Hello!
Apologies for the delay. I spent my morning on Adrian Chiles’ radio show, and after that I had to have a sandwich.
A…stack of…subs?
Here are some very good Substack posts written recently by women who are not me:
Morgan Jones on mad and thick Nazi Francoise Dior
Rax King on getting sober and staying sober
Emma Garland on the concept of “body count”
They’re clever! They’re good! They’re funny! They’re…occasionally disturbing? Look upon my binders, for they are full of women!
A column
Were I in the business of inventing new curses, I would suggest that a pointed “may the New Yorker publish a long essay on that thing you’d been meaning to write about” could kill a journalist dead. You’re out there living your life, pleasantly letting an idea develop at the back of your head, then the heavens drop a large anvil on said head and here you are - deceased.
I’d been idly thinking of writing something on the death of the media for a few weeks and, as I finally decided to actually do it, the New Yorker published a long essay on the death of the media. I may be typing this as a real, physical person but, spiritually, my bones are currently crushed on the pavement.
In their defence, it was a pretty obvious idea. The Messenger dramatically folded last month. The LA Times announced a particularly brutal round of redundancies. Other places signalled, in their own way, that their businesses were failing. 2024 has, so far, been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for journalism, and it has only been 2024 for about 50 days.
Well, it’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade or so for journalism. Since 2005, “roughly three thousand newspapers in the U.S. have closed”, Max Read wrote recently.
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers lost more than forty thousand staffers during the same period. Two hundred and four counties in the U.S. now have no local news—high-poverty areas are most affected—and, by the end of this year, it’s expected that the U.S. will have lost a third of its newspapers”. Yikes!
Things don’t exactly look rosy on this side of the pond either. New research by the Press Gazette found that “in the mid-2000s, then local press trade body the Newspaper Society reckoned local newspapers employed around 13,000 journalists. Our analysis suggests that figure is now likely around the 4,000 mark”. Obviously it doesn’t end there:
“In 2007 news media advertising – magazines and newspapers combined – was worth £7.1bn in the UK, or 39% of the £17bn total UK ad spend (about £11bn in today’s money).
In 2022, all national, regional and magazine titles combined made around £2bn in advertising (print and online) out of the total £35bn UK ad spend - less than a fifth of what they were making in 2007. They’ve gone from taking 39% to a 6% slice of the pie.”
Haha! Hahahaha! Hahahahahaha! What a terrific state of affairs. Aren’t we all having fun here, on this rapidly sinking ship. I actually love it, feeling the water reach my toes then my ankles then my calves. Keeps me humble. Makes me feel alive. Anyway.
The stupid so-called “New Yorker” managed to cover what it called the “extinction-level event” pretty thoroughly - boo, hiss, and so on - but it did miss something, namely: who cares?
Sure, the world would become an even worse place without news reporters but let’s be honest: that’s not really what journalists are complaining about when they say they worry about the future of journalism. Only a minority of us actually do endless, tiring, unpredictable news desk shifts. Even fewer do the kind of investigative deep dives that get turned into movies like Spotlight, which made my dad emotionally call me to tell me he was proud of what I did for a living.
(I was, at the time, a gossip columnist, but I took the compliment.)
There are a lot of journalists out there who’ve never been gen(eral) rep(orter)s, reported on court cases, crime or local politics.
Most hacks could retire tomorrow and democracy, both local and global, would easily survive. We’re superfluous! That’s the truth we don’t want to confront. It’s what we hide from when we go “ooooh, but accountability”, and “ooooh, power going unchecked”. Babe you write about online culture trends! Who are you holding accountable!
(It should go without saying that I absolutely consider myself to be superfluous. Would Westminster fall apart without my 1200-1500 word features on arcane and whimsical aspects of British politics? I do not believe it would!)
The horrid and irksome reality is that journalism is failing as an industry because the world doesn’t really need us anymore. A lot of the important and worthy bits are essentially gone already, and are unlikely to come back. A lot of what we have left is fun but ultimately expendable.
Music journalism was useful when you had to spend real money to buy records and wanted to make sure those records would be worth it. Cinema and literary journalism were needed back when there were no websites where people give their opinions on the films and books of the day.
Artists everywhere can now connect with old and new audiences via social media. Clothing brands can rely on influencers and online word-of-mouth. Anyone with any kind of platform can now share their opinions, personal experiences and whatever else they may want to talk about, with no training or newspaper gig.
More generally, there are now a lot of other places in which you can place your adverts, and where they are more likely to reach the people you’re trying to reach. I could go on but you get the gist. We used to be embedded in the fabric of society and now we aren’t.
We’re not even especially cool anymore. I grew up in a world where the idea of writing for a living was inherently fun and quite glamorous. A real life journalist! Just like in the movies! After that the internet took over and things were really swell. People blogged and got famous and they got paid for it, they wrote all sorts of weird things that real magazines would never publish and in a way, weren’t they sort of like a new punk generation? It was thrilling. Of course a lot of us wanted in.
