The Culture Journalist

If you grew up reading publications like The Village Voice and LA Weekly, you probably remember flipping through pages and pages of edgy, hyper-local journalism, concert and movie listings, and classified ads of both the romantic and non-romantic variety. But what is the role of the alt weekly in the 21st century, when a lot of these functions have been swallowed up by the internet? And, perhaps most critically, how do these publications make any money? In today’s episode, we zoom in on the story of Hell Gate, a subscriber-funded, worker-owned digital news outlet about New York City that is boldly tackling these questions in real time. Launched by a group of five journalists who felt that the city deserved an alt-weekly style publication to fill the void left behind by the Voice, Hell Gate recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, and builds on a growing movement of worker-owned news outlets like Defector Media, Discourse Blog, Racket, and the Colorado Sun. Hell Gate is delightfully, unapologetically, hyper-local. Stories range from meaty topics like policing, labor organizing, and the most recent bizarre utterance from mayor Eric Adams, to we’re-all-thinking-it niche fare like the confounding nuances of DMV license plate design, weed bodega aesthetics and why people keep seeing gross viral food recipes during their subway commute. There’s even a column devoted to the state of New York’s public restrooms. Helping Hell Gate chart its path are writer-editors Adlan Jackson and Katie Way, two talented writers who cut their teeth writing for outlets like The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and VICE and are now leading the publication’s arts and culture coverage. They join us to talk about Hell Gate’s origin story, how the worker-owned model works, and what it’s like to run a daily publication about a city with a population of 8 million with just seven people. We also discuss what happens to arts and music communities when local news organizations disappear; how the role of alternative publications has evolved in the internet era; and how local media helps us touch grass amid the digital dysfunction of city life.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

For most of the so-called “content creators” we know, marketing is a necessary evil. You make the work you want to make, then wait until the last possible moment to figure out how you’re going to get people to click on it. But what would it look like if you became super obsessed with the marketing side of the equation and let it become the driving force of the entire creative process? What if you zeroed in on a single distribution platform, spent years studying how it worked, then built an entire creative practice based entirely around the tips and tricks you knew would attract a snowballing number of eyeballs to your work?If you’re wondering what the resulting content would look like, well… it might look something like the videos of a 25-year-old YouTuber named Jimmy Donaldson, who recently surpassed the Swedish edgelord PewDiePie to become the biggest YouTuber of all time. Even if you haven’t seen his videos, or stumbled across his chocolate brand, you’ve probably heard his YouTube moniker: MrBeast. As of this writing, he has 171 million subscribers and counting.Donaldson owns an entire neighborhood in his hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, where he has dozens of employees working around the clock to produce big-budget spectacles with names like “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life” and “I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.” His videos often revolve around random acts of charity — one of his early breakouts involved him walking up to a homeless person and giving him $10,000 — and he has spoken at length about how attention-grabbing headlines and thumbnails are the engine of his success. If you know somebody who works in actual marketing, they’d probably tell you that MrBeast is the future of media. Between the budgets, the audience numbers, and the sheer physical scale of many of these spectacles — not to mention his spin-off channels and a whole sub-economy of reaction videos and YouTube tutorials — the world of MrBeast is so big and bewildering that it takes a special kind of dedication to explain it all. Lucky for you, The New York Times Magazine recently published a delightfully brain-bending story called “How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube” by one of our favorite writers on technology and culture. His name is Max Read, and he’s a screenwriter and journalist who has a terrific newsletter on Substack called Read Max. Max began work on the article after a MrBeast video called “1000 Blind People See for the First Time” went “bad viral” on Twitter, sparking questions about the “authenticity” of Donaldson’s super-sized brand of altruism (he paid for their glaucoma surgery) and differing generational attitudes towards the mercenary tactics he uses to pull these stunts off. He joins us to discuss what he calls the “unstoppable flywheel of charity, spectacle, and growth” that powered Donaldson’s rise, and the dystopian realities of the creator economy that his tactics lay bare. We also dig into what makes MrBeast’s relationship with his audience unique (hint: according an academic Max spoke to, it has something to do with a media studies concept called the “audience commodity”), and how even though a lot of millennials can’t stand him, there’s a little bit of MrBeast in all of us. Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comWith Hollywood actors and writers joining forces on the picket line for the first time in 63 years, “hot labor summer” is officially upon us — and on this week’s subscriber-only episode, Emilie and Andrea try to pinpoint the sweltering, revolutionary, distinctly Barbie-pink feeling in the air. We discuss how big labor upheavals in Hollywood are historically connected to big technological sea changes, how the shutdown is already impacting life on the ground in Los Angeles, and some of the unexpected folk heroes (like SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher and “there’s-a-lot-of-ways-to-lose-your-house” Ron Perlman), who are emerging as the faces of this turbulent time.We also get into what all this heralds for a culture that is stuck in an endless IP loop, as encapsulated in a recent New Yorker piece revealing that in addition to Barbie, there are nearly 60 movies in the pipeline right now based on toys made by Mattel.This is a free preview of a subscriber only episode. To listen to the full thing and support our independent journalism, sign up for a paid subscription at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram.

