Digest 12/21/2020

Year in review, Caliphate, Nancy Meyers, and more.

YEAR IN REVIEW

The Study Hall staff rounds up the most significant, maddening, hilarious, or otherwise notable events in media in 2020.

The Journalist-Influencer (Again)

2020 was the year of the journalist-influencer, just like 2019 was the year of the journalist-influencer. Time is a flat circle, and so is the media industry, which is why we’re all doomed to reiterate the same takes over and over again, a little different each time. Taylor Lorenz predicted in 2018 that “journalists will begin to prioritize their personal brands” as a way of protecting themselves from precarity in the industry; the following year, I wrote about the disappearing line between journalist and influencer, noting that writers were increasingly adopting tactics used by online influencers to sell their personas alongside their work. (Lauren Duca dragged me on Twitter for calling her an influencer then recycled my take for Nieman Lab a few months later.)

This year became the year of Substack: the platform underwent a dramatic surge to become the home of a growing cast of journalists with devoted followings. Striking out on one’s own to self-publish has started to look like the future of an industry in peril. In a rising sea of layoffs and shutterings, even staff writers who seemed safe from the surrounding chaos left their salaried jobs for the newsletter business. 

In this year’s Nieman Lab predictions for 2021, Mark Stenberg predicted the line between journalist and influencer will continue to shrink, and Taylor Lorenz predicted that journalists will become better acquainted with the perils of influencing: the potential pitfalls of making one’s home on a tech platform and the difficulties of maintaining a relationship to one’s readers. I agree with all of this, and think it’s probably safe to say that 2021 will reveal to us the limits of a platform like Substack. But in any case, 2021 will be the year of the journalist-influencer, just like 2020 and 2019. — Staff writer Allegra Hobbs

The Other Side of Doomscrolling

I taught a class on media and democracy to 60 continuing education students at SUNY Purchase this fall. None of them had really paid attention to the media analytically before, but they immediately “got it,” the “it” being the overwhelming sense that there is something very broken in the information systems in this country.

Trust in media has been plummeting year over year, and this is usually framed as a bad thing. But I think it’s good that these students were ready to write the whole thing off — not just the skewed election coverage on Fox News or the terrible op-eds in the Times, but all of it. They have grown up simultaneously immersed in and dependent on this deluge of streams — their Instagrams and TikToks and push alerts and cable news — while knowing that it’s terrible for them, that it’s making them sadder, more angry, and more hopeless.

Perhaps because I have been forced to find the silver lining in everything this year, I found their gloom heartening. For a few years I’d assumed I was just a weathered media worker, who, after seeing the proverbial sausage being made, became an evangelist for proverbial vegetarianism. It’s nice to realize that we’re all fed up, that we know we deserve better than giant corporations selling addictive information that makes us feel like lab rats: constantly stressed, yet pressing the button for more.

For anything to change, there needs to be a critical mass. This year, we might have hit it: dozens of new media companies started; people decided to support content creators who brought them joy via Substack and OnlyFans. We’re not quite done with the doomscrollling yet, but I do feel like we’ve come to a collective breaking point and decided that, instead of scrolling forever, we’ll do something about it. And that, in this bleak bleak bleak bleak year, made me happy. — Co-founder P.E. Moskowitz

The Real Victims of Cazzie David’s Nepotism

A month ago, in anticipation of her forthcoming book of essays, No One Asked For This, Cazzie David (daughter of Larry David) had a little press run. Along with a glowing profile in the LA Times, we all got to see an excerpt of David’s work in The Cut. Many decried the attention David was getting; let’s be honest, the essay was pretty bad. David wasn’t exactly breaking new comedic ground by writing an essay about how eating “handfuls” of ice cream makes her too full for sex. In light of the book deal and all the exposure a mediocre book of essays was getting, many accused David of being the product of nepotism. 

I agree. But the most galling result of nepotism wasn’t all the exposure her essay got. It wasn’t the profile; It wasn’t even the book deal. Cazzie David’s connections led her to be able to do what I and so many others can only dream of: She got to fuck Pete Davidson. True nepotism is being able to use your connections as the daughter of comedy royalty to win its dirtbag prince. As an industry, it’s crucial that we make sure the ability to fuck men that are inexplicably hot is based on merit, not your connections. So, please, for the love of God, someone get me on Raya. — Operations manager Chika Ekemezie

The Death of Text

Possibly my worst Twitter mistake of the year was a tweet about how I didn’t like when people described listening to an audiobook as “reading” the book. Not only was it ableist and condescending, but I also realized I wasn’t able to read the written word so well myself over the pandemic. The concentration long texts required sometimes felt like meditation, and lately, it’s pretty difficult to keep your head empty. 

Instead, I consumed more audio and video online than I ever have before. When I needed a distraction from writing, I went to Eater’s homepage and looked for their latest short food documentaries, and while cooking or cleaning, I often put on the audio versions that Audm (which was bought by the New York Times) makes of New Yorker stories. At first I couldn’t take the weirdness of words that were clearly written to be read as text spoken aloud; the knotty grammar and manifold clauses of the magazine’s sentences aren’t ideal podcast material. But I came to appreciate the recordings as a way I could still consume the articles in the midst of brain fog. It’s good content, whatever the medium! 

