All media is niche media now

What stories can we tell now? And where do we write them?

I have a complicated relationship with this platform. While it’s enabled me to write and support my family and stay in Iowa and write books and be radical in a state that is not, it has also profited from white supremacist viewpoints and anti-trans bigotry.

But, put down your pitchforks because that’s every platform. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Spotify, your local newspaper, and yes, even NPR. Not every platform is all bad. But not one platform is all good. Money makes people conservative and those people are in power everywhere, not just electorally. Owners, bosses, boards — people with money like to hold on to money. Real stories, true stories, stories that change things challenge those power structures.

And as Taylor Lorenz pointed out in her newsletter this week, the people with money don’t like investing in those stories because they shake the very foundations on which wealth sits.

Also, this week,

Hamish McKenzie

, co-founder of Substack, wrote that media is now controlled by an Elon Muskian ethos. He noted,

In The Elon Times, the star “columnists” and “anchors” aren’t Paul Krugmans or Walter Cronkites. They’re instead people whose platforms have been inflated to insane degrees by X’s heat-seeking algorithms. Ian Miles Cheong, Collin Rugg, and Mario Nawfal have more influence now than Anderson Cooper, Lester Holt, and Maureen Dowd—for as long as they remain in the good graces of the God King. And the man at the top, Elon himself, is the chief editorialist and propagandist, pushing his posts to the front of everyone’s feed, picking his favorites to amplify while proclaiming “News should come from the people,” flying the free-speech flag while promoting a soon-to-be-president who wants TV networks that broadcast content he doesn’t like to be taken off the air. 

When people criticized the Harris campaign for not sitting down with New York Magazine or the New York Times, they missed what has been clear for so long. She was trying to reach people where they are, not where we think they should be.

There no longer any such thing as “mainstream media.” All media is niche media now.

Some of the collapse of media is due to private equity gutting newsrooms, some of it is social media leeching off ad dollars, and some of it is simply media murdering itself — erecting impossible paywalls and janky-ass websites; writing stories that only cover marginal communities when they’re dead and dying or in jail. People who work in these places and for them and run them like to pretend that a locally owned newspaper is better than nothing, but when that paper is owned by someone who backs Steve King and some of the reporters believe in the Plandemic conspiracy, is that really much better?

We are watching the death of something old and powerful, but we are also watching the rise of something new — independent content creators making newsletters, magazines, videos. And sure, does it lead to Andrew Tate-types. But it also, hi, leads to me and so many others. Yes, something right now is fracturing, shattering, breaking. But I hope this break forces us to tell better stories in better ways.

As

Tressie McMillan Cottom

said on “The Daily Show”, Democrats lost the story wars. Trump is not some sort of evil genius, but he was better at crafting a story about America and he knew how to reach people with it. (The answer, by the way, is not to create our own knockoffs. We do not need a liberal Joe Rogan. That’s brain-worm thinking. I grew up evangelical, where our counter-culture was just sanitized Christian versions of everything cooler. Is that what you want, you nerds? You want the nicer gentler, more PC Joe Rogan? Please.)

A few people unsubscribed from my newsletter after the election, saying they can’t face it anymore. And I hear that. Okay. I never take it personally. But it does make me think about how I can write and tell stories better, so that I’m bringing people in, rather than turning them away. I remember telling the editor of my book This American Ex-Wife that I needed it to be partially personal because I needed people to find points of connection and interest. I didn’t want some sort of lecturing top-down manifesto; I wanted heart, and fuckups, and also it couldn’t be too long.

I think we did it in that case. It was a New York Times bestseller after all. (Also, the paperback is coming out in February, just in time for all those post-inauguration divorces.)

But I think those are the kinds of conversations we need to have. What stories are true, yes. But also, how do we have fun telling them? What makes people want to read something? I don’t have all the answers, but I do listen to you all a lot. I do watch and see what kind of content you click on, interact with, and share with your friends. And more and more, I think it begins by being personal, it begins by being human, messy, complicated, and frankly, fun.

Here is the thing: Find the stories and the storytellers you want to support. Find the places making the art that you love and that crystallize a vision for a better place. Be rabid about the world you want and help to make it. I’ll be out there doing my best to do it too. And what does that look like? Well, I think I am going to get more personal, more contemplative. I am going to make more jokes. I am not going to look away from the truth. I hope you will stay with me.

And rather than marinating in the Elon Muskian media stew of hate-takes, I think we should all subscribe to and share the fuck out of the things we love and want to see more of in the world.

And now, for your Sunday reads.