The Flattening

Last week, Blackbird Spyplane’s Jonah Weiner published a fantastic piece looking back on his time as a celebrity profile writer for Rolling Stone, a contract that ended when the magazine was sold in 2017.

By that point, thankfully, I had a contract at the New York Times Magazine, too. It didn’t come with guaranteed monthly checks the way Rolling Stone’s did, but it paid well for the stories I did write. Between that and occasional freelance features I wrote for magazines like the New Yorker, New York, WSJ, and Wired, I could still pay my bills. Crucially, I could still call myself “a profile writer,” too, which was, after all, the thing I’d spent some 20 years of my life learning how to be.

Over at Hearing Things, Jill Mapes - formerly a staff writer at Pitchfork, before the publication was “restructured” - was thinking along similar lines last month, with a barnstormer of a piece self-deprecatingly titled The Latest Elegy for Music Journalism and Middle-Class Musicianhood:

I also had to reject the line of thinking that goes something like: With enough posting and pivoting, you can successfully monetize your own creativity—you’re just not trying hard enough to optimize your brand on social platforms. But the 2020s version of my job—music content creator—isn’t one I want.

As a reader, the quantity of excellent writing that can be found on Substack and other newsletter and blogging platforms can feel like an embarrassment of riches. But the dissolution of bigger institutional structures that could contain and present that writing in its optimal form is dispiriting. Sam Freedman’s UK policy insight is unrivalled. Jim Waterson is doing invaluable boots-on-the-ground reporting in London. By rights, both should be star hires at a larger publication. It is absolutely no shade on either of them to say that we’ve lost something when writers of this calibre need to rattle the tin for a few quid a month from readers.

One of the utopian promises of the 90s internet was that it would be a fresh canvas for entirely new and infinitely varied forms of media. In fact, the opposite has transpired. Slowly and surely we’ve seen the whole spectrum of media condensed down into a ever-decreasing number of containers, owned by a shockingly tiny number of companies. A great flattening has occurred. If you write things for a living, your plausible options to earn some money have largely been whittled down to the newsletter economy, by which we mostly mean Substack. If you make things with moving images, you’re increasingly reliant on video platforms, by which we mostly mean Youtube.

If you make audio, you’re also increasingly reliant on video platforms. Received wisdom states that a presence on Youtube is essential for “discoverability”, and also that the algorithmic secret sauce that makes this happen punishes audio-only content. So the podcast - one of the internet’s truly great new forms of media - has been bastardised into a low-rent imitation of a TV chat show, to no creative gain. (We experimented with video for the last run of my Doctor Who podcast I’ll Explain Later and it gave us a tiny increase in audience but a much larger increase in stress, time and effort to produce, inevitably, a locked-off shot of two middle-aged men discussing Doctor Who. When the show returns later this year, it will be blessedly audio-only.)

If you write things for a living, the chances are video is looming into consideration for you too. Substack added monetisable video features in 2025, and earlier this year launched its TV app. My newsletters folder in my email is increasingly full of alerts for video livestreams that are about to start. Like podcasts before it, one assumes it will soon be “best practice” to add video to your newsletters, by which point a singularity will have been reached and yet another form of media will have been successfully transmuted into people awkwardly talking into their front facing cameras via tiny microphones in an impressive feat of reverse alchemy.

“We’re pivoting to video” has become something of a dark joke in media circles ever since a bunch of publications followed Facebook’s instructions to do so in 2015 and self-immolated shortly after. By now, the correct response to a tech platform suggesting that a medium’s glorious future involves doing web video instead of the things it’s already good at should really be polite laughter. But it’s a trick everyone keeps falling for again and again. (Witness Disney - arguably the most iconic movie studio with one of the most valuable IP stockpiles in history - debasing itself with a push into a “microdramas” - a joyless format that apparently “does the numbers”; I’ve never spoken to a single person who watches them.)

Reflecting at the end of his piece on how video interviews - often conducted by writers - have supplanted the journalistic celebrity profile, Weiner drops a grenade:

But as a profile-loving oldhead, it’s hard not to feel some dismay at the way video seems to be eating up all kinds of cultural forms whose excellence it can neither equal nor replace.

As a video medium, the podcastification (by which I mean Youtubification) of television can at times feel inevitable. The main brake at this point is a stubbornly persistent audience expectation of scale. But with swingeing cuts to commissioning, schedules and production team sizes, the trajectory is clear.

Linkedin - home of the anxious career pivot dressed as a thrilling strategic opportunity - is of course full of slightly wild-eyed bag carriers for television’s Youtube future, excoriating those of us who are rather fond of using the skills we’ve spent a career honing for our myopic reliance on asking “gatekeepers” (ie broadcasters) for “permission” (ie money). This is of course fine if you’ve got the cash (or inclination) to make your own stuff and then roll the dice on it finding enough of an audience to cover your rent.

But this isn’t a liberation, it’s a capitulation. There is no doubt that audiences, technology and brutal economics are forcing a necessary evolution of TV. But it might be wise to take a breath, survey the ashes of other media industries who accepted the logic of the big tech platforms, and then ask - are these really the guys we should be listening to?