Will Leitch: Internet Semi-Celebrity

By Stefan Beck | Monday, April 9, 2001

If you were to give Will Leitch his due and count him among the foremost savants of Internet journalism, he'd probably quip that he's mostly just an idiot. Leitch, a twenty-five-year-old freelance columnist, was recently named editor of Steve Brill's new All-Star Newspaper. Through his long-running Life as a Loser column series at Ironminds.com (Leitch bills his ongoing column as 'excruciatingly long'), he has made a name for himself by telling the reading public, at great length, that he is pathetic, a bungler, a 'stupid midwestern kid'. Unfortunately, Will, most of the evidence points to the contrary.

So what brought about his impressive (if not exactly meteoric) rise to Internet semi-stardom? We decided to give Will a call, to find out what unseen force drives this newly successful, media-minded fellow.

Not surprisingly, he was in excellent spirits. Once we had established that we were not, as he suspected, angry creditors, he wanted to know why we weren't busy watching baseball. (He'd already taken care to point out that the last four digits of his phone number are also the last year the Cardinals played in the World Series). In spite of this concern, we got him to talk.

According to Leitch, his start came at the University of Illinois campus newspaper. 'It's a really nice crappy school,' he said. 'But I loved it there, you know; we got to drink a lot.' From that paper, he went on to a one-year fellowship ('Every year they picked like three good college journalists — or two, and me') at You: The National College Magazine, in Los Angeles.

Leitch recalls that the now-defunct supplement was 'such a crappy magazine...they kept canceling issues like the week before it was supposed to come out. We'd just sit around and play Uno.' However bad it was, it landed him a job at the Sporting News website, in St. Louis, where he wrote a weekly column for the next year and a half.

It wasn't until August 1998, when Andy Wang started Impression magazine (later to become Ironminds.com), that the real Will Leitch made his debut. This Will, an incisive, relentlessly self-deprecating humorist, told the world that he is, quite literally, a loser. One of the first Life as a Loser column, in a series of about seventy, is the story of his experience as an unsuccessful contestant on Comedy Central's 'Win Ben Stein's Money.'

'I never talked to anybody about that,' Leitch told us. 'Then one day I was like, 'You know what? This is a good piece to write.' So I sat down and wrote it. Andy [Wang] was like, 'That's pretty good. Let's make a series about how much of a dork you are.' I used to say...it's for the guy who was perpetually picked last for kickball.'

Since then, Will has written a Loser column ever week. These 'self-indulgent rants,' as he lovingly terms them, appear every Wednesday on Ironminds.com. They deal with sources of personal humiliation as varied as youth sports, a runaway fiancée, and his cat's micturation habits. 'I'm running out of stuff to say,' he admitted. 'But it's cool. It's a fun little gig.'

Almost against his will, the fun little gig blossomed into a much larger project. Some time ago, a New York agency asked Will to turn his popular series into a novel. 'I never thought of writing a book, because those things are big,' he said. Nonetheless, he agreed, and completed the work in his hometown of Mattoon, Illinois, during a period of unemployment. 'The basic point of it is that this stupid Midwestern kid who doesn't know his head from his ass or his ass from a hole in the ground, or, by the transitive property, his head from a hole in the ground...all I ever want to do is just get out of Mattoon and make it big in the world, and then I get to New York and realizes that this place will eat you alive.'

'It was pretty obvious,' he told us, 'that they were like, 'Oh, wow, Dave Eggers's book [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] is selling a whole bunch...let's find another Midwestern kid under thirty, who's in New York, and writes about his own life all the time, and feels weird.'' He wished to point out, however, that these are only a few superficial similarities between himself and Eggers: 'He's really good, and I'm not...I think he's the man. I think his book is great.'

Whether or not Leitch has as much faith in his own as-yet-unpublished book, he is clearly serious about writing. Asked whether he hoped to write books in the future, he said, with little hesitation, 'Yeah, I could see myself doing that. That's kind of the goal. That's the only thing in the world I'm any good at. I can't even do laundry or change a tire.' Although his book is not fiction (Will Leitch is the protagonist), he maintains that, 'It's not always just going to be about me. I'm not David Sedaris.'

Will has also contributed to Salon.com. His piece 'The Online Housesitting Nightmare' describes in amusing detail his stay in a loft rigged with thirty-two cameras and microphones — all broadcasting his life live over the Internet. 'The piÀce de résistance is the control room. It's what I always imagined Darth
Vader's sleeping pod looked like on the inside. On the main switchboard are four monitors, each containing 16 little pixelated video screens. From here you can watch the shower cam, the toilet cam, the bed cam, the refrigerator cam, the cat litter cam. I see myself on camera No. 10. It's situated right above the main computer monitor, and focused on the top of my head.'

Of course, aside from his other adventures, Leitch's most recent big break is his position as editor of the new Brill's Content All-Star Newspaper (allstarnewspaper.com). The site offers links to the most significant and best-written stories in the national press, so Leitch's job, as he has described it, is to 'go in and read newspapers all day.' Although he admittedly went in with news interests limited to 'movies and baseball,' he notes with pleasure that 'it's kind of neat to actually know what's happening in the world. I actually know what's going on in Uganda right now.'

Not everyone is so enthusiastic about Will's new job. His most recent Loserinstallment is a series of vitriolic e-mails that he has received of late from one 'Daniel Hopkins'. This disgruntled All-Star reader has demanded on several occasions that Leitch step down from his position. In one missive, 'Hopkins' writes, 'I am forced to conclude that you are plainly not up to the modest task at hand. The way your words clunk and wheeze across the screen suggests that you are hobbled by a serious mental impairment. If this is incurable, I will recommend to your editor that you be taken round back and shot.' In another, he asks whether Leitch was 'nursed on lead paint.' It doesn't look like Mr. Leitch will be running out of stuff to tell us about any time soon. In any case, Will, we fully intend to keep reading this crap.

Will Leitch: Internet Semi-Celebrity

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