By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally posted on FishbowlLA, 2013
FishbowlLA was, for years, one of several blogs published by Mediabistro — and that meant the occasional promotional crossover. One of them, from early 2013, doubles as a small time capsule.
Then
In January 2013, FishbowlLA ran a light item promoting a Mediabistro contest. The pitch played to anyone who had ever sweated through a job interview: tweet your most embarrassing #InterviewFail to @Mediabistro, in 140 characters or less, and the funniest entry would win a free seat in Mediabistro’s online Job Search Intensive, a course then valued at $145.
It was a small artifact of its moment — a media-careers company using a Twitter hashtag contest to market a training course, posted on one of its own editorial blogs. In 2013, that blend of journalism, jobs board, classes and social-media promotion was simply what Mediabistro was.
Now
Mediabistro itself did not last in that form. The company — a fixture of media careers since the late 1990s, combining a job board, training courses, industry news and the Fishbowl blogs — was sold more than once over the following years as its parent companies were reorganized and broken up. The FishbowlLA, FishbowlNY and FishbowlDC blogs were wound down by the mid-2010s, and the Mediabistro brand narrowed largely to its job board and courses under new ownership.
That is what gives this throwaway contest post its value now: it is a direct trace of the network FishbowlLA belonged to, and of an era when a single media company tried to be a newsroom, a school and a hiring hall at once. The #InterviewFail contest is long gone; the question it joked about — how anyone breaks into media work — did not get any easier.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.