MEDIA JOBS & the venerable transaction of attention for meaning
Dear reader,
The following jobs are cool in mostly the same way. The way is this:
Social media and internet changed the game of media creation and distribution, and thereby changed content. Think, for example, about how impossible it would be to recreate the personalization of your Facebook infinite-scroll using the television. Or the magazine. You couldn’t do it: there’s no profitable way to send content to audience segments that specific, and there’s no revenue model to incentivize the creation of content that diverse. In the old days, you had a distributor and a provider and a network and a studio all choppily working together to send attention-worthy content to viewers so that money could be extracted from advertisers. This, among other reasons, is why you had Friends in 1994 instead of, say, Harry Potter Puppet Pals.
Today, we have many new ways of exchanging our attention for our entertainment. Sometimes what we exchange for our entertainment is our data; sometimes what we exchange for our data is that sense of deep meaning we get when the algorithm tells us to watch To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before on Netflix, and we love it.
This week, we’re profiling 4 companies taking advantage of the new world of media distribution and consumption.
Farnam Street monetized a knowledge community.
An oft-ignored problem with the world: self-help books are actually a compelling concept, but it feels uncool and crappy to buy them. Like, we all want to do better, and we’re all trying to find out how, but we’re pretty sure it isn’t by reading The Secret. Google doesn’t readily offer a solution, either: it just gives you four thousand articles that say “Visit New Places” and “Read a Little Every Day” (Go where? Read what? Why those activities in particular?). Farnam Street is genius in that it is a self-help community that doesn’t feel like a self-help community. Browsing their website and reading their articles and listening to their podcasts is sort of how I would imagine it feels to shop for tools at Home Depot: anxiety quelling (you’re prepared for everything!), productive (So Many New Things Can Be Accomplished Now), and sort of macho (in a way that is totally accessible for all gender audiences).
Farnam Street is hiring an operations administrator. This is a cool employee-of-many-hats generalist role. I also really, really loved their recent podcast on love.
Gimlet makes high-quality podcasts.
A long time ago, podcasts were sort of lame, but now we all listen to them. What happened? Maybe part of it has to do with the fact that it took us some time to tap into the magic of the form. A podcast is like radio, but you can control it; it’s like a book, but you don’t have to read it; it’s like a TV show, but you don’t have to look at the screen. We iterated on story arcs (think: Hardcore History), formats (think: Serial), sound effects (think: Radio Lab). The end product is almost relieving to listen to because we’ve spent our entire lives watching and rewatching stories crammed into the 90-minute hero’s journey, and we are tired of it. Now, we get to plug in headphones and listen to improvisational slam poetry as we make a fried egg: a new and purely 21st-century form of solitude. Maybe it took us some time to to figure out how to structure our podcasts so that they hit the dormant emotional notes of the masses, but Gimlet thinks it has found a secret sauce. Working there would mean trying to perfect it.
They are hiring producers, analysts, programmers, marketing managers, and more.
Morning Brew is a an emoji-ridden business/finance newsletter.
Paying attention to the daily news is pegged as a hallmark of real adulthood, but it can be hard. It can require slogging through 20-word sentences in The Wall Street Journal; it can necessitate knowledge of, say, the yield curve and its inversion. There are real barriers to entry, and surely some do break through them, but Alex Lieberman had the theory that it was with limited enjoyment. His team writes a daily a email newsletter that distills critical business/finance news into nuggets of easily-readable text, punctuated by mood-lightening GIFs. It’s a simple idea, and people love it. The internet magic is that this would have been difficult to execute in a traditional media environment. Big-money advertisers like JP Morgan probably wouldn’t advertise in a free paper newsletter, but they do advertise in Morning Brew — a free paper newsletter is spam; a free article on the internet is, well, the internet.
Morning Brew is hiring a head of new media. This person will probably get to strategize about the forms of media Morning Brew should take on next. Podcasts? Videos? On what platform? In what way?
FiveThirtyEight makes it exciting to look at data.
In one of my classes at Michigan, we learned about a diagram known as “the wisdom hierarchy.” At the very bottom, you have data (all the things your nose smelled in a day); at the next level, information (nose smells according to place/time); then, knowledge (associations of smells with causes); finally, wisdom (principles on the cause of smell). So how do you tell a story about data when data is, definitionally, that which lacks a story? FiveThirtyEight has mastered the art of making data significant by telling stories around it, and/or letting readers find their own stories within it. Take, for example, this chart of all deaths in America between 1980 and 2014, this graphical breakdown of spy compensation, or this interactive time-lapse of presidential approval ratings.
FiveThirtyEight is hiring copy editors, journalists, and reporters.
See you next week!
Love,
Lea