why media people loooove salary discourse

the only perfect and correct opinion on the N+1 managing ed listing

As an eagle-eyed reader pointed out, that “tweet” I was so obsessed with from last week’s email is actually from Bluesky! So things really are happening over there I suppose.

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Media Twitter, or what’s left of it, are making quite the piñata over usual internet fave Kaitlyn Tiffany’s tweet about the salary band for N+1’s managing editor listing. Like all good media Twitter brouhahas, this one is exceptionally prime material in that it taps into our collective anxieties about the inherent value of a media job and how it is compensated in comparison to say, a finance suit but also vs. a typical New Yorker. The thing is that working in journalism has always suffered from a “nobility factor” problem, in that we as an industry pride ourselves on doing it for reasons beyond the financial one, which then makes it somewhat gauche to quibble over the specifics of the salary, healthcare package, etc.—a dissonance that employers themselves often don’t mind exploiting, e.g. A thousand girls would kill for that job—and, perhaps less obviously, makes it more fun for each of us to congratulate oneself for surviving less-than-optimal economic conditions whilst in the trenches.

In the last decade (almost exactly: Gawker unionized summer 2015), the industry has undergone a much-needed awakening regarding workers’ rights and the concept of journalism as labor (occasionally to varying degrees of cringe when it came to rhetoric, in that, of course, typing on a Macbook does not typically involve the same occupational risks as a lineworker). As a result, it’s become something of a celebrated pastime to shame job postings with bad or opaque salaries, per the tradition of say, @writersofcolor or more recently @badcreativejobs.

Earlier this summer, the fashion podcaster Recho Omondi, who famously interviewed Leandra Medine in her girlboss apologia era on Omondi’s show, The Cutting Room Floor, got caught in a TikTok-fueled shitstorm for posting a listing for an “office coordinator” at $55K, which as writer Ira Madison III pointed out, “Respectfully, that is three whole ass jobs.” In this context, Tiffany’s tossed-off eyeroll about how $58K-64K for the N+1 managing editor role makes perfect sense—who didn’t do numbers on a tweet like this for sport in the 2010s?—but her real mistake appears to be misreading what appears to be a shift in the media worker narrative of the moment, in that anyone with a full-time staff position like hers (at a well-funded legacy institution like The Atlantic) right now is sitting in such a rarefied position so as to seem quite separate from the rest of the industry that’s grubbing for contract scraps and $0.001/word rates. To flout the privilege of gainful employment in any way, even by just posting itself, is going to be taken as a personal affront by many angry, broke, or disillusioned comrades; to “punch down” at an indie operation, even worse. Hang in there, KT! Soon someone will post about old Condé salaries again, and we will begin the cycle anew.

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“The New Yorker sent the guy who wrote about listening to Taylor Swift in prison in 2023 to the Eras Tour and had him write about it” sounds like such egregious levels of This American Life-vibed bait, so it is truly a credit to writer Joe Garcia for taking that premise and giving us an unforgettably sincere essay about making parole and piecing his life back together, with only a nominal bit about the concert itself. There were still parts of this where I felt cynical of the gimmick—as in partitioning sections of the essay and titling them after Taylor Swift albums, or making T.S. lyrical puns, but it all actually really works. You won’t regret reading it.

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I personally loved One Battle After Another, especially in that it inspired a broad range of analysis from some favorite internet heads: Mary H.K. Choi dissected it for tone, J Wortham critiqued the racial dynamics, Max Read went deep on the cars, Shea Serrano sent a subscriber-only newsletter rating the cast’s performances from A (Teyana Taylor) to A+++ (Sean Penn), and Justin Chang noted the great kineticism of said performances.

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NYT Styles editor Stella Bugbee posted a spicy take of Fashion Month on her IG Stories and then did a Q&A about it in Blackbird Spyplane, the newsletter, in case you are wondering where the two central loci of discourse are for the true cultural elite!!

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And finally, I’m helping out the team at Julie and Sex Happens with their news digest each week, amazingly named Sneaky Links—their brilliant title, not mine! You can read the first one here to keep up on: sugar daddy recession anxiety, cool underground student contraception services, and generally excellent groupchat fodder.