[upbeat music] I was still relatively new at Digiday, but you gave me what was excellent advice.
And we were like, "The way to make it in this business is to cultivate a really deep niche and have this knowledge set that runs really deep." I loved my time at Digiday.
I learned so much just about being a reporter, but my passion in life was not to be an ad tech expert for my entire life. I, I mean, it was just...
I was happy to do it, and if I were to give advice to any young reporter, it's get a beat that you're not naturally interested in, because it will force you to cultivate skills and to think about what makes a good story.
[upbeat music] Welcome to "The Rebooting Show." I'm Brian Morrissey.
Thanks for the feedback on last week's episode with HerCampus CEO Stephanie Kaplan Lewis. Really enjoyed the conversation. I did get one thing wrong in the intro.
HerCampus has grown fifty percent in the last year, not, I think I said a hundred percent. I got it right in the newsletter, but I got it wrong on here. Sorry about that. It's still very impressive.
And I hope to have more of these stories.
I wanna talk to more people who are making it work in this environment, because I think probably like anyone, I can get a little caught up in some of the doom and gloom around the, uh, media extinction event.
It's hard to ignore it, but there's a lot of good things happening out there, and I wanna focus on them just as much. Send me your feedback, send in suggestions for guests and things you'd like to see on the show.
My email is bmorrissey@therebooting.com. Also, if you like this show, check out another podcast I do. It's called "People Vs. Algorithms."
I do it with Troy Young and Alex Schleifer, and last week we spoke with Kyle Chayka, the s- staff writer at The New Yorker and author of "Filter World," which is about how the algorithms are flattening culture, so a really good conversation, so do check that out.
Final little promotional thing, if you're around on April tenth, and I hope you are, please join me for an online forum that I'm doing in partnership with Viafoura.
Um, gonna be joined by John Roberts, the chief innovation officer at Dotdash, and I think one of the smartest people in the media business.
He's gonna be joining me and Viafoura CEO Mark Zohar to discuss getting off the traffic treadmill.
I do a lot of these private dinners, and the last two over the last two weeks that we have done, it always comes up, what, what is happening after SEO.
One publisher was telling me last week that they've seen a sixty percent decline in search traffic. Obviously, this comes on top of social traffic dwindling, and, you know, publishers are gonna have to do more with less.
I always harp on this topic, but I think it's true.
And they also need to find new sources of, of traffic, and they need to build community and build direct connections, and we're gonna talk about all of that, because I think, you know, Dotdash is probably a great bellwether for this.
I mean, they are a classic business that is, is very driven by sessions. I mean, it's in one of their key performance indicators that they report as part of IAC.
You know, they're actually seeing sessions go up, which is very impressive in this environment, considering how reliant on search Dotdash Meredith properties have been, just like the rest of the industry, I should say.
So we're gonna talk about all of that. It is on April tenth at one PM. You can find a link to register in the show notes or also in this week's newsletters. These are interactive sessions.
First one we did with Bloomberg Chief Product Officer Julia Basser and Puck Chief Strategy Officer Max Taichien. It was a lively affair, so help us keep the streak up. And thank you again to Viafoura for the sponsorship.
This week on "The Rebooting Show," I am speaking to a former colleague. John McDermott joins me. It's a little bit of a different episode.
I usually talk to people who are on the business side, but John, John is a writer. He was a writer that I hired at Digiday, and he went on to scratch his itch as a magazine writer, and he's had a great career since then.
So we talk about that and how he didn't take my advice too.
We talked specifically about a recent piece he did for The Guardian digging into the past of Jay Shetty, a wellness influencer, sort of spiritual guru type, who has parlayed a compelling backstory into a lucrative influencer career.
This is one of thousands out there. He's got one of the most popular podcasts in the world and has interviewed President Biden, who himself is targeting influencers instead of the media.
I mean, I thought this was an interesting conversation because people like Jay Shetty are mysteries to me, a-and yet they're very famous to a, a lot of people.
And there's never been a time when so many people have been so famous and influential within their own niches.
A-and that comes with tremendous opportunities, but also challenges, because as John found when he dug into Jay Shetty's past, is some things didn't totally add up.
So we talk about that and also John's adventure in just getting this story published, because a lot of media is very gun-shy right now.
This was cited actually in Semafor recently in a piece that Max Tanney wrote about how news organizations have, quote-unquote, "lost their balls." And, and the reality is, publications never really wanted to get sued.
Nobody wants to get sued. Legal threats are always a good way to scare off media from, from covering stories. And these days, I think that pressure is even more acute.
I think this whole saga raises thorny questions about who is going to provide that kind of accountability journalism. There's a lot of excitement around newsletters and podcasts, but we just...
we don't see that kind of coverage for the most part that mainstream media has long provided. So I hope you enjoy the conversation, and again, if you get a chance, rate and review the podcast.
It really helps people find it. Now here's my conversation with John.John welcome to the podcast. I can't believe I'm doing a podcast with you. Why do you say it like that?
Well, because we worked together, and I didn't think we were-- we'd be doing, you know, a podcast like this together so many years later. It's true. When did we, when did we work together? It was, like, 10 years ago.
