The Future is Grim

Read to the end for a suggestion of a much better Substack than this one.

Very quickly before we begin — I am never going to charge for my Substack, but I am really enjoying writing on here, and I feel like if I can get a couple hundred subscribers, I might be able to start doing it more regularly (also I am not employed full-time at the moment so every little bit helps). If you feel like contributing, I would really appreciate it. If not, I still appreciate you reading. Thanks.

This morning I was watching gearhead YouTube, the part of YouTube that shows me beautiful electronic instruments I can’t afford to buy, when I came across a video by a guy named Benn Jordan. I’ve watched his videos before, but this one was very illuminating. It was all about how he makes money, and more importantly, the money he leaves on the table because he feels that taking it would compromise him ethically.

He goes over how the thousands he doesn’t make by not taking paid ads for things like VPN companies and Blue Apron and the phone game Raid Shadow Legends. He talks about how he doesn’t put ad overlays on his videos because he doesn’t like the way they screw up his videos. He describes his philosphy when it comes to reviewing/returning/paying for/asking to keep gear that has been sent to him. And then he lays out how much money he makes a month from YouTube and from Patreon.

This video caused two very visceral reactions in me. The first was that I now have a strong parasocial bond with Benn and feel more likely to trust his reviews and want to watch more of his videos. The second was just a deep paranoia of pretty much all other independently created content on the internet — content that is created by people in a perpetual, nearly unregulated state of being enticed to compromise themselves in order to grab a slice of a forever shrinking pie — and how I now count myself among them.

In keeping with the spirit of Benn’s video, I think I’ll make a disclosure right now — I don’t currently have a full time job. I have been producing a podcast called Western Kabuki and it’s a fun gig, but we make all of our money from Patreon and is split four ways, which amounts to a couple hundred dollars a month at the moment. I have done a tiny amount of consulting work, which pays well on an hourly basis, but when I say “tiny amount,” I mean less than $1,000 worth in the past six months. And I have this Substack. My current subscriber count is a whopping 56. This week, I will make $122.58 for writing here.

I am in the process of looking for a new podcast gig, and I feel like I have some promising leads, but the last time I started a podcast was 9 years ago this fall, and the landscape has changed immensely since then. I am at least partially at fault for that for reasons I will explain, but as a result I am now a very small fish in a huge pond and more than ever I have to be a “brand” online, which is something I truly loathe with all my heart, and am still figuring out how to navigate ethically.

Part I - How I got here

When we started Reply All, Alex Blumberg, the founder of the company I worked for, cashed in 20 years of goodwill as a producer on This American Life as a way to get listeners to follow him to this new venture, and our podcast. We also leveraged that relationship early to get a couple of our stories onto This American Life, each time capturing about 50,000 listeners. From the jump we had a leg up, and quickly became profitable.

I have never really felt like I was on-time to anything in my life. I was too young for punk and hardcore, I was too old for electroclash. The dotcom bubble would have burst right when I was graduating college, were I not late to graduate from that as well. I didn’t even get into radio until I was 30. The one time I struck at the perfect moment was Reply All. Somehow we managed to start the show at the precise moment podcasts escaped the orbit of public radio. Our first episode aired during the first season run of Serial. It’s hard to overstate the hype podcasts had at that particular moment in time, and when Serial ended, a bevy of articles appeared about what to listen to next, and we were fortunate to land on a lot of them.

Beyond that, the podcast space wasn’t nearly as atomized as it is now. According to this website (whose info I have no particular reason to trust, so take it with a grain of salt), Reply All was one of 200k podcasts when it was released, as opposed to today where there are over 3 million.

It was really nice to not have to worry about building a brand, because it kind of built itself. I was working on a show that was profitable, it was all I wanted to do, all I had to do to was keep my head down and keep making my show. I didn’t have to hustle. I was kinda spoiled in that way.

Those next couple years were a kind of podcast gold rush. There was so much hype around how podcasts were going to be the next big thing — how they were an inexhaustible resource of content that could not only be produced for a fraction of what it cost to make movies or TV, but would be a pipeline of adaptable new IP to make into movies and TV. Podcast companies were founded, grew precipitously, and got acquired, which is exactly what happened to Gimlet, the company I worked for.

In 2019, we were acquired by Spotify for something on the order of $230 million. It was part of a much larger bet that Spotify could drastically increase subscriptions and listener retention if it could hoover up podcast companies and convince people to listen within its app as opposed to a podcast app.

