The rise of MINI MEDIA: media is dead, long live media... in your inbox. 💡
Media is alive and well, if you know where to look for it-- not at Condé Nast or Hearst.
I love media.
Old media that is— the heyday I didn’t even work in. I love Ruth Reichl’s telling of old school Condé Nast in Save Me The Plums, I love 13 Going on 30’s Poise Magazine, I love my former boss Amanda Hesser’s re-telling of being a New York Times Food Critic, I love expense accounts and high heels and long days at the office and a business lunch.
By the time I started working in ad sales at Food52, 2015, media was not yet dead, but withering on the vine a bit. Influencers were nascent, but this was the age of media working with influencers. I was hired, specifically, to do this. My job changed almost immediately upon arrival, but the thought was that I would bridge the gap between social, influencers, and our ad sales clients— American Express, Carnival Cruises, Cabot Cheddar, KIND Bar and many others. The first few weeks of my job were a whirlwind. It was a lot less of the above, a lot more manual labor at Food52’s pop-up, an impressively large former Starbucks space on 17th street and Broadway, right in Union Square. I remember serving canapés at a Dan Barber event in our office that we put on with our clients at American Express on my twenty-second birthday. I was living in a Hampton Inn just by the Holland Tunnel because I hadn’t had time to find an apartment between signing the offer and my first day on the job in Chelsea. For my new job, my mom had gotten me a pair of blue snakeskin driving loafers from Coach, on sale at Bloomingdales, at the Stanford Shopping Center. (They sound bad, but they were very, very, good— why don’t I still have those?) I was exhausted, I would end work late and trot over to a bar around the corner from my office where a guy friend I knew (and was toxically crushing on) worked, and he’d make me free drinks and ply me with french fries. It was the best of times, it was the worst best of times.
As an aside— and indulge me in a brief tangent— I miss the beginning of my career very much. My only directive was to do a really fucking good job. Impress, hustle, get promoted. The sky was the limit, there was no road map, I had no ideal next role, the only ego I had to contend with was the one that just pushed me to do my best at any task, whether washing dishes at an event or emailing a big client, so that I could get more opportunities to do better in the future. That drive I had was an insatiable hunger. Whether I lost that to Covid, to age, to being a founder, to the realization that a business was never going to love me back the way I loved it— I’ll never be too sure.
While Food52 wasn’t your typical media business (for those who don’t know, Food52 was both a content and commerce site— recipes, editorial about food and home cooking, and a marketplace of cookware and tableware and homewares), ad sales was your typical media job. We worked with the big classic ad agencies. We took cabs to meetings. We took clients to Blue Hill and Eleven Madison Park. We flew to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit. We threw big, splashy events— some ticketed for the general public, some just for influencers, many in crazy and stunning locations, many nicer than most weddings. We brought in celebrity chefs, all the big ones. We worked our asses off on print issues, sponsor integrations into cookbooks, Augmented Reality 360 tours of a Patchogue oyster farm, pop-ups and pop-ins of every variety, whether at an antique fair in Brimfield, Mass or a median in the middle of the Meatpacking District.
And, damn. Did we do a good job! All of it— truly all of it— came out beautifully.
By the time Covid was over, my start-up adventure was over, and I was looking for another job— 3 short years since leaving Food52, really— that world was extinct. Gone with the way of the dinosaur.
Don’t get me wrong, my lovely friends and former teammates still work in different kinds of ad sales, they still put on events or experiences for clients, and Food52 still makes money.
But I’m hardly the first to point out that the media landscape has changed dramatically with the rise of the influencer, tastemaker, content creator, or individual— whatever you want to call it. Five years ago, your primary sources of content didn’t land in your inbox like this one did. Maybe a few, here and there— but nothing like the scale that Substack has today. The same is true of TikTok— the content creators have bypassed the editorial process that powered traditional media’s most legendary forces.
My friends who work in ad sales now work in what we really would have regarded as ad tech several years ago— the jobs to be had are at places like Instacart, Uber, and their competitors, or a coveted role at TikTok.
This isn’t another think piece on
’s Machine in The Garden.The other day I had a shift in perspective. I think of First Rodeo as a rather fixed entity— there’s no editorial calendar, no commitment to writing a certain amount of content per week, no editor or oversight. I think of this as a small publication, relative to my friends
and who have been writing a newsletter with broader reach for years and years. My goals are usually really just to grow. I’m not sure why— mostly because I sense opportunity for First Rodeo will come with scale, and I can’t turn off the ambitious part of my brain that seeks opportunity or growth.But occasionally I have these rare moments of lucidity where I realize that nearly 10,000 people choose to read my writing here. Isn’t that the best kind of microinfluencer to be? No one responding to my Instagram stories with wacky feedback, but instead supporting (kindly, amazingly!) my writing? I was fumbling with my AirPods and looking for hand soap in a bathroom drawer last Monday when it hit me— I am the editor in chief of my own tiny magazine. And I can do whatever the fuck I want. If I want to have an event, I can have an event. If I want to do a glorious, illustrated print issue, I can. If I want to stop using punctuation altogether, include a watercolor with every issue, make this a video letter, exclusively podcast my writing, change my beat entirely to writing about tap dancing— and to be clear, I want to do none of those things— I can.
Reader, you probably already knew this! But sometimes my face gets a bit too close to the page, I lose perspective. First Rodeo becomes another thing on my to do list and blends in with the rest of my work.
I recently joined a group chat for Substack writers that has made this experience a little less lonely, and helped give me a sense of parity when it comes to going rates for brand partnerships, the unit economics of paid vs. unpaid subscribers, etc. It’s also helped me read between the lines now that I am getting to know some writers behind the scenes, and not just through their writing.
And in another moment of tremendous clarity, I’ve realized that these people are creating in the very same way I cherished what we did at Food52— we just aren’t all on the same masthead. (There are plenty of rumors about roll-ups coming to Substack— I know nothing, if this is true, but I can confirm I’d love to be in one.)
I know, not so original to announce that Substack is the new media.
But more so, I want to take a minute to shout out the people who are somehow doing cool things— as solo writers— that it used to take a full team of us to accomplish, in the old media world. Individual writers and creators who are creating tentpoles, packages, beautiful editorial, events, the sorts of interesting, rich, community-first content that fueled the Food52 fire back when I started there.
I’m nostalgic for the 2010s media era, and even more nostalgic for the one I missed before that. (It’s not my fault, I wasn’t born in time to be a part of it.) As much as I love reminiscing— and I really, really do, and I see nothing wrong with that— something really special is unfolding around us right now. And some day I know I’ll be nostalgic for that too.
Below, a few of the things that remind me of the past, in a really good way.