In this issue: RIP Jezebel / Clickbait culture and war / Nerd media economy uber alles + more!
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
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“Media news: G/O Media is shutting down Jezebel after failing to find a buyer. Memo just went out from Jim Spanfeller:”
“It’s no secret that there’s money to be made on the internet as a content creator who traffics in sensationalism, hysteria, and other forms of obvious (yet often tantalizing) forms of clickbait. We are inundated with it on a daily basis, but if it didn’t work, it wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Some people are cut out for this approach and do very, very well financially from it. Generally, it requires a very high level of dedication and a constant, rapid-fire reaction to the 24 hour news cycle. It also means sticking your neck out all the time, and being comfortable with being proven to be wrong…repeatedly wrong. The smartest of these types have built-in audiences who are very one-sided in their views and/or happy to consume content that plays on their fears, confirms their priors, and so on. The “luckiest” are those whose audiences don’t care how often the creator is proven wrong in the near (or even immediate) future. Entertainment has a value all its own, and credibility takes a back seat. This is the nature of our present media environment.”
”There’s an undeniable truth to the idea: nerds took over culture because nerds will spend money. Just look at the market for collectibles. How much money does Wizards of the Coast, the publishers of Magic: The Gathering, rake in annually?
But my own thesis is that it goes the other way. Nerdom ascended because it was the nerds themselves who got rich. Really rich. Like Bill Gates rich. Because all the kids playing D&D in 1985 were doing dot com startups in 1995. The dot-com bubble burst, but a lot of them still got rich. These people, mostly men, had grown up mop-haired and spindly, the geek side of Freaks and Geeks. Then tech companies outperformed the S&P 500 for the last thirty years. We had the personal computing revolution, the internet and associated dot-com bubble, the crypto craze, and now the AI explosion. The end result is that Jeff Bezos is now buying yachts that somehow require other yachts, like some sort of marsupial yacht-ception.
Of course, like many of that generation, I suspect Bezos is still somewhat ashamed of being a nerd. Unable to see that the culture has moved toward him, he tries ever harder (making billions, getting buff, sleeping with beautiful women, hanging out with the Instragram famous), but it comes off more like an adorable ruse than anything else. Like, we all know Jeff knows the rules of multi-classing in D&D.”
”A new social media policy at publishing giant Hearst Magazines warns staffers that even “liking” controversial content could result in their termination, and encourages telling on colleagues who post content that could violate the rules.
On Monday, Hearst — whose magazine titles include Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Town & Country — sent staffers an email announcing the new restrictions, which were detailed in an internal document that employees were encouraged to sign.”
”Chicago’s Hottest Music Venue Is a Concrete Pillar In The Chicago River
The “Secret River” concert series features local bands performing atop a concrete bridge pile on the North Branch of the Chicago River.”
”Salon, the left-leaning news and opinion website, is being sold to a team of French entrepreneurs behind the two-year-old Malta-based media company, Find.co, sources involved in the deal tell Fast Company.”
”I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.”
”WhatsApp has also become a backbone of Meta’s business in what Mr. Zuckerberg has declared to be “a year of efficiency.” After global economic uncertainty last year caused an advertising slump, Meta cut nearly a third of its staff. It remains reliant on its core apps to deliver steady sales growth and to appeal to Wall Street.
In the interview, Mr. Zuckerberg positioned WhatsApp as a “next chapter” for his company. The messaging app could become a cornerstone for business messaging, he said, as well as a primary conversation app.”