Digest 01/18/2023

Jane Drinkard asks, "How the fuck are you all landing media jobs in 2023?"

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“PERSONAL NEWS!”

By Jane Drinkard 

I logged onto Twitter in the first week of 2023 only to be bombarded by an onslaught of “personal news” (and “professional news”) job announcement posts. After a year and a half of struggling to land a full-time journalism gig, I felt seething envy for my peers but also curiosity. I’ve spent so much (unnecessary and unproductive) time in this industry, alone and at my desk, wondering if there’s some secret method to getting a job that I just didn’t know about. My jealousy was exacerbated by the algorithm; the more I clicked on the job announcement Tweets, the more they came up. So under the guise of Study Hall reporting, I reached out to some members of the “personal news” squad to ask them an extremely “personal” question — how the fuck are you all doing it?!

Unsurprisingly, their quippy posts masked years of effort, strokes of luck, compromises, and strategic planning.

Nick Garber, a newly hired politics reporter at Crain’s New York who formerly worked for Patch, emphasized luck and using Twitter as a networking tool (ugh, congrats Elon…). After seeing some of his breaking stories about Astoria, Harlem and the Upper East side neighborhoods in New York for Patch, an editor from Crain’s reached out to Garber via Twitter DM and asked if he had seen their recent job opening. The interviewing and hiring process moved quickly from there. “I had actually seen the opening and had looked at it and frankly it struck me as an incredible job, but I didn’t think I was qualified for it,” Garber told Study Hall. “I would just say it’s impossible to foresee how good fortune can suddenly arrive in the media world.” He made a point of clarifying that he had spent months applying to jobs that he never even heard back from before receiving the greenlight from Crain’s.

Right before the holidays, good fortune suddenly arrived in the inbox of another media professional. Elie Levine told Study Hall she was hired on the social and community team for Games at The New York Times, after a Times recruiter also reached out to her through LinkedIn. Levine, who graduated college in 2020 and then started as a reporter, made the deliberate choice to focus on expanding professionally useful skills such as social media and engagement, which paid off. “I found that I have a lot more stability in my career with social media,” Levine said. “I also found that I enjoyed the work on a whole other level but I do feel that the difficulty of getting a full-time job is definitely what contributed to me wanting to stay in social.”

Levine suggested that media workers in liminal phases of their career keep a brag sheet handy — a list of career highlights and successes that you can easily communicate to others and return to when you’re feeling down.

I also reconnected with Jeremy Childs, a journalist who I briefly worked with on our college newspaper years ago when we both covered arts & culture at Occidental (in 2015 that meant covering Tinashe and Mykki Blanco performances on campus). He recently got a new job as the East County reporter at the VCstar, a local California publication he’s been working his way up within since 2016. He started as a part-time reporter in 2016 after his mom learned about the opportunity through an acquaintance in her chiropractor’s waiting room. He then moved on to a night reporter position, before landing his current full-time role. Childs told Study Hall how behind he felt when he first started working part-time for the Star in 2016 while also working as a barista at Starbucks. “I really was kind of adrift for months and months and I was in horrible debt. I couldn’t pay my rent. It got really dicey there and then things kind of just came together all at once,” Childs said. Since joining the VCstar team, he’s covered stories that gained national traction, such as actress Naya Rivera’s tragic death, and the 2018 Thousand Oaks shooting. In his new position, Childs plans to take on the massive responsibility of covering East Ventura County, which includes Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, and Moorpark (as well as Newbury Park and Westlake Village) — cities of hundreds of thousands of people — all on his own. Despite the exciting promotion, local newspapers are so under-funded and understaffed, Childs has joined the ranks of other local reporters across the country that are completely overburdened.

I know that I am not alone in thinking that it’s pretty much impossible to get one of these coveted gigs. There’s also the crushing reality that new opportunities are scarce. A recent study by research firm Challenger found that media job cuts were up about 20 percent in 2022 compared to the previous year, with layoffs affecting hundreds of workers across CNN, BuzzFeed, and Gannett just last month.

I found solace in speaking with a couple of freelancers who also shared in my feeling of “personal news” overload. Music writer and freelancer Insanul Ahmed was laid off from Genius at the end 2021 and was pushed into the freelance economy but has been trying to find more steady work. He admitted that his morale has been decidedly low and that he’s thinking of pivoting to a job in IT, at the recommendation of a good friend. But he also said that he wrote a review for Complex about reading music producer Rick Rubin’s recent book and how it inspired him to continue writing. Ahmed’s review was surprisingly prescient. “The book is about being an artist and Rubin’s thing is anything you make is art,” said Ahmed. “You just gotta go and create.” I guess, as cliché as it may sound, that artistic drive is what keeps us in it, despite the ever-escalating odds.

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SAY HELLO TO THE ROBINHOOD POST

Axios reported that Robinhood, a financial trading platform with a sketchy track record, is teaming up with Joshua Topolsky, The Verge co-founder and VC funder enthusiast, to create an independent media startup called Sherwood Media that will report on “cryptocurrency, technology and geopolitics” (AKA: everything you need to know to survive a lightning round of Silicon Valley Microbrewery Small Talk). The startup, which will publish reporting and analysis in newsletters and on its own website, will also oversee Snacks, Robinhood’s already wildly successful newsletter. Topolsky, who resigned from his position as chief content officer of Culture & Innovation at BDG last April, told Axios that Sherwood will report on Robinhood when necessary (the startup will run independently from the mothership) and may launch separate newsletters devoted to news about stock market behemoths like Disney and Tesla. Axios noted that this is the latest instance of a trading platform utilizing content to develop a customer base for their products, citing how a casino operator gobbled up Barstool Sports in 2020 for the same purpose.

Foster Kamer, the editor-in-chief of Futurism, said he was offered the gig but declined. In a colorful tweet, Kamer said, “it sounded like a giant SEC violation in a company whose stock price was tanking after creating a de facto gambling app that could ruin people financially with a single swipe.”  

Our prediction? Dogecoin will outlast The Robinhood Post #HODL. —Daniel Spielberger 

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK

Dan Zak profiles blogger Matt Yglesias for The Washington Post. Like many of you, I’ve encountered a Matt Yglesias Take that has filled me with so much rage that it made me consider venturing out into a desolate corner of the planet with no wifi, such as Antarctica. Whether you love him or uh, have him muted/blocked, the flamewar king is a compelling case study. Dan Zak illuminates how the Vox co-founder has found success peddling milquetoast centrism to 13,000 Substack subscribers (his posts have apparently been read by Biden White House staffers). In addition to covering how a select few can make bank by pandering to niche audiences on Substack, the piece also demystifies Yglesias’ idiosyncratic fixations on granular policy disputes. It’s less about him having actual knowledge and experience, but more about gesturing towards the idea that he possesses it and therefore, should be trusted to tell you that well, actually, nothing is wrong with the status quo. —Daniel Spielberger

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—Last week, NBC News and MSNBC laid off 75 full-time employees after NBCU laid off dozens of people earlier this month. According to Politico, NBC News is closing NBC News Think, a vertical devoted solely to opinions. In response, the NBC News Guild filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against the company for trying to push msnbc.com staffers away from their union. “We will fight until we win a fair contract that protects everyone in our newsroom,” the Guild wrote in a statement. 

—While university students are using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework, media websites are also seemingly relying on the technology as a shortcut. CNET, a tech news outlet, is churning out financial explainer pieces with the help of “automation technology,” Futurism reports. In other news, “M3GAN” is a documentary.