Digest 1/17/2022

Monetizing MEL, a new Grid, going long on Yanagihara, and more.

This week’s Study Hall Digest has been handed over to Daisy Alioto, a writer and the cofounder of @dirtxyz.

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MEL-COME HOME

Ryan Vail Brown, formerly of Hearst and Gawker Media, has been hired by the ass-enthusiasts at MEL (now owned by Recurrent Ventures) to “ramp up MEL‘s advertising sales business,” according to Business Insider. Brown told BI, “The real goal for this year — I’ve been calling it ‘The MEL-ckoning,’ which I don’t think anyone should write down — is standing up MEL as a business.” This instant word choice regret was later revised with a tweet coining “MEL2: MEL Harder” the well-known sequel to 2 Dollar 2 Shave. 

We reached out to Brown to find out his top 3 MEL articles:

1. ‘We are your family now’: What it’s like to lose a loved one to QAnon by Quinn Myers
2. The oral history of the super soaker by Brian VanHooker
3. First Ladyland from MEL Films 

MEL, beloved by media insiders and fans of non-toxic masculinity, was previously a brand-building play for former owner Dollar Shave Club and didn’t pursue advertising revenue. It will be up to Brown to monetize the community. How much ass will ‘The MEL-ckoning’ include? Only time can tell.

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ON THE GRID

Also announced this week, an entirely new publication! Grid went live on January 12th, promising a 360-degree view of news stories that otherwise get siloed into separate verticals. (Yes, they are hiring.) Friend of Study Hall Kaila Philo joined Grid to cover political institutions, a welcome departure from her prior role doing daily beat reporting on a federal agency. “I’m excited about working in a collaborative newsroom rather than a competitive newsroom, as well as pursuing investigative projects,” she told Study Hall. 

Benjamin Powers (another friend of SH) left CoinDesk for Grid after being sold on the 360-degree coverage angle. “A single story can simultaneously be a tech story, climate story, and politics story,” he said. 

In Politico, Jack Shafer spills ink about all these new starty start-ups. Is it possible to have grand visions for the news industry without all the, you know, grandiosity? Apparently not. “When pitching investors, founders feel compelled to exaggerate the novelty of their prospective startups, composing the most exaggerated headlines for their baby’s birth announcements,”  Shafer writes. 

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A LITTLE DISCOURSE

Andrea Long Chu went long on Hanya Yanagihara in Vulture. In characteristic ALC fashion, the piece is a close reading of both the text and the author’s public persona. The piece takes issue with Yanagihara’s predilection for torture porn, although the lifestyle bits of A Little Life are also much discussed. My favorite aside? “​​Now it is no crime to put your paid vacation into your novel.” Thank god! 

In The New Yorker, we learn more about Yanagihara’s lifestyle from D. T. Max, who offers very exciting morsels:

Yanagihara’s private life is as constrained as her cultural knowledge is broad. She lives in a narrow SoHo loft, decorated with art and antiques and baubles, that she calls her “pod.” She rarely goes out and likes her place to be tidy—she won’t host dinner parties because she doesn’t “want the crumbs.” We once agreed to meet at a local restaurant. “You either go to Omen, Raoul’s, or Fanelli’s if you live down here, and I go to Omen,” she declared, adding that she wanted to sit at a particular table in the back. When she takes her trips, she packs a suitcase that, a friend says, is “almost as small as the one in ‘Rear Window.’”

Naturally, these stories brought together a colloquium of Twitter’s most distractible opinion havers: novelists, aesthetes, and people who choose a random pull quote to tweet. 

https://twitter.com/jesslbergman/status/1481393024173232130

 

In Jezebel, Becca Schuh cheered on Yanagihara’s personal idiosyncrasies, drawing parallels with another recent New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong. “Perhaps it’s time to embrace our most unhinged habits in the service of art, writes Schuh, adding, “Relatability has become the preferred mode of acceptable worship, while oddness is seen as foreign, alien, and, perhaps most of all, suspect.”

I reached out to Schuh to ask whether there was a third way for people that hated Yanagihara’s most recent book (or even, gasp, all her books) yet salute her quiet, crumbless and designer lifestyle. “I think that people were supportive of my piece but also entertained by the harsher reviews. As am I!!! Of course I have my specific criticisms of the ‘takes’ within the reviews, but overall I am tbh loving the discourse and glad everyone is fighting about someone interesting,” she said. 

In conclusion,

https://twitter.com/SomersErin/status/1481363374667616263

— by Daisy Alioto

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As Study Hall prepares to publish the findings of our 2020 State of Freelance survey, we wanted to give our subscribers an exclusive peek into the forthcoming report. Over the next several weeks, we’ll publish snippets and musings from our ongoing research, and even pose some larger questions that the survey project is meant to illuminate. For this week’s dispatch, Development Director Evan Kleekamp reviews trends found among survey respondents who reported six-figure annual incomes in 2020, questioning the merits of online discussions about six-figure incomes found online. 

THE $100,000 QUESTION

“I made a lot of money last year,” says freelancer Angela Serratore. “But if I had to come up with the top five things that helped, one would be that when my dad died he left me a house in Los Angeles to sell, so I was able to go freelance and chase higher-paying work. Another is that I live with my partner and we split the bills.” 

Such disclosures about financial support from family members or partners who share their income or living space are rare. Instead, as Study Hall contributor Brian Ng put it bluntly, the online conversations primarily arise from the ‘coaching crowd.’ Ng says he believes the mythology around six-figure incomes is a holdover from when that was considered a high salary, and that these freelancers are merely performing wealth.

Study Hall’s 2020 State of Freelance Report Part 1: The $100,000 Question