Do media brands have a future?

Note: I’m taking a break for the next few days, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite posts from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on March 24, 2015.

Years ago, my online browsing habits followed a predictable routine. Each morning, after checking my email, I’d click over to read the headlines on the New York Times, then The A.V. Club, followed by whatever blogger, probably Andrew Sullivan, I was following at the moment. Although I didn’t think of it in those terms, in each case, I was responding to a brand: I trusted these sites to provide me with a few minutes of engaging content, and although I didn’t know exactly what would be posted each day, there were certain intangibles—a voice, a writer’s point of view, a stamp of quality—that assured me that a visit there would be worth my time. These days, my regimen looks very different. I still tune into the New York Times and The A.V. Club for old time’s sake, but the bulk of my browsing is done through Reddit or Digg. I don’t visit a lot of sites specifically for the content they provide; instead, I trust in aggregators, whether crowdsourced by upvotes or curated more deliberately, to direct my attention to whatever is worth reading from one hour to the next. In many cases, when I click through to a story, I don’t even know where the link goes, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve told my wife about an article I saw “somewhere on Digg.” And once I’m done with that one spotlighted piece, I’m not particularly likely to visit the site later to see what else it might have to offer.

As a content provider—which is a term I hate—in my own right, the pattern of consumption that I see in myself chills me to the bone. Yet it represents a rational, if subconscious, choice. I’m simply betting that I’ll have a better time by trusting the aggregators, which admittedly are brands in themselves, rather than the brand of a specific writer or publication. Individual authors or sites can be erratic; on slow news days, even the Times can seem like a bore. But an aggregator that sweeps the entire web for material will always come up with something diverting, and I’m not tied down to any one source. After all, even the most consistently reliable reads can lose interest over time. I started visiting Reddit more regularly during the last presidential election, for instance, after I got tired of Andrew Sullivan’s increasingly panicky and hysterical tone: reading his blog turned into a chore. And I became less active on The A.V. Club, particularly as a commenter, after much of its core staff decamped for The Dissolve and Vox, although I still read certain features faithfully. To be honest, it’s been years since a new site grabbed my attention to the point where I wanted to read it every day. And I’m not alone: the problem of retaining loyalty to brands is the single greatest challenge confronting journalism of all kinds, even as musical artists deal with much the same issues on Spotify and Pandora.

Faced with a future driven by aggregators, which destroy the old business models for distributing content, most media companies have turned to one of two solutions. Either you provide content in a form that resists aggregation while still attracting an audience, or you nurture a voice or personality compelling enough to draw readers back on a regular basis. Both have their problems. At first glance, the two kinds of content that might seem immune to aggregation are television shows and podcasts, but that’s more of a structural quirk. From a network’s perspective, the real brand at stake isn’t Community or Parks and Recreation but NBC itself, and with the proliferation of viewing and streaming options, we’re much less likely to tune in to whatever the network wants to show us on Thursday night. And podcasts are simply awaiting the appearance of a reliable aggregator that will cull the day’s best episodes, or, even more likely, the best two- or three-minute snippets. Once that happens, we’re likely to start listening to podcasts as we consume written content, as a kind of smorgasbord of diversion that isn’t tied down to any one creator. As for personalities, they’re great when you can get them, but they’re excruciatingly rare. Talk radio is a fantastic example: the fact that maybe half a dozen guys—and they’re mostly men—have divided the radio audience between them for decades now points to how few can really do it.

And there’s no reason to expect other kinds of content to be any different. Every author hopes that his voice will be distinctive enough to draw in people who simply want to hear everything he says, but there aren’t many such writers left: David Carr, who passed away over a year ago, was one of the last. Even I’m mostly reconciled to the fact that readership on this blog is largely dependent on factors outside my control. My single busiest day occurred after one of my posts appeared on the front page of Reddit, but as I’ve noted elsewhere, after a heady period in which a mass of eyeballs equivalent to the population of Cincinnati came to visit, few, if any, stuck around to read more. I’ve slowly acquired a coterie of regular readers, but page views have remained more or less fixed for a long time, and my only spikes in traffic come when a post is linked somewhere else. I do what I can to keep the level of quality consistent, and if nothing else, I don’t lack for productivity. All I can really do is keep writing, throw out ideas, and hope that a few of them stick, which isn’t all that different from what the major media companies are doing on a much larger scale. (Although you can find lessons in unexpected places. One brand that caught my eye—in the form of a shelf of musty books, most of them long out of print—was the Bollingen Foundation, which I still think is a fascinating, if not entirely useful, counterexample.) But I can’t help but feel that there must be a better way.

