Study Hall Digest 5/11/2020: Quarantine Content Edition

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

What Are We Reading in Quarantine?

Editors commissioning and publishing content are striking a tricky balance right now. You don’t want to completely ignore the pandemic, but at a certain point, readers have seen enough content focused exclusively on the coronavirus. As readers collectively cycle through the stages of grief, their preferences are changing.

I talked to an editor at a mid-size general interest publication who has been following pageviews and engagement patterns to track what sort of content people are reading as the pandemic progresses. They told me that so far, they had witnessed two phases:

— Phase one, which lasted roughly mid-March through mid-April, was characterized by panic and a desire for information-dense coronavirus content, to the exclusion of articles on other topics. “People wanted basic information and answers,” said the editor. “They wanted on-the-ground stories, ‘as told tos.’ They didn’t want much reporter analysis, just, ‘What is information I can know about this and who are people who are experiencing these things?’”

The turnaround for an article during this phase, said the editor, was rapid. They weren’t able to commission freelance work because everything was time-sensitive, so interviews were either delegated to staff or editors did the interviews themselves.

— Phase two, which started mid-April and is continuing into May, is characterized more by analysis and first-person essays. There is now less of an emphasis on simply shoveling out information and more interest in analyzing circumstances and feelings. “There was a hunger for essays, either first person analytical essays: ‘The thing you’re feeling is x,’ ‘The thing happening to you is happening to me.’”

The editor said they started commissioning “big idea” essays on areas of life impacted by the pandemic — inequality and women’s issues, for instance.

Readers are also gravitating towards what the editor called “speculative analysis essays,” which imagine what the next few months, years, graduations, or elections might look like based on interviews with experts. “All we have right now is speculation,” said the editor.

Meanwhile, the editor is starting to revisit stories they had put on hold when the pandemic hit. “A lot of the features I had on hold, I’m realizing now is the time they could work in the world, because I think people are hungry for characters and narratives — they’re hungry to read fun, weird, and wonderful stories,” they said. “I’m starting to see that hunger start again.”

How Are We Unwinding in Quarantine? By Immersing Ourselves in Nostalgia.

Rebecca Jennings at Vox noticed a lot of millennials and Gen Z’ers seem to be longing for a return to 2013, and that the early-2010s Tumblr aesthetic and indie pop have both reemerged as people revisit their angst-ridden youths. “Nostalgia is a popular pastime even in normal circumstances, but particularly so in an era where the present feels inescapable,” writes Jennings. She interviews a professor of psychology who studies nostalgia, who notes that moments of change — as well as loneliness — tend to inspire a yearning for the past.

That would explain why, in the earlier days of quarantine, I started re-watching the early-aughts CW drama The O.C. and listening to the soundtrack of my late teens: Death Cab for Cutie, Modest Mouse, The Strokes. I even tried to access my LiveJournal from those years, which is locked behind an email I no longer use, protected by a password I can’t remember. I’m not a nostalgic person under normal circumstances, and generally avoid thinking about my teen years at all because I like avoiding crushing embarrassment. Not so when confined to my apartment during a global pandemic! I was suddenly desperate to revisit those years, the shame I’d previously associated with my youth replaced by warmth and affection for my dumb baby self. There she was, trapped in time, listening to Transatlanticism and writing in her LiveJournal, totally oblivious to the hell unfolding around us in 2020. If only I could get back to her.

I have consumed very little new or previously unwatched content since quarantine began. I have almost exclusively re-watched parts of old shows I’ve already seen — including Mad Men, a quarantine re-watch trend — sometimes multiple times. It’s like my brain is resistant to taking in any new characters or plotlines. Which leads me to my next point.

Normal People is good quarantine content because it is familiar. The BBC/Hulu adaption of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People is one of the very few new, previously unseen pieces of content I’ve watched while under quarantine. I’m not the only one who followed the maddeningly slow courtship of two improbably attractive Irish teens: 16 million viewers watched the show during its first week on BBC iPlayer. It was also the talk of Twitter and the subject of multiple light, fun The Cut pieces — part of the normal TV content cycle, but this felt like a first since the start of the pandemic. It seemed we were all watching the same (new) thing at the same time and documenting our experiences.

