The truth about DCLOVE was that it was a little trashy, sort of like the Us Weekly of Washington, DC. We did plenty of restaurant reviews and things like that, but what really got Ellie and Miles excited was gossip and party pictures. All you had to say to get a story approved was “Well, no one knows this yet, but—” and Ellie would scream out, “Love it!” before you even finished.
They founded the website in 2009, when the whole world was obsessed with Obama’s administration—Gawker couldn’t get enough, writing about the hot young speechwriter and how he was maybe dating the twentysomething woman who worked in foreign policy and had also posed in Maxim. Even Jimmy was on Gawker a couple of times, once in an “Obama Hotties” roundup that named the most attractive staffers. But by 2010, the world was sort of over it and Gawker went back to writing about socialites and celebrities.
And DCLOVE picked up the slack, was committed to reporting every little bit of gossip in the District. Our most popular section was “Movin’ On Up and Movin’ On Out,” which reported notable hirings, firings, and job jumping. We weren’t the only place to do this—Politico Playbook did it quite well, with snappy anecdotes and fresh language. But the difference between us and Politico was that they were classy about it and we weren’t. We always trashed up the announcement with a takedown or a quote. We didn’t mind printing anything. For example:
Regional Communications Director Bobby London is leaving his post at the White House and heading to PepsiCo, where he’ll be Director of External Relations. Sources say he beat out co-worker and nemesis Maggie McDonnel, White House Director of Press Advance, for the job, mostly because of his family connections, and not because of any real qualifications. Co-workers say they won’t miss his standing desk, which he constructed out of cases of Diet Coke (take note, Pepsi!), or his half-pack-a-day habit, which supposedly left a Pigpen-like cloud of smoke around him. “He judged the rest of us for sitting all day,” one officemate said, “but all he did was smoke cigarettes and eat bacon, so really, good luck to him.”
When I told people I worked at DCLOVE, especially people at the White House, they often gave me a condescending smile, and would say something like “Oh, I’ve heard of it,” while implying that they would never actually read it. Sometimes I wondered if Matt was embarrassed that his wife worked at a website that put out a monthly list of the “most datable” White House staffers. High-class journalism we were not.
But the thing is, they all read it. And I mean all of them. (Okay, not the President and probably not the other top people at the White House, but everyone else.) When Alan asked what I was up to at the Snowmageddon party, I knew he was just playing dumb, pretending he didn’t know exactly where I worked so that I would think he was above reading such trash. But Jimmy told me that after Alan’s golf incident with the President, he scoured the site every day, worried we were going to write something about it.
I was happy that Jimmy never pretended that he wasn’t interested in DCLOVE—I’m not sure I would’ve liked him as much if he did. He always talked to me about the things we posted, let me know when everyone in the office was talking about a certain article, and even asked me if we were going to announce his new job in “Movin’ On Up and Movin’ On Out.” He said it in a joking way, but I knew he really wanted it in there. I told him I’d make sure they knew about his new position, and he covered his eyes and said, “Just be kind.”
Maybe I should’ve minded that I worked at a place that wasn’t respected, but to be honest, I didn’t really care. The website was interesting enough and it paid me more than I’d been making at Vanity Fair. Also, I was still a little shaken after getting laid off—I’d worked so hard at the magazine for so many years and then it was just gone. None of that mattered at the end. If jobs could be taken away so easily, maybe it wasn’t worth investing so much of yourself into them; maybe working at a semi-trashy website was just fine.
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The following week, we posted Jimmy’s job announcement on the site: