🐲Context Collapse: New Year, Old Media. Let's Go.

January news cycles ohhh yeahhhh: CC #272

In this issue: Headlines back on Twitter / Steamboat Willie is OURS / Why politicians make terrible podcast hosts / The Travis Kelce entertainment-industrial complex / The internet gets weird and niche-y again + more!

Vacation was good. Photo: Neal Ungerleider

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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Confession time: I’m one of those people who likes work. Even if we lived in an alternate universe where hustle culture and the Protestant work ethic didn’t exist, I’d still be one of those people constantly creating and hammering away at different projects to see what works and what doesn’t. The idea of not doing things makes me stressed out and mad.

Which is why it was so important to take two weeks of vacation at the end of the year. My wife has the good luck to be from Miami originally, we both have flexible jobs, and we spent two and a half weeks there so the kid could see his extended family. We went on airboat rides through the Everglades and to the beach where the five-year-old got absolutely excited about jellyfish. Had an absolutely massive Nicaraguan-American Christmas Eve feast and lit sparklers and poppers for New Year’s with the family.

Airboat time!

I may have also taken some work calls from a children’s indoor bouncy-castle-and-ball-pit playground and from mall food courts, and may have rewritten a client spec sheet while my son climbed on top of me while shouting about how he wants to eat bugs. This is how we work.

And getting back to media…

This is what my agency was up to in 2023.

Context Collapse’s top articles of 2023.

Links below.

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”After Elon Musk last month decided to banish article headlines from posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, he’s bringing them back — but in a different format.”

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“Disney is fiercely protective of its copyrights, recently butting heads with artificial intelligent image generators that were producing its logo. But despite its efforts, it couldn’t keep Steamboat Willie from falling into the hands of the public.

Memes featuring the character immediately began flooding the internet as clocks struck midnight across the U.S.

Unsurprisingly, many online rushed to create the most controversial memes they could in celebration of Disney’s loss.”

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”In recent years, however, politicians have turned to another, newer format: the podcast. After washing out of the presidential race in 2020, Pete Buttigieg launched The Deciding Decade, which focused on issues like gun violence and the minimum wage. (He abandoned it when he got a real job as secretary of transportation.) Podcasting is especially popular among sitting politicians on the right: Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz have reasonably popular podcasts, as does their fellow Republican member of Congress, Dan Crenshaw. Mike Johnson, the newly installed speaker of the House, did as well.”

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”The Chiefs have spent the last few years as the most unstoppable force in football and, along the way, Mr. Kelce’s other team has grown to include a creative strategist, a community outreach coordinator, a Los Angeles-based publicist, a personal chef and a trainer. He has four football agents, led by Mike Simon at VMG. In the spring, he also became a client of Creative Artists Agency to feed his budding acting itch.

The Eanes brothers coordinate it all, managing the surging flow of incoming traffic for a piece of Kelce Inc.”

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”Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before. And while some of the drivers of this change have been hyped up, or even over-hyped, a few of the most important changes haven’t gotten any discussion at all.”

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”Robinson’s lecture, however, was not about the existence of DID. Instead, it was about a new challenge for the clinicians like him that treat it: TikTok.

The social media platform is home to a community of people with DID, who are known as “systems” — a name that signifies their status as several distinct identities, called “alters,” sharing a single body. On TikTok, systems have posted videos about their experiences with the disorder, which have become popular with teenage audiences and attracted more than 5 billion views.

It was TikTok, in Robinson’s eyes, that was driving the sudden rise in pediatric DID referrals.”

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”As two strikes shut down production across the US, Netflix Inc. did something it has never done before: It released fewer shows.

The company released about 130 fewer original programs in 2023 than the year before, according to What’s On Netflix, a site that covers the streaming giant. That is a dip of 16%.”

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”Snapchat+ hit another wild milestone over the holiday break. The $3.99-per-month premium subscription reached 7 million paying users, up by 2 million since September 2023 and more than double its April total. It now dwarfs Instagram and Twitter’s premium offerings, which have struggled to move beyond 1 million subscribers. And that’s perhaps because Snapchat+ is not a social media subscription at all.

For the $3.99, Snapchat offers users a slew of generative AI features, not simply status markers like blue checks. Snapchat+ subscribers get an AI image generator similar to Dall-E, an AI image extender that expands pictures based on what the tech thinks is out of frame, special functionality in Snapchat’s GPT-4-powered chatbot called My AI, and a ‘Dreams’ tool that uses selfies to create images of users in fantasy settings like alternate universes or movie posters.

Snapchat+, in other words, is a generative AI product, and a hit at that. And as the first breakout in the genre since ChatGPT, its success indicates that generative AI’s near-term future may be a bit different than many anticipated.”

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”Over the past few days, the Platformer team analyzed dozens of Substacks for pro-Nazi content. Earlier this week, I met with Substack to press my case that they should remove content that praises Nazis from the network. Late today, we submitted a list of accounts that we believe to be in violation of the company’s existing policies against incitement to violence. I am scheduled to meet with the company again tomorrow.

Whatever becomes of those accounts, though, I fully expect that more will spring up in their wake. So long as Substack allows itself to be perceived — encourages itself to be perceived! — as a home for Nazis, they will open accounts here and start selling subscriptions. Why wouldn’t they?”

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Northern Exposure now streaming on Amazon Prime.

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The Business Clinic: Why Isn't My Substack Gaining Any Traction?

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“ONLY these two variations of Mickey are available for public use. The Steamboat Willie (with the hat on SPECIFICALLY) and the earlier 'classic' design before that. I am simply informing people to be aware when they're planning on using his early designs.”

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