What kind of primitive or extinct monster do you want to be known as? The editor in chief of the Daily Beast gave an atavistically swaggering interview in which he talked about being the next Gawker—good luck, pal!—and basically talked like that spiked punker bracelet the Verge editor wears all the time would talk, if it suddenly became sentient.
The most embarrassing quote, though, came when he explained how his reporters don’t do access journalism:
[W]ho’s gonna spoon-feed to the Daily Beast? Like, they all know we’re a bunch of velociraptors around here. We’re just gonna bite the hand off if you spoon-feed us.
Velociraptors? Who is impressed by velociraptors in 2018? The velociraptor was a hyped-up addition to a canon that was perfectly fine without it—like Elmo on Sesame Street, or Jar Jar Binks, or Pepsi Clear. Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg felt like the regular dinosaurs weren’t thrilling enough for their dino-stories, so they took an obscure and marginal species and made it meaner and bigger than the fossil record could justify. Pure branding. The word “raptor,” which properly referred to actually fierce and cool hawks, falcons, and eagles, got taken over by a fifth-rate dead thing, because Hollywood made it happen. A bunch of Canadians got so caught up in it they named an NBA team after it and dressed the players in purple.
The only good thing about the ’90s is that they’ve been over now for a long time. The basketball team still has its stupid name because Canada is immune to shame. It is now generally understood that the real velociraptor was fluffy and marginally more menacing, as a physical presence, than a wild turkey. Evolution came up with much better ideas. Come up with some better beast.
