🟧 The new rules of media
20 lessons for digital media’s present and future
Kyle Chayka: There’s an old-school magazine editorial format that goes something like “The New Rules for [X]” or “The New Way to [Y],” posing a tongue-in-cheek surety. New York magazine revived it in 2023 for its post-COVID etiquette package “The New Rules” for dating, partying, parenting, etc. Lately, some lines about the tumultuous landscape of digital media have been rattling around in my head, little axioms about How Things Work Now in our micro-era of news influencers, video podcasts, and group newsletters. So I packaged them up in that style. The implicit promise of all such guides: If you follow these rules, you will definitely succeed.
With input and contributions from Delia Cai, David Cho, and Nick Quah.
Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.
New platforms emerge all the time and some of them become very popular. The best way to succeed online is to surf the upward wave of a new platform by committing 100% and catering all of your output to it. It’s a land grab game. Once you win the game, then you can be less obsequious to the platform.
No matter if you’re a text-only website, it is now in your best interests to hire camera-ready contributors who will make successful video-podcast clips. The problem is journalists and critics aren’t generally known for their personal aesthetic appeal.
Parasocial relationships are the name of the game. When people call for a Joe Rogan of the left, it seems like they don’t realize that one of the reasons he is so powerful is that he is many of his listeners’ best friend. People spend hours and hours a day with him; his show and its extended universe have become an on-demand loneliness killing service. The power (and value) of that relationship is unmatched. Puck is a parasocial publication, that’s why you hear the tentpole writers’ voices in solo podcasts.
Consumers tend to find a few trusted sources of facts and opinions and stick to them, then it’s hard to tear the consumers away. The sources could be podcasts or influencers or TikTok accounts or platforms. But when one sinks into decay or disappears completely there’s a chance to grab the formerly loyal consumers.
Each time a platform decays or fades in popularity there is a fresh chance to reset the online hierarchy. New voices go from obscurity to prominence and old brands start losing their holds on authority. Look for those moments and take advantage of them. (See the exodus from X to Threads and Bluesky.)
Locality and specificity are good things and offer ways to preserve meaning in the increasingly contextless internet. You have to remain tied to your own digital geography or the scope of a specific viewpoint. An audience wants to feel like an in-group, like they’re in on the joke, even if that joke is just that the mayor of New York sucks.
The most compelling publications or media brands are the ones that can throw the best parties, because it shows they can mobilize an IRL group of interesting people, who are then consumers and customers and clients. (See Feed Me, The Drift, Byline / The Drunken Canal cinematic universe.) Media brands increasingly work like fashion brands: Consumers have to want to wear them. If no one wants to come to your party, you’re doing it wrong.
Be vigilant. Break up with them before they can break up with you, whether it’s platforms, employers, or audiences.
One Thing is a twice-weekly newsletter about taste, authenticity, and cultural consumption online from Kyle Chayka, Nate Gallant, and other contributors. Subscribe here.
Average consumers are less obsessed with newsiness than the media industry tends to think. Evergreen content is good, whatever is interesting is good, even if it’s “old.” Non-newsy newsletters are replacing the racks of undated magazines at the grocery store checkout and they’re probably making more money than you are. (See also the true crime boom: Who cares if it’s not a recent murder?)
If you want a publication or a writer / podcaster / video maker to continue existing, find a way to pay for their work as directly as possible. Your fav old magazines and sites are going to continue disintegrating and contributors will spin off solo or in little groups. (See Hearing Things from ex-Pitchfork staff, Best Food Blog from ex-Epicurious and Bon Appetit staff.) The job as a consumer is to find and support them
Everything is iterative. A single Instagram or Twitter account becomes a newsletter becomes a small publication with a few contributors becomes a corporation. (See The Free Press.) Thus it makes sense to build your concept in public and test its engagement at every stage. Every powerful brand starts with a single post. As with restaurants, new publications or writerly personas will pop up in established spaces and then go independent when they can survive alone.
Everything is multi-platform and multimedia. Not just journalist-personalities, but every magazine issue, every feature package, every article. The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible. The presentation has to be optimized in every venue: You need good Instagram pinned posts, whether you’re a person or a brand, not that there’s a difference.
Broadcast on every channel, at least if you want to intensify your personality cult: text, livestream, video, audio. Jamelle Bouie broadcasts his ideas (and persona) on every platform at once. His TikTok commenters mostly ask him where he buys his very fashionable jackets. Now we’re watching Ezra Klein talk on the NYT site as well as listening to him. You have to be better than the rando parroting your articles in a selfie video.
No one is media literate. The more you explain who you are and what you do, the better. Preface your newsletter with the explanation of wtf you’re writing, anyway, because your subscribers don’t remember. The “enhanced bios” of NYT, Vox, etc, are long because of SEO but they also make explicit the expertise that was once just assumed from professionalized media.
Rely on nothing you can’t take with you. For now, Substack email lists and Stripe charges are still portable. If they weren’t, I would move to Ghost, because Substack’s incentive is to get you as locked in as possible. (Patreon still keeps your Stripe info, therefore fuck Patreon.) The same goes for audiences: Direct traffic, through homepages or email inboxes, is the most reliable because no one can take it from you, but it’s the hardest to cultivate.
The traditional metrics of success don’t matter. Don’t rely on the old regime to recognize the achievements or potential of the emerging one. There’s no Pulitzer for newsletters or TikTok explainers; BuzzFeed News died winning a single one. The most successful small digital media businesses are YouTube channels that no NYT exec will ever recognize.
Advertising will never die. Even if Substack thinks it designed itself as the anti-ad content ecosystem, just take a look at all the newsletters with sponsored posts, classified listings, and partner email sends. Going subscription-only means leaving money on the table, which no media company can afford. Display advertising alone is kind of impossible, too. Semafor makes a major chunk of its revenue from IRL sponsored schmoozing events
Nothing matters more than the relationship between a person, brand, or publisher and their audience. Screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else: email from work competes with text from a friend competes with Instagram and Tiktok. Every second for the viewer is just that viral video where the person picks between two pop stars. You’re always deciding what to pay attention to. The relationship between person-who-makes and person-who-consumes is paramount to long-term success, because if you are winning that game then you will be able to survive.
Make sure you know why you’re doing something, especially if you’re a publisher or brand and you have limited bandwidth and / or resources. Your print magazine has a blog? Why? What is that accomplishing? Is it even good or does it make you look bad? Define your goals, inspect them thoroughly and be able to have an honest answer about why you want them. Media does too many things because they seem cool internally, when the audience doesn’t really give a shit.
Have your own new media rules? Reply to this newsletter or email onethingnewsletter@gmail.com and we’ll collect the suggestions, just note if you want it bylined.
Previous media thoughtz on One Thing:
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.
The internet’s distribution problem: Why digital media companies should want consumers to intentionally seek them out instead of finding them through feeds.
Notes on format: Our editorial strategy for this newsletter, or why a publication should be like a great neighborhood restaurant.
I mean this is 20 Things, but they're good so I'll let it slide
Great pointers. I would add customising your output for different channels based on the audience you have there. Caveat - more time consuming.