triumph of the collective
Also, "Clinamen" not worth it if you ask me
If you saw me handing out roman candles inside a bodega on East Broadway in a perfectly upright sober manner on Saturday night, no you didn’t.
The framing of the Knicks championship win as a definitive triumph of the collective is indeed compelling — like I do get what Heidi Moore was trying to get at with her Substack essay about the win, before it unfortunately achieved escape velocity on basketball Twitter.
Nevertheless, it’s an infectious framing device. One quickly starts seeing it everywhere, perhaps even in the media business. When catching up on my inbox today, I noticed that Ryan Broderick is bringing on Lisa Tozzi, the former BuzzFeed News global news director, as COO for the growing Garbage Day empire, effectively formalizing Ryan’s newsletter business as the closest successor to BuzzFeed News we have now. When I texted Ryan to check how long Cates Holderness (of “The Dress” fame) has been the managing editor at Garbage Day (about a year), he also mentioned that former BuzzFeed News writer/illustrator Dan Meth now does videos for the team, former BF News correspondent Lester Feder is the director of Garbage Day’s consulting agency, and former BuzzFeed creative director Josh Fjelstad now works on the newsletter’s “Panic World” podcast. You just know the Slack culture over there is generational in the best way.
Elsewhere in the BuzzFeed diaspora lately: former BuzzFeed editor Erin Chack got published in “Modern Love” (and is really living it up, it sounds like); former BuzzFeed News editor/reporter Amber Jamieson launched the Bed-Stuy Stoop as a weekly hyperlocal newsletter project. (Noticing that I am still hardcore about delineating between BuzzFeed the website and BuzzFeed News the newsroom? There are some collective traumas you never unlearn…)
Purely coincidentally, this was also finally the day I sat down to read Jasper Wang’s Reflections on Five Years in Worker-Owned Media, published initially back in November amid Defector’s five-year anniversary (Sorry Jasper, what can I say except that clearly I save all my favorite emails for last?).
The success of Defector (and its Normal Gossip franchise) has been my favorite modern media success story and is now of course the subject of close study by all the new worker-owned / indie news collectives trying to make Substackonomics work for one person at a time. I liked how Jasper’s blog talks honestly about how relatively favorable the headwinds were in 2020 for the Defector crew, but I also appreciate how he articulated the quiet part out loud about what it means to truly be a part of a news collective (added spacing is my own):
There is one win condition of the Defector story that could be replicated through individual choices: A commitment to acting in the interest of the collective, especially by those writers with a relatively larger following.
From the very beginning, we were aligned that each owner-employee would be expected to dedicate at least 75 percent of their professional efforts to Defector. We had set the expectation that nobody should expect a paycheck for at least the first six months (though we did end up paying ourselves much sooner than that), so it seemed unfair to ask people to turn down paid freelance work, but our company would only succeed if readers understood that the bulk of any given writer’s work would appear on Defector.com.
In early 2020, Drew Magary and David Roth were offered a meaningful amount of money to start a new podcast for Stitcher; they waited until Defector was off the ground before assigning the contract to the company and starting to record episodes. Kelsey McKinney first articulated the idea of Normal Gossip in a viral tweet in October 2020, and within 24 hours a podcast agent from one of the big talent agencies reached out to offer their services in shopping the concept; Kelsey instead brought Normal Gossip through the internal podcast pilot process at Defector, where it continues to be a critical source of income for the company.
As Jasper goes on to point out, this narrative stands in marked contrast to the other biggest story in media over the past few years, wherein the individual big names are striking out on their own, so focused on unburdening themselves from institutional constraints (both legit and otherwise) that they/we haven’t considered how much weaker the institutions are then left, to say nothing of the cohesion of the industry as a whole. As such, everyone trying to swim against that current is, in my book, doing great work, even if it doesn’t make you the subject of splashy brand deal / cable contributorship.
Leaving you with a bit of art snobbery: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s “Clinamen” — an installation featuring hundreds of ceramic bowls floating in basins of water — has arrived in the U.S.; you can see it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The appeal is supposed to be the “unlikely symphony” arising from the bowls knocking together, but I am here to warn you, having observed this show last summer in Paris, that it’s not so much some delicate tinkling and chiming as it is a more familiar kind of teeth-grating cacophony (picture your least favorite roommate trying to put dishes away in the middle of the night). Perfectly worth skipping, if you ask me. (Far more enchanting to the senses is Meg Webster’s “Thicket” at Paula Cooper, where you can immerse yourself for a second in a dense spiral of plant cuttings that presents itself as a mysterious bushy-tailed creature.)
