Essay

Fear & Scrolling: Journalism's Creator Replacement Theory

Having lived through the 'blogging is a hobby'-era, this journalists vs creators "debate" feels like nostalgia all over again...

Sean Adams

29 Aug 2024 — 14 min read

Image Source: Adobe Stock plus screenshots from Reuters and Rolling Stone

Or How Content Creators Are Challenging Traditional Journalism and What It Means for the Future of Media.

With platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch propelling influencers to the forefront, the line between journalism and content creation has never been blurrier and in the past week, that lack of clarity has bubbled over into what you could call attack pieces from media institutions and journalists alike.

Having lived through the era when blogging was dismissed as a hobby, this "debate" feels like nostalgia all over again...

⏳ TL;DR Summary: After recording a recent series of Drowned in Sound podcasts about the future of music journalism, I found a lot of hope but I still agree with all the doomsayers that say journalism is in crisis, at least economically. However, content creators aren’t the problem and they may be the media's salvation.

Trusted, fact-based reporting is increasingly rare in an era of outrage farming for clicks and clout, especially in the right wing media ecosystem. Not just on digital platforms but on TV, radio and in newspapers chasing eyeballs for ads and pleasing their most radicalised readers has become the norm.

📼 If you only have a minute right now save my essay for later and watch this video by content creator and journalist Rachel Gilmore. Key quote: “journalism is about the practice, not the way it’s packaged.”

The annual Reading (& Leeds) Festival always gives me a big gust of nostalgia but perhaps not for the reason you might think.

Back in the summer of 1998, fresh from getting my GCSE results and sleeping in a filthy tent for the weekend, I returned home brimming with a feeling unlike anything else.

As a devourer of the music press, I had dreamt of being a music journalist but at that moment - giddy from seeing Deftones, Symposium, Garbage, Idlewild and so many more - I decided I didn't need to wait for anyone's permission and started to act as if I was one.

Seeing a bunch of bands in a field in Berkshire, I had found my calling.

Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?

On an unremarkable August morning, The Last Resort newsletter was born. I emailed out a pilot edition to a few hundred people who had kindly agreed to read it - these were mostly music fans from messageboards, chatrooms and newsgroups (the WhatsApp group chat of their time).

I then started to ring PR companies asking for promos and interviews. To be fair, not everyone laughed and a few people were really encouraging. My teenage eagerness subsided a little bit as call after call, I got a polite brush off.

Instead of waiting to get on their databases, I summarised news stories in magazines, compiled gig recommendations from the live ads, covered acts from the Evening Session, and spent what little money I had going to gigs.

Few in the music biz had email back in the late nineties, which made it hard to even show people what The Last Resort was. Using money from my jobs working in kitchens and in the local independent record shop, I laid out the best bits of the emails in Microsoft Word 95 and printed it out as if it was a 'proper fanzine'. I sent it to record label addresses I found in liner notes and posted copies to magazines and broadcasters.

Suddenly, a few promo CDs started to turn up.

I continued emailing and printing out the newsletter fairly regularly, diligently giving a few of my (probably quite earnest) thoughts on a pile of records. I was finding my feet as a writer and as an editor, experimenting with the format, feel and types of music that was covered.

There were no blogging platforms back then, so it was a bit chaotic. It was 'very early' as they say in tech circles and the word Weblog was only coined around this time. I had no website to begin with and there was no newsletter technology, it was just an email BCC'd from my AOL account to anyone who asked for it. And to my shock and that of my local newspaper, thousands starting trading it... and I've kept going ever since.

The newsletter grew and grew. A few people asked to write for it, including Matt Johnson who now manages Sugababes, who I'm sure once wrote about them in an edition of TLR.

Before long, it felt like email was old hat, so in the summer of 2000 I decided it should become a website and have a better name than an Eagles song that I liked because the Stereophonics covered it as a b-side.

After asking around on messageboards if there was anyone who could volunteer to help build it or would like to write for it, people said yes, and a few thousand instant messenger exchanges later, TLR was reborn as Drowned in Sound. Our first editorial meeting (if you could call it that) took place over warm pints of Carling sitting around at Reading 2000 and a few weeks later, the site was live with its first review.

All that said, the reason Reading Festival makes me feel nostalgic is because in 2003, as we reached our first million readers of DiS, I got my first accredited press pass. Five years on from my first newsletter, it felt amazing, not just to get access to the VIP toilets and some picnic benches, but to be able to walk up to musicians with a dictaphone and ask them questions. To have our photographer in the pit with a massive lens. To have the PR say thank you when we sent a links to all the coverage. Something had changed.

