I always wanted to be a writer on the internet, now I don’t think I can be.
I'm talking about the end of digital media as someone who has never gotten to be a part of it.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking right after seeing the headline: “But Renée you ARE writing on the internet! With this newsletter!” While that’s cute and supportive you simple fool, you know what I mean. I mean a writing on the internet as a job that you get paid a living to do at a place with a name that people recognize. This newsletter is the furthest thing from a job. Sure, it takes time and effort, but I don’t get any money from it and only, like, five people who are my closest and most supportive friends (who would support me even if I wrote like literal doo-doo) read this thing every week. The analytics tell me this is true. It’s fine because I like writing and I’d rather write out into the ether than not write at all, but this isn’t the life of “writing on the internet” that I put on my vision board in 2016.
Back when I was in college, and then just out of college, digital media was doing pretty well (though it was about to crumble in, like, a year but we’ll get to that). I thought that Buzzfeed was kind of lame, but if I could get paid to write listicles about, I don’t know, High School Musical 2 and Demi Lovato every day on a salary and maybe then even make my own YouTube short that was work-produced where I talked about Aaron Carter (my niche interest at the time) every week, then sure I would fucking take that job. You could write articles while also getting health insurance, incredible! (Hindsight is 20/20 and pretty much everyone worth their salt there has left because it sucked to work there, but we didn’t know about that back then.)
CollegeHumor was still around and anyone could just submit an article to Cracked (which was a good, fun site to go to). Reductress took submissions via email pretty much whenever. There was that website that Zooey Deschanel ran for some reason (HelloGiggles I think?) and paid writers sometimes, and I even got an article published on Total Sorority Move dot com (clicked on that website for the first time in five years and the link is a mess) about how my sorority was full of losers (kindly).
At the time I was a fresh, 22 year-old with no job and a creative writing degree. I wanted to teach abroad in France, but didn’t realize my passport was expired when it came time to apply so I had to take a gap year, live with my parents, and work until I could apply the next year with an actual valid passport. I also had zero self-confidence in myself and my writing so while websites still existed and still took pitches, I didn’t think I had anything good enough (yet). I posted some satire pieces on my personal Medium account, and some of them got to publications (very cool), but that was it. In the meantime, I was looking for work that would pay me in real human dollars, and then I got those jobs and I had to commute by train into Chicago every day, making my days twelve hours long. The plan was to write on the side while I did my money-job, but I quickly just became so bogged down by the grind of working and also never meeting my dad’s expectations that I didn’t write shit. I know these are all just excuses but I cannot go back seven years in time.
Sure, I wasn’t good enough to get a job in any major online publication yet (I had no portfolio other than some sketches I wrote in college and a couple of articles that were pretty stupid), but I was qualified for one freelance writing job: TheThings. This website I think exists, but it exists in a completely different universe than it did when I started as a freelance writer in 2017. This website, and the others all owned by one Canadian company, was what I described to my friends as “discount Buzzfeed.” It had the same kind of format—list of things that hit a certain audience that may make it go viral—but with more entries and more words because they were going through Facebook’s ad service to generate as many views as possible.
The job was easy: each article was a list of about fifteen entries and each entry had to have at least 120 words of a description. Sometimes, when I was passionate about something, this was not hard to do. Other times, it felt very much like I was trying to fill up the word count for a book report on a book I never read. We got paid a flat fee and then extra based on how many views we got. I would submit about two to four articles a week, and a lot of them were duds in the virality sense, but some really took off. I didn’t make enough money to quit being a call center representative, but it was just enough cash that made me feel like life might be worth living another day.
I was living with my parents at the time, and every time I would exit my room my dad would say, “Are you blogging in there?” I knew that the work I was doing was kind of garbage, but it was a writing job and it gave me money and sometimes a pitch for something that I have always wanted to write about got approved and it was sick. I thought that maybe I could take some of my best pieces and use it for a writing sample down the line. We never got to that, though.
The good times were not good for long. The Cambridge Analytica thing happened (throwback alert!) and Facebook’s ad algorithm was all out of whack. You couldn’t use a whole chunk of keywords without your post getting absolutely ethered into oblivion. There were suddenly a bunch of things you couldn’t write about (and this was a site that mostly focused on reality TV recaps and celebrity gossip, no politics in sight). I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty of it, but basically over time, the rules became more stringent, the word counts became longer, the payouts became less.
I was finding myself working full-time and then writing a 5000-word article about nothing while also having my piece flagged for using the scandalous word “career.” It got to a point where my depression with having to live at home (I had already went to France and came back at this point) and having to commute so long for a job that paid $12/hr (making me feel like I was never going to leave my hometown—plot twist: I did) on top of writing straight garbage just wasn’t worth it. Nothing I was doing had a good enough payoff for how much time I spent on it, so I just quit. They had enough freelancers, and I didn’t really talk with anyone much, so it wasn’t a huge loss.
Now it was 2019 and I was finally getting myself together. Moved out to the big city, signed up for improv classes, making friends and working on a podcast: it felt like time to try writing again. Then the pandemic hit. Weird stuff was happening with writers online, and employment in general and I didn’t really care. I was getting paid my regular wages to stay home for six weeks and do nothing but cross stitch, watch movies, and make TikToks. There was no pressure from myself to get into writing. I started submitting to satire sites just for fun and got in for a few. I was creating on my own terms. I finally got laid after a three-year dry spell. I was unstoppable. My job was fine and secure and I was doing what I wanted on the side.
