They will never think you're good enough
They will never think you're good enough
Traditional media can't stand the Internet's success
Earlier this week, pop culture commentator and hypeman Evan Ross Katz published a thought-provoking essay on a social media spat he’d been involved in. Katz has a large following on social media, and was criticized for the manner in which he’s gained that following. Maxwell Losgar, an editorial director at a variety of Hearst magazines like Cosmopolitan and Women’s Health, had a rant that picked up some attention on Instagram about how he believes Katz is harming the entertainment media. Losgar’s complaint at its core can be described as:
We in the traditional media put all this time into conducting interviews and doing photoshoots and producing really great content.
Evan Ross Katz and people like him just take a picture and a quote of our work, share it on social media, and get far more attention than we do.
That sucks and he sucks, and he wouldn’t even exist without us.
There are a couple of things I think about when I hear this complaint. First, fair use exists. Posting a portion of someone else’s work with commentary is explicitly legal. Beyond legality, even if you tried to outlaw or stop people from sharing things on social media it’d be utterly impossible. And even if you could somehow stop people from posting, you wouldn’t want to! When a scene from a TV show or a quote from an interview goes viral on social media, that’s good for the TV show or magazine in question! They absolutely benefit from the social media pop culture ecosystem.
But I don’t really think this is a story about fair use. Beyond the explicit complaints about who’s allowed to post which images to Instagram, what this really looks like to me is media classism. Losgar works at a prestigious magazine for a historic brand that’s over a hundred years old. Evan Ross Katz is a glorified shitposter,1 a memester, a highly-online and independent commentator who primarily works through Instagram, Substack, and podcasting. And what matters is that Katz has been incredibly successful through these independent online channels, and it makes people in the traditional media hopping mad.
That’s the interesting part of this story. This casual disrespect of online media has happened for as long as there’s been an internet. It continues to happen and likely always will happen. If you are a podcaster, if you are a blogger, if you are anyone who has taken a non-traditional and internet-based approach to building your media career - they will never think you’re good enough.
The history of the internet is filled with people from traditional media finding out about a new way of doing things online, dismissing it as frivolous and unworthy of their time, and then getting histrionic when that new thing succeeds despite their disapproval.
Blogs experienced this before social media even existed. Weblogs and Journalism: Do they connect? asked Rebecca Blood and Paul Andrews in 2003.2 Not to spoil the conclusion, but according to our intrepid journalists:
“The vast majority of Weblogs do not provide original reporting— for me, the heart of all journalism”
“Their commentary… will never replace the journalist’s mandate to assemble a fair, accurate and complete story that can be understood by a general audience.”
“The blogs that do contain bona fide news are largely derivative, posting links to other blogs and, in many cases, print journalism. The top “news” blog, Jim Romenesko’s Poynter Online site, is composed almost exclusively of linked references”
The essays linked, to be fair, do present some minimum level of nuance. But you can practically taste the desire to gatekeep ‘real journalism’ from the silly little bloggers who are just collecting links and offering personal opinions.
What’s remarkable is that this represented the *pro-blogging* end of the opinion spectrum in 2003 - both Blood and Andrews wrote blogs at that time. But even they couldn’t help but disdain blogging as a ‘lesser than’ form of writing. The rest of the industry didn’t even bother to hide their contempt, largely regarding bloggers as unwashed basement dwellers with second-rate writing skills.
You can continue through the entire history of the internet this way. Online celebrity media outlets like TMZ were treated like the lowest form of garbage-tier nonsense. To be clear, TMZ has done a lot of awful stuff and deserves a great deal of criticism. But early criticism missed that TMZ regularly beat traditional media to giant stories like the Mel Gibson rants, the Donald Sterling scandal, and the deaths of Michael Jackson, Prince, Kobe Bryant, and more.3 In addition to all the things they did wrong, they were clearly doing something right.
Podcasts. Social media sites. Substack. Every hot new form of online media is inevitably denigrated by traditional media. Buzzfeed experienced this sneering disapproval early in its career from larger media outlets, only to use the profits from their Which Harry Potter Character Is Your Iguana articles to fund Pulitzer-Prize winning journalism that uncovered the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang. When videos from SNL started going viral on YouTube, NBC’s reaction was to launch multiple lawsuits and force them to be taken down! They didn’t understand the appeal and hated that their videos might be posted online.
YouTube, Twitter, Vine, TikTok, Instagram, and every other social media site went through phases where the very serious mainstream media wondered ‘What is the point of this incredibly stupid thing’? There’s a very predictable pattern of responses from traditional media to anything new online:
What’s the point of this online thing? Why would anyone pay attention?
Lots of people are paying attention - but it can never replace the more important things we in the traditional media do.
It turns out that this thing is replacing traditional media, and now I’m going to petulantly lash out about that.
Traditional media companies adopt the new technology years after they should have.
You can see this pattern everywhere. The newsletter/blog format has absolutely taken over traditional media outlets. The New York Times is now best understood as an online gaming and podcasting company that funds some written journalism on the side. After years of griping about how frivolous social media is, every major media brand now has a podcasting arm, a video-production team for YouTube and for TikTok, a social team to post on Twitter and Instagram, and more. They fail to understand the internet. They pooh-pooh it. They get mad at it. And then they surrender and embrace it when they have no other choice.
