313 Comments

"Actually, Slatepitches are good!" is still a Slatepitch.

Expand full comment

I feel like you nailed a root cause here: "Articles are consumed decontextualized from their publications, so nobody knows what anything is anyway."

A big reason media outlets have converged into a mass blob of "parents are not okay" is because "parents are not okay" does great in SEO and social media content algorithms. It's impossible to maintain a distinct identity when nearly all of your content is consumed divorced from source of publication, which also explains why the NYTimes has hung on - it's big enough with enough gravity to avoid having its work consumed fully independent of other platforms.

My hope lies in podcasts and substacks. I miss slatepitches too.

Expand full comment

MY is better than the entire Times opinion department put together. Douthat, Brooks and Krugman are all good but never go as deep as MY does. When Douthat reels off a slew of mellifluously worded examples, MY drills down and explains things. The other Times columnists are too hand wringing and officious to even read.

Expand full comment

This is somewhat related:

Games journalism has gone through more or less the same process in miniature. There was a time a few years ago when, if you were a weird PC gamer into indie stuff there was a whole publication of talented writers basically catering specifically to you (Rock Paper Shotgun). If you wanted your video game writing with a side of lib/left politics and culture writing you could get that pretty easily too (Kotaku). You could get really in-the-weeds technical and design talk with behind-the-scenes details (Polygon). There were a few different publications about consoles for different audiences. Etc.

While all these places do still try to hold on to their identity, you can still find weird indie games on RPS for example, there has been a ton of homogenization. Part of that is SEO chasing and feeding the algorithm, part of that is that every games journalist spent too much time on Twitter and decided they also wanted to write self-important left-wing culture analysis for their work so they basically turned their outlets into knock-off Kotaku, and now Kotaku isn't nearly as entertaining for doing the same thing because it feels tired and overdone and they don't even reliably piss off Gamers(TM) anymore.

I think the future of online media is a dual model of SEO-chasing homogenized slurry for most people, who will be happy with not following particular publications as much as just clicking on interesting links, and premium publications that cater to a much smaller, wealthier audience of people who want particular, distinctive voices. Unfortunately that latter situation is much more expensive than the way things used to be but at least we got SB out of it.

Expand full comment

An interesting exception to some of these trends is The Economist. Unlike the welter of online ideological publications MY cites, I (and I imagine many others) still read the articles in their “root source”—the magazine just arrives via my iPhone, rather than print like in the past. And unlike the NYT opinion pages, The Economist manages to deliver opinionated content that doesn’t devolve into completely predictable “trending” groupthink. Yes, it’s generally neoliberal, but they take an issue-by-issue approach, and have changed certain views over time. All in all, this results in me trusting the Economist’s reporting more than just about any other publication.

(My local news outlet, Star Tribune, and the WSJ news desk are also up there—NYT is close, but when there’s a sensitive ideological subject I’ve grown to read NYT with an increasingly skeptical eye.)

I wonder what explains this? Dedicated paying base of “elite” subscribers? International reporters? Lack of individual author bylines (allowing the publication’s goals to take precedence over individual aspirations)?

Thoughts? I’m curious!

Expand full comment

How many times will we read the word, "trauma" today?

Expand full comment

"Charles Blow [is]...really good". Do we read the same Charles Blow? Because "here is why white people are ruining everything for everyone everywhere" has gotten pretty tiresome after the 100th column in a row.

Expand full comment

I found that non-parents seemed to do better than parents. for the first few months of the pandemic. They filled their time with Netflix and new hobbies. Parents scrambled to find childcare, supervise remote schooling, and manage work commitments. As a parent of a 5 and 2 year old, I seethed when my childless friends described their new hobby.

But over the long term, I think my family has come closer together. We spent a lot of time just riding our bikes and going to Galveston on the weekend b/c there wasn’t a lot of kid programming and church was remote. We were forced to forge closer relationships with our neighbors and arrange play dates b/c aftercare was cancelled in the 20-21 school year. I found that parents in particular were pretty open and even vulnerable about struggling through the uncertainty. Those kinds of things are what is really valuable in life.

While my experience is pretty limited to white-collar families, I’m not surprised that parents’ mental health has fared better over the pandemic.

Expand full comment

I feel like insufficient attention is a given here to the structural factors. You mention how everyone visits via social media, so there's no way to have a brand. But also didn't everyone pivot to video and lay off lots of people only to discover that Facebook was lying? And isn't everyone aiming at the same algorithms on both the traffic generation and the ad sales sides?