Getting a job writing on the internet felt less and less like a goal over time. I made this newsletter to keep me accountable about writing at all, which has turned out to be really good for me. I was going to submit a bunch of headlines for Reductress in June of 2022 but then my mom got diagnosed with glioblastoma so that really put any writing on the backburner for a year and then some (it turns out when you give up everything to take care of a dying parent and then they die, you still need like six months to recover emotionally and become a functioning person again). None of this really bothered me (I am now bothered by how little experience in stand-up comedy I have even though I am old and withered at 29). I have grown old in this harrowing past year and I have a son (my 66 year-old dad) to take care of now. I can’t be pursuing risky freelance writing ventures anymore—I must continue working a corporate job that is quite demanding and doesn’t give me any time to write during the day the way my old law clerk job did. Oh well, that’s what growing up is: giving up to get health insurance.
Even though I haven’t been actively looking for writing jobs recently, I’ve still been keeping up with what’s going out in the digital media world—and it’s not good. The site formerly known as Twitter, a site that once was a really good place for writers to network with each other and a platform that often rewarded writers for good work and good jokes, is now a steaming pile of garbage. I don’t even know why I still go on it at all. Everything is fake, the ads are insane, and sharing a piece written on Substack is useless. There’s much more to say about the downfall of Twitter, but so many people have already done so and there’s nothing more that I could say that’d be really insightful or anything.
But after a long-winded writeup into my lore and my shortcomings as a writer, this is what I wanted to talk about today: the disappearance of online publications dropping like they were all dinner party guests from Clue. So many people have written about it already, and I’m always two weeks late to the party (thanks, full-time job!) but I’ll talk about this anyways! Sports Illustrated is a shell of what it used to be, Pitchfork just got merged into GQ, and there have been layoffs left and right.
Going outside of the scope of hard journalism, writers everywhere online are taking a massive hit. Just look at The Hard Times and its sister, The Hard Drive, satire sites about music culture and nerd culture respectively. To write for The Hard Times was always something I wanted to do sometime in the future. I pitched a few headlines a couple of years ago and heard nothing back, and with the rest of my life going south submitting again wasn’t a priority. I have a friend who wrote for The Hard Drive for a while, even making it up to Managing Editor. I talked to him about his role around Thanksgiving and he was like, “Yeah it’s a cool gig!” Not even a month later, both The Hard Times and Drive made a post all over their social media saying they were going to start a Patreon to try and keep the lights on. With that post unraveled a whole bunch of grievances from former staff, including my friend. Like most things these days, the site got rid of the contributors that made the site great, then went asking fans, who probably don’t know about all the hidden tomfoolery that was happening, to crowdfund them. The sites are still taking pitches, but the idea of submitting now just feels sour. It’s another end of an era.
Journalists are going on TikTok to tell everyone that journalism as we know it is gone forever. Writers are scrambling for work and posting about their struggles online. And I’m just here. At the end of an era where writing could be a valid career for some people, it never was for me. Even though there used to be writing jobs, I never got to be a part of that, and now that they’re gone my life really isn’t affected one way or another. Maybe my dreams can no longer be as possible as they once were (albeit have been very difficult to achieve from the start), but my salary, health insurance, and day-to-day life does not change a single bit. All that changed is that channels to publish my writing on are disappearing, and the idea of being paid by a company for my written work feels like a pipe dream. But besides that, my life is the same as it always was. I’m a girl with a dream, and that dream is slowly just not existing anymore.
So what is there to do? The only thing anyone really can do in these trying times is to keep going and keep creating work that is good. Writers with huge followings are going to move to blogs or Substack or whatever and do the stuff they’ve been doing. Since this is their livelihood, they’ll ask for paid subscriptions, and because they already have a ton of readers following them on this new journey, the subscriber revenue might actually be enough. There will also be a lot of hacks writing absolute filth, but since it looks the same and is on the same website as real journalism, people will not be able to tell the difference. It’s going to be hell, that’s for sure. Meanwhile, me with my silly little non-writing day job will continue to just keep doing what I’m doing—a cute hobby and nothing more, if you will. It’s been almost eight years since I graduated college, and even though there’s “always time for a big change,” some things just don’t feel practical anymore. I’ll have the same five friends read every week, while most of you just keep it in your inbox as support (supporting is enough!). Maybe I’ll go to grad school, not for writing but for library science, and maybe executive search research will be my lifelong day job and even, maybe, a career. Who knows? All I know is that writing on the internet as we’ve known it is gone.
I know that I have been inconsistent with posts and the content of my newsletter is all over the place these past three years. There really isn’t a market for fake horoscopes, horny write-ups about sports mascots, and pieces about the grief of losing a mother, but if this isn’t going to be my job I really cannot be bothered by having a theme for this newsletter, I hope you understand. That being said, I am finally going to bite the bullet and open it up to paid subscribers. I’m not going to paywall anything, so there is absolutely no incentive to pay me whatsoever. I want as many people to have access to my work (especially you five super fans), and I don’t think anything I write is really worth the money if you don’t have it. We live in a society where we’re all passing around the same $20, and I don’t want to take someone else’s $20 they might need. BUT, if you are obsessed with me and in love with me, or have $5 to spare I am open to taking it and using it for the one beer I get every time I go do an open mic.
Wow, that was a lot of words! If you’re still here, thanks for reading as always!
Ghost Rats, my improv team, has TWO shows this week! First is Date Night with the Rats on Thursday, February 1st, 8:00pm at the Bughouse Theater. Second is on Friday, February 2nd, 10:00pm at Cornservatory, opening for Think N’ Grin.
As a rando who follows you on insta and appreciates your writing, thanks for keeping it up! Drop ur venmo