It's Got a Price - Freddie deBoer
About two and a half years ago I wrote that the sports-and-pop-culture site The Ringer, now owned by Spotify, appeared to be doing things right, or as right as could be expected in this perpetually-reeling industry. I felt that they were doing as well as anyone to navigate the choppy waters of #content media. (I have no idea how well they’re doing financially now, when every boat in the business appears to be slowly sinking.) Because I’m me and my detractors are who they are, I got wind of a little mockery from people in the business suggesting that I wrote the piece in an effort to get a job there. Which is silly, and also reflects my weird position in this industry: I am well aware that they would never hire me, and also they could never afford me. I have never been a staff writer anywhere and I’m too disreputable to ever work at most professional publications, for reasons that are almost all my fault, but I believe that between this newsletter and my freelancing my earnings are somewhere in the top quintile of all editorial employees in media. (As Snoop taught us, the game is to be sold, not to be told.) Perhaps this is only of interest to me. But it’s an odd thing, to be in this professional space where reputation and compensation are so divorced.
Kyle Chayka, of The New Yorker, discusses the new independence of Taylor Lorenz, formerly of The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Lorenz, who writes about digital culture and fashions, is perhaps the most talented controversialist in the game today, someone has relentlessly parlayed making people angry into career advancement. This probably sounds like an indictment, but such efforts are as old as media, and anyway my house is glass. Now, Lorenz has decamped for her own independent newsletter, which offers the possibility of a lot more money; the great unbundling continues. I have little doubt that she will succeed, financially. In a certain sense, though, she’s a bad fit for Chayka’s concerns in that piece, which are more about the imprimatur of media, the status anxieties and sense of prestige and exclusivity that have always been a big part of the compensation package in the industry. Lorenz has never seemed interested in prestige, only celebrity; as she says to Chayka with admirable candor, “I don’t want to be a full-time writer. I want to be an Internet personality.” In that sense, Lorenz truly doesn’t need traditional media. She can probably make more money outside of those stuffy publications than in them, and anyway the world she reports on has no interest in prestige, only notoriety.
