(2024-12-10) Chayka The New Rules Of Media

Kyle Chayka: The new rules of media. There’s an old-school magazine editorial format that goes something like “The New Rules for [X]” or “The New Way to [Y],” posing a tongue-in-cheek surety.

Lately, some lines about the tumultuous landscape of digital media have been rattling around in my head, little axioms about How Things Work Now in our micro-era of news influencers, video podcasts, and group newsletters. So I packaged them up in that style. (I'm honestly not sure how of the below he agrees with vs is saying sarcastically.)

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

New platforms emerge all the time and some of them become very popular. The best way to succeed online is to surf the upward wave of a new platform by committing 100% and catering all of your output to it.

No matter if you’re a text-only website, it is now in your best interests to hire camera-ready contributors who will make successful video-podcast clips

Parasocial relationships are the name of the game. When people call for a Joe Rogan of the left, it seems like they don’t realize that one of the reasons he is so powerful is that he is many of his listeners’ best friend.

Consumers tend to find a few trusted sources of facts and opinions and stick to them, then it’s hard to tear the consumers away. The sources could be podcasts or influencers or TikTok accounts or platforms.

Each time a platform decays or fades in popularity there is a fresh chance to reset the online hierarchy

Locality and specificity are good things and offer ways to preserve meaning in the increasingly contextless internet.

Your fav old magazines and sites are going to continue disintegrating and contributors will spin off solo or in little groups. (See Hearing Things from ex-Pitchfork staff, Best Food Blog from ex-Epicurious and Bon Appetit staff.) The job as a consumer is to find and support them.

Everything is iterative. A single Instagram or Twitter account becomes a newsletter becomes a small publication with a few contributors becomes a corporation.

Thus it makes sense to build your concept in public and test its engagement at every stage. Every powerful brand starts with a single post. As with restaurants, new publications or writerly personas will pop up in established spaces and then go independent when they can survive alone. (stair-step)

Advertising will never die. Even if Substack thinks it designed itself as the anti-ad content ecosystem, just take a look at all the newsletters with sponsored posts, classified listings, and partner email sends.

Nothing matters more than the relationship between a person, brand, or publisher and their audience. Screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else: email from work competes with text from a friend competes with Instagram and Tiktok

Make sure you know why you’re doing something, especially if you’re a publisher or brand and you have limited bandwidth and / or resources. Your print magazine has a blog? Why? What is that accomplishing?

Media does too many things because they seem cool internally, when the audience doesn’t really give a shit.