🟧 There's a new media model
You just might not like it. (Media Thoughtz)
An essay on the current state of journalists fleeing to the multimedia ecosystem of video-podcasts and real-time talking heads. How many livestreams can one pundit produce?
Kyle Chayka: For journalists and commentators now, especially those of any public notoriety, there’s an identikit new career package. It goes something like this. Loudly quit or get pushed out of your job in traditional media institutions, whether newspapers, television, or even a website. Argue that your voice has been ignored, neglected, silenced, and held back from its true potential of reaching audiences who hunger for truth and connection — it may be true or it may be an exaggeration. Start a series of direct-broadcast channels for yourself — newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel — and then use your preexisting social-media accounts to promote them. Then, broadcast yourself incessantly, your face, your voice, your thoughts, as if you are a 24/7 cable news channel of one. Go on television, if you can, with your Substack publication in your chyron, otherwise, livestream on YouTube or Instagram or Substack. Importantly, collab with anyone who has more followers than you. Cross-post on their newsletter, appear on their video podcast, or get into a public fight that benefits both parties. Finally, you will have developed your digital clique, the bellicose band of paying subs who sustain your livelihood and pay attention to your sponsorships.
Years ago, the game was manipulating social networks to build proof of an audience and then cashing that capital into some lucrative institutional legitimacy, and the now vanishing prospect of a stable media job. Now, it’s about funneling your disparate followers toward yourself and away from institutions, promoting yourself in opposition to them. Ryan Lizza is one of the latest to follow this playbook, waiting a while after getting exiled from Politico then launching his Substack, Telos.news. Extant politics coverage is “not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we are facing,” he wrote in his introduction. (To be fair, media is not itself causing the democratic peril.) Lizza has been flailing for a fight, documenting his own legal fight with his former employer. At the same time, he’s been beaming out talking-head videos, hours of them, one Zoom background next to another. Breaker Media, the new NYC media publication from Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya, is shooting video podcasts in empty restaurants, which has the benefit of nice production values. It feels a bit like trying to put early-2010s Gawker on TV. (Most people who read those writers did not watch them talk on video; you had to go to messy Brooklyn dive bars for that.) 404 Media, the post-Motherboard indie publication covering hacking and digital security, does plenty of videos with its staff, too.
The new solo journalist is everywhere at once, not just tweeting but turning themselves into ever-present parasocial holograms. They mount an implicit argument that the cult of personality is better, or at least more adapted to the current moment, than following a traditional media outlet. Taylor Lorenz left the Washington Post and now has a podcast, YouTube channel, and newsletter covering the niches of the internet under the brand User Mag. Tara Palmeri left Puck and launched The Tara Palmeri Show on YouTube (“No bias. No agenda.”) and The Red Letter on Substack. Piers Morgan left an enormous deal at Fox to take his “Uncensored” YouTube channel independent (with Fox taking some equity) and he seems to be thriving. Molly Jong-Fast and Kara Swisher have both become animated avatars of anti-Trump 2 sentiment. Swisher has distribution deals with Vox Media for her solo “On with Kara Swisher” and “Pivot” with Scott Galloway, but she could easily take those independent, as she mulled in a revealing episode of the Semafor Mixed Signals podcast (which is also on video).
Maybe I’m just not used to seeing so many faces next to the arguments. We all used to be tiny Twitter avatars, but now there are talking heads on homepages and in sidebars, video clips silently chattering away until you click on them. (I thought this NYT Jason Horowitz vertical video on the conclave was unusually elegant.) Speaking of Semafor, their (video-)podcast has been on a tear of tracking down these journalism-creators: Tina Brown, Ezra Klein, Piers Morgan, Colin and Samir, Substack’s Hamish McKenzie, while also foregrounding the personas of its staff, Ben Smith and Max Tani. Using your masthead as a funnel for personality-driven content — a self-produced TV show — can be very effective. See the forward-thinking example of The Verge and EIC Nilay Patel’s The Vergecast, which has been doing video and audio for years. Patel’s strategy lately, IMO, turns him into a kind of solo creator who happens to be running a huge publication. He also invites parasocial connection and broadcasts his own authority in Decoder, a podcast of long, knotty interviews with CEOs. And his staff is good! I can’t think of another example of that combination; Anna Wintour isn’t out here making YouTubes. (I would say hire Nilay to run something even bigger, but what could possibly tempt him?)
This overall pivot is not contained to one political faction or another, and it is neither good nor bad. It is often fun and interesting. Cultivating a readership who will move with you in the precarity of the current media economy seems to be a necessary chore. Emily Sundberg is one of the independents pursuing this model most elegantly, I think. Feed Me is a text newsletter with intermittent audio and video broadcasts, and an ongoing IRL party that follows Sundberg when she, say, goes to London. It works because Sundberg is constantly hustling to put herself in front of an audience, connect with her readers, and deliver them content that serves them in their daily lives through the lens of her own persona — some actual business news, sure, but also etiquette, dating, restaurants, parties, niche celebs. You could look at Feed Me and think I could do that, because Sundberg makes it look easy. But like a successful influencer Instagram account, it hides the labor. Few traditional journalists (even those of the ~early internet~) ever expected to expose themselves so fully, face and all, to the slavering jaws of the audience. You have to wholly commit yourself to your fans, where media has long been accustomed to talking down.
What’s more, Feed Me isn’t just Sundberg. She is developing a mini-institution of contributors and voices under a brand that isn’t her name. As an erstwhile builder of indie media brands, I know that’s the only way to survive. If you’re truly on your own, you burn out after a few years. Plus, readers want more than just you. They want a variety of voices and subjects. Sundberg has become an archetype in this new media model, which I realized when I read a former Substack employee’s announcement that she was leaving the company in part to start her own “solo newsletter-podcast on technology, politics, and culture.” “Solo newsletter-podcast,” plus front-facing video channel, is the new “blog.” Another lesson to take away, however, is that you need to refine your personal brand and know exactly what you symbolize — that is, which slice of the algorithmic network of consumer identities you represent. Eventually you run the risk of replicating the very institutions you’ve rebelled against.
We can’t all be magazines, nor can we all be photogenic influencers documenting our daily routines. Not every journalist or writer wants to broadcast endless YouTube videos and TikToks just to eke out a few random eyeballs that convert to paid subscribers. Perhaps you really want to write, not commentate in a chat podcast or have your grinning rictus featured in a YouTube thumbnail. And as Patel and Lorenz themselves pointed out on Bluesky, this creator economy isn’t really structurally capable of confronting authority in the way that old-school newspapers and magazines were. It’s best suited to criticism, gossip, and commentary, the meta-narrative of the news. But the people who are embracing this model — do we call it the Journalist Best Friend? — are accruing the most power the fastest right now. (Radhika Jones just left her job as EIC of Vanity Fair and whoever takes it up next promises to have even less fun; why wouldn’t anyone of sufficient platform just go it alone?) If you don’t become one of them, you’re probably going to end up working for one, a contributing editor to the media brand of their life.
The real Pope-aissance:
The Vatican conclave has just named an actual new pope, an American named Robert Prevost, who is now Leo XIV. But we here at One Thing already called the Pope-aissance a month ago with our observations of Pope-obsessed culture: fashion, film, TV. Check out the newsletter for blurbs from David Martin, Eliza Brooke, Kyle, and Nate.
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.
Kyle… thank you for believing in me!
“Few traditional journalists (even those of the ~early internet~) ever expected to expose themselves so fully, face and all, to the slavering jaws of the audience.”
This is one of the more complicated outcomes of the patronage model. Nice to see Kyle acknowledge it.