It's Got a Price
independence, being valuable, cannot be free
About two and a half years ago I wrote that the sports-and-pop-culture site The Ringer, now owned by Spotify, appeared to be doing things right, or as right as could be expected in this perpetually-reeling industry. I felt that they were doing as well as anyone to navigate the choppy waters of #content media. (I have no idea how well they’re doing financially now, when every boat in the business appears to be slowly sinking.) Because I’m me and my detractors are who they are, I got wind of a little mockery from people in the business suggesting that I wrote the piece in an effort to get a job there. Which is silly, and also reflects my weird position in this industry: I am well aware that they would never hire me, and also they could never afford me. I have never been a staff writer anywhere and I’m too disreputable to ever work at most professional publications, for reasons that are almost all my fault, but I believe that between this newsletter and my freelancing my earnings are somewhere in the top quintile of all editorial employees in media. (As Snoop taught us, the game is to be sold, not to be told.) Perhaps this is only of interest to me. But it’s an odd thing, to be in this professional space where reputation and compensation are so divorced.
Kyle Chayka, of The New Yorker, discusses the new independence of Taylor Lorenz, formerly of The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Lorenz, who writes about digital culture and fashions, is perhaps the most talented controversialist in the game today, someone has relentlessly parlayed making people angry into career advancement. This probably sounds like an indictment, but such efforts are as old as media, and anyway my house is glass. Now, Lorenz has decamped for her own independent newsletter, which offers the possibility of a lot more money; the great unbundling continues. I have little doubt that she will succeed, financially. In a certain sense, though, she’s a bad fit for Chayka’s concerns in that piece, which are more about the imprimatur of media, the status anxieties and sense of prestige and exclusivity that have always been a big part of the compensation package in the industry. Lorenz has never seemed interested in prestige, only celebrity; as she says to Chayka with admirable candor, “I don’t want to be a full-time writer. I want to be an Internet personality.” In that sense, Lorenz truly doesn’t need traditional media. She can probably make more money outside of those stuffy publications than in them, and anyway the world she reports on has no interest in prestige, only notoriety.
In that sense I envy her. Many of the kind of things I want to do, as a writer, require a certain amount of status in the prestige economy. To the extent that I lack that status because of choices that I’ve made, I can live with it. The trouble, of course, is that the prestige economy operates through alchemy and innuendo, communicates through Slack channels and off-the-books conversations, rewards deference to insider mores and fealty to in-group status hierarchy, treats actual ability as a tertiary concern, and (especially) amounts to one of those strange games of telephone where everyone is developing a sense of prestige not through their own organic perceptions but by trying to deduce what everyone else things is and is not prestigious. It’s all a lousy basis through which opportunity might be distributed; that some degree of status hierarchy is an inevitable part of all human competitive cultures does not make it less lousy.
I am well aware that there is no business in which some version of vague-but-consequential social sorting does not influence opportunity and who gets it. The trouble in media is that we’ve been through decades of ironizing of its whole prestige economy, a meandering political critique of who gets elevated in the business and why, and the rise of a default idiom among the industry’s workers that amounts to anti-communication. (Nothing defines media culture in the 21st century more than the attachment of writers and journos to blank and corrosive sarcasm as a universal approach to life, even now that Twitter has cracked up.) All of this means that prestige still haunts the business but that no one knows what the proper orientation towards is should be. They will mock the very concept of prestige, but they continue to pursue one of the shrinking number of chairs at the remaining big-deal publications in part because they sensibly see the professional value of rubbing up against prestige. And everyone who happens to work for a stuffy publication professes to be a regular Jane or Joe who was just blown into that position like a tumbleweed.
