The Future of Media

Earlier this month, yet another fancam went viral on Twitter. “born in the wrong generation, i was meant to be a young millennial working at prime Buzzfeed!!!” @blackwomenwhore wrote above a compilation of some of millennial media’s greatest hits—New Girl, Fleabag, Broad City, spliced in between a smash cut of dip dye, Doc Marten, Lana del Rey, sepia-toned Tumblr reblog bait.

They’re missing 2010s media like a bitch, and so am I. Over the past few years, my shame for not having been born ten years earlier has only cropped up more frequently. If only I’d been born in 1988! My career would be so much better! I know I’m not the only twenty-something writer that feels this way. Clearly, I’m not the only one who spent years working towards this burgeoning new landscape of writing only to find that there’s seemingly no gold left for us.

Nowadays, working in editorial media feels kind of like being suffocated in a vat of Patagonia vests. Over the years, private equity and tech billionaires have taken their Dior Sauvage-soaked fist and shoved it deep into the anal cavity of creative industries until they’re being worn like puppets, business interest speaking through the Muppet mouth of newsroom upper management. Journalists and writers have been hit with layoff after layoff, nothing too certain or guaranteed anymore, everyone deciding to focus on trying to Work On Their Own Thing. After so many years of new content formats bringing frothy promises of prosperous horizons, it seems that there are no more answers—which sucks, because we’re living in a time where we really need some!

Everyone is out of promises for the thing that will pull editorial out of its slump. First it was digital media, the shining answer to declining interest in the old guard; then it was a pivot to short-form video that was never really realized; shortly after, the uptick in audio, and the gold rush for anyone, literally anyone, to make a podcast. Take the mic! Take the camera! No, just kidding, there’s actually no money to be made. You’re still getting outpaced in engagement by a 12-year-old on their school iPad. Double back. All the while, every time a half-baked effort didn’t immediately turn a profit, the answer was the same: blame the people making the content, lay them off. Hire them back, release them to the streets again. Keep the business managers who treat selling culture the same as selling a consumer good like toilet paper. What the hell is all this? Unemployed oomfies are growing by the day. Getting weekday lunches with other freelancers is turning into fucking Oomfapallooza.

I don’t want to bite the draft that feeds me, or worse, sound ungrateful. After all, my memories of BuzzFeed were never at its peak—I only worked there when it began stepping down from the public pedestal, when the pressure not only came from executive desperation to raise shareholder value but also the itchy cringe of people my age who thought I was working for the meme morgue. I’m jealous, well yes! I never got to say I worked at BuzzFeed and hear people tell me that it was cool, which is the part that hurts the most. Millennials got to be young people working at a young company talking about youth culture; I’m not saying it was ever a perfect or even remotely healthy system, but it was a truth that budding writers could launch themselves from one of these hot new platforms just by making content they thought was cool, regardless of timeliness or applicability or newsworthiness. The internet was still a gaping mouth that we wanted to keep feeding. Any content was good content because the concept of it still felt novel. We watched millennials make a name for themselves talking about millennial shit, but Gen Z writers aren’t making names for themselves just talking about Gen Z shit—that one, in this sphere of coastal elite media personality social clout, still belongs to millennials (though some of you are not ready to have that conversation). That’s what people miss: the optimism of being able to drive culture in an internet that felt as though everyone was paying attention.

Still, whenever hopeful new writers ask me if they think they should give up on their future in editorial (a question I cannot actually answer for you! There shouldn’t be shame in giving up though there should be in relying on others to make those calls for you), I always tell them I think they should keep writing. I just think that the world is poorer when people read and write less. Of course, this logic is also contoured by the fact that media is not the only industry that’s been afflicted with this same issue: the high-roller benefits of tech and auto jobs are also being hemorrhaged, layoffs hitting every company that was swearing up and down five years ago that this new direction would lead everyone straight to the Emerald City. In these fuck ass conditions, you may as well do whatever you want. Maybe we’ll find our own havens when we decide to test the limits of free will. 

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