When You Trash Good Content, You Get Trash Content.
It's that simple.
Back when the internet was a teenager, I ran a graduate literary journal—one of the most thankless jobs on the planet. Midway through the year, we hosted a reading at a fancy cafe with a nice snack spread. At first, we were worried that nobody was going to show up. We were wrong. Everyone showed up at the end, for the free wine and the featured author. They skipped the rest.
The other readers were annoyed.
At me.
“If you really cared about us, you would’ve had the featured author go on first. That way, everyone would’ve shown up on time.”
A few months later, we hosted another event. We spent hundreds of dollars on catering, and hundreds of dollars on a guest speaker—a visual artist who did a lot of work with literary themes.
He went first.
Hundreds of people showed up on time.
When he was done, more than half the audience abruptly got up and left. They didn’t stay for the poems inspired by his work. They knew the event wasn’t over. They just didn’t care. The p…