Put it this way. Not too long ago, the New Yorker christened a new podcast series called Critics at Large. And I like it; it’s got exactly the upper-middlebrow thrills you’d expect from such an endeavor. Perhaps they’ll talk about Radiohead next. But in a recent episode the hosts referred to “the culturati” and “coastal critics” derisively. My friends! My friends. If the fucking New Yorker Critics at Large podcast is not a product of coastal critics, of the culturati, what ever could be? This is what I mean; the business is still permeated by a palpable and consequence-laden status anxiety which provokes people to care about prestige, while its members also feel social pressure to deride the very status markers they busily seek. It’s a culture full of people who know better than to publicly court the approval of the status-granting forces that still exist, but also one made up of precisely the kind of front-of-class kids who know nothing beyond the long slow grind up the ladder. And, of course, there’s a good deal of sense in trying to win whatever laurels you can, in a labor market that has become notoriously unreliable. But that is the trap of irony, right - the need to deny that you have needs, the inability to say plainly that there are things you’re pursuing because they matter to you, or their rewards matter to you. Plenty of people in the business have found a way to evoke the spirit of Didion and the tradition of Gay Talese and similarly lame shit even as they wrap every word they write in air quotes. It looks like an ill-fitting suit, to me, like someone completely unsure about whether they want to stay or to leave the party.
You are already aware of my take on the basic pathologies of media as an industry. My stance on media has changed little in the sixteen or so years I’ve been doing this; if anything, the same old observations have been confirmed again and again and my distaste for it all has only intensified. To my surprise, the ongoing financial collapse of media and journalism as profit-generating enterprises, and the attendant rise of independent media in which I have played a somewhat-reluctant part, have only accelerated these conditions.
Writers who work in media, defined broadly, have an intrinsic professional responsibility to be willing to say unpopular things, especially things unpopular with other members of the profession
Members of all professions everywhere face pressures to conform to the needs and desires of their peers; this problem is especially acute in media because of the previous point, that the very purpose of journalism and commentary is to speak the unpopular truth
As media has financially collapsed, the number of seats in the musical chairs game has shrunk, making for a more and more competitive job-seeking environment, which further deepens the perceived risks of saying things that your peers don’t want to hear
Twitter specifically and social media generally have taken dynamics that once existed within a given workplace (cliquishness and social pressure and gossip inside of a specific newsroom) and extended them to the entire profession; individual figures within media would reliably dismiss the importance of Twitter when they felt threatened by critiques of the network, but would reliably tell young journalists that being a Twitter personality was absolutely essential for building a career; the result was a) a status of perpetual surveillance on the opinions of everyone in the profession and b) a quantitatively-expressed set of permissible beliefs that c) everyone trying to make it within the profession felt intense personal pressure to conform to in order to be successful and, more importantly, be liked
The profession has geographically spread out even as financial security has been concentrated in a tiny handful of publications, most notably the New York Times; thanks to the possibility of fully remote work and the spiraling costs of living in a major urban center like New York or DC, and the ongoing fiscal contraction of the industry, many who once would have lived in one of those places now have decamped for the hinterlands, which along with the pandemic and a deepening culture of people never leaving their homes has helped undermine social scenes where journalists and writers would regularly congregate outside of work; perversely, the demise of this kind of ordinary social influence has deepened the perceived importance of being popular with peers online
Writing as a profession tends to attract people who are more introspective, internal, and socially isolated, which can intensify the desire for professional writers to find community with and approval from their peers.
A lot of this, again, is ordinary social behavior; most of what’s left is essentially rational responses to a cratering industry. Were all of this smaller scale, just the typical within-workplace opinionating and subtle peer-group coercion, it would be unfortunate but low-stakes. The trouble, again, is that the internet blew it all up, made in-group pressures industry-wide instead of confined to a given workplace, created a permanent record of offenses against the mob, and rendered the whole process extremely apparent to everyone with a smartphone - and in so doing established perfectly clear rules for everyone in the business to follow, or else to risk finding themselves an outsider, someone uncool.
Do this long enough, from a disreputable position, and the in-group signaling and endless bids for popularity become all you can see. I once wrote about metal and metal-adjacent music I love for Vox, in a piece that I thought was pretty straightforward and unobjectionable, and consummate Twitter insider Joe Bernstein tweeted about it “This has got to be a troll!!” I can only surmise that this was a naked play for approval from his peer group, probably a successful one, though the actual content of the tweet said nothing. But though the tweet may have said nothing, it said it to all the right people.
