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The wildest thing I wrote last year was a 4500-word screed about the state of pop performance at Coachella, the kind of frenzied, stream-of-conscious piece I hoped would stand as an opening salvo to a looser form of criticism and a lower-stakes format for sharing my work. But 2023 was not a good year for journalism.
Grappling with the enormity of that understatement, the way it’s tied up with my own struggle to land a non-contractor writing job in media (I haven’t yet), hitting the threshold of my patience with playing nice about politics for the sake of a freelance gig while living in a state actively hostile to multiple facets of my identity, and the quicksand feeling of watching week after week roll by as unanswered and rejected pitch ideas piling up at the wayside…
Well, I’d like to write about all of those things. But one at a time.
This missive comes to you from my new publication with Ghost, so you might need to reconfigure your filters depending on where you want to see it in your inbox. A little timeline of events as an apology for eight months of virtual silence: I went quiet last fall while dealing with a contract negotiation that ultimately did not get resolved, and by the time I reemerged in November, things had started to look dicey at Substack. Jonathan M. Katz reported for The Atlantic that Substack was hosting white supremacists and, per its business model, raking in 10% of their subscriber fees.
The excellent independent journalist Marisa Kabas (subscribe to The Handbasket!) organized a letter campaign, Substackers Against Nazis, to demand answers from leadership. In response, they painted a pretty clear and unflattering picture of where that company’s priorities lie — namely, violating Substack’s own terms of service and propping up some of the worst people on the internet because hate speech is a profit motive.
Although being a conservative shill is a lucrative career, I’ll say it again for those in the back: “Asshole” is not a protected class!
I know plenty of good people still on Substack. Frankly, this era of having to game out the moral calculus of every single platform, product, public individual, etc., is exhausting. (This migration has taken so long in part because it took me over a month to decide on WordPress as my new home, only to find out from 404media that Automattic is in talks with Midjourney and OpenAI to train their LLMs on WordPress user data. No, my eye is not twitching, that’s just my face now.)
And now I have been lured back to posting by the prospect of another year of Coachella, this time, a festival that has, curiously, still not sold out both weekends and that some people seem to be unaware of happening at all this weekend.
I don’t have the stamina to stay up until 3 am to catch all of Lana Del Rey’s headlining set tonight. But you can expect: A similar round-up of my favorite Coachella performances next week. Maybe a 4000-word essay on Lana Del Rey that I started to write for you last April after I reviewed her album for ELLE.com and had a lot more to say. Some musings on the job hunt as I search for ethical work outside journalism and watch multiple companies eat shit in public and put up distress calls for communications managers. An examination of the 27 Club after the recent deaths of several actors, the 30th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, the release of Amy Winehouse’s (terrible-looking) biopic, and as I close out my last two weeks as a 27-year-old. And many more to come!
I’ll see you very soon,
Cyrena