After years of trying to be taken seriously, whatever it was I was doing instead of going to university, it finally felt legit.

RUN DNC

Those early days of The Last Resort feel both distant and strangely familiar as I observe the current debates around media access. Just as I once faced skepticism from the traditional gatekeepers of music journalism, today's influencers at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) encounter similar pushback from legacy media. Why should anyone feel affronted by the idea that someone self-propelled, with millions of viewers, deserves the same access?

This tension is nothing new; it’s the same resistance I faced when starting out, revealing a broader pattern in the evolution of media. At the DNC, the narrative remains unchanged - only the players have shifted.

"Content creators" and "influencers" were given press credentials, allowing them to stand side by side with reporters from media organizations like the BBC, Fox News, and The Washington Post. This access enabled them to attend speeches, witness the party's nomination of Kamala Harris as the presidential candidate and conduct interviews.

Why the kickback then? There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, you have the purists who believe that to be a journalist you have to have studied the craft to receive accreditation. Partly this is to keep out people who are ideology driven (hello to all the secretly funded think tankers who crop up across the BBC, as if they are independent experts!) and therefore will not have the journalistic rigour of accuracy and honesty to their reporting - perhaps not something we're too accustomed to in the UK, given even Boris Johnson and Jeremy Clarkson could technically be classed as journalists (not by my definition, obvs!).

Then there's the fact degrees and certifications don't come for free, and many journalists are still paying off student debts to get them where they are today. In many ways it's understandable these journos are midly irked to see 200 or so people-off-of-the-internet with tripods, clip mics and light boxes, rock up alongside a row of decaying laptops. These reporters have paid their dues, working their way up to get themselves behind the velvet rope and near the seat of power, to do the journalism they always dreamed of, decades since they got started doing 4am starts, coffee runs and opening the mail.

There‘sa another group too. These are the people taking aim at influencers because they're being treated like VIPs by being invited to yacht parties. It's against a lot of journalistic ethics to be wined and dined by the people you're there to hold accountable. The suggestion is, like spon-con or hashtag-ad, many of these influencers are there to promote the candidates, rather than to act as journalists.

For many however, they can chew cheese sticks at parties and play video games with AOC whilst talking about trans rights.

Take a Twitch streamer like Hasan Piker, who at the time of writing has 2.7 million subscribers, - most major news brands aren't even on Twitch. It's a huge audience, especially compared to say NME's YouTube channel which has 400k subscribers or GB News' has 1.2m, despite millions being invested in it.

Much like establishment media outlets have space at the DNC to film news reports and record radio shows, there's space for Piker and many others like him to broadcast from. The only difference is that when he goes live to air from a creator lounge, he's not wearing a suit and tie, and isn't held accountable by anyone, except maybe the continued support of his Patreons and the fickleness of the attention economy, where people are spoilt for choice as to where and how to spend their time.

Throwing well-researched political streamers like Piker in with some imagined Paris Hilton wannabe "influencer", is the kind of bad faith conflation and sneering that I faced when Drowned in Sound first took off. To be honest, to many old men, stuck in their ways, we never really shook off that ire, even when we were reaching 3 million music fans a year.

I felt the same "ah bless, you do the tweets" from certain people in the industry when I went to work at the BBC, where pretty much every week my posts were reaching 8-18 million people across social media. One minute I was making videos of St Vincent shredding, the next interviewing Louis Theroux. Had I listened to people around me, at times you’d think that running social media channels I was a gloried intern, rather than a community building comms specialist.

Fear & Internetting

Back in the mid-2000s, I would regularly be invited to speak at conferences about music, media and "this internet thing" and often I felt alien-like. Sitting alongside someone who wrote for Q or who hosts a BBC Introducing show, time and time again the questions from moderators and audiences alike had a tone that what I was doing was amateur. It’s just posting online and that anyone could do it, right? At more corporate tech events, it was less about the format and more a sense of belittling because we didn't have some global conglomerate behind what we were doing.

The advice I got from peers and mentors was to choose my battles and keep growing a thicker skin, and eventually people would get it…

Reminder: Posting on the internet isn't just typing in a box, just like hosting the 6 O'clock News isn't just speaking into a camera. Making a 2 minute video go viral about a complex topic, like many creators do on a daily basis, requires so many skills and often a great deal of courage to deal with the abuse.

