What does the digital news and print media industry even mean anymore? Today, half of Americans get their news from “social media, and three-in-ten say the same of podcasts.” But social media has existed beyond its usefulness. We are commodifying human cognition itself at this point. What little intellectualism does slip through algorithmic filtering, it’s onto an empty stage. Social media platforms design their interactions to be transactional. The desired effect would be like Elmo recently asking everyone on X how they were doing. The question got over 200 million views and over 9,000 responses. Something that doesn’t happen for the average Gen Xer or millennial, writers especially. Writing as a passion, craft, and profession is in a “silent,” total-controversial crisis.
“Vibes and Their Musings” is New York AF’s section that follows a long, literary New York tradition. That is criticism, satire, humor, or reporting on current events and cultural trends. It is a place for opinions, arguments, and reflections. The aim here is to do so with wit, insight, and a style reflecting an authentic voice and tone of real New York. More to the point, the New York writer and meta-discussions entailing their goings-on. Vibes and Their Musings seems like an eminent, thought-leading way to carry on this custom.
Bewilderment intensifies in digital news and print media job markets. Newspapers and magazine layoffs, restructurings, and internet publishers ending operations altogether. Not long ago, blogs proved to be a writer’s salvation. With them, one could find their voice—readers, their tribe. The name reflects its sensibilities. Its emotional impact, its shared values and beliefs. Some defined the zeitgeist of the ages far better than legacy media contemporaries. In return, a simple click—ad revenue or subscriptions. Or direct financial support of its independent journalism by donating.
Sensible alternative? To legacy media contemporaries demanding impressive education and distinguished credentials? Draconian-feeling bureaucracy that often quells creativity and innovation? Yes. But many abandoned such progress. For the allure of privilege and promise of status at these very organizations. Enough where there’s an ironic demand for less writing, hence today’s crisis.
At the core is an outcome of society’s demand for immediacy and democratization. It is a complex and pervasive interplay of the Internet of Things, news, and social media. It fostered an unprecedented level of dependency. We do not have the processing speed or power of the machines we’ve tasked for this. Thus, we cannot perceive, let alone comprehend, the immediate consequences. It is unlikely these machines are self-aware and want to take over our minds. There isn’t some Skynet-Cyberdyne-Systems-like plot or the Architect’s plan for a subduing Matrix. It is that social media platforms design their services for scalability. We’ve gaslit ourselves into presuming we can handle digital news and print media this way. But the fact is with the passion, craft, or profession of writing, we cannot.
In retrospect, the tech recession and filter bubbles will shoulder most of the blame. As of January 2024, another 24,000 workers from 85 tech companies, according to CNBC. These are preemptive, cost-cutting steps. Companies arranged them to prepare for possible inflation and interest rate hikes. There were 260,000 tech sector job cuts in 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi creator, Roger Lee. At Twitter, the company referred to as X now (I still can’t) had 6000 plus layoffs. At Facebook, now calling itself Meta (again, I can’t), there were 20,000 job cuts. But in our get-to-the-point society, many may wonder, what does this have to do with writers? That is how filter bubbles work, though. You were never made aware of them. Or how they affected you or the writers.
So what happened exactly? Generation X and millennials seem to have given up on social media altogether. It’s happened so fast, has it not? The digitalizing of our six million-year evolutionary functions in these past twenty-something years. Then, like that, the party is over, over—finito. But not before doing inextricable collateral damage to digital news and print media. And society’s value of the modern writer. Now there’s this close-to-ineffable learned helplessness where fortified literacy once prevailed.
The “silent,” total-controversial crisis is that writers can’t reach new readers. And if they could, what medium would they voice these criticisms on? Thinking about this made me remember an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Shredder and Krang opened a portal to Dimension X, and the Neutrinos flew out. Kids driving “rocket-powered lowrider” hover cars with the 1950s “space-age” fins on them. So Rocksteady & Bebop shoot at them, and the kids blow a hole through the Techndrome’s wall. With ease, they cruise out of Shredder’s impenetrable war machine like it’s nothing. On the way out, one of the kids even says in the most casual-unphased way possible, “This place is dozeville, man. Let’s cut out.” Gen Z—as a dad, my kids, especially my youngest—reminds me of the Neutrinos.
Gen Z—including my youngest son—exploration of millennial nostalgia is mind-blowing. They do this while excluding us. Their effortless yet barbed boundaries, especially on TikTok, are astonishing. Like something out of Dimension X. Comedian Iliza Shlesinger is a 40-year-old millennial. She defines it as proximity violence in a recent joke. I have liked her comedy for about ten years now. She popularized #eldermillennial. Although I stay clear of Dimension X, Shlesinger is among the 15% of Americans ages 30 to 49 using TikTok. Millennials “walked on Instagram so you could run on TikTok,” she says in the now-viral clip. It has 9 million views and is hilarious and accurate, so I texted my son to see what he thinks.
She sounds “scared and jealous,” he replied. “With technology available to us, it’s our choice to achieve more in 10 minutes than she did in the last decade. She hides her insecurities of that in the jokes.” Shlesinger is millennial comedian in that sphere. What chance does someone who crafts well-written paragraphs stand in it? TL;DR! The entire exchange took four minutes and thirteen seconds. He then blew a hole through the Techndrome’s wall and cruised away in his hover car. That’s what it felt like to me, at least. Because he went back to watching Kai Cenat, CaseOh, Gumball, and playing Roblox on PS5—all at the same time, he’s 13.