Do media brands have a future?

Years ago, my online browsing habits followed a predictable routine. Each morning, after checking my email, I’d click over to read the headlines on the New York Times, then The A.V. Club, followed by whatever blogger, probably Andrew Sullivan, I was following at the moment. Although I didn’t think of it in those terms, in each case, I was responding to a brand: I trusted these sites to provide me with a few minutes of engaging content, and although I didn’t know exactly what would be posted each day, there were certain intangibles—a voice, a writer’s point of view, a stamp of quality—that assured me that a visit there would be worth my time. These days, my regimen looks very different. I still tune into the New York Times and The A.V. Club for old time’s sake, but the bulk of my browsing is done through Reddit or Digg. I don’t visit a lot of sites specifically for the content they provide; instead, I trust in aggregators, whether crowdsourced by upvotes or curated more deliberately, to direct my attention to whatever is worth reading from one hour to the next. In many cases, when I click through to a story, I don’t even know where the link goes, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve told my wife about an article I saw “somewhere on Digg.” And once I’m done with that one spotlighted piece, I’m not particularly likely to visit the site later to see what else it might have to offer.

As a content provider—which is a term I hate—in my own right, the pattern of consumption that I see in myself chills me to the bone. Yet it represents a rational, if subconscious, choice. I’m simply betting that I’ll have a better time by trusting the aggregators, which admittedly are brands in themselves, rather than the brand of a specific writer or publication. Individual authors or sites can be erratic; on slow news days, even the Times can seem like a bore. But an aggregator that sweeps the entire web for material will always come up with something diverting, and I’m not tied down to any one site. After all, even the most consistently reliable reads can lose interest over time. I started visiting Reddit more regularly during the last presidential election, for instance, after I got tired of Andrew Sullivan’s increasingly panicky and hysterical tone: reading his blog turned into a chore. And I became less active on The A.V. Club, particularly as a commenter, after much of its core staff decamped for The Dissolve and Vox, although I still read certain features faithfully. To be honest, it’s been years since a new site grabbed my attention to the point where I wanted to read it every day. And I’m not alone: the problem of retaining loyalty to brands is the single greatest challenge confronting journalism of all kinds, even as musical artists deal with much the same issues on Spotify and Pandora.

Faced with a future driven by aggregators, which destroy the old business models for distributing content, most media companies have turned to one of two solutions. Either you provide content in a form that resists aggregation while still attracting an audience, or you nurture a voice or personality compelling enough to draw readers back on a regular basis. Both have their problems. At first glance, the two kinds of content that might seem immune to aggregation are television shows and podcasts, but that’s more of a structural quirk. From a network’s perspective, the real brand at stake isn’t Community or Parks and Recreation but NBC itself, and with the proliferation of viewing and streaming options, we’re much less likely to tune in to whatever the network wants to show us on Thursday night. And podcasts are simply awaiting the appearance of a reliable aggregator that will cull the day’s best episodes, or, even more likely, the best two- or three-minute snippets. Once that happens, we’re likely to start listening to podcasts as we consume written content, as a kind of smorgasbord of diversion that isn’t tied down to any one creator. As for personalities, they’re great when you can get them, but they’re excruciatingly rare. Talk radio is a fantastic example: the fact that maybe half a dozen guys—and they’re mostly men—have divided the radio audience between them for decades now points to how few can really do it.

And there’s no reason to expect other kinds of content to be any different. Every author hopes that his voice will be distinctive enough to draw in people who simply want to hear everything he says, but there aren’t many such writers left. (David Carr, who passed away earlier this year, was one of the last.) Even I’m mostly reconciled to the fact that readership on this blog is largely dependent on factors outside my control. My single busiest day occurred after one of my posts appeared on the front page of Reddit, but as I’ve noted elsewhere, after a heady period in which a mass of eyeballs equivalent to the population of Cincinnati came to visit, few, if any, stuck around to read more. I’ve slowly acquired a coterie of regular readers, but page views have remained more or less fixed for a long time, and my only spikes in traffic come when a post is linked somewhere else. I do what I can to keep the level of quality consistent, and if nothing else, I don’t lack for productivity. All I can really do is keep writing, throw out ideas, and hope that a few of them stick, which isn’t all that different from what the major media companies are doing on a much larger scale. But I can’t help but feel that there must be a better way. Tomorrow, I’m going to talk more about one brand that caught my eye—in the form of a shelf of musty books by the Bollingen Foundation, most of them long out of print—to see if its example holds any lessons for the rest of us.

