The Joy of Google News Alerts

Blogger Maya Kosoff weighs in on hero cat, stolen bees, Juicero, hot dog cannon, new species of pool bear, Lisa Rinna migraine cure.

I don’t know exactly when I started collecting Google Alerts, the service that scrapes the news for search terms you want regular notifications about. Based on the earliest terms on my list — “Peter Thiel,” “Vanity Fair,” “Juicero,” my own name — it was probably in 2016, the year I started working at Vanity Fair as a tech reporter and suddenly had a large public platform, and separately, the year a billionaire venture capitalist used a lawsuit to smother a website out of existence. In the years since I’ve accumulated 40 alerts. Every day around 5 pm, I get a flurry of emails stacked up in my inbox, like little packages you order at 2:30 am in a fit of insomnia and promptly forget about until they arrive.

They include, in no particular order: possum removed, hero cat, pool bear, nutcracker seller, Farmville, Wegmans, Drake single, potato gun, “police found not guilty,” bounce house, food truck overturned, Glenn Danzig, Rob Thomas Carlos Santana, seemed like a nice guy, new species, Phanatic, hot dog cannon, mascot t-shirt gun, antifa supersoldier, “blogger weighs in,” Juicero, Hershey native, “died doing what,” Rockaway Beach boardwalk, migraine cure, Lisa Rinna, dinner party episode, James Gandolfini Spongebob, iPhone notes app, Jim Boeheim picking his nose.

I add words or phrases to my Google Alerts cache whenever they come to me, or whenever I’m reading a story and see a cliché being used that would be interesting to track over time: phrases that seem to develop overnight in the journalism hivemind, emerging from nowhere and suddenly used by every reporter in the same way. Few of my Google Alerts are necessarily congruous, though “hot dog cannon,” “mascot t-shirt gun,” and “Phanatic” have a shared through-line — I added them collectively after the Phillie Phanatic nailed a woman in the face with a hot dog during a game in 2018 — same with “nutcracker seller” and “Rockaway Beach boardwalk.” Some of them tell you something about me (I get migraines; I love the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills; I went to college in Syracuse).

Of course, funny Google Alerts are not a new phenomenon. Meredith Haggerty, writing for WNYC’s On The Media in 2015, explained the idea of “weird” Google Alerts — phrases like “ghost” or “sinkhole,” she and her colleague Ethan Chiel explained, produce news results from around the world that showcase a gorgeous tapestry of human experience. Classic weird “ghost” stories could be a first-person story in the Guardian written by a Welsh bar owner who claims his pub is haunted, or people stuck at home during the pandemic discussing the ghosts they now believe live in their homes.

The sheer volume and breadth of my Google Alerts sets them apart from the phenomenon Haggerty and Chiel are explaining. After another day of living in a cold, stupid world, my Google Alerts are a nightly treat. In the same way other people might unwind by watching the evening news or settling down with a good book, I climb into bed after doing a face mask and see what the day’s news results were for “Hershey native” or “blogger weighs in,” or why, exactly, “stolen bees” is trending (usually someone stealing a beehive in California or Australia) or why we’re talking about antifa supersoldiers again (a phrase Wonkette regularly overuses in its coverage of BLM protests).

I track other phrases that are overused in headline constructions or in how newswriters describe people. You can see patterns emerge by tracking these phrases. The preference in some outlets for phrases like “police found not guilty” and “officer-involved shooting” (usually in the same story) shows the passive way in which mainstream publications tend to describe police violence and the discomfort reporters have with writing about the police in a substantial way. “Seemed like a nice guy” is used by witnesses or acquaintances of mostly middle-to-upper-class white men who are accused of doing horrible things. I follow “died doing what” for the sentence construction “[he/she/they] died doing what [he/she/they] love.” “iPhone notes app” appears every time a celebrity has to hastily apologize for fucking up; “I’m learning in public” would bring up most of the same stories.

Though I still freelance, I stopped working in journalism full time this year. Even though financial stability and employer-sponsored health insurance have been a welcome change for me, I’ve realized that, as I started my marketing job in April, I denied myself the chance to grieve for the industry I thought I would work in forever. The running list of Google Alerts feels like a way to continue my years-long passion of caring deeply about Internet and media minutiae without having to go through the hassle of logging onto Twitter and looking for a funny meme, only to fall down a noxious rabbit hole of finding out which neo-reactionary New York Times columnist we’re all mad at this week. In other words, Google Alerts let me keep an eye on what’s happening in media without having to faceplant into the confusing, toxic, screaming void that is Twitter.

You can opt to only get weekly or monthly updates about your Google Alert search terms, but I must have breezed through that setting the first time I set them up and never thought to adjust them later on. Some days I’m overwhelmed by work, or busy, or just don’t feel like reading them. That’s fine. I’ll either delete the emails and wait for the next day’s, or save them to read tomorrow. Sometimes the news overlaps from day to day; that’s just the price you pay for being an avid Google Alerts reader. Even when Google gets it wrong, which occasionally happens (“stolen bees” has more than once delivered me news articles that have nothing to do with hornet bandits), I learn about a story I never would have found otherwise.

---