Oh, gosh. Twenty twelve to... or twenty thirteen to, like, early twenty fifteen. Yeah. Okay, yeah. I'm just dating it from the start. So you recently-- you, you went off and, and you became, like, a, a writer.
You, you'd left. I remember when you told me you were leaving and to-- for Mel, and you were like, "I really wanna do this. I wanna, I wanna, like, scratch this itch."
And I was-- I thought I was pretty supportive and- You were, yeah. You worked for Mel and then- I could tell you were disappointed at w-- as well.
Oh, of course I was disappointed 'cause you're a good reporter who, like, could write and actually understood ad tech, and that is, is very rare.
And, uh, for some weird reason, you didn't wanna continue to, like, cover the ins and outs of programmatic, and I personally, I just disagreed. Uh, but whatever. [laughs] To each their own.
[laughs] Anyway, you've gone on and had a great writing career, and you're the hardest, the hardest of all jobs is the freelance writer, and so I, I have total respect for doing that.
And you recently wrote, I would say it was this, like, semi-viral piece, and we had discussed it a little bit before you found a home for it.
But talk to me a little bit about it 'cause I think it, like, does say a lot about the media industry and where we are right now.
But let's, let's talk about this Jay Shetty piece, 'cause I'd never heard of this guy when you told me about, about the story. And, and I will just disclose right now, I was like, "John, who cares?"
You know, you weren't the only person to give me that feedback, but that was kind of one of the maddening things about- Wait, who is this guy? Tell us. Sure, sure. Believe it or not, uh, most people are like me. Yeah.
I mean, absolutely. And I hadn't heard of him until I got the assignment from Esquire to write about him. You know, I was contributing to Esquire pretty frequently.
I had written a profile about another influencer, and that was just kind of a day-in-the-life kind of New Yorker, Talking Town style, but a little bit more in detail and a little bit longer and broken out about this influencer named Tinx, who is a lifestyle influencer.
She has a Sirius XM show, and young women will call her for dating advice and advice on how to throw, you know, a Fourth of July party, you know, things like that.
And she's this up-and-coming millennial age influencer, and I'm very, to your point about how this speaking to how media works, I'm very interested in the current state of celebrity, and Jay Shetty is a perfect example of this, where someone can be so incredibly famous within a certain niche of the culture but then completely unknown to everyone else.
Yeah. Like, you know, the average- I'd never heard- The, the- I'd never heard these words together before in my life. But who is he? Who, who is he?
He is a former monk turned media personality and self-help guru to the stars, and tens of millions of followers. Sounds like a great job. I would, I would love to... I would love this job. It's lucrative.
What does it involve? What is his, what's his gig like? [sighs] He does YouTube videos, and he does- Does YouTube videos... speaking stuff, and he does live shows and- A very popular podcast.
It was the number ten most- Got it... subscribed to podcast in all of the country last year. So he's up there with Huberman, you know, Rogan, Call Her Daddy, and he's very big in the podcast game.
I think the podcast is how most people, I imagine, know him from, and I think they're a little oblivious to his backstory and how he came up in the world.
Okay, so his basic focus, shtick, depends on, on what you wanna call it, is that he's gonna use his background. He's got a compelling story. He was- Right... a wayward, you know, it's, it's a normal arc.
It's like, okay, we're, you know, I was down. It's like David Goggins. I used to be fat, and now I'm hard, and I- Yeah... do these crazy things, and I am going to help you become the best version of yourself.
Like, I just feel like there's a lot of flavors of this out there. Essentially, yeah.
His is a l-little bit different because the story he tells about himself is that he was going to business school on the path to become a management consultant and, you know, being just a pretty typical corporate white-collar guy.
But then his freshman year at Cass Business School in London, he sees a lecture given by a monk and is so incredibly moved by this talk that he decides to follow this man back to India, go into this Hindu monastery and ashram, and spend three years there and kind of, for a period of time at least, renounces the material world to pursue this spiritual path.
He eventually comes out of it and decides that his goal in life is- Wait, I can do both Right.
[laughs] His goal in life is to become grotesquely rich and famous sharing his wisdom with the world, and that kind of sets him off on a media career that takes him to Huffington Post and then as a solo creator for Facebook Video and YouTube.
Facebook actually plays a huge role in this, and Facebook's attempts to compete with YouTube as a place for video is really what kind of initially spurred his rise to fame.
So, but, I mean, his is a story of, to me, I call this, like, the information space, right?
Like, you've got all kinds of, in the professional publications that, that you write for, right, are, are dealing with this in that there are... Their competition is everyone and everything out there. Mm-hmm.
And the, the creators have an advantage in their, not just their cost basis, but these kind of personal stories that you don't have as a publication.
And now there's-Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these people out there, and they have amazing-- they, they get really big followings, right?
And, and that's why to me what's fascinating about it is that, like you said, I don't think we've ever had as many people be quote-unquote famous as there are today. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You know?
And e-exactly, and that was kind of what intrigued me about this person at first.
