This is part of my campaign, putting this to text!
Generally, though, my interest in celebrity lies in seeing how celebs or stories about certain celebs are received in online discourse. So much of what we debate online has become politicized and polarized that I find it fascinating how certain celebrities represent team blue, others team red, and how no matter what they say or do, each side either likes or dislikes them based on whether or not they are on their side. It isn’t much different than politics. Meghan and Harry are one example. Sydney Sweeney is another. Blake Lively is like a curse word for some. I like to see people’s take on Gwyneth (also a topic for my above suggestion!), and how certain actors and actresses are perceived even when they associate with problematic figures or how they recover from PR disasters. For instance, how smoothly has Matt Damon transitioned from being Crypto Pitch Guy?
Speaking of crypto….
Question from Michelle B:
Do you use any AI tools for the site and are they helpful or misleading?
The short answer is not many, if any, and when we have, it’s been in very limited ways.
I’m trying to be a little less pessimistic about AI these days (and mostly failing), though my baseline state as it relates to AI is cynicism and worry that it’s in the hands of people who don’t care to first understand (and regulate) how massively it can and will impact society. So, my approach to AI adoption at LaineyGossip has been slow and guarded, likely to a fault, because I view us as these gatekeepers of how online writing was (waaaaaay back in the 2010’s, remember those?). Because of that view, we’ve only brushed up against AI in a couple of ways at LaineyGossip where our workflow is concerned.
When Chat GPT first came out, we briefly experimented with having it read and summarize our articles in order to generate what are called Metadata titles and Metadata descriptions, which are page mark-ups in the header code of a page that tell crawlers what the page is about. Those are also what are often pulled into your Google or MSN feeds as the titles and descriptions you see when you decide if you’re going to click into an article. We’d have it read and summarize the post into those two titles, then we would fix them, make them our own, and post. That lasted about 2 weeks, and then my paranoia kicked in about the fact that we were feeding Chat GPT entire articles we had written to consume and add to its ‘brain’ even before we posted the article, so we’ve abandoned that practice. Could it save time? Probably. But it also feels like somewhat of a betrayal of creative process to have it spit out a summary for us. And Emily has gotten really good with her summaries so why not have a human do some human work, and pay them for it, right?
The time we used AI when it did make a lot of sense was during the site migration to the platform we’re currently using. And forgive me if some of you have read this before because I can’t remember if I addressed it already, but for the rest of you, we had it help us with a task that would have been impossible to do manually. Or take years to complete for little payoff.
During our migration we had AI ingest thousands of individual photo captions from the database of our old site, where we captioned each photo individually, and had it write a combined caption at the bottom of a set of photos, similar to how you see captions presented on LG today (where most gallery captions are combined to capture all the subjects in a group). Without that AI script, the alternatives would have been to take only the first caption of a set of photos, or none at all, or spend about 6 years manually re-writing those ourselves.
So, in limited ways, AI can be useful. But without some solid standards like watermarking, platforms either classifying or ID’ing works as AI generated on a level that takes voluntary disclosure out of the hands of the “publisher”, and all kinds of other well thought-out safeguards that the Sam Altmans and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world would rather first break, then (maybe) think about fixing, or political leadership with some degree of foresight and concern for the long term and not just quick wins (looking at you, Orange Buffoon), we seem destined to turn the internet into this.
Questions from:
Thanks Jacek! I’d love to get your thoughts on living with a TV personality. Fun!
Does she get recognized a lot when out and about? Do you get recognized as her husband? Does her fame get you better tee times?
First off, Lainey will cringe at the suggestion that she’s a “celebrity”, but she is on TV so for us who aren’t, let’s call her that for the sake of this column.
She is very much a TV personality in the sense that what I see at home and what I see on TV, especially during her days on The Social, are different. On television she becomes this entertainer, when in our social circles everyone knows I’m the hilarious one with the amazing sense of humour (😉). At home and on the street, Lainey has stranger danger, and it’s always been like this even before she started working in TV. When we’re walking in the neighbourhood and she gets recognized, she’s this awkward recluse type, a natural introvert, who barely lifts her eyes off the sidewalk and when someone does say hi to her because they know her from TV, she kindly thanks them in what I perceive as this stilted, forced effort to be kind. She tells me people can’t tell that she’s being awkward and it’s only because I’ve lived with her for over 25 years that I know the difference. Sure!
As it relates to being recognized, I have found it used to happen around the city a little bit more when she was still on The Social. It attracted a certain kind of audience and also came on at a different time of day, not to mention doubled her time on screen, so more people would say stuff like “I watch you all the time!”, or what kills me is when a young person goes “my mom watches you all the time!”. We have a laugh about that occasionally. So much for reaching youth on TV!
Question from Jessica:
How do ads work on LG, like do you get to choose the types of products or services that get advertised, and do you get paid based on how successful each ad is? Or is it more like a company pays you a flat fee and they pick all the ads and it doesn’t matter what kind of engagement they get?
Most of the ads you see on LaineyGossip are delivered through what’s called programmatic advertising, where an auction happens in milliseconds after you enter a page on the site. We have contracts with several ad exchanges that are authorized to sell LaineyGossip ads on their respective marketplaces to advertisers who specify who they would like to target, and if a reader on LaineyGossip matches the profile the company is looking to target, an ad is shown.
Several of these exchanges “compete” for that ad view in those milliseconds before it shows and it goes to the highest bidder. Most of those ads are not performance dependent, but overall the algorithms that conduct these auctions will determine which websites are more likely to produce quality views for their advertisers, so while click performance may not determine whether or not we get paid for that ad in the moment, on aggregate the better you perform against your peers, the more likely you are to see those brands bidding on your website.
We don’t preselect the ads, but we can apply filters to block certain advertisers if we wish, or certain categories of advertisers. So there’s some degree of control in that sense, but sometimes if a distasteful ad runs, or a bad actor injects a script into an ad that displays an ad that the network didn’t authorize, we have to scramble to try to find it reactively. Which is why you might find, on some sites (including ours from time to time), those pop ups that try to scare you into thinking you’ve been infected with a virus, when in actual fact not interacting with that ad is the way to avoid problems. But the industry has done a lot to clean that stuff up, so you probably see less of it now than you did 3 or 4 years ago.
And with that, thank you all for coming to this space and LaineyGossip and making us part of your daily routine. Somehow, we’re still making it work and a lot of that has to do with many of you opening your wallets to support us directly, whether that’s a paid Squawk subscription, paying for an ad-free LaineyGossip experience, or simply by allowing ads on the site when you visit LaineyGossip. Annual Squawk renewals are around the corner and while we’re aware of how many subscriptions it takes these days to get in all the shows and podcasts you like, and how unbalanced and uncertain the economy is, we’d love it if you can continue (or start to) support us.
Squawk on,
Jacek
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