Hello everyone. We’re interrupting our regular programming this week to bring you a taste of something different: On Monday, the journalist Max Tani reported that VICE Media paid its executives out over a million dollars in bonuses in the weeks before filing for bankruptcy — so our friends at Nersey, a new podcast that bears no relation to the VICE music vertical by the same name, convened an emergency pod to talk about it. Emilie joined hosts Trey Smith, Slava P. and boyfriend-of-The-Culture-Journalist Drew Millard to share war stories from their time at VICE and dig into a 139-page “statement of financial affairs” on file with the Southern District of New York, which reveals just how much the company was paying its top brass (among other itemized expenditures) in the months leading up to the Chapter 11 declaration. The Culture Journalist bears no responsibility for anything that’s said herein by these guys — though Nersey touches on similar topics to ours, it’s much looser in format. But we’re sharing their episode on our channels because, well, we think you might enjoy the pod. As for TCJ, we’ll be back to business as usual starting next week. Subscribe to Nersey hereDonate to a hardship fund started by recent TCJ guest Sara David for VICE workers who were laid off this spring but have yet to receive severance from the company. Read Katie Way’s excellent reporting on the story for Hell Gate NYC This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comIn this week’s subscriber-only episode, Andrea and Emilie introduce listeners to Emilie’s concept of “jobflation,” based on her observation that more and more of the “laptop jobs” on the market now actually seem like three or four jobs rolled into one. In other words, just like with the decreased spending power of the U.S. dollar, it can feel like every task we perform at work is suddenly counting for “less.” We discuss some of the nightmarish role descriptions that have been circulating on job sites of late (want to be an “AI editor” publishing 200-250 articles a week?), the macro factors contributing to this corporate divestment in knowledge work, and how jobflation and related phenomena like “ghost jobs” and “quiet hiring” are creating a perfect storm of disfunction for workers and employment-seekers alike.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram.

