Alex Pareene

Career

Early in his life, Pareene lived in South Minneapolis and attended South High School, where he wrote for the school's newspaper and took part in the extracurricular theater program. Pareene began his career writing a blog entitled "Buck Hill." In January 2006 he started writing for the sardonic Washington, D.C. political gossip blog Wonkette, then a part of Gawker Media, before he moved to their main web property Gawker in October 2007. In April 2010 he left Gawker to write about politics for the online news magazine Salon. In their farewell post, the Gawker staff wrote of Pareene, "His writing is hysterical, his voice is unique, and his political mind is finely tuned into the idiocies and hypocrisies of our crumbling democracy." He later joined First Look Media in hopes to launch the blog Racket with Matt Taibbi. In January 2015, he rejoined Gawker Media.

Hack List

At Salon, the rise of personalities who dominate the 24-hour news cycle continued to be one of Pareene's mainstay concerns. Salon publishes a yearly list composed by Pareene called the Hack 30: The Worst Pundits in America, a list of people described as "the most predictable, banal, intellectually dishonest and all-around hacky newspaper columnists, cable news shouting heads and political opinion-mongers working today." The Columbia Journalism Review described the list as a "fun-to-read, blunt, stick-it-in-deep-and-twist-it list of mostly old-world print-y pundits." The list became so popular in media circles that Pareene began composing essay-length posts throughout the year about each person featured in the list to expound upon what he considered to be their hackery.

Donald Trump

Pareene has been a frequent critic of President Donald Trump, known for his show Celebrity Apprentice where he uses the catchphrase "You're Fired!" to dismiss celebrity contestants competing for charity. At varying times Pareene has referred to Trump as a "fictional television clown tycoon," "a living freak show" and "a weird attention-hungry idiot."

On August 15, 2012 Trump criticized Pareene on Twitter as a "lightweight reporter" who is a "total joke in political circles." Over the previous week Trump had been alluding to a "very, very major" surprise for the 2012 Republican National Convention that would be "unique and interesting." Pareene had written that Trump's surprise "is almost definitely just going to be some idiotic video where Trump 'fires' [a Barack Obama] impersonator." One day later, Obama impersonator Kevin Michel posted on his Twitter feed a picture of himself with Trump and advised his followers to "watch the Republican National Convention," prompting some news outlets to conjecture that Trump was upset that Pareene had accurately predicted his surprise. When interviewed by Politico about Trump's criticism, Pareene responded, "I was hoping the first universally loathed NBC personality to publicly call me out would be the monkey from Animal Practice, but I'll settle for Trump."

Books