Jan Willemsen

Daniel Hirsch goes from covering development at Mission Local to writing about his life as a cupid on The Bold Italic. 

In some ways, this is the “sharing economy” taken to its logical extremes, proving that with a little bit of cash, the Internet lets you outsource everything, even the intimate act of asking someone out.

For me, a queer male, logging into someone else’s OkCupid account and sending messages as them, be it a straight man or a straight woman, was oddly thrilling. But the experience also made me wonder if we are a generation for whom the mores of courtship, and, ultimately love, are completely and utterly out of whack. READ MORE OF THIS EXCELLENT PIECE

FYI: His own formula for success in getting dates for his client – El Zoro: ( reference to shared interest + measured compliment )^ fun greeting X ( PG innuendo/ delta of perceived attractiveness levels ) + 1/√pinache = Suggestion of Real Life Romance

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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