Is the independent newsletter media economy immune from all of this? lol no
I recently listened to a podcast hosted by unreconstructed old-school school reformers, “every student should have a superstar teacher,” lets-fire-all-the-bad-ones types. What was remarkable was that, though they were forced to acknowledge that the policy environment is much less friendly to their preferences than it once was, they acted as though nothing substantively had changed. They still thought that you could get better schools by shouting “ACCOUNTABILITY!” over and over, said nothing about the relentless drip of evidence that school reform measures don’t work, and generally partied like it was 2010. But really, why wouldn’t they? There’s no major topic in American media that’s covered with less openness to new perspectives than education, no subject that’s more of a citadel for establishment narratives and business-as-usual. And none more obviously cries out for real rebel thinking; it’s a subject that’s considered of massive public importance, governed by a sclerotic and self-righteous conventional wisdom, where the “reform” agenda has produced decades of failure despite all of its no-excuses rhetoric. We spend extravagantly in this country, to no avail, and yet people still insist that it’s a funding problem. We institute endless school-side accountability programs, nothing gets better, and yet people still insist it’s an accountability problem. The whole education experience of the last 50 years proves that our issues cannot be solved at the school side, and yet no arguments to that effect are made in establishment media.
I mean it, none. I’m putting the challenge to you: find a piece written in a major newspaper or magazine that seriously engages with the question of whether any school-side reform can close academic gaps. Find a mainstream piece that asks hard questions about what it would look like for every student to succeed, if success means anything. Find a piece from an establishment venue that frankly addresses the plain reality that there’s always going to be people who are bad at school, which by the way should provoke us to imagine a humane alternative to meritocracy. Every piece in the mainstream media about schooling sticks doggedly to the Official Dogma. They’re all stories about plucky students struggling to overcome their disadvantages and the heroic/feckless teachers who save/fail them. Nobody ever asks if maybe school can’t do the things we’re demanding it do. I’m not asking for a sympathetic hearing for those ideas; I’m asking for any hearing of those ideas. But the New York Times isn’t going to run any pieces about eduskepticism, even though that domain desperately needs new ideas and radical rethinking. That’s why you need newsletters and blogs and all the rest. The trouble remains, though - and this is the hell I live in - that it’s still really hard to spark big conversations across the discourse from a newsletter. I can make a very good living doing the only thing I’m good at, I can engage with sharp readers and spark conversations with other independent publications, but I can’t force a topic into people’s brains. That is a privilege that traditional media still hoards.
One of the best things about independent or outsider media is the willingness to consider ideas that are out of bounds within traditional media; this is also one of the worst things. I can say “Hey, perhaps education reform relentlessly fails because what it’s attempting is impossible,” and nobody is going to deactivate my keycard. But, you know, I also live in close discursive proximity with people who write “just asking questions!” posts about whether Hassan Nasrallah was vaxxed. And, look, I get that those things go together, that the only way to create space for the good rebel ideas is by creating space for the dumb rebel ideas, because we don’t know one from the other until we’ve had them, right. I even like that reality, most of the time. But you do end up in a place where you’re constantly disappointing your audience for only being four-fifths a crank.
Perhaps I’m just misremembering the way the website used to be, but it definitely feels like The New York Times has hidden submission instructions further and further away. I’m an experienced writer with a lot of connections and a good resume, one which includes writing for the NYT several times, and yet in the rare instance that I think I have an idea they’d like for me to write, I am typically baffled at who to email and how. The masthead is no help, nor is “Our People.” If you’re willing to really dig to investigate how you might pitch the Times, you’ll eventually find this automated form. Is it possible that there are editors there who read these submissions and take them seriously? Sure, it’s possible. But I can tell you that, in general, when a high-falutin publication throws out an automated form as their submission system, it’s a way to tell prospective freelancers to fuck off. Which is still, somehow, less insulting than what’s going on at Harper’s these days, where the directive is to send your submissions in a paper letter. In 2024. It’s not just that this is obviously far more tedious for the writer, it can only be more work for the editors and the publication as well. But apparently the need to signal that they don’t want submissions, while maintaining the pretense of not being entirely closed off to the rest of us, is sufficient that they’ll pretend that email does not exist. New York’s contact page, which once had submission instructions, no longer does. (But if you want to “pitch a store opening,” you’re in luck.) Never fear, though - they too have somewhere you can send a physical letter.