But to your point about how now publications are competing alongside this just countless number of influencers and content creators, it has fundamentally changed the dynamics of the type of journalism I do, you know, kind of glossy magazine profile journalism, where now these-- it used to be that people who were aspiring for fame, celebrities, and however you kind of calculate celebrity, they would need access to these magazines in order to get their message out.
Whereas now, a lot of these magazines seem, seem to think that they need to align themselves with these influencers- Yeah...
to expose themselves to their inf-- to the influencer's audience, which is pretty much exactly what Esquire [chuckles] wanted when they initially assigned me the story.
It ended up being something- Okay, so they assigned you-... entirely different... like the typical- Right... lifestyle magazine piece of, okay, this guy's got a tremendous number of followers- Mm-hmm...
and he's got tremendous reach, and so I mean, maybe this is, you know, it's interesting and stuff, but you got to attach yourself to the culture and, and- Correct, yeah...
now the culture is fragmented into these thousands of pieces, and he's just one of those pieces. But you, since you- But a very big piece, though...
I know you-- Yes, but I know you as a dogged, dogged reporter, so you started, you started scratching, and what did you find?
Well, so my initial plan was to go in and do a pretty straightforward piece of culture journalism. I didn't want it to be just about this guy.
I wanted it to be about what he represented in the culture, which is kind of this mainstreaming of mental health and how Eastern spiritualism is kind of being commodified by the West.
And, you know, the two were kind of melding in this very kind of amorphous wellness industry, which, you know, is become its own social media niche that's incredibly lucrative and has all these different tentacles and manifestations.
So it was gonna be about that because no one embodies that more than Jay Shetty.
So an interesting part about this, especially for your audience, is that Jay Shetty's publicists asked Esquire to have me specifically cover him in his new book.
They-- The woman I had pr- written about previously, Tinx, she shares the same publicity agency as Jay Shetty.
They liked what I wrote about her, and so when Jay's new book came out, and he was doing his book tour, they were like, "Hey, we know John's in LA.
Why doesn't he come out and cover the book event for our other client, Jay Shetty?"
So there's been this attempt to kind of portray me as this obsessed hater who has be-been preoccupied with Jay for many years and just waiting for my chance to take him down, which could not be any further from the truth.
Again, I didn't know who he was until his own PR team asked for me specifically to cover it, so... Okay, so and you found that his backstory is not all that it was cracked up to be. Essentially, yeah.
Well, the first thing I found out is that he was a serial plagiarist.
And again, the Jay Shetty story is a media story at its heart because like so many other famous social media personalities, he gained his following by pretty flagrantly taking other people's content and passing it off as his own.
You know, um- But what are we talking about, other people's con-- What, like, slogans? What are we talking, what kind of content? Somebody would tweet something out, or- Oh...
someone would post something on Facebook, and he would repurpose it on his Instagram as if it was his own original idea. Isn't that mainstream now?
I mean, E-Elon Musk is st- take- ripping off memes all the time and, you know, it's like- Why? I can't believe you're defending this. I understand that this is- I'm not, I'm not defending it.
[chuckles] You're literally defending it. I didn't think this was gonna get hostile- That's what you're doing... until the second half of the podcast.
I'm not, I'm just saying, like, you know, w- that, that, that scene, is, is that, like, is that a felony? Is it a misdemeanor? I don't know these days.
But y- I think it's a sign that, like, he's playing a little fast and loose, but what else?
What else, what oth- Totally, I- What other- And I think most people would classify it as a misdemeanor, but it's pretty ironic for a guy who preaches- Yeah... this gospel of authenticity- Huh...
to be out there, you know, stealing tweets from accounts that have a few hundred followers and, and, but also passing off Tony Robbins quotes as his own.
The type of person who's going to do that, I guess, thinks they're just not gonna get caught, which is so bizarre to me because it's so easy to get caught for plagiarism.
And the thing that was really bizarre to me, and again, making this a, a media story, is that this information about his plagiarism had been publicly reported for years.
It was originally broken by a YouTube comedian na-named Nicole Arbour, and yet all of these publications had written these just fawning, glowing profiles of Jay and conveniently left out or just kind of gave him a pass about the plagiarism, which I couldn't, I just couldn't understand.
No one wanted to really press him about it and have him answer to why he did it and what happened and, you know, if they did, it was just a very glancing, fleeting reference. Right.
So- And his, his story about the ashram was a little embellished, seems like, from what you- There's some holes in it, yeah.
It's not even clear that the lecture that supposedly inspired him on this spiritual path ever even occurred. You know? Yeah. As a-- After discovering the plagiarism thing, I went through all of his interviews.
I read both of his books meticulously, took very thorough notes. As you said, you know me to be dogged, and when I- Yeah... get on a hot scoop, I pursue it pretty aggressively.
And what I found is that he would tell different versions of this origin story, and his age when it occurred would change a lot.
Sometimes he was eighteen, sometimes nineteen, sometimes twenty, some twenty-one, twenty-two, and there were also other details that didn't ring true.
So in some versions of the story, he would tell, you know, in interviews, you know, like when he was on Ellen, right? He-He was a, a media darling within Hol- Hollywood circles.
So he's on Ellen and he tells Ellen, "Well, the only reason I went to this lecture is because my friend said we could go to the pub afterward," and, you know, implying that they were gonna knock a few back.
