How can we survive and thrive in the new media landscape?

Hi friends,

People talking about the massive disruption happening in media right now are missing an important bit that we ignore at our peril, which is that large media companies exist, in essence, to work as curators of culture for their audience.

They seem to have all forgotten this fact, but aside from massive overvaluation by venture capital, private equity, or opportunistic oligarchs, the throughline connecting every media company struggling right now is they have become terrible curators for their audience.

They are sifting through millions and millions of data points to find the ones they think their audience will like the most. Sometimes, they find a hit, but even when they miss the mark, you can see their curation all over the things they choose.

The better you curate, the stronger your vision, and the deeper the connection you build with your audience. A24 is a good example of a company that curates very strong vibes. You can tell an A24 movie a mile away. I would die for A24 at this point I love their taste so much.

I used to feel the same way about Focus Features, but after NBCUniversal bought them, they diluted their brand until that strong hand of curation fell away. They are just starting to find that again. The same thing happened to Miramax, Searchlight, and many other businesses once they were acquired. People came for the curation, and when that curation changed, their audience faded away.

Great companies mold their brand to draw the right people in who will appreciate their curation and grow their audience through sharing those cultural touch points with more and more people. Fashion magazines are basically curation engines, from the stories to the covers to the advertising.

Over time, people learn to trust these companies more and more, because they share the same taste. They resonate on the same frequency, and those things they curate hit the right bit of dopamine in their audience’s brains.

Eventually, these companies create “mindless buyers”. This does not mean dumb buyers. It means buyers who trust them so implicitly that they will buy without thinking because they trust the brand implicitly.

Good brands are only good brands as long as they continue being good curators for their audience. When they break that trust, people stop buying, or at least they start to think very seriously about what they are buying once again. Great companies are manically loyal to their audience. If Vogue started selling Sports Illustrated, it would be weird and they would immediately lose their carefully built audience.

Media companies are cratering because:

1. They have grown beyond what their audience wants from them

2. They have lost their way in how to curate what their audience wants from them

3. They started valuing unlimited growth above being good curators for their audience

We talk about how hard it is to grow an audience in the creator economy, but we gloss over the fact that the real power in these, both new and old, media companies, is in building trust through curation.

Many people curate through their personality and writing, but others curate through creating roundups or lists or wish lists, etc, that others can search.

Good curation will never die because there’s never enough time in the day. Curation is a beautiful gift for readers. A while ago somebody told my business partner, , that when she posts something on her Substack, it means they need to pay attention. If she doesn’t post, then they don’t have to worry about it.

That is a heavy burden but also a beautiful gift.

No matter the platform, every creator is, in essence, standing up and saying “I think you should pay attention to this”. Those who “win” in the creator economy are actually winning the curation game. They create a symbiotic relationship wherein their fans are telling them what they want to hear about and they are searching out those things and making decisions on what they should pay attention to next.

It’s a delicate balance. You have to give people want they want but also what they need. It requires moving between the past, the present, and the future and laying them on top of each other.

In the new creator economy, curation is how we grow. It is how we know what to write, how to find other writers to work with, how to find cross-promotions to promote, how to decide where to advertise, how we decide how to build our platform, how to hire staff, how to strengthen the work we do, and how we deepen our audience’s relationship to us.

People are not really subscribing for your writing. They are subscribing because of what your writing can do for them and for what it does to them. They are paying for the time you have saved them in finding things worth reading. People pay well for great curation.

This is why somebody like Gwyneth Paltrow can create something like Goop and succeed even though it was wildly different from anything they did before. She knew that the only game worth playing was becoming a curator of culture and developing trust enough in their audience that they would trust their taste.

That relationship is precious. It is everything in the new paradigm…but it was also everything in the old paradigm. Yes, the old media is dying in many ways, but in all the ways that matter, the game of curation will never die.

If you want to build a sustainable practice, then the secret is curation, but even if you want to get more comfortable with getting paid for your work, the true value is in the taste you have developed and the time you’ve spent curating work for your audience.

We are all drug dealers, but the drugs we traffic in are serotonin, endorphins, and dopamine. We are all working to give that little hit in the back of people’s brains that gets them to believe we are good curators of where they should spend their precious time and attention.

How did you like that one?

• Do you curate your publication?

• Do you think about curation when you decide what to write?

• Does this spark something in how you think about growth?

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