Internet based media is lower status than traditional media. Social media, in particular, has always been low status. Outsider projects that take a different angle are always lower status - until they succeed. I got a chance to chat with Evan Ross Katz about the recent spat between him and Losgar, and he agreed that this traditional media vs social media dynamic explains why it happened.
To Katz, the anger from traditional media is understandable. They have to jump through more hoops, get approval from layers of management, and go through more bureaucracy than he does, and that means he has a more natural voice and a faster speed to market when it comes to posting. “But social media isn’t going anywhere, they’re not going anywhere, and I’m not going anywhere” Katz says, “So they need to figure out how to utilize these innovations to bridge the gap”.
Katz’s last point is key - you can rage against the tide, or you can adapt and thrive. When I was a teen, music piracy was incredibly common and nearly impossible to stop. The recording industry, displeased by this fact, threw an absolute shitfit and went on a spree of suing dead people and 12-year old girls over file sharing. Despite all their lawsuits, they didn’t make a dent in file sharing and music piracy. The technology still existed and people still used it.
You know what did kill piracy? iTunes and Spotify. Rather than fight technology, some companies leaned in and used the new format to provide an easy and convenient way for users to pay for music legally, and they succeeded. Why didn’t the record labels think of developing the iTunes store on their own? Because they were too busy scoffing at the digital future from their traditional perch, and suing anyone who crossed them.
When I think of celebrity news today I think of accounts like Katz’s, or perhaps insanely successful aggregators like Pop Crave. Traditional magazines that cover celebrities can rage against this (and they do), but the relevant question is why didn’t they become Pop Crave? There’s no special secret, Pop Crave doesn’t do anything particularly difficult. Pop Crave didn’t even launch until a decade after Twitter was founded, so it wasn’t an early mover advantage. Anyone could have filled Pop Crave’s niche. Yet none of the traditional brands did.
And they’re still not learning fast enough. What is Pop Crave doing that got them 1.7M Twitter followers? Why do Katz’s posts get more online attention than the actual articles they’re taken from? Rather than trying to learn the new formats, traditional media types would rather rage against online creators beating them at their own game.
Let’s be blunt for a second. Working in the media is a status game. In a lot of ways status can be zero sum, and when one person is rising and getting more attention it often means someone else is falling and getting less attention. In that kind of environment, there’s always going to be jealousy and bitter recriminations against any successful newcomer.
Traditional media is also a failing industry in a lot of ways. Magazines and newspapers have been absolutely savaged over the past two decades, with declining employment opportunities, readerships, and influence. Many mainstream publications still have a great deal of history and prestige, but the financial rewards for working at those places are greatly diminished. There’s now a mismatch between expectation and reality, between the perceived status of working for a prestigious outlet and economic reality. And when you combine rich history with declining relevance it doesn’t surprise me that many of these traditional media types cling to their gatekeeper status ever more tightly. It’s all they have left.
If you’re someone who is trying to build a voice, a platform, or a career on the internet, this is something you need to realize. No matter how much you prove you belong, they’re still going to snipe at you. No matter how many followers you have, no matter how much you influence the culture, no matter how insightful your work or how good your writing is, they’ll still pretend you aren’t as ‘serious’ are they are. This is especially true if you’re doing anything cutting edge online. After 20+ years they may have finally learned to respect blogging, but anything truly new will be shunned.
It doesn’t even matter if you succeed and start to branch into these respectable outlets yourself - you’ll still have the scarlet letter of having started from social media. This won’t be true universally. There are many fantastic people working in traditional media. But it’s true enough that if you work on the internet you are absolutely going to run into it.
These types don’t want you to succeed. They don’t want the platform you’re on to succeed. They are zero sum thinkers who are more concerned with protecting their slice of the pie than anything else. The only saving grace is that their objections don’t matter, and that you don’t need their permission. They will never think you’re good enough, but technology doesn’t move backwards. Previous generations blasted open the gates to the private club that is traditional media, and you can succeed despite their disapproval.
To be clear, I also include myself in this category. Shitposters are great!
For the children among us, a ‘weblog’ is what we used to call blogs back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
At this point, TMZ is actually one of the *most* reputable sources for breaking celebrity deaths.
“Working in the media is a status game. In a lot of ways status can be zero sum, and when one person is rising and getting more attention it often means someone else is falling and getting less attention. In that kind of environment, there’s always going to be jealousy and bitter recriminations against any successful newcomer”
This is something that is just so *obvious* but also something I’ve also never considered until now. I think some folks would consider those qualities the threshold of profundity.
I am one of them, brilliant insights all around but that specific bit’s something I’ll be chewing on.
As someone who works with corporates, I think the risk aversion rules them out from the fast-paced atavistic pursuit of new ways of engaging people. Establishment media will spend months and years deciding their tone of voice around celebrities, for example. I think there are benefits to the “corporate tone”, eg for state broadcasters it ensures all the coverage is evenly shared and does not harm anyone, but it obviously falls down when trying to engage with anything that *feels* current. I wonder whether we are in a transition where we will increasingly draw on individuals for updates on what is happening, but check the big media houses to see what the government budget announcements mean for them…