But then on his website he has a blog post saying that he quit drinking when he was 18. So why would he be so tempted by, you know, grabbing drinks at the pub if he wasn't even drinking?
There were just all these inconsistencies that started to stick out. So- Yeah... I take this information back to Esquire and I tell them, I mean, and I tried to be up- upfront.
I was like, "Look, I don't have this story nailed down.
It's a lot of smoke, a little bit of fire, but if you give me some time, I think I can chase it down and I would like to do this," and they killed it then and there. Hmm. I, I mean, w- d- do you think...
'Cause Max Tanney, who, he does a great job for Seven Four Media- Yeah... wrote about you. You were like, you were a main character in his piece, I think, about...
I think he's, he's basically like, "Big media's lost its balls," something like that. And the point was, look, under tremendous amounts of pressure- Mm...
you know, in football, they talk about, you know, making a business decision. It's like you're going over- Yeah... the middle- [laughs]... with the ba- the ball's a little- Reggie Waters...
out there, and you're just like, yeah- Yeah... for who, for what? Yeah. And you're like, "Hmm." And those business decisions, they get made.
And, and you probably all experienced them, but that these days making those decisions, I'm not saying this about Esquire specifically, but that the, these days we see mounting evidence as, as Max had reported of those kind of business decisions, you know, being made more frequently.
Mm. And it also is coming at a time when, you know, media's under attack, its credibility is under attack quite a bit by a lot of prominent people- Yeah...
with a lot of power and their own megaphones on Twitter and, and elsewhere delegitimizing media in some ways.
Absolutely, and I think Max did a good job of capturing the market forces and how they affect decision-making for a story like this.
I mean, what I was proposing was a months' long, very involved investigation that would require a lot of editorial resources and could possibly end up in litigation and would potentially require a lot of legal resources.
That's very costly, it's very resource intensive, very labor intensive for a magazine staff that's already spread very thin. I understand why they made the decision they did. I, I'm not saying I, I don't understand.
But they're not alone, right? I mean, you, you remember- Right... us, you and I talking, and you shopped this to a few people, right, a few different outlets. For sure. And, yes, this is...
You're not like some random dude off the street. You've got a, a track record and s- and you've written for a lot of great publications. So I don't know, do you think that the...
I guess it's really hard to say, but do, do you think that a lot of places passed on this for we're making business decisions? No.
I think a lot of people pass on it because editors tend to have kind of a myopic worldview. Are you talking about me? And, uh, this is not directed at anyone [laughs] in particular. I'm sorry.
I'm getting uncomfortable, John. Not directed at present company, but, you know, it was very much the same feedback that you gave me. It was like, "Oh, so a self-help guy might not be who he says he is?
His backstory might not check out? What's the big deal?" Yeah. To which I say- Gambling Casablanca, that's what I thought. [laughs] Yeah. It's- I just, I start from a position.
Let me just defend myself briefly, and then I'll let you go- Sure... since you brought, dragged me into this, fairly by the way. I, I just like...
And maybe sometimes that's like a, a curse of it is I just assume that, that most people in the self-help field are full of shit. No offense to the s- [laughs] the self-help people listening to this.
[laughs] And, and there's, there is an element, and I would like actually your take on this, of there's fake it till you make it that exists- Mm... in so many, so many fields and so many industries- Totally...
and so many people engage in it. And I think that the line between fake it till you make it
o- on one, which is like mostly kinda harmless and we sorta celebrate it in the culture and stuff, and then on the total opposite end of the spectrum is, is the F word, right? And like we saw... That's fraud.
We saw this continuum with, with people like Adam Neumann where- Mm... yeah, the early parts, it's like, yeah, you fake it till you make it. And then, and then all of a sudden it can go into...
And I think that line is very fuzzy in some ways where when- Mm... things are just hustling, right, and then when it's, quote-unquote, dishonest.
Let's leave aside fraud as a specific thing, but like when it moves into true dishonesty. Do you know what I mean? Totally. And, and I think it's totally fair to say it exists on a spectrum.
And I also understand the point that within this specific industry, there's kind of a different bar for legitimacy and, and authenticity, but not everyone in this industry is as big as Jay.
Jay got a, an exclusive 30-minute sit down interview with President Biden, the President of the United States in the White House. Yeah. A pre- Well, that's also telling by the way.
Totally, and this is a president who doesn't give many- Well, I saw Biden on Meet Cutes. Do you, do you do Meet Cute NYC? It's like this Instagram account. I don't even know what that is. It's adorable.
John, it's adorable. You gotta, you gotta follow this stuff. [laughs] Okay. I'll get on it. It like, this guy stops people on the streets in New York and he asks them how they met- Mm-hmm...
and he does like, you know, brand activations and whatnot with Hinge and... But he also did this one with the White House. It was basically a brand activation where it was like Jill and Joe- Jill and Joe. Yeah...
walking by. And Jill, he's from Philly. And walking by and is like, "Hey, can you tell us how you guy- you both met?"
And then they went into the story, and I think that is also telling, the fact that Biden turns down the pre-Super Bowl interview with mainstream- Right... I forget who had the Super Bowl this year.
