Butt News #24: Never Been Kissed

Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast. 

Somehow, the oldest and most reliably profitable product in history, commercial sex, was unprofitable for all but a handful of anonymous disruptors. Curiously, or maybe not, I found the same disruption at work once I went “legit.” As a mainstream journalist, I covered tech, advertising, law, and personal finance. Each beat was unique, but always my

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What’s coming into focus more gradually is how bad things are getting for those of us in the audience, too . Something that’s long bothered me and Erin about the hegemony of streaming is that if you do away altogether with physical media, you put yourself at the mercy of corporate accountants (who might decide there’s insufficient R.O.I. when it co... See more

In the wake of the Summer of Substack, the novelty of launching a newsletter where readers pay directly for your work has given way to the reality of, well, keeping that newsletter up. And keeping those readers happy. And finding new ones when, inevitably, some of those readers decide they’re kind of over you (nicely termed as “churn”). Inevitably,... See more

“I think writers have always realized their own value; there just weren't a lot of options in the post-2008 recession for how to make good on it,” says Anne Helen Peterson, who writes the newsletter Culture Study. “But all of this feels very cyclical to me. The economy tanks, writers get laid off from their publications, writers go freelance, write... See more

If you tend to blame celebrity culture run amok for our current national woes, you might find some poetry in this week’s news that Interview would fold, bankrupt, just short of its fiftieth year—mired in lawsuits over unpaid work and rampant infighting. But mostly it’s just a bummer, like hearing about an East Village punk den shutting its doors—ev... See more