As a staff, we “have very little in common aside from being completely obsessed with blogs and blogging.” So wrote Nicholas Jackson when he announced this paper’s staff. Most of us have experience snarkily chronicling campus goings-on, personal goings-on and worldly goings-on, or some combination thereof, on our Blogspot, Tumblr and WordPress pages. But all of us pale in comparison to Michael Kane, who, for better or worse (and I leave the judgments to him), has built the most popular Northwestern blog, rumorroyalty.com. And unlike our staff of retired and/or repentant bloggers, Michael Kane is still at it, ten days after graduating from Northwestern and weeks after he announced to readers he would stop before summer began.
“Now, that – that is, I don’t want to say misconception… I never fully intended to reveal myself,” Kane says. “That was kind of something people wanted me to do more than I wanted to do it.”
That Kane writes most of the posts has long been an open secret, something that, like the pseudonyms on the site, everyone is kinda in on. I get the sense that he’s always wanted people to know, but only the right people. He once froze up in class when a professor asked if any of his students penned a blog. All eyes – O.K., “75 percent” of them – were on Kane. The girl next to him opened a tab in Firefox and pulled up rumorroyalty.com. Michael Kane did not raise his hand.
The awkward situations passed with end of the school year, but so has some of the luster of being a gossip demigod. Gone are the salad days of infamy, when Michael Kane would walk into Bobb Hall and the freshmen girls would accost him or avoid him, depending on their own designs on notoriety. “I have a lot of friends who live in Bobb, so when I would go there to visit them, the freshmen would just be, like, obsessed,” he explains. It can be pretty thrilling to hang out in Bobb Hall as a senior. “They would check it when I was in the room, they’d check it on their Blackberries. I never knew anyone who took it as seriously as they did.”
Now Michael Kane is at home in Los Angeles, looking for a job, hopefully in television. He wants rumorroyalty to outlast him, and he says the class of 2011 is the key. To keep up interest over the summer, he’s typing up entries himself. I asked him what he thinks his fellow recent alumni would think of the fact that he hasn’t stopped, whether they think it’s pathetic or whatever.
He dodged the question like a pro, but it’s worth noting that whatever his NU colleagues think, Kane persists in peddling unsourced salaciousness at a time when the blogging community may finally be getting some ethics. Former Gawker editor Emily Gould’s New York Times magazine cover story, “Post-blog confessional,” capped a year of soul-searching. Women’s blog Jezebel started banning nasty commenters and bloggers began discussing the ethical ramifications of online-only decisions like when to link and how much to repost.
Now, Michael Kane would like you to know that he has standards, too. He gets a number of anonymous emails – 4 or 5 a day during the school year – with information that he thinks is too personal to post, about nights out or individuals getting arrested. On Tuesday, he got an e-mail about guys who are impotent on campus, and you don’t see a post about that, do you?
No. On this slow week, Michael Kane offers intrepid freshmen a glimpse of the “NU A-List,” the social elites who make most of his posts possible and may or may not be his most avid readers. It’s what a lot of the class of 2008 is doing right now, as best I can tell: reminiscing about their old social lives with an eye toward the future.