And it's- Which is a standing traditionYes, standing tradition, and instead he's on these random Instagram accounts and he's talking with this self-help guru. Right.
The only podcast interviews Biden has done that I know of are Jay Shetty and SmartLess.
So the President of the United States will participate in the interviews with people so long as they're not conducted by real journalists who are gonna ask real questions you know?
And the story of Jay Shetty is a story of what happens when influencers and celebrities replace real journalists in the public sphere as public intellectuals. I mean, this is what we get.
Wait, are you calling yourself a public intellectual? I'm just saying, you know- That's okay.... a source of- You said it, John... a source of information. You know, this isn't trying to be high-minded about myself.
You know, until this story came along, you know, I was just kind of a middling freelancer, and now it's just kind of, this thing has taken on a life of its own, and gone- So what has the reaction to this story been?
I mean, I, like I re- I read through it and I was like, "Good for you, John, for getting this across." I got to admit part of me was still saying like, "Man, this is a lot for what" [laughs]
What, what still to me was at the time, I'm like, "Okay, this guy's like a little full of shit maybe," and I'm not sure about the crime, though. I'm not, like I'm not sure about the crime. You don't think it's serious.
Like, what's the reaction been? Well, like, I mean, there was one thing- Well, hold on, hold on. Okay. Let, let me address this. All right.
You don't think it's serious that when you're running a for-profit life coaching school and that school claims that it's a, that it is affiliated with certain universities in the UK, and then all of those universities say, "We have absolutely nothing to do with this organization, and we want our names taken off the marketing materials."
So when the school- Yeah... falsely markets itself as being affiliated with certain univer- certain academic and accrediting bodies, that's not serious? Yes.
So that, the business, because like when you move into using it in marketing materials in order to take people's money, you get closer along that spectrum to the, the F word, and then it becomes, in my mind, that becomes more serious than someone massaging a narrative.
'Cause those, to me, I, I guess it's just having heard so, so much nonsense that people make up about their backstories.
Like, I remember, you know, these DTC founders that always, it's like, oh, and they discovered some- Yeah...
problem that they needed to solve, and they just always happen to discover it between their first and second year at Harvard Business School. Right. And I'm like, okay, is that... You know. Yeah.
But this, what has the reaction been to that? I mean, is this... I don't know, what has it been? The overwhelming majority of people who have responded to me directly have been positive. They've thanked me.
Or, you know, the single most common reaction was, "I always knew it." You know, like, "There was always something off about that guy that didn't ring true to me," and kind of thanking me for putting in the work.
It was kind of just this open internet secret that there was something amiss about the guy, but no one could ever connect all the dots. And when I started to look into it, right, that was essentially what the task was.
And to the point about the life coaching school, I have received messages from several people who have gone through the life coaching school who feel like they've been misled.
One woman in particular felt like she was progressing towards a master's degree.
She was never able to go to university, and now this progression that she thought she was on doesn't exist, and she feels like she is out $7,000 and wants a refund, and was essentially falsely advertised to. Mm. Yeah.
So there is legit- There is news value here beyond just, hey, this guy's resume might be fluffed up a little bit. Yeah.
To me, it's so interesting with how many of these kind of influencer creators are out there and the power that they're wielding, because i- in some ways it's, it's, it's a lot smaller really- Mm...
than mainstream media- Yeah...
you know, was, and mass media, and I, I believe we're, we're sort of at the end of, of the mass media era, and what we're going to, whether we like it or not, is this very chaotic, very decentralized information space where there are all kinds of, all kinds of [laughs] entities, characters that are able to build these kind of followings.
You know, I was listening to Derek Thompson. It was like the best, the best media is, is to build a cult, you know, to some [laughs] degree.
[laughs] 'Cause you don't need that many people and, you know, the business models are, are pretty fairly established now with the cults, and that feels like something we're gonna see a lot more, particularly as the, you know, the business models of these influencers.
It's all about incentives and, and the incentives are there. Yeah. And there are just not enough reporters to keep them honest. Yeah. Not enough reporters.
You know, the reporters that are out there are mostly doing the daily churn.
This was an investigation that took from the time I got the initial Esquire story to the time I published was just a little less than a, it was just almost exactly a year.
And again, you know, who's gonna finance that with budgets being what they are at publications?
And on the other side of it, say you even do get some negative press coverage as an influencer, you can just flood the zone with content, and odds are a lot of people who follow you will be blissfully unaware of whatever potentially damaging press there might be out there.
Well, it seems like this is the, the strategy of this Jay Shetty guy, right? He's, he's just sort of ignored it and, and is plowing ahead with what he was doing before. I mean, it's kind of...
I see it, it finds me, like, regularly. I don't know if it's because the algorithms know that we're connected.
[laughs] But I see a l- I s- I see a lot of talk of it, at least in, in online spaces that I see, and, you know, I saw Max's article obviously, but is that-Is that the strategy basically that you see him deploying?
He's posting through it, as they say. [laughs] I mean, he's just going along as business as usual. But he employed this exact same strategy when he got called out for plagiarism years ago.