But of course, Normal People isn’t entirely new content. It’s based on a widely-read novel from a beloved author praised as the voice of her generation. Discourse around the Hulu show feels like a continuation of the discourse around Rooney and her writing. When I watched the first episode, it didn’t feel intimidating because I already knew the story and the characters. It was a relief, like I was starting back in on something I’d bookmarked the previous year. It is also heavy on the nostalgia — data shows that Normal People, a show that follows two characters from their late teens into their early twenties, was not watched predominantly by teens, but by adults apparently longing to relive the emotional intensity of their youths.

This Week in the Discourse: Side With One of These Two Rich Chefs

It’s an incredible thing when a single messy interview can launch two separate controversies online. That’s exactly what happened when The New Consumer, Dan Frommer’s niche e-commerce newsletter, published an interview with shallot writer-influencer Alison Roman. Controversy #1 now seems quaint by comparison to what came next, but essentially: Lauren Oyler took issue with Roman’s characterization of her financial situation, which made it seem like she was “not rich” (she writes recipes for the Times and has a forthcoming cooking show plus a book, so she’s probably doing alright). This launched a whole discussion about what makes an author successful and how we ought to talk about money.

Controversy #2: Roman also had some harsh words for Marie Kondo, who she considers a sell-out for launching a product line after telling us all to throw away our stuff that doesn’t spark joy, and also for Chrissy Teigen, who launched a line of home goods available at Target following the success of her cookbook Cravings, a business decision that Roman said “horrifies” her. Because Roman has in the past been accused of appropriating (and watering down) food and flavors from other cultures, the fact that she chose to target two Asian women did not go over well, to put it lightly. The controversy also, naturally, evolved into a discussion about women “taking down” other women. Teigen responded that she was hurt by Roman’s comments, having supported her professional endeavors; she also noted she had signed on to executive produce Roman’s upcoming cooking show (yikes?!?).

Roman’s response to Teigen — which tried to reframe her comments as far more mild than they actually were — was plainly disingenuous. Just come out and say you were being petty! We can all read! Anyway, Roman has been silent on Twitter since Friday, which is probably for the best.

Taco Bell Quarterly Is a Thing

Study Hall has a new syndication partnership with the daily media newsletter Deez Links, by writer Delia Cai. Each week we’ll highlight one of Delia’s posts.

Very thankful that Vox is here to bring our attention to the existence of the Taco Bell Quarterly, a literary mag that publishes poems, essays, and short stories about your favorite Crunchwrap Supreme destination but *isn’t* affiliated with the actual brand like, at all. Writer Constance Grady does a Q&A with “Editor Grande Supreme,” MM Carrigan, and the results are great and sharply appetite-inducing. Enjoy!

Everything Else

— This is a time of profound crisis for most digital media companies, local newspapers, and alt-weeklies, but the New York Times is doing just fine! Even as ad revenue plummets, the paper has added about 600,000 digital subscribers in just three months as readers seek out coronavirus coverage. It’s a phenomenon reminiscent of the Times’ “Trump bump” in 2016, when the paper attracted a legion of new readers with its political reporting.

— Barstool Sports is “hemorrhaging money” due to lost ad revenue, and apparently its editor-in-chief is having something of a nervous breakdown, per this report from The Daily Beast.

— People are reading introspective-yet-relatable personal essays; what are people watching in quarantine? Netflix and other streaming services don’t want creators to know. The streaming service keeps viewer numbers a secret from producers, according to this Bloomberg report, leaving them guessing about what audiences want. Writer Steven Conrad, who created the Amazon series Patriot, told Bloomberg that services do this so they can make executive decisions about content that can’t be questioned. “They can manipulate the show under the argument that it’s what audiences want. It’s a way to maintain control,” he said.

— BuzzFeed News has a new editor-in-chief: Mark Schoofs, who created the site’s investigations unit in 2014 and previously did award-winning work for the Wall Street Journal and ProPublica. (BuzzFeed News’ previous editor, Ben Smith, is now a media columnist for the New York Times.)

— In a perfect bit of casting, Nicholas Cage will play Joe Exotic in a scripted adaption of the Texas Monthly article about the saga that was recently popularized by Netflix docuseries Tiger King. The IP explosion around this is all very confusing.

— Here’s another bit of nostalgia quarantine has pulled to the surface: chain emails! What was once considered corny and a waste of time is now…kind of nice, it turns out! “In pre-COVID times, I would have been so judgy of this,” one chain email recipient told the Huffington Post, “but now, all bets are off!”