new media, old problems

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! So we’re not going to get into the whys and hows and whens of this quite yet - I think they deserve their own piece at some point - but the background to what follows is: I’m very bored of political journalism. I really, really want to write about things that are not politics in 2025.

I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to have some Big Thoughts about what I want to be writing instead, aside from this newsletter, which I obviously enjoy, and I’ve been struggling. I keep having chats with friends about it and they have good ideas and I think I’ve also had some good ideas but they all have one thing in common: I just don’t think anyone would commission them.

Ideally what I would like for my career going forward is to not solely have one beat as a journalist but to cover quite a lot of ground, and report on whatever I fancy that week. Perhaps most importantly, I would like to - going to use the technical term here - get fruity with it. I want to get weird.

I have some ideas on sports and arts and other things but the main thing about them all is that they’re bit silly, a bit off-kilter, not entirely serious. Not too long ago, I would have known who to pitch them to. I would have gone to Vice or to one of the innumerable new media-y start-ups. Hell, I maybe would have even gone to one of the mainstream newspapers. Right now, though? I don’t think anyone would take them.

Most of what we liked to call “new media” has died a death, and it hasn’t been replaced with anything else. More traditional outlets won the Fleet Street wars and they no longer feel the need to compete with the new kids on the block, and so they’ve stopped commissioning fun and unhinged pieces.

It’s a shift that somehow passed me by entirely at the time, as I was mostly hiding out in Westminster. I now feel like someone walking down the street for the first time in a while and realising that half the houses on the block have been torn down, and there’s this great big gap where people and buildings used to be.

It’s a shame for me personally, because it’s not immediately clear what I should be doing next year to earn money, but I worry that it’s also quietly bad for everyone else. Online media felt like a richer place when you could tell that a lot of editors were having a tremendous time doing their jobs. It was great to click on a piece and read about the funny and stupid adventures of reporters who should have known better.

It sucks that we had all of that for a while and now we don’t. Sometimes change happens but it just doesn’t stick, and things return to normal again. I worry that normal is a bit boring. Fuck knows we’ll need some entertainment in years to come. What a shame that no-one’s paying writers to provide it anymore.

PS: since I wrote this some fellow millennials have been gently making fun of that viral post going “oh if only I’d been born earlier, I could have worked at i-D and hung out with my friends who worked at BuzzFeed”, and I mean I get it, I peeked behind the curtain at the time and I too struggle to romanticise that era, but the youths have a point!

At least we got to be young and work for online companies that felt exciting, even if they weren’t always delivering on their promises! There were countless outlets that catered to young people, and were largely staffed with young people! Fuck knows it wasn’t ideal but at least it was something, and the kids who are now the age we were at the time don’t even have that.

A column

Editor’s note (yes the editor is also me): I wrote this last week while feeling really quite down, both as a result of seasonal depression but also in general, and I toyed with the idea of not publishing it for a while as I don’t think it represents my feelings all the time, but then I decided to still go ahead, because it does represent my feelings a fair bit of the time. It’s depressing but that’s fine! Life isn’t always fun! I do feel better now though. I’m sure I’ll feel bad again at some point soon. Woo!

(Also: I’ve washed my sheets since writing it. You’ll get what I mean later.)

I get tattoos because they’re a way to mark the passing of time. Prisoners use a pen or a knife or their nail to scratch a line into the wall of their cell at the beginning or the end of every day, so they can look back on it and know for certain that more time has passed, and I pay strangers to draw under my skin instead.

I read a novel recently in which the protagonist is single and lives alone and he ends up cherishing the act of emptying his bin at the end of the day, because it proves that he has lived. There is food in there, and there are pieces of paper and perhaps even some pencil shavings, and looking at them means looking at evidence that he is still there, and is still going.

I’ve been meaning to write about what it’s like to be an adult and be freelance and single and to live alone for a while, but I just never knew where to begin. Recently I looked at my duvet cover and realised that there was a spot of blood on there, from an evening when I flossed with too much enthusiasm and failed to catch the resulting drip on a bit of tissue.

I briefly thought that I should shove said duvet cover in the wash and then I didn’t do it. It wasn’t clear to me why I needed to appear clean and tidy, seeing as nobody was about to come around and check. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it’s like to spend most of your life entirely alone, because I have so much time on my hands, and I’ve come to think of it as “quiet nihilism”.