He hired a crisis PR firm, and they implemented an SEO strategy to bury the results. You know, right after that, you see he starts beefing up his blog on his personal website, publishing a lot, and just- Mm...
creating all this kind of content.
And it's fascinating that even on his Instagram, which I believe has the biggest following of any of his social media channels, you know, there have been people in the comments gonna be like, "When are you gonna address The Guardian article?"
And then people respond and be like, "What are you talking about? What, what article?" Or, or people will s- be, you know, characterize on what accusations. I take... I object to the characterization of accusations.
If you read my piece, you'll see we're not accusing him of anything. We just found hard documentary evidence that shows that his story, as he's told it, in certain parts, could not possibly be true.
So I consider them facts. They're not accusations. Yeah. I was saying this to you. Like, I think it's actually probably a good strategy, though, if you really think about it [laughs] from, from the other side.
Because- You will do any- anything to take this g- to defend Jay Shety. I, I try. It's amazing. I try. Yeah. [laughs] Actually, Jay's in the other room. Jay?
No, he's not, he's not here in the retirement community that I know of. Maybe, maybe next week he'll, he'll, he'll, he'll say that he was here.
Well, I, what I mean by that is I think what is different is a lot of people have their own megaphones, right? Mm-hmm. And again- Mm... it's not right or wrong. I just think that that is the reality.
And the posting through it is just gonna become the norm, and it is gonna be a challenge for this kind of accountability journalism. I guess, would, would you characterize it as such? Yeah.
And then again, it's worked for him previously, so why wouldn't he do it again? Yeah. I, I don't disagree with you. Well, he's got a massive footprint, right? I mean- Totally...
he has a, he's a media entity unto himself, and he's not rare in that regard, and that's why, you know, the numbers, and I went back, you know, the, the numbers of, of, of, you know, YouTube subscribers, Instagram, yeah, it's like really impressive, and I was like, "Yet I still, I never heard of this person [laughs] before," right?
And there's- Right... tons and tons of people like this.
And then also, you know, I think about it in the business world, you know, a lot of these, if you look at what's happening with a lot of Silicon Valley people and, you know, Bill Ackmans of the world, they're looking at themselves, they're like, "Look, I've got my own megaphone."
You know, they look at the media as the ones who are, they just wanna run these gotcha pieces, and I'm just gonna go, quote, unquote, "go direct." Yeah. And, you know, I think they have a point to some degree.
I do think- Mm... digital media, especially in its, you know, early iterations, when we were writing about it together at Digiday, was a little unnecessarily antagonistic at times.
If you look at my body of work, I am not a hit piece artist, you know? I did not go into this with the intentions of writing a takedown.
All the other profiles I've written have been pretty straightforward pieces of culture journalism.
So, you know, the idea that I went with, went into this with bad intentions is not true, but for a while there, people were. I mean, I think the lingering effects of Gawker's legacy are still kind of- Oh, yeah. Yeah...
you know, illegally- I mean, it's like I- Yeah... I'm very torn by Gawker and its, its, its legacy. I think a lot of times it's- Same. Yeah... painted too black and white when- Mm-hmm...
it, it really did engage in some horrific excesses, and, like, people go to the Hulk Hogan thing, but I go to the Conde Nast CFO story. There's no defense for that.
And i- that alone really, to me, they should've gotten sued for that. It bred a lot of... I don't know. It's just, it's a mixed legacy to me of, of, of- Yeah... of Gawker.
And I, I, I really liked a, a lot of, of what Gawker- Same. Yeah...
did and changed in how people went about their jobs, but in some ways I think it had a, a negative impact, particularly when it w- it's executed in a super ham-handed way, which I see in some publications.
I won't name them. Yeah. And it felt like there was some copycatting there, too. Yeah.
And you know, I remember when we were covering digital publishing, you know, the mid-2010s, all, you know, BuzzFeed, Vice, all these companies are popping up, and they're all getting tons of money, but they were all kind of the same, and they were all just kind of a, you know, approaching the news from the same very anti-big tech, very pro-left politically point of view that I think in a lot of ways people are like, "All right.
Well, it does breed distrust," you know, to a certain extent. And, you know, to your point about people wanting to take their own megaphones, I can see why they would want to.
You know, if they don't feel like they're gonna get a fair shake, and if a lot of these publications are very one-note and not even striving for intellectual diversity in their coverage, mm, makes sense. Yeah.
But what about you? Like, why... And so I'm, I'm interested in, you've stuck it out in this profession and in the hardest, I think the hardest part of the profession, right?
[laughs] I mean, the, the, the, like, you know, the freelance culture and, like, writer. Yeah. I mean, man, John, do you wanna, you wanna choose, like, a tougher path?
[laughs] Brian, do you remember when we were coming back from Palm Desert? I do. I got a really expensive ticket. I blame you. Yeah. That was an interesting experience.
If you ever see your boss, you know, getting his [laughs] lunch served to him by a California Highway Patrolman, it's a really weird- It's ridiculous... dynamic. It's another reason I, I don't like California. Yeah.