I had a pitch for Harper’s, a good one. They have an attractive magazine-out-of-time quality, a remove from the hustle that I quite like. It happens that they published maybe my favorite piece among all I’ve ever published. But I couldn’t figure out how to pitch without buying a printer, and anyway I’m confident that sending the physical letter to the listed address would have had precisely the same effect as leaving it at Lewis Lapham’s grave. So I gave up. When someone says “fuck off” as clearly they’re saying it, it’s best to take them seriously.
I cannot understand it, will never understand it. At this time, when so much of the fretting is about Substack and other independent newsletters - there is always fretting, if there was no fretting, there would be no media - when there’s so much fretting, to decide that this is the time to raise the drawbridge just baffles me. What is the advantage? It’s like an NFL coach with a shitty team telling the beat reporters he thinks the solutions are already on the roster, I can’t decide if they really believe it or not. Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that all the money flowing into the hands of grubby little outsiders like me is a symbol of a broad discontent within the audience? Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that if nothing else this is useful market information, all of this steady drip drip drip of Lorenzians and Yglesiaii and Nates Silver, Bronze, and Gold? Tina Brown! When Tina Brown feels comfortable sitting at the freakazoid table at the high school cafeteria, perhaps it’s time to ask if maybe there’s some reason why, that maybe the business has grown myopic and scared, that it’s responded to financial difficulties by crawling into a defensive crouch. At exactly the time when the public’s appetite for outsider voices has been proven, quantitatively and with dollars attached, the usual suspects have built the walls higher around their pages, making freelance contribution even harder. Why? For who?
I’ve never been a staffie, can’t recall ever applying to be one. At this point, frankly, getting such a job would entail a real hit to my quality of life. I’m sorry if that’s obnoxious to say. But if it makes you feel any better, I couldn’t ever get such a job anyway. Yes, that’s because of my bad behavior, my abrasiveness, my relentless dedication to ruining everything for myself, my neurochemical instability. And maybe it’s not at all because I believe things they don’t, and say those things persuasively enough that it makes them uncomfortable, that we share a profession and I’m better at it than they are. Maybe that stuff makes no difference. That’s the thing about all of it; when prestige still haunts the enterprise, and when so many talentless loyalists achieve and achieve and achieve, you just never know. And of course, for them, it’s better if you never know.
I get it, for the record. I get scrambling around, trying to build a career in a business where achievement is so intangible, wanting to feel like you’re actually doing something, eager to be able to tell your doubting aunts and uncles “I work for X.” I get the value of having clear and explicit systems of advancement that help you feel like you’re climbing a ladder. I get believing in the power of being edited, as I do. I believe in wanting a workplace to go to and colleagues to hang out with. I get wanting health insurance and, if you’re lucky, maybe a 401(k) match. I get being impressed by institutions. I get the appeal of stationary, of a business card. I get wanting to feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, like you live in the flow of a tradition, of an institution. I get feeling like what you do is good and true but may not be marketable. I get wanting to contribute cheap value to the kind of publication that still sends reporters to investigate pollution at the local factory. I get that being a staff writer can look good on a Tinder profile. I do, I do, I do get it.