One thing that is maybe odd, or maybe not, is that things have become more homogeneous at the same time that there are many more online outlets.

Expand full comment

Should've called this one The Strange Death of Liberal Slatepitch...

Expand full comment

In the broadest sense, good-faith disagreement seems to be evolutionarily unfit for the current state of our discourse. I'm not surprised that the slatepitch can't survive in an environment where loud people on the left have learned to code their counterarguments as "from my lived experience as a X, this is violence" and those on the right are similarly freaking out about how you are #canceling Dr. Seuss.

But this is bad! I don't know how we try to fix it. When people don't act in good faith or assume good faith on behalf of those around them, all sorts of stuff breaks in terrible ways.

Expand full comment

An acquaintance, who was an executive at Axios, told me the most profitable part of the business right now is paid for newsletters with statehouse news targeted at lobbyists.

Expand full comment

I’ve been reading you for 10+ years and this is the post that compelled me to pony up and pay for you. Nice work.

The true Slatepitch is the pandemic has been GOOD for parents’ mental health. It made parents focus on what’s actually important (keeping our kids healthy and safe) and not what’s not (work drama, blah blah trump whatever). That’s how I feel and I bet over half my parent friends would privately agree.

Expand full comment

My first real tastes of politics with much more depth than democrats good, republicans bad was reading the early 2000s TNR as a young teen. I never agreed with everything there but I really appreciated different points of view and having to think about the things I believe. I cancelled my subscription there years ago because it was completely indistinguishable from other left publications. I still want to get differing perspectives to keep challenging my views so I have keep searching out a wider range of increasingly niche viewpoints(Jacobin, Marginal Revolution, Volokh Conspiracy, etc.) because the same things keep happening. At one point, I read Redstate a lot. I almost never agreed with what they said but I thought they had about four writers that did a good job of at least helping my understand why republicans were doing what they were doing. It also became total unreadable garbage. I wish I didn't have to keep hunting for new websites.

Expand full comment

On the audience side, I think there’s now a consumerist identity pressure to read only the right kinds of news and authors, and that’s contributing to blandness. I think part of this is social media - sharing is a kind of endorsement, regardless of disclaimers. And since I feel like my social circle will police and judge what I read about, I self-censor what I would share.

Back in the day, it was more of a badge of honor to read things you didn’t necessarily agree with - an act of keeping an open mind and keeping yourself intellectually sharp.

Totally agree about the guest blogging stints, and I found a lot of great writers of color that way that I still follow today. TaNehesi Coates, yes, but also Adam Serwer, Jeet Herr, Jelani Cobb, Jamelle Bouie, Oliver Willis. Lotta dudes on that list so clearly my media diet needs further diversification! This also made it very apparent how much legacy media outfits were just not trying to find interesting writers of color.

Expand full comment

I am a parent of young kids (we live in NYC and our youngest was born in April 2020) but I'd be much happier if media coverage focused less on our mental health and more on the FDA dragging its feet on authorizing the vaccine for young kids. I'm glad that the difficulties parents have faced has been so widely expressed, to be sure. It has been rough. But I actually agree with your assessment. At work, the people on my team who burned out during the pandemic were not the parents of kids young or old. It was single, childless individuals who lived alone. A family friend also had a severe mental health crisis, becoming near-catatonic, after she lost her job, which she had moved to a new city to in which she did not know anyone, in the middle of 2020. This is something that really does deserve a lot more attention than it has got.

The media environment's a funny place. The professional outlets differentiate at some times and converge at others, and sometimes it's the very sharpening of those differentiations—the hardening of the partisan line for example—that creates pressures for convergence within each division. But the amateur sphere is a huge, variable space with tons of points of view. And of course in the middle space are individuals such as yourself who are able to build enough of a personal audience base to retain some independence from the pull of their particular wing of the professional media space, and in fact have that audience in no small part because of that differentiation.

The success of things like the top Substackers creates a countercurrent which, to speculate, causes the wheel to turn again, by creating a pressure towards differentiation. A cyclical lens is probably appropriate to some extent, though we're not going back to some previous state otherwise; I don't think the NYT's new, big footprint is going away any time soon. Differentiation will be structured in a way where that's a given.

Expand full comment