I’ve been in for over a decade now, and I’m just not convinced that journalism is still even remotely sexy. I find it sexy, obviously, in the way that when you’re dating someone there’s a point at which you wonder if they may be the most attractive person to ever live, but journalism could absolutely walk down the street today and not turn any heads.
Kids want to be influencers now because they’re not really reading on their phones anymore. They’re a lot more likely to be watching endless videos, and why wouldn’t you want to create what you spend so much time being an audience for? Friends who are editors tell me that there are still some idealistic and self-involved people who would like to grow up and become journalists, but they are unlikely to be legions. Even if they are right now, will they still be in five years? Ten?
I wonder if that’s the thing people are missing right now. The N*w Y*rker piece mentions that countless journalists have never known anything but a trade in decline, but it doesn’t wonder why those people still decided to hop onto the Titanic. We did it because we could just about remember a time when the ship was afloat. Similarly, people with acres of cash decided to invest in us because they too could remember a time when journalism was indispensable. Who will join us today now we’re blatantly drowning? Who will throw us some life vests?
We may well be on our way towards an extinction-level event and it will be sad and bad for us, the people old enough to have thrown all our eggs into the journalism basket but still young enough that we won’t be able to retire in time. Will it really be all that sad for anyone else? Life managed to continue after dinosaurs. Hard-nosed, public interest news reporting aside, it should be able to keep going without us.
We’ve spent the past decade with our knickers in a twist because we collectively find it hard to believe that we may just be part of the last generation of our kind. It’s understandable, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least try to get over ourselves. Few people are indispensable. We’ve lost thousands of journalism jobs in the past decade and we’ll probably lose thousands more in the decade to come. It sucks; it’s life. I’ll be holding on for dear life for as long as I can, and feel lucky that I got to have a go before it all collapsed.
But what about Marie? (pt.2)
You may remember that the Guardian asked a lot of people to write about Poor Things but did not ask me, because I do not work for the Guardian and do not write about films. What a snub! What an affront!
Anyway the Times asked its writers to chat about their worst ever dates for Valentine’s Day and once again did not ask me, I assume because I do not work for the Times, though I do not believe that to be a good enough reason.
Had they asked, this is what I would have written:
Listen, the thing you have to understand here is that he was unbelievably attractive and that I was 18 years old, ergo a huge moron. Please try to keep this in mind while you read on.
So: I meet him at some house party and he is offensively hot - literally a model! - and we get along very well and snog and decide to see each other again. He invites me out to go to the Prince Charles Cinema in Soho on a Tuesday afternoon, because he’s a model and I’m a student. Neither of us has any other place to be on a Tuesday at 3pm.
I go to meet him and he’s just come out of a photoshoot, and he is steaming drunk. He explains, somewhat apologetically, that he’s had to do some silly stunts on a motorbike while topless and the embarrassment of it all made him drink the best part of a bottle of wine. Fine. If I want to be a model’s girlfriend, I’m going to have to deal with the harsh reality of modelling life.
We have an hour to kill before the movie so start walking towards an off-licence, to buy wine, at which point he turns to me and asks: “hey, would you like to go buy some heroin?”. I stare at him in silence for a moment. I really do not want to buy any heroin. I am living quite a dissolute life at that point but had drawn the line at heroin, especially on a weekday while it is light outside. Had he asked at midnight on a Saturday, I would have potentially considered it. Again: 18, moron.
I politely turn his offer down and, to my surprise, he does not take it well at all. Turns out people who like taking heroin really like taking heroin. Who knew. We go to the off-licence to buy some cheap, horrible wine and he sulks. We sit on a pavement and drink the wine in complete silence. He occasionally asks if I’m sure, really definitely sure that I do not want to buy even a little bit of heroin. I do not.
Some time later - hours, days, centuries - we walk to the cinema and he gets us tickets for what turns out to be some wildly random, three-hour long, experimental sci-fi movie from the 70’s or 80’s. He buys himself some pickled onion Monster Munch, which he eats by himself. I do not want any pickled onion Monster Munch. I am French.
We go take our seats and he tries to kiss me in the dark. I turn my face, because he smells of pickled onion Monster Munch and I remain French. He tries to walk his hand up my thigh and I stop him, because I am considerably more sober than he is. He begins sulking again.
The movie starts and within ten minutes he is passed out on my shoulder. He snores for a while, and only wakes up at the very end. We awkwardly go our separate ways afterwards. That’s not the worst part. Do you want to know what the worst part of it is?
I saw him again. We actually ended up seeing each other for a few weeks. After which he dumped me.
There is no amount of money you could offer me to be 18 again.
“ I do not want any pickled onion Monster Munch. I am French.” was a genuine LOL for me!
I do miss news of the annual Fuschia Exhibition in the British Legion Hall, and who’s up before the beak for acts of wanton violence. The local paper still exists but I doubt whether there’s more than one journalist covering N.Essex, whereas it used to be the Harwich and Dovercourt Standard. I don’t want to know about a new eaterie in Chelmsford.