Trust me - there’s a lot not to like, out here in the independent wilds. I always say, and it’s always been true, that I don’t think any of my beliefs are in tension with each other, don’t understand the charge of contrarianism because none of it seems contrary to me. All of it always fits together perfectly and obviously in my brain and after all of these years I’m still frequently surprised when things I believe are generally thought to be incompatible. And so the contrariness of independent media doesn’t make me feel especially good, even as I recognize that it’s important and necessary. As I will not stop saying, it all depends on what exactly you mean by independent. Because in a funhouse mirror way, I’m constantly asked to apologize for my orthodoxy by the self-consciously heterodox, asked to explain myself for having conventionally progressive opinions on immigration or Palestine or, especially, on trans rights. It is so fucking exhausting to be in this whole dissident media space as someone who affirms trans people, their rights, and their identities. I’m not asking for credit. I’m just saying - it’s fucking exhausting. And I’ve come to understand, but not quite to accept, that this space is permanently Joe Roganized; I am independent and free, so long as I avoid pointing out that Jeffrey Epstein probably did kill himself. Which, to be clear, is not any worse than living under the thumb of David Remnick. It’s like everything else in life. You have to serve somebody.
Well. I hope everyone’s subscriptions pay the rent, or if not the rent, for an occasional meal out with someone they like. Just as I hope no one at a media company is ever laid off again. I very sincerely want all of us to make it.
My first novel is coming out from Coffee House Press next fall. I’m very confident in it; I think it’ll find its audience, and I think it has a good chance of doing well commercially. But reviews? I have zero confidence that it will be given a fair opportunity by most places that still run book reviews, if any still exist by then. I hope for better, but my assumption will be that if they review it at all - and they probably won’t, which is the easiest way to discipline the publishing field - they will in fact review me and not the book. The book media, what’s left of it, is still lorded over by a Brahmin class that has deeply ingrained ideas about who is and is not to be taken seriously. Those definitions of seriousness are all bound up in these vague-but-loaded status realities that have been battered but paradoxically strengthened by the collapse of media; it’s also the case that novelists without straightforward Park Slope liberal politics almost never receive positive reviews. Is saying this a preemptive strike against potential bad reviews? Maybe. Probably. But it’s also frank talk about the enduring power of gatekeepers and what, exactly, they ask you for when you arrive at the gate. Some resentful apparatchik somewhere is going to have to make a decision about my book, and this is my ultimate and only point: it still matters. They still matter. Here on Planet Substack, in rebel America, not being in still costs you. It has a price.
The truth is pretty boring and pretty obvious. The people who are still ensconced in the status hierarchy, many of whom have integrity and talent, are hoarding that status not despite the fact that the old world is dying but because it is; they are clutching more jealously to the coin of a dying kingdom, in lieu of newer currency. And I suspect that they do it understanding that those virtues embedded in that old economy, the status economy, which for all my complaints I recognize as virtues indeed, will not come back around again once they’re gone. There are still old German pensioners with scores of deutschmarks stuffed under their mattresses.
The TV podcast The Watch, hosted by Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald - a Ringer podcast, as it happens - is one of the only shows in that medium I can stand. The hosts are enthusiasts without being stans and manage to discuss a populist medium while still frequently demonstrating their unfussy interests in higher-brow concerns; they are also, as the inescapable podcast cliche goes, just a good hang. Occasionally they make fun of Patreon or Substack, and I wonder what exactly they mean, if they mean anything by it at all. I suspect they know that the line between Spotify paychecks and asking listeners to hit the Patreon is exceedingly thin. Most likely they don’t mean anything by it, as little of what they say is said seriously, other than those things that are. And anyway, I don’t think anyone knows where any of this is going, what will survive this endless bloodletting and what won’t. So I’m not surprised that I don’t quite understand what they mean. What does surprise me is that I don’t quite understand what I mean, either; there was a time when few of my beliefs were more clear or more full than what I believed about this. My thoughts on media and its brokenness, and what and who broke it, and how, and why, may not have changed much. But I find the ivory towers now seem too modest and vulnerable to be worth pitching rocks at anymore. I always know exactly what I want to say about all of this, when I sit down to say it. I just can’t remember what I thought it was all for.