There are too many places to write things now

Also: I am turning on payments on Substack!

OK. I know there have always been a lot of places to write things. Even in middle school I had the stressful digital life of juggling a Xanga with a MySpace blog and MySpace bulletins and a Blogspot blog that I made for some reason. And then came the next wave — Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook — and then the stories features every platform made that were all clones of Snapchat. But I am so tired today by how many places there are to write things, and how less-than-ideal most of them are. 

I can write things here, which is often today the best way to get genuine feedback and foster connections with an engaged audience. (Substack, you are NOT authorized to use that sentence in a promotional way.) I can go to Twitter, where I have the biggest following of any of the platforms I use, but tweets from people I don’t follow keep showing up in my feed and nobody seems very engaged with the platform anymore, and why should they be, with the way things are going there. Plus you get traction on one 200-character missive you thoughtlessly typed out in line to check out at the store and you get anywhere from 5 to 500 people making the most ungenerous interpretation of your tweet and yelling at you about it for days and telling you you’re a bad person, a thought that you have probably already internalized at a different time when this happened to you before. I can go to Mastodon, but why would I? You could go to Bluesky but only if you have an invite. You could write on Instagram or make a TikTok or reopen your Facebook for the first time since 2019. You could go to LinkedIn if you’re a real business psycho, or if, like me, you run a corporate LinkedIn page. I could do any of these things, but at the end of the day I’m not going to do any of them because I’m exhausted and overwhelmed and by the time I’ve thought it through I’ve lost the will to share whatever I was going to say in the first place. Do you see my problem here? I don’t have any answers, and I’m not really looking for them. I’ll keep writing here for now, I guess. Speaking of which…

Turning on payments on Substack

I didn’t want to put this at the top of the newsletter but I do know how people’s attention spans work so I can’t just bury it at the bottom and expect you to read it. 

I’m turning on payment options for my Substack! Here is why I am doing this:

• People have expressed an interest in supporting my newsletter financially

• I have supported other writers’ newsletters with paid subscriptions, and it feels nice to do it, and I suspect a few people may want to do it for me

• We live in a society that runs on real American currency, which is nice to have a little bit more of in exchange for something I like and am good at doing (writing)

Here’s what’s changing:

• If you don’t pay, nothing will change. All my posts and my archive will remain free.

Here’s what I’m going to give paying subscribers:

• Occasional extra writing behind a paywall

• Opportunities for chatting and community engagement

Here are some reasons why you might want to support me:

• You like my writing and want me to be enabled to continue writing in a freelance capacity

• You have benefited or appreciate the hundreds of hours of free career consulting I have done and will continue to do for journalists

• You are a kind wealthy person with a lump of dollar bills burning a hole in your pocket and you don’t know what to do with it

Here are expectations you can have if you decide to pay for my Substack:

• Occasional subscriber-only content. These are posts that I think are a little more personal, or provide IP or professional advice that I think is more valuable than my brain drippings posted elsewhere in this newsletter. Maybe this is how to pitch reporters, or advice for leaving journalism, or how to navigate being served a lawsuit when you’re a freelancer, or a new recipe I wrote. It’s important to have varied interests and areas of expertise. 

• Occasional community engagement/chat opportunities. Maybe we’ll discuss the series finale of Succession or the season finale of Yellowjackets together, or talk about what to do about digital media’s death rattle. Or we can talk about where we’re buying upcycled clothes these days, or whatever drama is happening in the CPG DTC olive oil company wars.

• Other than the above, I will not do anything drastically different than what I do here already! Please do not pay to subscribe if you cannot or don’t want to and aren’t comfortable with these occasional benefits and nothing more. If readers are engaged perhaps that will organically lend itself to more engagement opportunities, but I’m really doing this because enough people have asked me if I would do it that it feels like I’m throwing away some freelance income by saying no and keeping payments turned off. You are by no means obligated to do so, and I feel a little weird about even floating this!

Aren’t you glad we got that out of the way? Moving on…

Last week’s newsletter happened again this week and keeps happening

I wrote last week about the Insider and BuzzFeed News layoffs, and then the layoffs just kept happening at other outlets. Paper Mag laid off all its staff and Vice announced layoffs today. It never stops. We used to quote tweet someone who was laid off and say “you’d be an idiot not to hire this person!” but we don’t really do that anymore because there are no media jobs for people to relocate themselves into. The VC funding that felt like it opened doors for me in 2014 at the start of my news career cuts both ways, as I mentioned last week: for as many people who benefited from it at the time, wide-eyed and excited to have simply made it, just as many people lost jobs when the media companies that expanded so quickly ran out of funding without ever trying to make their businesses more sustainable when they had the chance. What happens today when these companies shed ever more employees is sad, but one thing it is not is surprising. Everyone who works in digital media has seen the writing on the wall, wondered to themselves when their number would be called, because absolutely nobody, especially in more recent years, harbored any illusions of sustainability or stability. I could keep talking about this until I’m blue in the face but that seems exhausting and frankly kind of boring for you. 

Writing a book proposal: Can someone force me to do it?

I got a bug to work on a larger-scale project than I’ve ever embarked on recently (a non-fiction book) following a conversation with my agent about an internet subculture I find particularly fascinating and that I feel compelled to write something about. Now I need to sit down and write it. (In this case “it” is not even the full proposal, just like…the beginnings of one). If you have any advice for disciplining oneself into doing such a thing and carving out time in a busy schedule please hit my line! I cannot bring myself to do it! Thank you!!

My books are once again open for career consultations: summer edition

Starting in mid-May, I will have more time to chat with folks who are looking to leave journalism or just want to talk about the non-newsroom careers out that that use their existing skillsets. Here’s some of the stuff I have covered in the past in these conversations:

• You can vent to me about the industry

• We can talk about how you know when it’s time to move on from a job

• We can talk about what kinds of jobs and career trajectories exist that you can do with the skills you already have 

• We can talk about retooling your resume for hiring managers who don’t work in journalism

• We can talk about where to find those jobs 

• I can give you a pep talk

• Etc.???

Please hit my line if you’d like a 30 minute chat/informational session. I have had more than 100 of these conversations since 2020.