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Elite Daily…News?

By Catalina Campos

While we are all starting to get tired of Facebook, it’s hard to miss Elite Daily’s featured blog posts with over 60 thousand likes and a sprawl of useless debate on the commentary. Elite Daily, dubbing themselves as the “Voice of Generation Y”, publishes articles without worthy content, but instead tries to categorize the complexities of life through lists and graphics. Most of their posts will make you question if the future of journalism is even safe with Generation Y.

Their discontent with traditional news publications influences the new layout of articles that remain to be heavily popular on social media outlets, despite its lack of news-worthy content. On the top of every article are buttons to post to eight different social media accounts, with Facebook and Twitter being listed twice. On their About Us section, they explain their problem towards mainstream publications as these publications, “… that dictates a story rather than speaking to its readership. Elite Daily was created out of a growing discontentment with antiquated media publications mandating that news coverage is presented in a dull, one-dimensional manner.”

However, the vast majority of their articles are far from relevant news coverage, instead a mindless portrayal of posts dedicated to those with a short attention span. The most shocking post to read as a female, “Why You Should Never Trust a Girl With No Girlfriends”, written by Laura Argintar has a bitter, misogynistic tone drawing conclusions from just inferences while unknowingly attacking its female readership.  Argintar writes in her article, “Girlfriend-less women are a special breed of female. They have a twisted sense of loyalty and never make genuine connections, which can be attributed to their manipulative or self-absorbed nature, or both.” Although its intentions are to point out women who are problematic towards others, Argintar ironically takes an anti-feminist stance by putting down others.

Another one of her article’s, “The 8 Types of Ride or Die Chicks”, encourages degrading behavior in young women by describing the type of friends every woman should have in their crew. With lines such as, “The Thirsty Chick can always be counted on to wear a suggestive outfit and dick-hungry smile.”, what type of message is that sending out? The articles garner an excessive amount of backlash, but despite the angry readers, Elite Daily still manages to retain its almost five hundred thousand Facebook followers. I tried to get in contact with Laura Argintar, however, she was unresponsive to my attempts.

What’s the secret behind their success? Business Insider wrote, “Elite Daily’s articles resonate so well with youth because the headlines and content are a combination of Thought Catalog’s realness and The Huffington Post’s breadth.” Their articles might have the perfect length for the internet, but their philosophy criticizing traditional media hurts their credibility as a reliable source. Elite Daily opens their articles as a source of discussion but no intellectual debates can really come out of “The ABCs of Every Party Girl’s Life.” Instead of positively innovating the field of journalism, what they resort to gives a bad reputation to the Millennials.

Argintar isn’t the only writer and the online publication boasts a wide variety of writers on their new revamped website. While Argintar doesn’t represent the entire online publication, her style is the unfavorable common denominator. Maybe they should adopt this philosophy: If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

by Guest Author