Awake in the Dark

A movie, or any work of art, isn’t complete until someone sees it. Even the most modest studio film these days represents about two hundred years of collective work from the cast and crew, and when the result of their labor is projected on a screen in a darkened room, where it can shape and channel the emotions of a theater full of strangers, surprising things can happen. In Behind the Seen, Walter Murch compares this phenomenon to that of an old-fashioned radio tube, which takes a powerful but simple electrical current and combines it with a weak but coherent signal to transform it, say, into Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A similar thing happens to an audience in a theater:

The power—the energy—isn’t coming from the film. It’s coming from the collective lives and emotional world of the audience. Say it’s a big theater—you have a thousand people there, and the average age of that audience is 25. You have 25,000 years, three times recorded history, sitting in the audience. That’s a tremendously powerful but unorganized force that is looking for coherence.

And the mark of a great movie is one that takes up an unexpected life, for better or worse, once it meets the undirected power of a large popular audience.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since finally seeing Zero Dark Thirty, which I think is unquestionably the movie of the year. (If I were to repost my list of the year’s best films, it would occupy the top slot, just ahead of The Dark Knight Rises and Life of Pi.) It’s an incredible work, focused, complex but always clear, and directed with remarkable assurance by Kathryn Bigelow, who tells an often convoluted story, but never allows the eye to wander. Yet it’s a film that seems likely to be defined by the controversy over its depiction of torture. This isn’t the place to respond to such concerns in detail, except to note that Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have already argued their own case better than anyone else. But it seems to me that many of the commentators who see the movie as an implicit endorsement of torture—”No waterboarding, no Bin Laden,” as Frank Bruni writes—are reading something into it that ignores the subtleties of the film’s own structure, which begins with enhanced interrogation and then moves beyond it.

But it’s a testament to the skill and intelligence of Bigelow, Boal, and their collaborators that they’ve given us a movie that serves as a blank slate, on which viewers can project their own fears and concerns. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t tell us what to think, and although some, like Andrew Sullivan, have taken this as an abdication of artistic responsibility, it’s really an example of the art of film at its height. It’s a movie for adults. So, in very different ways, are Lincoln and Django Unchained, which is why I’m not surprised by the slew of opinion pieces about the lack of “agency” in the black characters in Lincoln, or whether Django is really a story about a slave being saved by a white man. Such responses tell us more about the viewers than the movies themselves, and that’s fine—but we also need to recognize that movies that can evoke and sustain such questions are ultimately more interesting than films like Argo or Les Misérables, which reassure us at every turn about what we’re supposed to be feeling.

Needless to say, the Oscars have rarely rewarded this kind of ambiguity, which may be why Zero Dark Thirty had to content itself with a shared award for Best Sound Editing. And both Argo and Les Misérables are very good movies. But it takes remarkable skill and commitment to tell stories like this—and in particular, to give us all the satisfactions we crave from more conventional entertainment while also pushing forward into something darker. (That’s why many of our greatest, most problematic works of fiction tend to come from artists who have proven equally adept at constructing beautiful toys: Bigelow could never have made Zero Dark Thirty if she hadn’t already made Point Break.) When we’re sitting in the dark, looking for coherence, we’re at our must vulnerable, and when we’re faced with a movie that pushes our buttons while leaving us unsettled by its larger implications, it’s tempting to reduce it to something we can easily grasp. But in a medium that depends so much on the resonance between a work and its viewers, such films demand courage not just in the artist, but from the audience as well.

Learning from the masters: the Pet Shop Boys

Last week, I finally picked up a copy of Elysium, the eleventh studio album by the Pet Shop Boys. At this point in the duo’s career, it’s hard to start any discussion of their work without marveling at their longevity: “West End Girls” came out more than a quarter of a century ago, and although they’ve never had as great a hit in the United States since, they’ve remained an integral part of synthpop and dance culture on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as providing much of the background music for my own inner life. Elysium isn’t their best album—its tone is deliberately muted and melancholy, within a narrower range than usual—but it’s still lovely, catchy, and superbly crafted, even if there’s nothing quite on the level of the stunning “The Way It Used to Be” on Yes. (I’d agree with Andrew Sullivan that the strongest track is probably “Breathing Space.”) And although I’ve spoken at length about the Pet Shop Boys before, I thought I’d take a moment today to focus specifically on what they’ve taught me about storytelling, and in particular about genre, reticence, and irony.