The problem is that Reply All, the show I made, wasn’t quick or easy to create. It was a big team that spent a lot of money of reporting, sometimes on stories that never came out. And while we had a number of stories optioned as films and TV shows, as of this writing, none have ever materialized.

After a while, the folks that held the purse strings across the industry started to realize that it was much easier to see a return on investment if they made cheaper content with pre-established celebrities than it was to make a show like mine. I want to be quick to add that I don’t think those shows are inherently of a lower quality than Reply All, but the fact is that having an interview show, or a true crime show that doesn’t do its own original reporting is a sight cheaper than making the thing we made.

If you watch Netflix or HBO Max or have paid attention to the discussions around the writer's strike, then this will be familiar to you - most companies have, in the last couple years pivoted from trying to make big projects and limited run series to simply making cheaper projects that can be “always on.” In a market flooded with cheaper alternatives, I can’t imagine finding someone who would bankroll a show with Reply All’s budget today.

Part II - Where I’m Calling From

I’m trying to be deliberate about what comes next, but I see basically one of two options:

1. Partner with a production company and make a show, which has its own set of difficulties and will inevitably mean making an “always on” show that likely won’t have the same kind of reporting muscle of my previous show but will be a balance between larger reported pieces and smaller interviews and news that will allow the show to exist on a weekly basis.

2. Creating something independently that will not be always on and funding it through something like Patreon.

As with everything, the avenue I take affects the thing I will end up making. If take the second route, I will have relative editorial freedom, but I will either need to release very occasionally, or significantly scale back my ambition. I believe I could probably pay myself a decent wage via Patreon, but there are so many perks built into working with an institution — studio space, access to fact checkers, lawyers that can cover your ass after a story comes out, libel insurance. All of those things have an impact on how I report and what I report on.

And if I go the first route for access to all of that, I also have to set my expectations regarding massive reporting projects against having to make an always on show, I will likely have to let ads for things I find morally repugnant run alongside my work, and I will probably have to make a show that fits a mandate somewhat narrower than I might if I were making it on my own. So, you know, there are trade-offs.

And as I navigate my post corporate-gig world, I find myself fielding emails and offers from the kinds of people that Benn talked about in his video — people who promise me untold rewards if I just compromise my integrity a bit. And as more and more journalists and writers and cultural critics start to try and support themselves via publications like this one, I am starting to realize that I simply have no barometer any longer for who is working with fact checkers, who is wholly independent, and who is just taking payola to write about things.

And, you know, there’s no perfect bulwark against that kind of thing, but at least the quickly disappearing large institutions that used to employ people like me had rules against it. Now, the closest thing you have to that is “good branding.” If you trust me, it’s because I have branded myself effectively as honest, not because there is anyone checking to make sure I’m actually holding up my end of the bargain.

I’m reminded of a tweet by my least favorite pundit, Matt Yglesias, in which he suggested carving out a reactionary niche in journalism not out of any kind of actual conviction, but because that’s where the easy money is.

There have never been fantastic economic incentives in journalism, and that has never been truer, unless you want to brand as a culture warrior, to deliberately stoke enmity. That’s a cash cow these days.

And the thing is, whether branding as an “honest forthcoming guy” or “a culture warrior,” I just hate the idea of having to be a “brand” at all. It gives me the same kind of agita as being asked to do a photoshoot; administrative work where the thing I’m trying to maintain is my own self image. I’d actually prefer my work just speak for itself.

I really miss being able to just make stories the way that I want to without a ton of interference. It doesn’t seem like it should be this hard. It doesn’t seem like we should still be having the “what are the alternatives to advertising” conversation 25 years on.

There are a couple of lights in the darkness, I suppose. The first is places like Defector and Hellgate NYC, both of which are worker owned and successful. I feel like that is an exciting model and if I had my druthers I’d give something like that a shot too. The other thing I find exciting is that no matter how cluttered the podcast space gets, the passion projects, the really creative stuff that its makers believe in, that stuff is still finding audiences. You could never focus group a show like Normal Gossip, or Articles of Interest, or You’re Wrong About. Those shows needed to spring sui generis from the minds of the people who created them, and I’m so glad they did. I hope I can capture that lightning again. I hope I get a chance to find out.

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My friend Caroline is a fantastic writer and she has recently started a Substack about being online, reality TV, all kinds of good stuff. You should subscribe because she’s a fantastic writer.

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Jamboxthis week is music I was listening to during the first six months of the pandemic. The sense memory of relistening to this is intense.