So we were driving back- [laughs]...
and I think I was still relatively new at Digiday, but you gave me what was excellent advice, and you were like, "The way to make it in this business is to cultivate a really deep niche and have this knowledge set that runs really deep."
I loved my time at Digiday. I learned so much- [laughs]... just aboutBeing a reporter but my passion in life was not to be an ad tech expert for my entire life. I, I mean, it was just...
I was happy to do it, and if I were to give advice to any young reporter, it's get a beat that you're not naturally interested in because it will force you to cultivate skills and to think about what makes a good story.
And I was very happy to do it, but you know, I remember you saying, "You know, it's very tough to be a generalist." And in my theory, I was like, "Shit. Well, that's what I wanna do."
[laughs] So my response was that you just gotta... I better be really- Well, John, I ta- I take the path of least resistance, so that was just- Yeah... for me. [laughs] Well, [laughs] I get...
In my mind, it was like, "Well, I better be really fucking good, and I better work really hard at this if I'm gonna try to take that path." So I know you meant to steer me away from this, but in- [laughs]...
in some ways, you kind of- I steered you towards it... steered me, steered me into it. Yeah, I mean, it was just when I- But, but I mean, when you think about it, there's, there's a shrinking number of outlets- Yeah...
out there that- Absolutely... want or can afford the, the type of work you wanna do, right?
And I just wonder how you think about that as far as, look, there's a lot of talk among journalists themselves about going direct and Substack, and I, I see a lot of people who are, who are flourishing in that field.
It's a different... You enter into, like, the, the Jay Shetty- Yeah... territory to some degree. Sure. You know? Mm-hmm.
You gotta start to be a personality and whatnot, and look, f- the freelance life is a li- is a grind, but a lot of the people who go independent, it's, it's, it's even more of a grind possibly, maybe a different type of grind.
Totally.
I mean, that's the irony is that the people who are doing the wholly independent route, such as yourself, who are on Substack, self-publishing, you know, building their brand, as they say, that's even more of a hustle than being a beat reporter, at least like it seems like to me as an outsider.
And you know, I, I guess, I don't know, maybe I'm just kinda old school, but the, the audience-building aspect of that has always really intimidated me, of starting a Substack, keeping the beast fed, and kinda having to self-promote that much.
It's just- Doing threads. Right, doing th- [laughs] getting, getting on the other newsletter stuff. You had a thread. You had a, you had a, you had a viral thread on this piece. I saw that, John. It was well, well done.
No, thank you. Give that a like. Well, you know. It's wonderful.
I got it kinda seeded everywhere, but y- you know what's interesting about this piece is now it's kind of taken on a life of its own where, like, people are making TikToks about it, and they're, like, two or three orders removed from the original source material, right?
They're responding to a response to a response of the original piece. But going solo, man, I, I don't know. And like, I never became a writer so I could worry about brand management, you know?
[laughs] That just doesn't appeal to me. And like, I- I mean- And I think, and, and- I can't, I can't say at Providence College in 1995 I was thinking about it either, but... Right, exactly.
It was like I don't wanna have to manage my brand, and I might... Honestly, until this, my career probably suffered because of that. I mean, I've heard from people, man, like, "You need a clearer brand.
You can't just be, you know, magazine writer for hire." And it's well, that's what I wanna do, so- Yeah... you know. Maybe I'm just- Good for you. Yeah. No, well, I mean, that's, that's...
Look, the field, the, the competitive field has, has shrunk a little bit because... Not a little bit, a lot. I have noticed that, yeah.
And, and to your point about this, you know, about this being a media story, there is this entire generation of reporters who came up through, you know, the Buzzfeeds and Vices of the world who don't know how to do anything but write about social media trends, and that's- Yeah, they're just on Twitter all day ripping- All-...
tweeting tweets. Yes.
All they've ever done is write about something, you know, and a certain trend piece that's based around what they're seeing on social media and digging in for a piece like this is, I don't know how many people have the chops for it these days.
So I think to, you know, I really have to credit you in, you know, kind of really pushing me, and when I was at Digiday, and to make the extra call, to go the extra step, to have a deeply reported original piece.
That feels like my Rocky training montage- Yeah... [laughs] portion of my career. Like, that was really- Yeah, Rocky IV. Yeah. It's just like that.
[laughs] You know, a lot of the incentives of the business, as you well know, trended in that direction during- Yeah... the traffic era. Right. It's not their fault.
They were told to do that, and they were rewarded for it. Yeah. And now I see a lot of publications that are trying to tack backwards, right? And they're like, they're going into the wind.
I'm not a sailor, but I think that's how it works.
[laughs] And that, that's really difficult because you've built up systems, you've built up y- personnel to meet personnel's policy, and you've built up personnel to do, to execute on that kind of content.
I, I have to say it as content. [laughs] Right. And then it's like, "Oh, no, no, we want, like, the deeply reported stories that people are willing to pay for and find meaningful- Mm-hmm... and build loyalty."
And it's, wait a second. You, you got the...
You can say that, you can say that in some North Star memo, but if you don't have the people to execute on it, if you don't have a culture of doing that, if you don't have a brand in the marketplace for doing that, it's gonna be tough.
