I was once a professional blogger.
It was part of my job as a reporter. Between filing spots and features, I posted about three times a day to my radio station’s news blog.
The posts were short—usually a link and a comment. They were built for an audience who used RSS readers and browser bookmarks. Writing something the length of one of these newsletters for the blog every day would have been way too much. Likewise, sending something like the average blog post in a newsletter today would be too little. This change in the medium pushed a change in the message.
What I’ve noticed now, though, is that a lot of writers (myself included) and podcasters (also myself included) are stuck in the middle, between the old blog-and-social-media need to constantly update and the new post-social media/anti-brain-rot expectation that each update will be substantive.
Every so often, in conversation with a friend, one of us will mention a paid newsletter/podcast/Patreon/etc that we mutually subscribe to. The reference meets a blank stare. “I haven’t kept up,” one or the other of us says. The reason is always the same: There was just too much.
The problem is, in most cases, we’re still paying for whatever it is we gave up on. The subscription was automatic, easy, and aspirational. Canceling felt like a betrayal to the writer and to our own sense of ourselves as the type of people who support and keep up with independent media.
But supporting just a handful of independents means getting more Content than you can reasonably sort through. Inboxes are flooded. Podcast feeds are full. YouTube channels are constantly updated. And for your money, you don’t get a full picture of the world. Paid subscriptions carry the user from niche to niche. The audience is pulled into deep and narrow crevices of culture then drowned in commentary.
It’s simultaneously too much and not enough.
This is the creator economy. This is the independent, entrepreneurial, tech-powered world we all live in, but in which very few of us make a living. The demand for output is greater, the rewards are smaller, and the quality is all over the place. Things needed to change in the old media world. They still need to change. But as a solution, this isn’t better.
Instead of a few people in institutions and more people trying to get in, we have hundreds of thousands of people hustling to create their own institutions and to collect their own subscription fees. This inherently means they need to dominate their own corner of a crowded world. And we (I say we, because what is this but my own entrepreneurial venture?) do it on platforms we don’t control—platforms that take a cut of the meager earnings and push us to constantly publish the dregs of our drafts folders just to stay alive.
We’re cranking out bits to line the bottom of big tech’s birdcage.
The promise of the creator economy is that a small group of supporters can, through small contributions, sustain the writers, podcasters, or artists they like. It’s a nice idea. But by replacing the old system that supported the people who are now called Creators, the platforms of this new economy put pressure on these people to do the work of newspapers, radio stations, art galleries, magazines, et cetera. And it pushed them to do it all themselves. This work includes marketing, finding subscribers, analyzing data, cultivating conversations in the comments, and putting out enough Content to keep subscribers happy.
These are not jobs that everyone has time for. They’re not jobs everyone is good at. I’d argue that almost no one is good at one of those jobs—data analyst for Content.
It’s not that people don’t know how to read measurements, it’s just that the measurements we have aren’t doing what we think they’re doing. Audience measurement has always been imprecise. Broadcast ratings were determined by statistical sampling (sometimes the samples were gathered by volunteers keeping diaries of the radio stations they remembered listening to). Nobody knew what happened to a newspaper or magazine once it was delivered. It’s technically possible (though unlikely) that a columnist could write a weekly dispatch for their local paper for fifty years and never have a single person read it, beyond an editor. Digital metrics still involve a lot of guesswork. If you’re still reading now, you are statistically the same to me as someone who quit after that first paragraph. Hatereads and devoted followers register as the same. Bots and humans are the same. It’s technically possible (though unlikely) that a post could get hundreds of thousands of clicks without anyone reading a single word of it.
As soon as the numbers start going up, a new mindset takes hold. It says that anyone who sees a little of something must want a lot of that same thing. Look at a news website. Scroll down to the bottom of an article. Chances are you’ll see links to three more articles that are about the same topic.
This mindset isn’t limited to big publishers. I’ve noticed that a lot of the newsletters I subscribe to have become increasingly narrow in focus and voice. Looking at my list of ideas for upcoming newsletters, I see it happening here. A post is popular, so I want to make more like it. This is especially true if I get new paid subscribers for a post.
This applies to the subject of a post and to the quantity of posts. If one newsletter on a certain topic gets a lot of readers, maybe a dozen newsletters on related topics will get even more readers. The data analyst in my head is now talking directly to the business manager in my head. And they’re bossing around the Content Creator.