It’s fair to say that it took a long time for the Pet Shop Boys to get the critical respect they deserved, largely because they were working in a critically unfashionable genre, and even now, some of that condescension still persists. The synthpop of the early ’80s sounded like it had been made by machines; it was emphatically crafted in the studio; and its tools were relatively inaccessible, at least at first, so it had none of the working-class appeal of other forms of popular music. In their early days, the Pet Shop Boys were often mistaken for arch Thatcherites, despite or because of the irony of songs like “Shopping,” and there are countless musical artists who attained greater critical success without a fraction of their talent and originality, simply because they happened to look more like our idea of what a singer-songwriter should be. Yet the genius of such albums as Actually and Introspective derives from their realization that synthpop can, in fact, be the vehicle for songs of great emotional complexity, although only after its conventions have been absorbed and transcended. And if it look a while for the rest of the world to catch on, the Pet Shop Boys seemed glad to keep the secret to themselves.

This has something to do with their own reticence as pop stars, which has greatly influenced my own feelings about artistic detachment and understatement. From the beginning, the Pet Shop Boys have engaged in an ongoing debate with rock music, which all too often conceals its own calculation and commercialism—and even less desirable traits, like homophobia—behind a front of feigned emotion and openness. Typically, the Pet Shop Boys reacted by going in the opposite direction, concealing themselves behind layers of increasingly elaborate production, playing characters that made them seem like the effete consumers that their critics assumed that they were, and treating emotion as a slightly chilly joke. But this detachment created the conditions, if you were listening, for some astonishingly moving music. Proust writes somewhere of a man who craves human company so desperately that he becomes a hermit, in order not to admit how much he needs other people, and that’s the impression I get from the Pet Shop Boys’ best albums. And the result wouldn’t be nearly as affecting if it hadn’t been filtered first through so many layers of pointed irony and impersonality.

In some ways, this has encouraged me to disappear into my own work. There’s a lot of me in my own writing, but you have to look carefully to see it: I’ve avoided autobiography and the first person, happily immersing myself in the mechanisms of plot, but don’t be fooled—these novels and stories are my primary way of dealing with the world. What the Pet Shop Boys taught me is that craft and artistic invisibility can be as valuable as confession, in their own way, when it comes to expressing the personality behind it, especially in genres where detachment is encouraged. This may be why I find myself most comfortable in suspense, which has a mechanical, slightly inhuman aspect that can feel like the fictional equivalent of synthpop. If anything, I could use a little more of their wit and, especially, their irony, which they turn, paradoxically, into a means for enabling their underlying earnestness. (When their earnestness comes undiluted, as in the new track “Hold On,” it can be a little hard to take.) Elysium shows that they still have a lot to teach us, if we have the ears to hear it.

The magician’s choice

The idea is to set up multiple paths to the same endpoint. In the simplest version, you deal two cards down on the table and ask the spectator to “remove” to one of them. If your volunteer removes to the card you want to force, you say “Ok, that’ll be yours.” If, however, the spectator points to the other card, you eliminate it, saying “Great, we’ll remove that one.” (Here you’re exploiting the ambiguity in the meaning of the word remove.) Either way the spectator winds up with the same card. This sounds transparent—especially with only two cards—but it gets more sophisticated. In the right hands, it can be incredibly deceptive. By couching choices in ambiguous, open-ended language and exploiting the fact that the spectator doesn’t know what’s coming—assuming they’ve never seen the trick before—the magician can gently control an apparently free decision from among numerous items.

—Alex Stone, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan

The Introvert-in-Chief

Most writers, it’s safe to say, are introverts. Outsized figures like Hemingway and Mailer may be the first that come to mind when we picture what a novelist looks like, but in reality, this is a profession that turns away more extroverts than it draws—and for good reason. It’s solitary, introspective, predicated on long hours spent working without human contact, and while it’s never exactly easy, it’s much less difficult when your temperament naturally tends in that direction. For every major novelist like Hemingway, whose outer life was as eventful as his fiction, there are hundreds more whose personality finds its full expression only in their work—and also countless extroverts, whose lives might provide the material for fascinating fiction, who lack the inclination to sit down in a room and write about it, which is a real loss.

The situation isn’t surprising, but it’s also unfortunate, for both writers and readers. On the reader’s side, it means that the subject matter of many novels can seem oddly constrained: countless books, both good and bad, are written about professions that tend to draw introverts—often because the authors themselves have rarely done anything beyond writing and teaching—and relatively few about the ways of life that introverts prefer to avoid. Mailer once wished that he could read a major novel written by a professional football player, and I know what he meant. Serious fiction all too often explores only a subset of what it means to be human, and while novelists have made brave attempts to move outside that comfort zone, the result often has the feel of excellent reportage, rather than something experienced from the inside. And one of the greatest challenges for introverted novelists is the expansion of the range of emotions they are willing to engage in their work.

