I’ve always found Cracked.com to be a box of mixed nuts. More and more, though, they can’t seem to figure out what the hell they are, or who their audience is. Their stuff ranges from some of the most interesting, entertaining and downright insightful pop stuff around (a shrinking minority), to dull and formulaic humor, to weird shit that’s neither funny nor informative, to… pure distilled whiskey, Tango Foxtrot brand.
I realized today that I spend more time wincing at their sophomoric, hep-cat view of the world than laughing at any photoplasty. I spend more time wiping my hands off after reading another supposed insider’s report on porn fluffers or legal asswipers or vomit shovelers than getting a worthwhile Quick Fix. And the proliferation of video and podcast material has taken them down the same tiresome road as too many other sites.
I visited just a few minutes ago and realized that all the crap just overwhelms any relevance or value the place once had. And I look again at the email from a colleague, a very sharp and funny writer with a national following, who inquired about writing for them and was blown off with incomprehensible snark about thinking he was too good for them.
Links deleted across the range of devices. Don’t need second-rate filler trying to pass as wit and relevant humor. Long for the days before MAD went color and sour at the same time.
Huh, and here I was thinking this was a golden age for Cracked.com. I really like the “insider’s reports” on the various industries I don’t know anything about, and the video section has become more polished and lost none of the funny. Could use a little more of Swaim’s “Does Not Compute” and a little less of that “Hunter S. Thompson/Harry Potter” -mashup, but the overall video quality trend is upward.
I’m probably in the target demographic in terms of age and sex, etc, so it’s not an unbiased opinion.
I think your colleague’s experience has (justifiably) coloured your feelings about Cracked. That’s too bad that they blew him off, especially considering that they’re screaming for people to contribute. I wonder if there’s more to this particular situation?
Possibly because it sounds like your colleague couldn’t be arsed to follow the very clear instructions for what to do if you want to write for Cracked.com that are available from a big link on the front page of the site. You do not send them a query letter. You join the writer’s workshop on their forum and start contributing ideas. If your ideas suck, you will probably be shot down. You can come up with more ideas. Or you can quit in a huff, your choice.
Personally I like the “insider’s view” articles. They’re great and I hope to see more of them.
And I’m out of it, so no surprise there. I can appreciate good stuff that just isn’t crossing the plate for me; I don’t think Cracked is delivering good stuff on any level. So much of it is undercooked and derivative, and I suspect a lot of the “insider report” stuff is made up. I found at least one supposed first-person “secret” in an old print article, nicknames and all. Others ring faint bells. I won’t be surprised if someone comes along and exposes a whole writeup as coming from a source Cracked thinks its readers will never find - because paper and libraries, y’know.
No, but it was a final pebble in the avalanche, especially as they’ve whined and cried and hollered for new writers for the last couple of years. I looked into it, but they use this strange semi-public sort of writer’s seminar process that’s not really compatible with how I write - and my colleague is the kind who turns out absolutely brilliant finished work in the time it takes him to drag one Marlboro down to the filter. (He makes me think I should start smoking.) I’d post the exchange here but it would be too identifiable. It’s so bizarre I thought he was pulling my leg, but he wasn’t.
Oh, well. Just thought I’d vent here. I’m sure Cracked hasn’t noticed any drop in its click rates.
That’s precisely why I gave them a pass. It’s a system for amateurs who can’t write or have never learned to write professionally. It’s also a system for editors who think they’ve found a way to get around the slush pile.
Good luck to them all. I’m sure it’s the future of internet publishing.
Even John Belushi auditioned for SNL, man. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and jump through the hoops. Or walk away and sniff about how your brilliance is just so totally above their amateurish requirements. Again, your choice.
I stopped reading Cracked about a year ago, after years of religiously reading every single article (never really got into the videos). It was a combination of three factors:
My favorite writer, Seanbaby, getting a real job and more or less stopping contributing;
Getting myself bant from the comments sections for a very mild flaming of John Cheese;
Finding myself skipping more and more articles. Whether this is due to me outgrowing the demographic, a drop-off in quality on their part, or a combination of the two, I couldn’t say.
I know of no other publication, in 30+ years of experience, that has or had only an “amateurs/DDD farm club” door for new talent. Its existence on Cracked indicates quite a few things, none of which are good and none of which are worth discussing.
It’s that, plus the continuing appearance of recycled material, that indicates to me that the situation is never going to improve. They’ve chosen expedience and limited scope over quality and its essential foundation, effort. I’m happy to cancel my nonexistent subscription and move on.
Oh, aren’t they? Then one wonders why you even brought them up.