The problem is, all of these are the same person. And only one person. There’s simply not enough capacity to keep up the quantity and quality needed to survive. I have a long list of newsletter ideas. I could send out three a week. But I wouldn’t be able to make them as thoughtful as I wanted to. I wouldn’t be able to trim them down and edit them to an appropriate length. They would ramble in an unfocused haze, hovering around whatever was most popular a few months ago. The newsletter would turn into the written equivalent of one of those Instagram accounts where a person does variations on the same joke over and over until you skip too many times and they vanish from your feed entirely.
The well isn’t deep enough. When I worked as a blogger, keeping up a cadence was easy not just because the posts were short, but because they were built around reporting. I went into the field and worked the phones and had new facts to present and to analyze.
There are a lot of newsletters and podcasts and YouTube channels about current events, but not many of them are journalistic. They don’t involve reporting beyond reading the news and coming up with something to say about it. They’re akin to the worst kind of newspaper column, something editors offered as a reward for a long-serving journalist that meant the paper would “lose a good reporter and gain a bad writer,” in the words of Tom Wolfe. The archetypal columnist, Wolfe wrote, “seemed to do nothing more than ingest the Times every morning, turn it over in his ponderous cud for a few days, and then methodically egest it in the form of a drop of mush on the foreheads of several hundred thousand readers of other newspapers in the days thereafter.”
Wolfe praised Jimmy Breslin, the journalist credited with reviving the column, in large part because Breslin left his desk. One of the themes of a recent documentary on Breslin and fellow columnist Peter Hammil is that the two were unique because they were constantly out and about gathering material. “They were everywhere,” as one of the talking heads in the movie puts it.
You can learn a lot more today by sitting at your desk than you could in the pre-internet years, but how often do you see this connectivity put to use to gather facts, and how often do you see it put to use to find something to give an opinion about?
“Holding too many very strong opinions about matters of minor consequence might elsewhere be the virtue of hucksters and demagogues,” Renata Adler wrote. This was in her essay on Pauline Kael, who, Adler argued, had ceased to have anything of value to say, but who kept cranking out the columns, dedicated to deadlines.
The Creator economy encourages hack work. It’s not that everyone is sitting at their desk and cynically thinking they can get by shipping slop to the audience (though I’m certain some people—maybe a lot of people—are doing this). The demands of the platforms can too easily inspire a single-mindedness that limits the Creator’s view of the world, of the audience, and of the audience’s needs. The platforms redefine success on their own terms. Those terms are not usually interested in art, knowledge, and the public good. They’re about profit.
At least with a newspaper or magazine, there were other things to read in the publication you paid for. Some of it was actual news—reported by a person whose job was to find facts.
As a freelance journalist, I work in an old-fashioned way. I come up with ideas for things to report on and I pitch those ideas to publications who pay me to go gather some information. It’s precarious work that’s getting ever-more precarious. But it’s far more rewarding. I get to work with editors who push back on ideas, tell me I’m too long-winded, and otherwise ensure that I’m making something people want to read. Often, the work is fact-checked.
I’ve never been under the illusion this newsletter would bring me riches. I’ve long hoped that any revenue that comes in here would be enough to pay a part-time staff—editors, other writers, designers. I could say this is because I love you, dear reader, so much that I want you to only have finely tuned work. Really, it’s more for me. I don’t want to be embarrassed by publishing too much unpolished work. I also know a lot of good editors who need work. There’s no Creator economy for them.
Still, I sometimes think about getting more paid subscribers and making this more of a job than a hobby. But honestly, there’s already a lot to give to. If you’re in the U.S., your local public media station or independent nonprofit newsroom needs the cash. And I’d rather have a staff gig than run my own enterprise. I’m not good at being a business person, or a business.
As a consumer, I’m not withdrawing from the Creator economy. I’m going to keep giving to writers and shows and publications I like. I don’t expect any of them to offer me more. I don’t know that I’d take more. I just went through my Patreon and other subscriptions and realized a lot of my rewards are sitting unclaimed. Videos are unwatched. Podcasts are unheard. Content is unconsumed.
If the slow collapse of the media industry continues, I may need to change my mind on a lot of this. But I also have the silly little hope that a different approach might help stop the worst from coming.
So tell me. How many newsletters and podcasts do you subscribe to? Do you read them all? Is my every-two-week cadence here too slow? (I’m not sure I’ll do anything about that last question, but I am curious.)
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