On a more practical level, introversion can also be a problem when it comes to the dirty business of publishing and promotion. Novelists don’t work in a vacuum: once published, they’re obliged to live in a world of agents, editors, critics, and above all readers, and the transition can come as a real shock. As I’ve said before, in order to write a publishable novel, a writer spends years attaining a skill set geared toward solitary, laborious work, and then is expected to suddenly acquire all the opposite strengths once his novel is out in stores. In my case, I’ve found that I’m fine with more formal promotional activities—I enjoy panels, interviews, and readings—but I’m often at sea when it comes to less structured interactions. I suspect that many writers would say the same thing: they may do well from behind a lectern, but throw them into a crowded room, and they’ll head at once for the bar.

But if we want an example of an introvert who has essentially willed himself into functioning in the larger world, we don’t need to look far. I started thinking about this after reading Andrew Sullivan’s recent post on President Obama, whom he characterizes, echoing John Heilemann, as that ultimate rarity: an introvert at the highest level of politics. Sullivan, who describes himself as “an introvert with good communications skills,” says that this helps explain his “visceral affinity” for Obama, and I can only second that feeling. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Obama once considered becoming a novelist, and you can see this reflected in his public persona, which resembles that of the writers I’ve described above: he’s at his best behind a podium, and notoriously less comfortable with schmoozing and glad-handing. And that’s why I can’t help liking him. He’s one of us.

The real value of hard work

There’s an animated discussion today among a couple of bloggers (Seth Godin and Ben Casnocha, courtesy of Andrew Sullivan) on the value of hard work. Godin believes that if you’re going to work at anything, you should work hard: “The biggest waste is to do that thing you call work, but to interrupt it, compromise it, cheat it and still call it work.” Casnocha agrees, and suggests that one reason some of us don’t work as hard as we should is because it deprives us of a convenient excuse:

In other words, if you work hard and fail, there’s the presumption that you’re innately not very talented. If you don’t work hard and fail, you can credibly preserve the belief or illusion that had you only put forth 100% effort, it would have worked out.

Which is true enough, as far as it goes. But I don’t necessarily agree with the underlying assumption, which is that most of us would be more successful if we simply worked harder. Most of the people I know work very hard indeed. The problem, if there is one, is that we work hard on the wrong things.

Few things in life are easier, or more seductive, than working intelligently and industriously on something utterly misguided, as long as the outcome is assured. My own life is a case in point. (Or, at the very least, it’s the example that I can discuss with the greatest firsthand knowledge.) I spent years working diligently on things that had little, if anything, to do with becoming a novelist, whether it was in school, at work, or in various side projects. For the most part, I did fairly well, but the main reason I avoided pursuing my real goals was that it would deprive me of excuses. As long as I was concentrating on other things, I could tell myself that I could be a writer if I just applied myself. But as soon as I quit my job to write for a living—which is what I eventually did—I would have no excuse if I failed. As commenter Russell Stadler notes on Casnocha’s blog, quoting Eric Hoffer, many of us aren’t looking for achievement, but for an alibi.

So the real challenge, even before the hard work begins, is to make sure you’re doing it for a reason, and not as an excuse to avoid something else. And even after you’ve found your true niche, it’s possible to work hard, on a superficial level, while still avoiding actual risk. I work hard as a writer, and I’m just starting to see the results, but I also need to avoid the temptation to channel all my energy into the same handful of pursuits. For instance, there’s a certain kind of short story—the science fiction procedural, for lack of a better word—that I can write easily and well, to the point where it requires a conscious effort to try something else. One of my first efforts at a different kind of story, “Ernesto,” was picked up by Analog, but another, “Warning Sign” is still bouncing around years later, after the anthology in which it was supposed to appear was canceled. So there’s risk involved. But without it, I’m never going to grow as a writer.

Finally, it’s important to remember that hard work isn’t everything. Writers, and most other creative types, are judged by results, not by the effort they expended. I’m proud of the fact that I’m on track to finish a novel in nine months, as promised, but in the end, the book will stand or fall on its own merits. (While it’s probably true that writers who work hard are more likely to succeed than those who don’t, there’s no Pulitzer Prize for work ethic.) And many creative breakthroughs aren’t the result of hard work, but what looks like its opposite: they’re discovered in sleep, while shaving, in the bathtub, partly as a result of all the hard work that has been done before, but also because of its absence. The moral, then, is that hard work is essential—but only for the right reasons, directed toward areas of the unknown, and supplemented, crucially, by laziness.