At the end of the day, a media company is a gestalt puzzle

Media outlet newsletters are the new verticals.

There was a fresh wave of chatter a few weeks ago in response to the latest NYT earnings report about how the NYT is “no longer a news company,” in that the Wordle/Cooking/Wirecutter/Athletic of it all are what’s keeping the lights on and the subscriber base shooting straight up to the moon (12.78 million!!), which notches a compelling win for the concept of a media company as monster content bundle. Which is fascinating, considering the most visible trend we’re seeing the industry otherwise is a profound unbundling of talent and topic, via a combination of lay-offs and the subscription platforms enabling people to strike out on their own and, ideally, charge $5/month rates for their hyper-niche news (or at least hyper-niche takes and carefully laundered gossip).

There’s a notorious fashion adage about how that entire industry can be boiled down to a reliable pendulum swing between Big Pants Now or Small Pants Now; I would posit that the equivalent, Sisyphean whiplash for media is To Bundle or Not to Bundle. You can trace the rise and fall and rise again of website verticals exactly to this problem (remember VICE’s Noisey, Motherboard, and Tonic, amongst others); you could also stretch a bit and write off the thorny complexity of international editions (did you know Vogue Adria was a thing?) to this impulse of wanting to be brandably hyper-specific and yet also a central standard unit (see: Conde Nast endlessly consolidating itself so that in 2 years there will just be (1) central writer and (1) central social media director To Produce It All).

Launching new verticals and international editions are classic 2010s moves, though: Today, the equivalent strategy is, you guessed it, launching a newsletter. Case in point: Vanity Fair apparently just launched three new newsletters on “money, power and influence of technology,” “the back rooms, barstools, and bacchanals of Washington, DC” and “the power players, peacocks, and deep pockets of fashion”. Guiducci might have closed down the official VF website verticals upon assuming the throne, but tell me if those don’t sound suspiciously like, well, a new tech, politics, and fashion vertical by another name…

Oh I do love thinking about a media company as a gestalt puzzle, wherein you want the parts to make the whole more valuable if you happen to be in charge of the whole. The problem is that inevitably a few parts don’t quite pull their weight, and then the other parts might be sentient enough to figure this out. (At least Puck cuts their newsletter writers in on a profit-share for new subscribers…canny media gestaltism at its finest!)

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Short one today but I did want to pass along some fun Wuthering Heights TikToks. I love that despite (or due to?) the Charli xcx soundtrack, a lot of the attention musically/meme-wise is going to the 1978 Kate Bush song and Olivia Chaney’s “Dark Eyed Sailor” cover …

• Chaney accompanying herself on harmonium on “Dark Eyed Sailor”

• “The type of music I listen to before I even give the day a chance”

• Thinking about Wuthering at the club

• “Cathy xcx”

• I do feel like TikTok is giving us the golden age of school project creation…

• Cool making-of of the hair title sequence

KK leaving for the True/False Film Festival AKA the pride of central Missouri hipsters AKA an unofficial college reunion. Back soon!! xoxo