The OG influencers

When people ask me what I want to do, I find it more easy to point to a general industry that I want to work in rather than a role I actually see myself doing. Honestly, at both of the publications I have now worked at, I applied to every single internship listing that I considered myself to be even semi-qualified for (and I was pretty generous in what I decided to count as “semi-qualified”). I didn’t really care what I was doing, but I cared where I was doing it.

I am really drawn to media and publications because I love the idea of creating things for people to consume. Even if I’m not the creative in a situation, helping creatives to produce their art is super valuable and fulfilling to me.

When I worked for the Times, Mondays and Fridays were WFH, but since I was living in a small, boring dorm room, I would go into the office anyway. While I normally sat on the advertising floor, on those Mondays and Fridays when my team wasn’t there, I’d go sit in common areas scattered throughout the newsroom.

Before going to work there, I always imagined newsrooms to be busy and bustling. Putting out fires, metaphorically (maybe physically?), journalists running between desks, the sound of computer keys clacking… (okay, so I have been told I tend to dramatize situations). The reality was not quite as I’d pictured. In fact, I think the sounds of typing were most audible from myself (I’m a keyboard pecker… it’s embarrassing and entirely my own fault for not paying attention during elementary school computer lab. Plagues me to this day.)

Despite the newsroom not living up to my imagination (and probably for the best at that) I found I enjoyed working on that floor because I loved the idea that I was surrounded by interesting people doing interesting things. The journalists were as good as celebrities to me, a byline synonymous with a coveted award. Sharing the same space as them felt like an honor, even if my designated “space” happened to be eight floors above.

It’s not even that I wanted to be a journalist. I wasn’t into yearbook or the high school newspaper or anything like that. Journalism itself, however, has always been very interesting to me.

My first year at UVA I took one of my favorite classes that I’ve ever taken: Point of View Journalism. In this class, we analyzed the works of renowned journalists like Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. These names and many others showed up in the massive packet we picked up from the wine shop on Elliewood that doubles as a used bookstore. We began our first class with our professor asking us, “Is good journalism objective or subjective?” (a question that could become a conversation for another time…).

So to reaffirm, I was interested in the craft of journalism, if not necessarily doing the crafting of said journalism.

I’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to work for two incredible publications with extremely talented journalists. They are tastemakers. They craft the cultural conversation. They tell people what to care about and why they should care about it.

Journalists are the OG influencers.

I say OG because the powers of influence are shifting, just like the way we consume media is shifting. The girl you know with a “great sense of style” might sooner be familiar with the handle @acquiredstyle (aka Brigette Pheloung) than the name of a fashion writer for Vogue. And in this day and age, fair enough (did you see the butter yellow Dairy Boy apron dress she just got engaged in? Yeah… add to cart).

Now I love to play this game where I think I’m cool because I delete TikTok for months at a time. Except I’m not actually that cool because then I will occasionally redownload the app in a moment of weakness (boredom), doom scroll intermittently for 48 hours, self-diagnose screen addiction, delete the app, and open up Instagram reels instead. Cause that is so much better (not).

What I will say is this: whether it is TikTok or Instagram reels, I am constantly being told to BUY. And it’s more often than not, entirely subtle.

For instance, the command to buy is masked by a “Day in my Life” where a visibly put together post graduate starts her day attending an already overpriced NYC workout class in a Beyond Yoga set. And then I think, wow, now if I had that workout set, it would make my incline walks in the basement of my NYU summer housing dorm literally 100x better (Arden… please).

Or, the command to buy is masked by a trending sound and a European backdrop. And then the thought goes, okay, but that Damson Madder dress would just get so much use, completely unlike all of the other sundresses I already have in my closet (?). Then there’s the OOTDs and hauls and ShopMy and LTK. And if it’s not linked by the creator, you better believe someone in the comments section has already found it (thank you for your service).

This is getting lengthy, but bear with me.

We went from the influence of journalists and publications to the influence of social media and content creators. But now, there’s a new influencer. And it might be the biggest disruption in consumption yet.

Let me explain.

In my current role, I do a lot of AI research. Eek, I know. At the mention of AI, I do hope you read on. Because for many whom think it sounds interesting, there’s also the many who’s eyes will start to glaze over. Maybe it’s because you find it boring. Or scary. Maybe you haven’t gone a day without hearing those two letters strung together since November 2022 and wish everyone would just shut up about it already.

The publishing industry, like all industries, is already being drastically impacted by this technology. I won’t get into SEO or copyright or click-through rate… but I do want to talk about brand dilution.

Back in the day (*my mom is rolling her eyes) if you wanted to know most things, you turned to publishers. From what’s going on in the world to what lipgloss stays on the longest to what are the best substitutes for butter (and can butter even be that bad for you?). Plug any of those prompts into Google (or your preferred search engine- unless it’s DuckDuckGo… iykyk) and you will be fed up links from your favorite and most trustworthy sources that will tell you more or less what you want to know (you just might have to scroll a little once you open the link… but Google said it’s in here somewhere, right?).

Well that’s the idea.

But we are the convenience generation! We don’t really want to read a whole article to get to our answer, we just want the answer.

Enter ChatGPT.

Now we’re going, hey, guess what? Now, I don’t need to click any links at all. Goodbye scrolling to find my answer, dodging ads and the occasional paywall. ChatGPT told me which lipgloss stays on the longest, and that’s that.

That’s great and all, but last time I checked, LLM’s don’t wear lipgloss, do they? So then how does it really know what’s gonna stay on the longest? Oh I see, because they scraped that information from publishing sites. Got it.

Now some people do still care about the source of their information. They aren’t gonna trust a non-lipgloss wearing robot. They trust Allure. They trust ELLE and Cosmopolitan. They’re even starting to trust the random person who shows up on their For You page with enough likes. But that doesn’t matter. The future of media consumption is changing, and publishers will need to decide what that means for the future of them.

If you read the news, you will learn that many publishers are engaging in licensing deals with AI companies. It sounds great, because at least they are getting paid for all of the IP and content that the bots are scraping and regurgitating to users. But what does this mean for the brand? What does it mean for publisher-audience relationships?

For some of these media companies, their brand identity is super important. People pay a premium to subscribe to them based on their reputation, their name. But is the future of search going to mean that publisher’s become invisible suppliers rather than audience facing brands? When does brand disappear?

Who’s the influencer now?

Whole lotta questions, not a whole lotta answers, I’m afraid. On that semi-dystopian note…

Love always, Arden