As vendors paid up to have potentially millions of eyeballs on their products, the merchandisers’ curatorial skills became less relevant, and their writing skills were redirected away from thoughtful, persuasive reviews on books, music, movies, and video games they love and toward neutral descriptive copy about products they likely hadn’t read/listened to/watched/played. Gradually, the skills they’d been hired for came to be viewed as quaint, and their taste considered a potential liability, as though a devotee of freak folk or opera couldn’t write competently about Maroon 5, too.