As a writer of non-multimedia text, I feel that in 2020 my medium lost ground to podcasts and audiobooks and explanatory YouTube videos with animated infographics. TikTok is awash with recorded monologues of the kind of cultural commentary viewers might have once received from newspaper critics or, more recently, blog posts. Multimedia platforms are where the act of reading now happens. So do I stick with my anachronism — black marks on a white page — or pivot? — Co-founder Kyle Chayka

Corporate Memes Killed the Queer Media Star

On February 6, 2020, queer media personality Fran Tirado announced that of Most, a “queer/trans social media channel” quietly created by Netflix in 2019, was relaunching with a staff of writers who left failing LGBTQIA publications like Out and Into for a more reliable corporate paycheck. As he explained to Study Hall after the announcement: “Media is broken. All I wanna do is make queer people happy and throw them parties and help them find their favorite shows.”

At the time, it seemed like a ridiculous idea. But a month later, as the COVID-19 pandemic locked us away with nothing but our screens to keep us company, the safest job in queer media wasn’t working at a prestigious publication reporting on the LGBTQIA community: It was being a meme maker for a multi-billion dollar streaming platform.

After I spent thousands of words detailing exactly how queer media’s bubble burst this October, I came to see something as brain-numbing and low-stakes as Most as refreshing in a year where everything went wrong all the time forever. LGBTQIA publications failed as they tried to balance reporting on real LGBTQIA issues with the whims of their heterosexual owners’ thirst for money. 

At Most, the straight corporate overlords still exist, but all the staff needs to do is produce endless quantities of surface-level content that remind you Netflix does good gay stuff sometimes (when they’re not busy canceling shows led by LGBTQIA, BIPOC, and female characters). Most is the most 2020 queer media platform because it isn’t really a queer media platform: it’s a sensory deprivation tank. When the alternative is facing the wreckage of what queer media has become, why not stumble in and float in the ethereal weightlessness of memes and corporate-controlled diversity? — Contributing writer Chris Erik Thomas

Leaving the Twitter Agora

In mid-March this year, a friend started a Discord server. Still in the early days of the pandemic — when a full year of coronavirus precautions felt impossible to imagine — it seemed like the natural place to migrate the jokes, commentary, and gossip we’d normally share in person. I found myself returning to it throughout the day, the online equivalent of a coffee shop that offers good odds of running into someone you know.

Many trends in media this year — the move toward Substack, the growth of independent media, and a greater willingness to take on fights with tech companies— rely on this sense that smaller, well-moderated online spaces now feel more humane than large ones. Twitter is exhausting and joyless, like a party that’s become so crowded it’s impossible to move. As Anne Helen Petersen told Study Hall for the 11/23 Digest, her readers are attracted to communities “characterized by people who want to have conversations with each other in a way that doesn’t make them feel like shit.” It is difficult to imagine or structurally impossible for a troll to target you while watching a streamer dispense skincare advice on Twitch, for example, or in the comments of a cat pic on the Patreon for a charming Vancouver veterinarian.

The filter bubble theory of the internet, prominent among liberals since the 2016 election, casts self-selecting online communities as vaguely antidemocratic; there is a sense that we owe the Online Commons our earnest efforts at debate, and the great intellectual battles of our era will happen there. But larger platforms like Facebook and Twitter are far from neutral spaces, and their dominance is not natural, inevitable, or destined to last. As my time online bears more of the responsibility for essential functions that make me feel like a person, I’m enjoying a return to the mid-aughts, stitched-together internet of blogs, chatrooms, and streamers — a cozy space where no one is going to come up behind you and start shouting about chemtrails. — Managing editor Erin Schwartz

EVERYTHING ELSE

— After a review of its award-winning 2018 podcast Caliphate, the New York Times has found that it fell short of its journalistic standards. The paper admits that the makers of the podcast gave too much credence to an unreliable source, a man claiming to be a former ISIS member whose claims they did not sufficiently scrutinize. 

— By now, we’ve all read and dissected the bonkers Elle story about the former Bloomberg reporter who fell in love with Martin Shkreli, quit her job, divorced her husband, and is now anxiously awaiting Shkreli’s release from prison while he refuses to speak to her due to her participation in the profile. Anyway, cue countdown til her book deal announcement.

— Nancy Meyers’ daughter was furious over Rachel Handler’s very nice tribute to her mother’s filmography; according to her, Handler dissecting recurring themes and aesthetics in Meyers’ films is sexist. Anyway, read Nancy Meyers Week at Vulture and watch The Holiday! 

— Axios bought local news site The Charlotte Agenda for around $5 million as part of a push into local news. Axios will replicate the business model of the Agenda (digital-only, newsletter-based) to launch other city sites in Tampa, Denver, Minneapolis, and Des Moines. If that works, said Axios CEO Jim VandeHei, Axios will “scale it to as many cities as humanly possible.”

— I mean, we all saw it coming. Vice has become the first major media company to launch an OnlyFans, a subscription service that was largely utilized by sex workers but has been increasingly overtaken by celebrities and now, publishers.