🟧 Gathering attention (media thoughtz)

Plus Dimes Square navel gazing and Grace Wales Bonner

Today we’re thinking through the management of attention in digital media and how we have a responsibility to organize coherent audiences, in a short essay by Kyle Chayka. Then, some links about physical reality and internet unreality from Emily Chang.

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During the peak social media era, media companies had a huge problem. They lost track of their audiences, scattered as they were across different feeds and algorithms and platforms. Facebook and Google had more control over who saw publications’ content than they did themselves. General-interest stories were pushed out for anyone who happened to come across them in a strategy of “distributed” or “off-platform” editorial content. This largely failed, unless you developed a strong enough core audience on a stable enough platform that shared ad revenue, such as YouTube. Otherwise, media companies faced the fate of BuzzFeed, disintegrating into a haze of vaguely familiar brand names.

I think we’re now entering a phase of re-organizing audiences as digital media companies understand that they have to own their relationships to their audience or die. A publication has to be able to gather and focus readers’ (and watchers’ and listeners’) attention. The ability to point to something and say this matters and have people engage with and trust it is in some ways the core value proposition of media. The reporters and critics dig up the content, information, or analysis and the publication, with its editorial staff, shapes and delivers it. This is true whether you’re running a print magazine or an Instagram gossip page or a YouTube channel. Thus you see more publications trying to improve their own post-social media modes of delivery. That could mean launching many new, branded email newsletters — a la NYmag — or cultivating more devoted podcast listeners or developing more anchor-style public personalities who provide a face for the brand (Vox just hired Astead Herndon, formerly of the New York Times, as editorial director and host of a new multimedia politics show).

The New York Times just added a “watch” tab to its super-popular app to deliver its bespoke vertical videos, featuring NYT reporters. Basically, it’s a NYT-only version of TikTok, and it’s pretty fun and engaging from the jump (plus you feel a lot better after watching 5 minutes of it than Instagram reels). Now you can read the news, do crossword puzzles, and mindlessly consume video in the same app. We trust NYT for a few varieties of content, so why not more of it? Similarly, The Verge’s homepage now offers personalized feeds of stories and the ability to follow specific topics, along with bespoke email newsletters, turning the website into more of an interactive platform and thus more of a destination. The amped-up opportunities for engagement are good for the media companies — more time spent means a closer relationship with subscribers and better fodder for advertisers — but it’s also good for audiences, who have more of a sense of what they’re getting than in an undifferentiated social-media feed.

The media analyst Brian Morrissey, of The Rebooting, recently had Tyler Brûlé, the founder of Monocle magazine, on his podcast. It’s a deep and fascinating conversation for anyone in media. Everyone knows I’m obsessed with Monocle, but what’s even more interesting than the publication’s luggage and cardigan collabs is the fact that it has stuck with the same business playbook since it launched in 2007. Brûlé describes his goal as “proximity,” which means something like, closeness to readers, readers’ closeness with each other as a community, and a closeness with the goals of brands / corporate clients, like selling more airplane tickets or promoting a tourism destination. Monocle knows its reader-community and it has also long served its content to them in multiple formats that it owns: luxurious print products, digital radio shows, physical storefronts, and IRL events (conferences but cooler). Now, other publications are coming around to that kind of slow gathering of devoted fans and reaching them as deeply and as directly as possible.

These strategies work for the biggest media corporations as well as the smallest indie ones. The Mozilla Foundation just published an interesting essay from a crew of Berlin-based researchers titled “Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era.” It’s an argument for small-scale, sustainable distribution systems online: “building digital infrastructure based on a different set of values, structures and ideologies to serve their communities, and establish new conditions for how things operate, are produced and circulated.” Metalabel, a project shepherded by Yancey Strickler from Kickstarter, recently published an adjacent idea of “groupcore.” All of this feels related to “proximity” which may also be described as “coherence”: know what you’re doing and who you’re talking to, as well as who your compatriots are.

It’s hard for audiences to find voices and publications they trust right now, and it’s hard to find the one voice or publication that suits you for one flavor of content: your go-to guy(s) for fashion, for music, for art, for politics, for business. We (media creators) should be making it easier and simpler by intentionally gathering our audiences and holding them close, no matter if that’s millions of people or hundreds — developing our brand identities and sticking to them, delivering on our promises. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with One Thing, too: gather an audience who is interested in this quirky combination of high and low culture; media criticism; art and design; and quality stuff of any nature. So if you’re here, welcome, and please follow along. — Kyle Chayka

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The extremely online cult of Angelicism: The long NY Mag feature about the Angelicism01girls is a very interesting read that encapsulates a weird, mythic microcosm of subterranean scenes and post-lockdown life in New York. “I wanted to be cool, and it felt cool,” Chloe Bartlewski says in the article. “In New York, a lot of people will ask you, ‘Are you an artist?’ This gave me a reason to say ‘yes.’” Oh boy.

The four young women who circled the titular “faceless prophet” who went by the name Angelicism01 and published dense Substack essays on topics ranging from AI, extinction events, and nihilism to internet addiction and philosophy sit at the exceptional center of multiple bizarrenesses of our time. The story is about aesthetic over substance; mythic realities born out of modern anxieties; and the collapse of what’s real, the cultivation of a digital life in which physical reality is merely a side effect of what happens on the screen. (The anonymous poster behind Angelicism turns out to be a depressed British lad named Jonty Tiplady.)

The girls in the Angelicism cult know that physical reality can’t survive without an aesthetic. Case in point: Four waify women dressed in slim white tanks and tees, short skirts, and alabaster skin pose for photos that bring to mind The Virgin Suicides’ Lisbon sisters or the Manson girls. They’re playing to the camera and leaning into all the right tropes, and maybe, for them, that’s all that mattered. In the aftermath of Angelicism’s leader, they’re claiming the aesthetic narrative for themselves. — Emily Chang

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Grace Wales Bonner for Adidas

Grace Wales Bonner is the new creative director of Hermès menswear: And it feels like a call to return to what’s real. She rose to superstardom through her eponymous brand and frequent Adidas collaborations, always with exceptional tailoring at the core of her designs. Hermès’s choice shouldn’t be this refreshing, but it is, given that lately, people have forgotten that so much of what luxury is is about the physical experience of it, not the way it looks on a two-dimensional screen.

People forget that you can’t really judge anything properly online, because you haven’t gone to the store, touched the pieces, seen the interior of the tailoring, felt it, worn it, lived in it. Shock value in fashion used to mean a worldview — a shift in not only how people thought, but moved through the world. So Grace Wales Bonner — the jazz musician of designers — heading the luxury brand feels like a reset: Stop designing 3D clothes solely for a 2D screen, and start designing for real identities again. — Emily Chang

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Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

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More Media Thoughtz from One Thing:

• Conversations are the new unit of culture: Why people talking to each other and the performance of expertise have become so important.

• The new rules of media: 20 guidelines for digital media during the video-podcast age, aka, why you need a personality cult.

• What makes a good newsletter?: An expert roundtable about newsletter strategy. Are there too many!? Does good writing matter!?

• Aggregation theory: More writers and publications are focusing on creating valuable aggregation because social media sucks so much.

• Voice, taste, trust, scarcity: The values that publications need to keep in mind while competing for readers in the new, messy ecosystem.