Hi gang. You ever notice how every generation, in every big city, seems to have a moment when the scene that defined them — the music venues, artists’ lofts, dive bars, and misfit inhabitants that collectively forged a cultural zeitgeist — is declared dead? Think: The closure of CBGB in Manhattan, the arrival of Erewhon in Silver Lake, the memeification of Berghain in Berlin. The phenomenon raises some interesting questions: Which came first, the predatory hand of late capitalism, or the generation aging into acquiescence? Are these collapses inevitable, and if so, are they truly as dire as people say they are?So today, we’re talking about scenes — how they start, the conditions that make them possible, and why, to the chagrin of so many successive generations of musicians and music fans, they inevitably all come to an end. Our guest, Jesse Rifkin, actually studies this stuff for a living: He’s the founder of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, a company that gives walking tours chronicling how different New York City neighborhoods — and factors like cheap rent, geographical proximity, and changing residential and nightlife laws — gave rise to era-defining music scenes like punk, post-punk, hip-hop, disco, and ‘90s and ‘00s indie rock. Of course, he also explores how those scenes helped fuel the process of gentrification that would eventually lead to their own undoing — and what arises, or doesn’t arise, in their aftermath.His new book, This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City (out July 11 via HarperCollins) examines how that story played out in Downtown Manhattan and North Brooklyn over a 60-year period where we see this process play out over and over again. It starts with the 1960s West Village folk scene (à la Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte Marie playing at packed coffee houses in an area of the city that is now pretty much synonymous with NYU and expensive gyms). And it ends with the 2010s Williamsburg Brooklyn scene, where our millennial-aged listeners remember frequenting venues like Death by Audio and 285 Kent. (Emilie sure does — it was her life for a while.) In his work as an NYC music historian, Jesse noticed a pattern: New Yorkers are always complaining that the city is “over,” and if you ask them when it “ended,” they usually say that happened around the time they hit 35 or 37, precisely at the moment when most of us get a bit tired of going out to parties every night. The book, he says, is an attempt to reframe our understanding of scenes as bygone golden ages made possible by once-in-a-generation artistic geniuses. He wants us to understand that scenes are a product of the specific historical and geographical circumstances in which they arise — and, even more importantly, that of ordinary people figuring out how to tap into the unique opportunities those circumstances afford. He joins us to discuss the geographical history of downtown NYC music, how the internet has transformed how scenes form and broadcast themselves to the world, and what the new downtown scene, centered around a couple blocks in Chinatown, tells us about the moment in New York history — and perhaps culture at large — that we’re living through now.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Hey friends. Have you ever fantasized about smashing your phone or throwing your computer into the sea? If so, you’re in good company, because today’s episode is all about the story of the Luddites, an underground network of early 19th century machinists and textile workers in England who took up arms against industrialists looking to automate them out of a job. They did this, quite literally, by smashing the machines that threatened to put downward pressure on their wages and flood the market with poorly made imitations of the goods they were producing. Sound familiar?  Their real story — and the story of how the word “Luddite” came to connote being “bad at technology,” which is the opposite of what these people were — is the subject of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion of Big Tech, an engrossing and exhaustively researched new book by Los Angeles Times technology columnist and Terraform co-founder Brian Merchant. It isn’t due out until September, but given all the chatter that’s been happening around tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT, we didn’t want to wait to have him on.Brian joins us to discuss how the Luddites were actually an early iteration of the labor movement — not anti-tech, but anti-exploitation — the eerie similarities between the systems of automation these workers were up against and AI, and what a 2023 version of the Luddite movement might look like. Hint: It’s already happening, and it has nothing to do with smashing out phones, though you do you.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comThis week, in response to a question from a listener, Emilie and Andrea wax philosophical about one of the most harrowing aspects of trying to make a living as a writer in today’s gnarly media economy: pitching! We discuss how this particular system for commissioning stories ended up becoming so ubiquitous in journalism (hint: it’s financially beneficial for media companies), why it so excruciatingly difficult to do well, and the larger structural forces that explain why editors can seem like the shallowest and most fickle people on earth. Along the way, we draw from our experiences on both sides of the pitching game to offer practical pointers for navigating the 2023 commissioning landscape and the looming threat of robots coming to replace us all.This is a free preview of this episode. You can hear the full thing and support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Note: If you are a media worker who has lost work or been laid off, reply to this email and we will send you this episode for free.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram.

Since May 2, the Writers Guild of America has been on strike, shutting down film sets across the country and demanding a fair shake in the face of a changing Hollywood landscape that, if we’re being honest, looks a lot like the one that we’re dealing with over here in the media industry. Hint: It has a lot to do with the ways that some of the world’s biggest tech companies — including Netflix, Apple TV, and Amazon — have transformed what it looks like to make a living as a film or tv writer. With issues like shrinking residuals — or payments writers receive when their work is re-aired  — increased job insecurity, and the looming threat of automation and AI, it’s a story that brings together many of the issues we touch on this show. So we brought on two key players from the front lines to give us a candid peek into what life as a screenwriter in 2023 actually looks like: Mason Flink, a TV writer and WGA Guild Captain based in LA who has worked on shows like Minx, Special, and Love, and Sara David, a former colleague of ours from VICE who has worked at Netflix and Paramount+, and who is now the VP of online Media for the WGA East. Mason and Sara tell us about how Hollywood labor conditions directly impact the quality of the film and television we consume (and who gets to produce it), the long history of deregulation and financialization that set the stage for this moment, and why this fight has big consequences for creative workers of all stripes — not just in the writers’ room.Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Spring is here and the outside world is beckoning. So we’re taking a break from talking about evil billionaires, digital surveillance, and shadowy financial instruments to bring you a special conversation with boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, who just published a book called How Golf Can Save Your Life.If that sounds pretty far afield from our usual programming, it’s not: Inspired by his experiences returning to the sport after a stint in 2010s media left him with a nasty case of depression and burnout, it’s a book-length celebration of the idea that the best way to resist the worst aspects of modern society is to get to get off the internet, spend time more outdoors, and learn how to be a better human, not just when it comes to other people but also to yourself.Emilie and Drew just got back from a golf-themed book release party they organized last week in Brooklyn, so we thought we’d bring Drew on to talk about why it seems like golf is suddenly everywhere in contemporary culture, from NYC menswear to DJ Khaled’s IG; the sport’s working-class origins; and how the book doubles as a critique of the state of digital and algorithmic media.Buy How Golf Can Save Your Life from Bookshop.org.Check out Drew’s work on SubstackSubscribe to Nersey, a podcast Drew just started with some former coworkers (ahem) from a certain defunct music website (ahem). They say it’s “sort of about music.”Support our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive free bonus episodes every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe