StarWipe

» see starwipe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A parody is only funny to somebody who has the original memorized. StarWipe was pointed at American celebrity gossip in its loudest years, at TMZ and the sites built in its image, and that industry reached me only as output. I could see the photographs. I could not hear the house style being mocked, which is where the entire joke lived.

It launched on 21 September 2015 out of Onion, Inc., with Sean O'Neal from The A.V. Club as its editor. The company was in an expansion phase and had reason to be confident, because ClickHole had launched in 2014 and worked immediately, so a second satire vertical looked like a repeatable trick.

It was not repeatable. ClickHole was aimed at a format anybody with a Facebook feed already recognized, and the target was the shape of the headline itself. StarWipe was aimed at a beat, which meant the reader had to be following the beat. The site never settled on how deep to go, drifting between recognizable satire and gossip-adjacent commentary.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

There was real craft in it. The staff came from inside the Onion machine and knew how to sustain a fictional editorial voice for months at a time, which is harder than writing one funny headline. Reviewers who liked it liked it on that basis, as a sustained impression of an industry rather than a joke delivery system.

The audience never showed up in the size that a full vertical needs. Jezebel's farewell said it plainly in the headline, that it had barely been known before it was gone, and Jezebel was writing about a site in its own neighborhood.

~ the postmortem ~

The corporate clock is the part that explains the timing. Univision took a controlling stake in Onion, Inc. in January 2016 for a little over $27 million, and StarWipe was named in the coverage as one of the properties that came with the deal. Five months later it was closed.

The exit post was unsigned and titled "R.I.P. Celebrity", a fake obituary for the concept the site had spent nine months covering, which is the correct way for that particular website to die. The domain went inactive and the articles are Wayback Machine material now, which is a heavy ending for jokes that were written to be read the same afternoon.

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