St. Remedius Medical College: “If It Wasn’t Free, We Couldn’t Give It Away”

Introducing Creative Onanism

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

Once upon a time, there was a geologic epoch known as the 1990s. These were the days of the great Journalism Wars, where advertisers realized that the best way to Be Seen was by becoming connected to something “edgy.” Some invested in designer sodas or sponsoring trendy alcohol, and others invested in monthly house magazines. The best return on investment for suburban realtors and dotcoms with too close a connection to certain family-oriented organizations, though, was through weekly newspapers. Weeklies had been a thing through the 1970s and 1980s, but they exploded in the mid-1990s: two pages of cover story getting even with someone who cut off the editor for a prime parking spot, two pages of obsessive sports and/or science fiction TV trivia, a syndicated advice or horoscope column, two or three equally syndicated comic strips that used too many F-bombs for daily newspaper comfort, and 150 pages of ads, and they printed money. Before long, every half-assed college paper film critic and humor columnist (with the word “humor” doing heavy lifting, especially in the days when readers had to be reasonably discreet about their cannabis use) found themselves sending in photocopied tearsheets and portfolios to a seemingly never-ending flotilla of weeklies opening in increasing smaller areas, and the desperate need for regular content, preferably from contributors who went to the editor’s school, meant that they had potential readerships in the tens.

For a time, it was heaven. Weeklies competing with each other over scoops and fighting over advertisers, with gigantic sponsored contests, concerts, and parades, and endless rivers of freebies and promotions from interests hoping for so much as a positive blurb. Portraits of the editors on billboards and on the sides of buses, usually with some variation of “You, of course, know who I am, don’t you?” printed underneath. Unlimited broadband internet access, allowing all-day downloads of only the best porn “for research purposes.” Christmas parties for staffers and investors where the success was measured in the number of police called and the number of lawsuits for property damage. Book proposals and contracts on the lasting influence of Space Precinct and staffer drink recipes and photoshoots of editor families and children. Advertising inserts that threatened to outweigh the main paper. And above it all, everyone hearing tales of life with Conde Nast magazine staffers and freelancers and deciding “We’re not a serious publication until we have our own ski chalet on the moon. Branded, of course.”

Eventually, the rivers of stupid money dried up. Advertisers no longer paid for full-page ads merely to have said ads framed and put on display in executive offices. Those ads moved online, and then directly to social media, where buyers could track exactly how many views and how many clicks instead of accepting platitudes of “We have four people reading each copy of the latest issue, and trust us on this.” Former journalistic stars in their own minds attempted to pivot to video, only to discover they had faces and voices made for cave paintings. In a world where movie ticket sales could drop 50 percent between showings on opening night with a few texts, coddling swag-addicted film critics made no sense, and musicians and restaurants retaliated against deliberately and obnoxiously poor reviews by bragging about moving their advertising online. Winners of “Best of” awards demurred on paying to play, often comparing notes on the costs of winning versus just posting on Facebook. Bigger weeklies bought up smaller weeklies, which then had to sell to bigger chains before the loans defaulted. The biggest source of revenues, personals ads, evaporated when those in the dating pool discovered that they could get an unlimited pool of psychopaths, perverts, and party animals with a monthly dating app fee instead of paying three times as much per week to get a voice mail account full of not-so-good weird. And the response from publishers and editors alike: “Full speed ahead! We’re going to turn that iceberg into Slurpees!”

By the end of the Aughts, the weekly newspaper was pretty much dead. The big chains that bought up scrappy underdogs themselves collapsed under the weight of leveraged debt. The staffers with undeniable talent left for better-paying venues, with the rest having to take day jobs or moving back in with their parents in order to afford to “keep reaching my audience.” Said audience started fragmenting after the introduction of the smartphone, and tore open its hull and started taking on water on the shoals of social media. Those staffers who remained at their posts did because they truly believed their work was important (writers and artists), they had nowhere else to go other than a career in customer service (editors), or they were certain that all of this was a temporary downturn, the Internet was nothing but a fad, and things would go back to the old days (publishers). As things dragged on and former readers had so many other places for entertainment options, the lights started going out, empty paper bins were scavenged for scrap, and the lines for “Drunk of the Week” photoshoots at local bars faded to nothing.

And then there was Creative Onanism.

Creative Onanism started like so many other weeklies during the 1990s: a gaggle of otherwise completely unemployable smarm merchants deciding “Let’s put on a show!” and getting someone else to pay for them to play. The difference was that during the massive contraction of the 2000s and 2010s, CO kept going strong. Very rarely did its staffers leave when offered better opportunities, as if that happened often, and the masthead only occasionally changed on account of “natural causes” (alcohol poisoning, vomit aspiration, levamisole toxicity, publisher defenestrations, and the occasional curb-stomping outside a club or music festival) instead of venue change. With the few who assumed their audiences would follow them, they rapidly discovered issues with their new places of work, such as being able to go to the office and stay the legally required distance from schools and daycare centers, and came back. For those who reached the upper limit of what they could accomplish at a weekly, the parent company still put out print magazines that guaranteed continued employment: the Dallas society magazine Funny Maundering that specialized in essential guides for Dallas elites such as “This is Awkward: How To Protect The Family Fortune When Daddy Shows Up In the Epstein Files” and “Third World Sex Tourism On A Budget,” the fashion freebie Camel Toe covering the absolute best clothing and jewelry from close friends of the editor, and the regional movie and TV magazine Film Flam with the perpetual cover story “This Year, Dallas-Based Movies EXPLODE!” All were available from expensive custom kiosks and prime supermarket checkout placement, in addition to innumerable free copies sent to potentially relevant businesses whether they were requested or not. The staff reciprocated by making sure that the excesses of the Nineties kept going: popup magazine stands in the middle of the Dallas summer without access to water or toilet facilities, open-bar meet-and-greet parties to “promote the brand,” book collections of staffer columns and “Best of” compilations, video podcasts and late-night syndicated television attempts, and enough staff blowouts that the cleaning staff could make a year’s pay just from selling the Peruvian Flake vacuumed out of the industrial carpet in the editor’s office each week.

Outsiders visiting Dallas for the first time and opening a Creative Onanism bin could be justified in wondering what the hell was going on, especially with a physical paper hefty enough to injure children and pets if it should fall on them. Part of this is due to an increasingly aging crowd of small businesspeople who vaguely remembered the annual Christmas staff and advertiser parties, and wanted their one shot at all-expense-paid blackout drunkenness in exchange for sponsoring the latest restaurant or craft fair review section. Part is due to other interests that use Creative Onanism to gauge whether it was time to leave a market: a review of a club or gallery from CO, particularly a positive review, meant both that the venue was in deep decline and would soon be overrun with CO readers, meaning that it was time to sell or shut down unless one wanted to ride the bomb all the way down. The most important aspect, though, is that publisher Melissa Kingsford, the seemingly never-aging perpetual mean girl who founded Creative Onanism, is probably the most prominent poster child for the Jeffty gene in the Southwestern United States: as long as she lives, 1995 never really ends in her proximity, and she has no intention of going anywhere.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Benjamin Willard Creative Onanism Jeffty gene Space Precinct St. Remedius weekly newspapers