Jay Caspian Kang
Media is a famously myopic and sclerotic industry. The big changes that take place within it often go unnoticed, at first, by the people who are paid to set its future course. Sometimes, the stuff that we in the industry miss out on is obvious to the rest of the world. We were not the first to notice, for example, that features and news stories were being cannibalized by social media, slowly at first, and then thoroughly. Many other changes start small before quickly catching fire—until suddenly you’re looking around and everyone you’ve ever met is working on a nine-episode narrative true-crime podcast.
Beginning in mid-November, shortly before Thanksgiving, the journalist Ryan Lizza turned his Substack newsletter, “Telos,” into a tell-all account of his messy relationship with his former fiancée Olivia Nuzzi, who was about to publish a memoir. He began with the story of Nuzzi’s alleged affair with the former Presidential candidate Mark Sanford before getting to her relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and he presented everything in serialized form, with a series of cliffhangers that promised big revelations for anyone who was willing to pay ten dollars for a subscription. (A lawyer for Nuzzi has stated that the relationship with Robert F. Kennedy she describes in her memoir marks the “only instance in her long career as a journalist in which she had an improper relationship with someone she was covering.”) The series eventually ran out of steam, as Lizza seemingly exhausted his supply of venom and scandalous divulgences. (“Part 6: Bobby was behind the whole thing” appeared yesterday.) But the experiment—a serialized newsletter that asked its reader to wait patiently by their inbox for the next installment—more or less worked. I cannot remember the last time such a large group of people (in this case, mostly gossipy media professionals) were waiting around impatiently for a journalist to publish the next part of a written story. Lizza, who previously wrote for The New Yorker, turned the messiness of his personal life into something like a sporting event that needed to be followed in real time, with a crowd.
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