Yeah. You know? It is gonna be tough, and sometimes it backfires, you know, kind of with BI. Yeah. I'm not gonna name any names. No, but BI is in transition.
Right, but they have good reporters there, but they have- Absolutely... and I applaud them for doing so.
They have been, you know, very ambitious in the reporting, but in a way that maybe they not, have not been previously, but...
And I can't speak to their internal structure, but if an organization, to your point, is trying to pursue this and they don't have, they haven't trained that muscle and they don't have the infrastructure for it, yeah, there's probably gonna be problems.
Yeah. W- so what are your... Just, like, a final topic w- is around magazines. Like, I think of you as, like, a magazine writer, right? A lot of your pieces are, to me, magazine-y.Yeah. Right? Yeah.
And that's kind of the style I've always liked to read myself, you know. Yeah. I, I know. I love, I love magazine writing. Unfortunately, the magazine companies are very challenged right now. I know.
And you see what's going on at Conde Nast and, and there's a lot of restlessness. Anytime you're marching on anyone's office, it's never a good... [laughs] It's not a good sign. Right. Yeah.
And then I saw, you know, Conde Nast just... When they call something, like, the Central Content Unit, I mean, that's just... It's not a good sign to me.
[laughs] I just, I don't think anything really unique, and I, I hope to be proven wrong, I just don't believe that something really unique and, and valuable and differentiated is gonna come out of something called the Central Content Unit.
[laughs] What even is that? What is its purpose? Well, you know, like, all of these, all of these publications wanna drive efficiencies because the numbers just don't work on the P&L. They just don't work. Mm. Right?
Mm-hmm. And y- you, you get to efficiencies by doing stuff like standing up a Central Content Unit that can create content one time and be able to tweak it and publish it.
I don't know if this is what's going on at Conde, but this is what I've seen repeatedly in the industry. You end up tweaking it in order to be able to feed it into different brands. Why...
If you have 12 different titles and you're doing the same piece about Kate Middleton, you know, there's no need to recreate it 12 times, right? Right. Yeah.
So if you're a McKinsey consultant, it's like, yeah, it's the first thing. You're, you're gonna... It's gonna be your first bullet point.
The problem is you end up getting to a point where you do away with the, what makes the brands dis- what made them distinctive in the first place, you know? Yeah. A- as for the future of magazines, I don't know.
You know, it's been kind of a rude awakening that the job I always dreamt about having as a kid is kind of, kind of slowly going away. You know, I remember there were always magazines in my house.
You know, my parents were longtime Rolling Stone magazine subscribers.
And that's when Rolling Stone was, like, big, thick, like, it was such a, a wide format an- and it just, it, it always just kind of spoke to me as something cool. ESPN The Magazine, which is no more- Yeah...
was very much the same way. I mean, these were the things that I, I was just very enamored of them at a, at a very young age, and I thought it would just be amazing to write for them one day.
As for a path forward for magazines, you know, people s- everyone says that long form magazine journalism and deeply reported things are dying. I have found the exact opposite to be true in my career.
All the short, low effort bloggy stuff has never really gained traction. All of my most read stories are the things that I spent a lot of time on- Yeah...
that were deeply reported, that were original, that were original ideas. You know, you talk so much about how content has been commodified. The only way to not commodify yourself is to have something original.
So I know there are all these market forces trying to kill- Yeah... magazine journalism, but all of the data suggests that people still want it. They want to read it. Yeah.
They want to read a- And, and, you know, the cra- Yeah. Yeah, the craziest thing is this has been, like... I remember when I was at Adweek, when was that? It was before twen- twen- 2010, right?
All of the most read stories on the website were magazine stories. We were creating all kinds of different, like, content on a daily basis. We had to do both, and the most read stories were the magazine stories.
And I was thinking to myself, and this was pre-Digi, I was like, "Why is that?" And the reason was because everything was happening so quickly, but you had a magazine deadline that was... It was...
You're like, "This is gonna be irrelevant." So you literally could not, you could not do the same things that were being rushed up on Mashable, uh, or, or on other sites and- Totally... so you had to do something unique.
It was a forcing function. So it was less that the, the, the content appeared like in a magazine, it was just the fact that the fact of the magazine process forced it to be differentiated. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the Shetty piece is a good example.
You know, there were this, all of these YouTube videos alleging to certain discrepancies in his story, to his plagiarism, all of these Reddit threads and Quora threads that I found of people saying, "Hey, his story doesn't check out.
I know him. I'm from his religious community. Uh, there are holes here." It wasn't until I kind of hunted him down and built sources and put it all together that it had, has had a real impact with people.
So, you know, people say long form journalism doesn't matter. Well, you know, you don't need it until you need it, right? Yeah. And so... All right. That's a, that's a good way to end it.
John, you gotta come back and we can talk ad tech 'cause we didn't get to it. [laughs] You know? Just like- Let's talk about the fun stuff. Yeah. Come out of retirement and talk- Yeah... a little programmatic.
Be awesome. Okay, cool. Yeah, and I've, I'll brush up on my alphabet soup. [laughs] All right. Cool, John. Thank you so much. I really appreciate doing this. Thank you.
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