Ten Years In A Crumbling Industry

There’s a screenshot from TikTok that recently caused me and a group of my writer friends to lose our minds.

“I’m watching Girls on HBO for the first time and I realize I wasn’t meant to be 23 in this age. I was meant to be a 23 year old hipster living in Brooklyn in 2012 wearing too many floral patterns, listening to vampire weekend, and writing absurd listicles on buzzfeed while it was at its peak. I’m a converted millennial apologist now because what a time to be alive.”

True to the spirit of that era — the screenshot lacks attribution

This is my actual lived experience, described by someone who was apparently born before or around 9/11. There are only two elements of this description that do not apply to me: I was 23 in 2013, and I stopped listening to Vampire Weekend after they released Contra.

For the few of us who lived that life, it was an inspiring time to be alive. Media startups were abundant. Young writers like myself who were willing to work for $36,000 dollars per year (in New York City) were allowed past the gates kept by legacy media and the traditional career path of working at a local newspaper to climb the ladder.

We were people with limited experience who were given large platforms and freedom to experiment with form, subject, and voice. It felt, to quote Tony Soprano in the pilot episode, like it was “good to be in something from the ground floor.”

But the best is over.

My early resumé reads like a parody of someone who worked in this business beginning in 2014. My first role in journalism was in the early days of BuzzFeed News. They hired me as an intern on the sports desk — then dissolved the section on the second day of my internship.

There, I learned how to do journalism. Seriously, my only consistent writing experience was writing, uh, pieces similar to this on Tumblr and being a highly opinionated person on Twitter. I blasted off my opinions on sports and everything else without even a moment of hesitation. This was one way young writers got hired in those days: You built up a personal brand, got noticed, and someone gave you a chance.

I moved to New York for that internship, living off $10 per hour and the free lunches in the college-like culture at BuzzFeed. Next, I went to work for Vice, which was a short-lived experience that I’ve mostly forgotten but adds an incredibly funny piece of credibility to my digital media bona fides.

Upon returning to BuzzFeed News, I was in the courtroom for Deflategate and the first Aaron Hernandez trial. I learned how to cover news, while also being allowed to write longform reporting about people like an unknown high school football player who lived on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. It was the era of Grantland and SB Nation’s longform vertical, and it felt like we were living through a contemporary version of the New Journalism era.

But it’s a time in my life, and in our internet economy, that has been killed and has taken a few extra shots to the face for good measure. What my friends and I thought was the reality of our industry was hardly more than a mirage.

The death of “websites” and outlets that value true creativity and diversity in coverage — largely at the whims of ghoulish executives and private equity vulturism — has created in me a stinging grief that I cannot seem to shake.

So many of my friends own ‘Vaulter’ hats. I bought a ‘Waystar/Royco’ hat — a company where I eventually wound up working.

In recent weeks, two of the people who I consider my formative editors in this stupid business have verbally shaken me by the shoulders and tried to wake me from this stubborn nostalgia.

“YOU NEED TO ACCEPT THAT 2014 WASN’T REAL,” each of them said to me. (Just prior to my conversations with them, they had seen each other for dinner and had been discussing those days themselves.)

After a few years at BuzzFeed, I took a job at Deadspin right as Gawker Media was in a tailspin. The company was at the end stages of a trial against Hulk Hogan, financed by Peter Thiel. It was evident a Florida jury was not going to side with the snarky New York media types and the case set a precedent for media censorship that seems to be on overdrive these days. A civilian or politician cannot control a news outlet’s posts, but they can bleed them dry for cash and instill a censorious caution that delegitimizes the industry and creates distrust amongst readers.

In my final interview, the then–executive editor of Gawker Media asked me directly: “Why do you want to take a job at a company that is imploding?”

Well, I told him, I wanted a new set of clips. I wanted the freedom to express my opinions and experiment with form and length. Gawker Media was the most liberated of all digital media operations, and I figured I’d get at least six months of new creative opportunities before it collapsed. Gawker, the website, was killed early in my tenure and the rest of the company was quickly sold. (My time lasted longer than six months, and I left prior to the takeover by a parasitic CEO and the principled exodus by the people who’d built Deadspin into one of the best websites on the internet.)

There was a rushing current of careerism and self-preservation that guided my employment decisions at that time. When I became a baseball beat writer, the first editor-in-chief I’d worked for in my career asked why I would go from the freedom of Deadspin to the daily grind of on-the-ground reporting. I told him that I felt I had missed the basic skills of reporting by entering the business without working a beat before obtaining a large platform. I made my early journalism mistakes very much in public, not hidden in the pages of prep coverage for a regional paper. If I didn't develop those skills, and quickly, I’d be easily expendable in our already shrinking industry.

“You’re too young to be this cynical about the business,” he told me in 2018. I called him out of the blue a few months ago to remind him of that conversation and ask if he felt my cynicism (which really, was a projection of fear) was misplaced. He asked me if I was ok. Clearly, I was not.

The friends I made early in my career are still some of the most valued people in my life. They’re not necessarily the people closest to me, but we are all bonded by the turbulent demise of our own dreams and creative fantasies over the last ten years.

That kid on TikTok really got my ass.

I worry often about what this feeling of fleeing from the quicksand has done to me. To live in constant fear of losing my safety net — and realizing that a safety net in the media industry is rarely, if ever, tied to ability and merit — can not have been good for my well-being. I am feeling the emotional effects of that fear and the turbulence that comes from crashing right into the net-less abyss. But also, I wonder what the anxiety has done to my body, my thinking patterns, my beliefs about myself and my abilities and the experience of trying to create individual protections against systemic issues.

Clearly, it eventually fried me to my core.

Ten years I’ve spent surfing my industry atop the illusion of control. Yet I find myself now grappling with the feeling of being discarded and forgotten and the resignation that I have to escape that nostalgic grief and let go of my creative expectations. My former editors are right: I have to let it go.

But it is deeply wounding to feel your industry get squeezed into a misshapen lump of clay. Something could be rebuilt from this material, but it’s going to require innovative thinking and people willing to provide the capital for the future of journalism. I see this in the television and film industry, too. The music business. Anywhere creativity lies is being borne down on by a hydraulic press, like in that disgusting commercial by Apple that reduces access to cultural fulfillment down to a goddamn iPad.

If you are a person who misses websites and a broad range of work worth reading, please understand the desperation that is felt by the people who used to be allowed to create them. Our society is poorer (and more stratified) by the cleaving of access to a variety of perspectives and ways to tell a story. Your favorite writers don’t want to be boring. We don’t want to be hacks. We don’t want to be constricted in our coverage by an algorithm that tells our bosses how to simplify our work.

I was at a birthday party recently for a decade-long acquaintance, and the question of how we knew each other was asked. We both shrugged as he answered dryly: “There used to be something called ‘digital media.’”

It wasn’t a mirage, though. Some of us lived it. And many people consumed what we were allowed to create. So thank you to the random woman on TikTok whose glamorization of that era lit up our group chats and Instagram stories when it circulated last month. At least I can say that despite the surreal decimation of the industry I thought I entered, the camaraderie remains real.