Last week, Buzzfeed announced it was shutting down Buzzfeed News, which means I’m now slightly confused about what Buzzfeed is without it. In the days since then, a variety of other media outlets, including Paper Magazine and Vice, have also announced layoffs. Everyone keeps citing vague things like “economic headwinds”, which sounds like a particularly boring weather phenomenon that I would like to decline to experience.

It’s a rough week in journalism, one of many rough weeks in journalism, and every time we have a stretch like this, I think about how my own path into making a career in this field no longer exists. All the things I did involve jobs that don’t exist anymore, or got moved to a new city, or outlets that got shuttered. I’m not exaggerating: all of them. I’ve talked with a lot of young journalists over the years and I always try to give them whatever advice I can to make it in this industry, but it feels absurd to walk them through my career and say, over and over again, well, that doesn’t exist anymore, but it was really helpful to me at the time. I want to help the next generation of journalists but I feel like I climbed up a mountain on a path that evaporated under my feet, or a ladder that vanished, to use my own subject line. It’s like I’m a more self-aware Ozymandias, gesturing at my works that are just an empty desert. Not my actual works, which I’m very proud of, but the “how to” I am trying to offer.

Obviously there are still ways into this industry, and enterprising young people are always going to find creative ways to break in. And I am capable of coming up with more generally applicable advice like, make good connections, work hard, meet deadlines, be an idea machine, don’t be a jerk to anyone because you never know who might rise to the top and also it’s generally bad form to be an asshole. It just makes me sad that each new generation of aspiring reporters and editors has it even harder than the last, no matter how clever and motivated they are. Opportunities dry up and people move on, because it’s impossible to battle for your own job indefinitely. Who has the resources, financial or emotional, to keep doing this over and over again?

I don’t have some broader point about Media Today to make here. Sometimes you’re sad and you write about it in your newsletter.

What I’m Reading Online

This scathing review of former Buzzfeed News editor Ben Smith’s book chronicling his employer’s heyday came out with impeccable timing on the day the company announced they were shutting it down. The book, and the review, tangle with this issue: “Informational chaos, not narrative clarity, is the internet’s guiding epistemological mode. The digital era has staged a corporate contest not for truth but for attention—a malleable asset that can be put to countless uses, whether it be to convince readers the 2020 election was stolen or to show them how their preference for Netflix over Hulu means they’re totally a Gorgonzola.” And of Smith himself: “But if his book portrays an executive class mostly unbothered by the potential consequences of the digital era’s popularity contest, it also suggests that journalists—in particular those named Ben Smith—remain confused about their own role in this shrill and data-saturated new world.”

I’m not totally sure I follow what we’ve learned from this study about parrots video chatting, but it is pretty entertaining. When I first moved into my apartment, my cat got in a prolonged fight with his own reflection in a mirror, so I’m not sure if video chatting with other cats is for him.

Speaking of journalism layoffs and their effects, this reporter lost his job at NPR and is choosing to continue reporting from Ukraine. It’s really brave! And I wish he didn’t have to do that.

To lighten the mood, please enjoy this very soothing video of a turtle swimming around a piece of research equipment. I felt strangely mournful at the end when it swam away.

What I’m Reading in Print

It would be funny if I was just like, once again I have read a very long fantasy book in the exact same series. Don’t worry! This week I read Endpapers, by Jennifer Savran Kelly. It’s set in 2003, and follows a person who restores books for a living and finds a love letter hidden in the binding of one of them that seems to have been written by a young woman struggling with her sexuality and gender identity decades earlier, much like the narrator. I’m sort of skating around using pronouns here, because sometimes the narrator feels more female, and sometimes they identify more as male. It’s an interesting depiction of life as a genderqueer person, particularly in the very recent past. Dawn is also in a relationship with someone she suspects might prefer if she always presented more masculine, although to be honest, some of the time reading it, I was just kind of like, yeah sometimes people fall out of love and are bad at ending relationships.

I also read Sea Change, by Gina Chung, which is set in a near-future New Jersey (naturally) where 30ish Ro has just been dumped by a boyfriend who is leaving her to go to Mars, and she works at a mall aquarium that is planning to sell their giant octopus. But her father, a marine biologist who disappeared on a research trip decades earlier, was the one who originally found the octopus, and so she really starts to spiral when she finds out she’s losing the octopus (the octopus is named Dolores, if that influences your feelings about this book). Given all of that, more of this book was about her parents’ failing marriage than I anticipated! I would have preferred if many more scenes were about the octopus, my favorite character, but despite this, I still enjoyed the book.

What I’m Watching

I saw Renfield last week and it was really, really funny. If you’re not familiar, it’s about Dracula’s familiar, Renfield, who has spent a century doing Dracula’s bidding and eating bugs to gain a fraction of Dracula’s powers. In our modern era, Renfield starts to question whether perhaps he’d be better off not fetching victims for Dracula to kill. Nicholas Hoult, who will always be the nerdy kid from About a Boy to me, plays Renfield, and Nicholas Cage really hams it up as only he can as Dracula. Some parts of this movie were very silly but mostly it was just funny consistently for the entire time, and as I was chuckling away at Renfield tearing someone’s arms off and then beating up an additional person with the severed arms, I found myself thinking about how it feels like a rarity now to find a good, actually funny 90 minute comedy. I don’t know why this movie is so much funnier than any number of other high concept comedies but whatever happened differently this time through, they should try that method again. Not to make 800 Renfields, just to make more movies that are dumb and funny and you can just sit there and be distracted for a little while. However, I do wish to say that the least realistic thing that happened in this movie where Renfield can eat a bug and then do like a 30 foot vertical leap is that Awkwafina played a cop. She’s funny, but this is taking suspension of disbelief too far.

I’m also almost all the way through The Diplomat, starring Keri Russell. If you can avoid thinking about the politics of this show for even one single second throughout the season, it’s pretty enjoyable. She’s a Serious Foreign Affairs Person bound for Kabul who unexpectedly is named ambassador to the U.K. after a British ship is attacked. The whole thing is competence porn; if you like watching people stride around in stylish suits, being smarter than everyone else, this is probably for you.

What I’m Listening to

This week I’m listening a lot to a generic Classical Piano playlist on Tidal because it’s a busy week at work. Please tell me your favorite ~concentration~ music in case I should try that instead.

Sorry we had a gloomy newsletter this week! I’ll leave it up to the world to do something cheerful and inspiring before next Wednesday.