GIF-packed clickbait trumps One Direction listicle to cinch Pulitzer Prize

The literary world has been left speechless, stunned, blown away, and had their lives changed forever this morning, after a gif-heavy clickbait article about cats narrowly beat its closest competitor - a One Direction listicle outlining 15 reasons Harry is the Perfectest Member of 1D - to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literary Excellence.

The Award Selection committee – who conferred the prize to the article’s author, 23-year-old blogger James Ericson, a wordsmith matched only by Matt Stopera and Benny Johnson when it comes to literary genius – now says that it’s about time the world’s most prestigious literary award reflected the state of modern literature.

“The times are changing, and we believe the Pulitzer Prize should reflect that,” said Award Selection Committee member Ash Hitpost. “It’s about time this globally revered prize echoed our world’s deepest hopes, terrible sorrows, and inability to read anything more than 140 characters long.”

Hitpost holds fast that – much like the wide body of unconventional literature that has won a Pulitzer before this – modern works of art can be misunderstood.

“These so-called ‘cynical, demographically-targeted ad-revenue-hungry GIF-laden list articles with misleading titles’ get such a bad rap,” she explained. “But which Pulitzer Prize didn’t? Did society wholeheartedly accept Allen Drury’s works outlining the difficult world of politics and homosexuality in Advise and Consent? Was there not fervent outcry around the coprophilia of Thomas Pynchon's controversial Gravity's Rainbow?”

“Clickbait has the power to move us,” she continued. “Who could ever forget the first time they read ’27 times Friends was the most flawless show of all time’? How could anyone not cherish those early childhood memories of reading ’21 Pictures of Emma Watson that will blow you away and leave you breathless’? Who doesn’t hold close to their heart the first moment they shared ’12 facts about Harry Potter that will totally blow your mind’ - especially after you got to number 6, which totally left us stunned?”

“And the best part is, the authors didn’t have to live a drug-addled, depressed hand-to-mouth existence in a dead-end job buried deep inside the clutches of an oppressive and prejudiced society to craft these colossal artefacts of definitive importance,” she said. “Hell, writers today barely even have to look past the front page of Reddit to find the inspiration for their masterpieces.”

The selection committee applauded Ericson’s magnum opus, lavishing it with praise at the awards ceremony in Geneva.

“When we read this timeless exposé into the human condition, we were blown away,” read the award motivation. “We were left speechless. We were shocked. Number 7 had us in tears. Ericson has reached that apogee of literary greatness: he is the Hemingway of snappy bullet points, the Gordimer of Cat gifs, the Proust of content appropriation. We are humble to hold this fragment of a genius’s soul up and say that it has finally arrived: The Great American Listicle.”

And fans could not agree more.

“Thumbs up, fireworks emoji, smiley, winking smiley, crazy-grin smiley,” said 21-year-old Tiffany Megan-Amber. “Tongue-out smiley, heart, heart, 100-exclamation-underlined.”

"Cheat" lawyer receives international recognition

A former Law student is being honoured by several large Law Universities this week, after numerous news articles and reports published in South Africa proved that he was ridiculously overqualified to be a lawyer.

Lwazi Mzozoyana, who was enrolled to read for a Law Degree at Rhodes University in 2005, is to be the recipient of not one but four honourary law degrees, having been praised as “the very definition of brilliance” and “possessing a legal talent and universal public revulsion far beyond his years and legal experience”.

“If we look at his astonishing list of accomplishments – for example, being found guilty of stealing two fellow student’s assignments from a locked submissions box in 2012, cheating on a law of contract exam in 2007, and also being banned from Rhodes until 2022, which, let me add, was previously a lifetime ban,” said Barry Starr, the Dean of the prestigious Law Faculty at Harvard University, “then we can see that, at the tender age of just 33, he’s amassed the kind of widespread contempt and scornful, dismissive public hatred that most lawyers take years to build up.”

“His utter disregard for the laws and rules of both academic institutions and civil society, his disrespect for moral decency, and his brazen attempts to utterly destroy another Zimbabwean student’s reputation and chances of graduation have shown that he is leagues and bounds ahead of even the most absolutely reviled lawyers who defend paedophiles,” explain Starr. “If you add this to the fact that he’s shown no remorse or shame whatsoever, hell, he might even be TOO ridiculously overqualified to practise law.”

The plans to confer these honourary titles and degrees have been met by widespread approval by members of the legal community.

“It’s simply astonishing,” said lawyer of nearly three decades, Sue Primcourt. “It took me years of defending definitely guilty serial murderers, baby-rapers, and underground sex-slave mafiosos to get even half of the spite and derision he got in just years of study.”

However, for Mzozoyana, this is just the beginning. With promise and accolades such as these, it’s only a matter of time before he takes up political aspirations and becomes President.

“If he works hard, puts in the tireless effort and passionate devotion it takes to succeed in the political sphere, then who knows,” said Starr, “Perhaps he could be as much of a thief as Zuma is (allegedly).”

Plagiarist unsure how to reword original content

An area journalist is reportedly unsure today, after meeting countless difficulties in rewording a rival website's news content while trying to make it look like his own original work.

“The world of cutting-edge journalism is a competitive and challenging place,” said 32-year-old part-time journalist and most-time “content aggregator” Robin Hartikles. “But nothing is more challenging than sitting there with another website’s content in front of you and a thesaurus in one hand trying to figure out how to balance synonyms with word replacement, phrase alterations and content mixing to make it seem like this is your own, fresh, original story that came solely as a result of your hard work.”

