the end of general interest?

For media publications, at least.

In need of a bit of seasonal structure, I’ve decided to devise mine own private summer cuisine challenge, which is to eat all of my favorite/aspirational sandwiches in New York before Labor Day. On the lineup: Mama Louisa’s artichoke parm (biked down to get it yesterday, it wasn’t as great as I remembered, but also I was very demoralized by the humidity by the time it was procured), anything with roast beef from Defonte’s, a lobster roll from Red Hook Lobster Pound, one of Bradley Cooper’s cheesesteaks, a banh mi from Ba Xuyên in Sunset Park, and the French dip at Salt Hank’s.

I used to do a “summer bucket list” but could never stick to it, so maybe averaging ~0.75 interesting ‘wich/week is more my speed. What other destination sandwiches am I missing??

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New York mag published a great pair of articles this week summing up the current situation in media: on one hand, per Charlotte Klein, Google’s AI summaries aren’t so much as contributing to the web traffic apocalypse for media companies as they are just fully kicking out the last leg that digital media has been hobbling on since tech platforms first started beating media at the business of letting people display certain kinds of information to each other.

As a result, media companies are obviously becoming more reliant on subscription businesses—which, reading between the lines, means specifically catering to a certain type, or should we just be honest and say class, of readers who are still willing to like still pay for interesting words-and-picture combos and be advertised at by lifestyle brands and be interested in a Deloitte-sponsored “summit.” So the Airmails and GQs are probably still going to be okay for a while; the Bustles and general interest outlets won’t. (Puck types maybe; read the piece for a funny shot at Puck if nothing else)

Often, non-media friends have asked me, usually with voices lowered, if maybe that’s all right, if maybe we never needed 500 websites in 2012 recapping the same pop culture show. Probably not 500 I guess? But it does seem like it should be more than like five. It’s apparent that the digital media wave of Web 2.0 was a bubble—one with a premise that seems utterly quaint now: “why not let the average news consumer choose where they get their information from, and with what tone and sensibility??” But also, it’s hard to be too nostalgic for that era when, let’s be honest, mostly we were all trying to out-Google rank each other on things like Kim Kardashian’s Paper cover. Now everyone efficiently gets the same standard-issue Gemini Summaries of the same stuff, unless you’d like to pay a premium for the extra toppings like voice, fact-checking, etc. Quality content’s trajectory—or is it a return?—to being a luxury good continues on.

The alternative route: encourage readers to form sort of free parasocial bonds with their favorite information deliverers by frogmarching writers/personalities onto TikTok and YouTube, which is what’s happening with top New York Times talent, per Nick Quah. (Podcasting fits in here, too, of course). Dole out free content to the audience if they’re loyal (lately I noticed The Daily shuts you out of episodes that are more than three days old if you’re not a subscriber; the effort to login through Apple Podcasts fully exhausted me), and hope your on-screen talent remains hot/likeable/not flighty enough for Substack to keep it up on their end for years, if not decades. I can’t imagine we’re that many steps away from a Wesley Morris paid meet-and-greet experience (presenting sponsor TK); one imagines that will get rolled into the NYT++ subscription package pretty quickly, though.

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