Killer Tweets: Mike Albo’s The Junket

“im in jamaica. pullin into giant city-resort. photogs taking our pics often. i wld feel gross abt all this if i wasnt so poor.”  Abbreviated and trivial, those twenty-five words are what triggered Mike Albo’s firing from The New York Times in 2009.  They likewise served as a catalyst for him to write his fantastic one man show, “The Junket,” which is currently in its second run at Manhattan’s Dixon Place.

When Albo was working with the Times for nearly two years as their acclaimed Critical Shopper, he garnered a following not only for his discerning eye, but for his gracious ability to underscore that virtually no one could afford the things he reviewed.  It’s essential to note that he worked as a freelancer, which usually entails a more lax set of rules than those that apply to a full-time employee.  Since he was acting as a free agent, the writer decided to attend a press junket in an “exotic mystery location” along with 150 other media types that included B-list TV hosts and reality show celebrities.

Over the course of an hour, the performer dynamically walks the audience through the windfall of events that ensued once he arrived in Jamaica on that hapless weekend four years ago.  The jaunt was sponsored by Thrillist, who had been embroiled in a similar debacle the previous year when they flew representatives from CNN, Fox News, and the NY Post to Las Vegas for an all-inclusive getaway.  No one was vilified as Albo was, however, and when we sat down with him recently, he was quick to highlight the tacit Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy amongst certain media crowds – “I did something wrong according to them, but to me, everyone is doing something wrong,” he claimed.  “It just depends on who honors the agreement of not taking advantage of their position.  No one is clean.”

At times Albo’s performance is side-splitting, while poignant and incisive at others.  Just as he was able to deftly construct articles that respectfully asked “Who can afford this?” here he is also adept at toeing the line of offensive without ever having to apologize, a balance many artists can never truly strike.  As for that untimely tweet regarding his moral dilemma over accepting the press junket, Albo hit send shortly after his arrival and didn’t give it a second thought. That is until an article entitled “Ethics takes a holiday:  Newsweek, New York Times writers in swag orgy” appeared on DailyFinance a few weeks later.  The piece zeroed in on his involvement and cited the Times’ inviolable Code of Ethics; he now muses that “bad journalism is what got [him] fired.”  Initially the Times backed Albo and contended that as a freelancer, he did not breach policy.  Yet once his tweet was disseminated across the blogosphere, our Critical Shopper promptly received an e-mail with his walking papers unceremoniously attached.

Today Albo claims that part of the reason he signed up for the trip was because he thought it might provide fodder for a future fictional work.  It certainly did as he first released The Junket as a Kindle Single in 2011, and he’s currently working on a book that examines the history of shopping (he also has two novels under his belt, Hornito and The Underminer).  When asked whether or not he’d take the trip again, Albo replied “I’m a comedian and a performer, I make fun of consumer culture – it was like going to Disneyland [and] I wanted to immerse myself in this really weird idea of reality.  If anything shines a light on how warped our world is, it’s that kind of trip.”