Hartikles explained why, unlike with images or photos on the internet – which are bloody easy to steal or pretend exist in the creative commons – written work still presents a challenge.

“There are so many possibilities, and doing it wrong means you’ll at the very least have to pretend that the source information is to blame,” he said. “What happens when there are specific words or a very specific vocabulary that makes for sentences that cannot be altered for fear of losing all the phrase’s meaning? This is why ‘curation’ or 'aggregation', as we call them in the business, are artforms unlike any other.”

This particular article – a series of photographs and accompanying descriptions pulled directly from a thread on a world renowned source of much free viral content known only as Reddit.com – is proving difficult, said Hartikles.

“What do I do? Do I reorder the words? Do I right-click the word in MS Word and choose from a readily available list of synonyms? Do I find other sources and blend the two to make it seem like this is original thought? It’s such a tough decision. All I can say is thank GOD for all that practice I got with Turn It In and my university essays.”

Whatever his choice, Hartikles is steadfast that he can never stoop to citing original sources.

“Have you ever read an article that says ‘reported The Sunday Times last week’ or ‘according to an article by The City Press,” he asked. “Admitting that I got all my information from another websites’ hard work would make me look like a journalist who is lazy, unethical and unprofessional.”

He added that “citing source material is also so much work”.

“It’s bad enough that I have to jump through more hoops than a trained circus animal to credit photographers for their images,” he explained, adding that by “credit” he meant “neglect to include any and all relevant information that might lead to the original photographer getting any site visits, advertising revenue, or even exposure, that beloved bread and butter of artists everywhere.

Hartikles was quick to refute colleagues claims that he is “a low life scum-sucking bottomfeeder mooching off the sweat and blood of real journlists” saying that he has totally had original thoughts before.

“For example, I came up with the new word that describes the new journalists of the future,” he explained. “A Plag-ournalist.”

Readers wanting to know more about this story can read it in slightly different wording and with my name in tiny letters at the bottom on any other news website in the world, except Buzzfeed, because they've closed down their website.

Pic: Bill Branson, for National Cancer Institute (Creative Commons - public domain)

Buzzfeed apologises for endless stream of shallow, un-lifechanging garbage

Citing the endless stream of failed attempts to “blow your mind”, “change your life”, “make you weep” and other such hyperbolic click-baitery, the chief editor and long-time writer at viral media website and “content aggregator” Buzzfeed has this morning issued a long and heartfelt apology to the internet, people who originally made the content they so brazenly “aggregate”, and the world in general.

“We just want to say we’re so damn sorry,” said editor Plaie Gerize. “Looking back at our long and ugly history of hyperbole, exaggeration and outright lies, we want to wholeheartedly apologise.”

Gerize’s list of apologies was long.

“We’re sorry. We know that Picture Number 8 didn’t blow your mind. We know Number 6 wasn’t perfect, as we said it would be in countless articles,” he said, permanently deleting the entire website in a show of ultimate contrition and sorrow. “Those fabulous snaps of Jennifer Lawrence didn’t prove that she was perfection, and that series of photos that was supposed to restore your faith in humanity was completely inadequate. We're scum. We're cancer. And we’re sorry. We can’t say that enough.”

Pictured: the new Buzzfeed website, with all relevant changes.

His apology extended to all the content that the Buzzfeed team as a whole –regardless of country or origin or format – had produced.

“Even our videos. When they weren’t silly or ham-fistedly trying to send an self-evident life-lesson, they were just totally trivial. Also, time and time again we totally blew down the importance of individual people’s hard work and passion by never using their name and just reducing them to their sex, nationality or even just ‘someone’. We should have given them due respect, even if it is hard to get a click out of you by using someone’s full name.”

He continued.

“We’re also sorry for having outright stolen content from many sites. Sorry, ‘aggregated’. Or maybe ‘curated’? I dunno, which word are we using these days?”

“Furthermore, we’re sorry about contradicting articles that provide you with reasons why each member of your favourite boyband or series is the best one. Like those twenty articles which individually claimed why different members of Friends or One Direction or The Backstreet Boy or whatever were by far the best. I mean, how did we not see how black our souls were, posting these kinds of articles at the same time and having each written by the same author? How could we have been so spineless as to not have an editorial stance on anything?”

“Finally, we’re sorry for using social issues and controversial topics to squeeze a few cheap clicks out of you. Like videos where we show people giving homeless people a pizza or a hundred dollars in a video that probably makes eighteen times that, or with serious issues that don’t deserve to be trivialised in shallow, bullet-point, GIF-heavy listicles.”

Having realised their errors, editors and writers at the website have since vowed to take courses in ethics and journalistic values, and have furthermore vowed to never oversimplify an argument or concept by using cat pictures or images cut from popular culture.

“We realise now that our insatiable hunger to just get that click out of you, to bleed you and other readers for pageviews and time, made us blind,” he said in a long, profound, ten-chapter essay that didn’t contain one picture or numerical bulletpoint. “It turned us into monsters, veritable scum-sucking bottom feeders who lurked on Reddit and subReddit forums and Tumblr pages, copy-pasting and rehashing and resharing old and boring content because we knew that, hell, you’d click whatever old shit we regurgitate.”

The move has been met by widespread praise.

"Their apology was amazing, incredibly. It literally blew my mind and changed my life," said one internet user. "In fact, if there was a list of 10 apologies published on the internet somewhere, this would probably be at number 4."

Those wanting to know more about this story can read this exact same article on The Huffington Post, Upworthy and Elitedaily.