Kai Cenat is a 21-year-old content creator and native New Yorker worth an estimated $12 million. Guess how much about 300 Condé Nast writers expect to earn soon? Nothing. The company’s CEO, Roger Lynch, warned last fall that it would lay off five percent of its staff. It feels like digital news and print media are in “a trash compactor,” wrote Shawn McCreesh. The features writer at New York Magazine said it is a “miserable time” in media. “Time magazine had layoffs,” and Sports Illustrated got itself “euthanized.” On the day of this month’s earlier Condé Nast strike in response to layoffs, the L.A. Times cut 20 percent of its newsroom. Only “two days after the strike, Business Insider announced it was laying off 8 percent of its staff .”
Tim Berners-Lee is the creator of the World Wide Web, or “Web” for short. Computer languages—creating and presenting media on the Internet. Like HyperText Markup Language or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, with time, anyone can learn. In 1994, 19-year-old Justin Hall did and used that knowledge to create one of the world’s first blogs. It’s comparable to the discovery of fire or the invention of language itself. The web and blogs are part of our evolutionary achievements, too. But neither society nor our media cared much.
It was business as usual until September 11, 2001. Sparked by the horrors of those circumstances, blogs as a medium became the message. Blogs delivered a new way for civilization to seek and share the written word in a digital space. It was a transformative moment in human language. It amalgamated and then galvanized news, defining social media.
It is the business-as-usual part that bothers me. Capitalism isn’t natural. It’s a contrivance. Over six million years, we evolved from very social, apelike-hunter-gatherers. We adapted our innate instincts to protect each other and our resources. Sharing information and literacy are part of that. But, the need for regulation and the political design of markets are individualistic. Pursuits of self-interests are competitive. Especially capital gain, often revealing its roots in deviancy. Before September 11, American newspapers and magazines didn’t consider bloggers “real” writers. It wasn’t until a sharp decline in circulation in the early 2010s that that changed.
That’s when blogs like Gawker were defining digital media. It went from making $2000 a month to being a media empire worth an estimated $250 million at its peak. It grew to have several sister sites. Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Jezebel, Kotaku and Lifehacker. Its writers’ pieces that legacy media contemporaries would never dare to publish were. Gossip, personal essays, or actual news that made millions of readers feel they matter. For U.S. newspapers and magazines, this windfall of an ecosystem was an economic crisis. Many reconsidered their stance on bloggers and their editors being “real” writers.
But this wasn’t by choice. It was out of necessity and under advisement. While still preferred by a large American audience, physical print had been shrinking. By 2009, the New York Times’ circulation was 950,000 on weekdays and 1.4 million copies on Sundays. Condé Nast wasn’t raking in the $2 billion annual revenue it once could. Management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. posed existential questions to Condé Nast. Inquiries that insinuated actualities, like what is a credentialed, top-journalism-school writer anyway? “What do they do? Why are there so many?” Layoffs. Newspapers and magazines got thinner. How people interact, learn, work, play, travel, worship, and shop was happening online.
“Has the company considered using the World Wide Web as a platform for its magazines? “Weblogs” and other websites could then “link” to Conde Nast articles. This would surely generate significant advertising income.” – McKinsey & Co.
Around this time, before accepting that I was born to be a writer, I had thoughts on dropping out of business school. In my defense for not pursuing communications to be a journalist first, I was 22 years old. For class, I once wrote an impressive presentation on why I’d want to work for McKinsey and Co., a consulting firm. I reasoned that it is no different than working for a successful newspaper or magazine. You’re leveraging people’s fantasies with well-written, supportive facts. In media, readers aren’t the real customers advertisers are. They’re purchasing the readers’ attention. As Martin Kihn wrote, consultants steal your watch and then tell you the time. The presentation ended with applause and praise as I returned to my seat. But I was having a distracting revelation. Don’t newspapers and magazines sell us the advice? Why would they, as thought leaders, need consultants?
There are two sides to any news organization or publishing company. There’s an editorial side and then the business side. My reserves about business school were ethical. And there’s a reason why many authentic writers and journalists don’t make much money. What they write is more than “copy.” Their essence is in every sentence by them that anyone has ever read. What you write about says a lot about who you are. Either you write the truth or live a lie. If you write lies, you’re still living your truth. It’s an immutable dynamic and why 2008 to 2018 was an exhilarating decade for millennials. It was real. Through digital means, we were putting out society’s dumpster fires our predecessors started. There is no doubt in my mind that that was the blog era. It was an era of authentic, thought-provoking content. Diverse communities and freedom empowering writers. We owned digital media, and legacy media’s business side wanted in. And the only thing traditional media could leverage was prestige and status. Backed by the Industrial Revolution, baby boomer wealth: worth $78.1 trillion today. Millennials? $13.3 trillion.
In 2024, we’re experiencing cultural lag at the moment. The bewilderment continues in digital news and print media job markets. Going on strike and unionizing against half the country’s wealth will not save you. At one point, millennials made something out of nothing in a digital space. Millennials are still the largest generation group alive. That’s what makes millennials so formidable when it comes to digital media that we don’t actually need anyone’s help. What happened? We agreed to do away with comment sections. We use centralized apps instead of decentralized [dot]coms. Your profile pic and feed screams, “Insert ‘Everything is Fine‘ meme here.” Elmo’s: “Insert Hellmo.” If you’re feeling lost in this uncertain digital landscape, think of NY-AF! as that map icon that says, “You are Here.” It’s a blog that is okay with being a blog. It embraces being a decentralized platform for expression and engagement. Crisis averted, or at least it could be—if everyone blogged more.
These are the lastest Vibes and Their Musings of New York, its people, the readers and writers.