As for me being a Cracked editor: aw, you flatter me. I looked into it but decided that the time I’d have to spend on coming up with ideas and getting them past the farm club (an apt description) would be better spent on drumming up more clients for my actual freelancing business, so that’s what I did. No harm, no foul. I suppose I just don’t have a lot of patience for people who claim that the only reason X publication won’t accept them is because X publication is just too plebeian to understand the brilliance of their deathless prose or whatever. Yeah, okay.
More on topic, I’m not surprised that Cracked is losing some long-time readers, because I suspect that will happen any time they change the site, and it most certainly has been changing. There are more videos and podcasts, and the articles are now a mix of comedy riffs on pop culture (their previous bread and butter) and insights into unusual jobs, or sociopolitical commentary or whatever. My guess is that they’re gaining as many readers as they’re losing, but that’s just a guess.
I am still curious about the plagiarized item you turned up in one of the “weird profession” articles. Not because I want to gotcha ya, just because I am curious.
I think Cracked is awesome and I read every text article every single day. I haven’t noticed the quality going down except for the fact that they can become repetitive just because there are only so many interesting lists you can compile without major overlap. I love the insider articles. I do not like their videos much. Their Podcasts can good good to mediocre but I usually pass on those as well.
I don’t think it is a valid complaint that some writers should be held in such high regard through reputation that they should be automatically admitted to write whatever they want wherever they want. That is how old-school media got to be so incestuous in the first place. Cracked is great because it basically says, if you can write and have interesting ideas, we will publish them for a mass audience, if you don’t, then you can’t at least here. It is that simple whether you are a high school student or a Harvard professor.
I don’t see why anyone with any real talent would balk at that idea. If you are a major league baseball player or a famous artist (or a million other things that require great skill), you should be more than willing to show your skills off at something that you deem to be a much lesser level. You should be able to hit the ball out of the park metaphorically speaking and make it known instantly instantly to everyone through your skills alone. Anything else is just a false appeal to authority where none ever legitimately existed in the first place.
Cracked never claimed to be a high-brow site but it is generally accurate in my experience (much more so than ‘real’ mainstream outlets like CNN). I welcome the model and hope they continue to do well.
BTW: Making a protest by deleting links to a major website is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. All you have to do to get it back at any time is type in cracked.com into any search engine of your choice and it will be right there again. You can ignore it if you choose but you can’t ever just wish it gone any more than you can wish any other obvious web link gone.
The more formulaic stuff is beginning to wear thin. How many times can you describe something as “mind blowing”, a term that shows up every third article.
And their style seems to be to include unnecessary locker room language where it contributes nothing to the content. I don’t mind an occasional F-word, but I don’t like wading through gratuitous fratboy swearing.
But I usually find something cool every day or two, so I keep going back.
If I had one thing to gripe about Cracked, it would be their iPad app: it’s a horrendous pile of crap, crashing all of the time, not responding, and so on. They never bother to fix it.
I am with Amateur Barbarian. I used to enjoy Cracked quite a lot - rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but usually amusing - and found it to often be quite informative. Lately I am finding less and less that is at all amusing, and more and more of the “factual” content seems to be either badly superficial, or just plain wrong. Their debunkings now often seem to introduce a good deal more bunk than was there is the first place.
I quit visiting them, too, late this past Spring. The last of the funny left with Seanbaby. The trivia and the moral lecturing do not entertain me. Neither does the relentless flogging of Cracked merchandise and books by their contributors. I promised myself I would never read “John Dies at the End” or watch the movie precisely because of the flogging.
I have never visited Cracked on-line, though I did used to read the print version (but prefered Mad) in my younger days. I have also never heard of that book/movie. Since I always seem to be pressed for time these days, can someone tell me what happens?
He never said any of that in his OP, though. He said the guy volunteered to offer them something, and was blown off. He never said a word about saying he should be automatically accepted.
And the model sucks for most normal writers because they can’t show off their writing skills. You don’t contribute your writing and have them judge it. You submit an idea, they say it’s good and then you have to work with a bunch of other people, having them constantly check your work. You don’t get to just show them a finished article and see if it works. It’s a completely different system than most professional writers use, seemingly designed for amateur writers. It seems to be designed to filter out people who are talented enough to get work elsewhere.
It’s not hard to understand why someone who doesn’t write like that would want to try a more traditional method. And I’m fine with them not accepting that. But I’m not fine if they really did out of the blue claim the guy thought he was too good for them. Honestly, unless he himself was a complete asshole, I can’t come up with any reason why that would be the correct response.
And, from what I’ve seen from the more regular writers, some of them are jerkish enough that they might act that way without provocation.
FWIW the site really has nothing to do with the magazine. It is more of a general comedy site with List based articles. As far as the plugs, I don’t find it more of less obnoxious than anyone else. Authors always plug books and other things they have to sell.