Confession

I always struggled with calling myself "a journalist" because I had fallen into the trap of believing the messages the world was sending my way.

I remember thinking anything I did was from the point of view of being a fan rather than a place of authority, as if I was an activist, championing the acts I love, even when I was breaking global news stories by discussing The Social Network film score and why Facebook sucks with Trent Reznor.

The more and more I have peered into the upper echelons of our media, the increasingly clear it is that the best journalists tend to also be the most impactful activists. Rather than blocking the entrance to arms factories, they create space for truths to be spoken and the important questions to be asked.

Of course, part of the reason I didn't take being called a blogger or fanzine writer as an insult was because of imposter syndrome. I didn't believe I had, let alone deserved, a seat at the table. For that reason, I have self-defined as a music critic, as the majority of my output is opinions about records, even if a lot that requires analysis, research and finding eloquent ways to structure my thoughts and express myself honestly.

As an interviewer and writer, curiosity keeps me asking questions and searching for fairness and justice alongside the need to find meaning in music. It's an endless quest to try to both enrich everyone’s appreciation of songs and to understand why sound captivates, moves, displaces, obscures, conjures, eases, exposes, wounds, heals or finds a way to soundtrack feelings we didn't even know we felt.

In many ways, a lot of what I have shied away from publishing since restarting this newsletter is capital-J, Journalism. The drafts are all sat here, unsent pieces looking into Coldplay and Taylor Swift's carbon credits or exploring the growing inequality of streaming economics. There are deep dives on corporate research into how to profit from superfans. Essays I've not even started because this is just a newsletter and I'm just a blogger... and how do I even begin a piece like “Why the music industry should shift from capitalism to socialism”?

I come from a working class background, and even though I had a column in The Sunday Times for 4 years, I have kept believing the people who rose through the ranks or were born into them, who framed what I was doing as 'not proper journalism'. Sure, there’s merit to the argument that arts journalism isn't the same as 'real news' but isn't that like saying Pop isn't 'real music' compared to classical or punk rock?

It's Snobbery, Stupid

Makena Kelly from Wired explained on their podcast that creators "can request some time slot for 15 to 20 minutes to be on this three-tiered creator-only platform, which is right on the floor next to the delegates... They have a beautiful vantage point of the stage. You can just take selfies with Joe Biden if you wanted to from there. And so, you see a lot of people doing that." It was hearing this that got me thinking about velvet ropes in clubs and how some journalists see themselves as having special access to write and record the first draft of history.

The reporters see these demarcated media areas as a rarefied space, that they've earnt the right to be in. Whereas these people from the internet, yeah they might have to research, script, host, source clips, edit, market, monetise, and hustle to create and sustain their "content", but that’s nothing compared to, erm, filing 300 musty words on page 22 of tomorrows newspaper. Sure, rip them apart for posting a quick selfie with a quote from the speech, that is reaching a million people, teasing their next video reacting to a line the VP just said.

It's all just snobbery, isn't it?

(Sorry, forgive me, I mean: it is all snobbery, is it not m'lord?)

In a brilliant alternative McTaggart Lecture to the TV industry, broadcaster and political firebrand Carol Vorderman talks about class issues in broadcasting and how anyone wanting to share the news no longer have “the filter of an editor or a producer.” Much like me starting a newsletter, they also don't need anyone's permission to get started.

Vorderman also went into the numbers in her lecture, obviously. She highlighted how this class divide, where just 8% of people who work in telly are working class, and yet 52% of the population consider themselves to be working class. That's a helluva lorra toffs setting the agenda and daughters of buy-to-let property tycoons deciding what the great unwashed would like to watch tonigh'. Those are the filters us internet kids are bypassing when we hit publish (although I would have loved two sub-editors to go through this piece and challenge me on my meandering to tighten this up…).

Whilst time spent online may be rocketing, traditional linear TV viewing is falling off a cliff, dropping 4-5% a year. Predictions suggest that by the next general election in 2029, only half the population will be watching broadcast television. Partly, this is because what is being made, who hosts the news, how stories are presented, how much time is given to debating what's on the front of the Telegraph or The Daily Mail, is out of touch with most people in this country. Carol’s lecture covers all of this and more.

Classed Out

One thing Vorderman’s talk underscores is that with the rising cost of living in major cities and global economic crises, the ability of those of us who don't come from wealth to pay for an education and work for little (or even for free for the first few months or years) is really not an option. It will lead us to a media class that is even less diverse than it is now.

However, anyone with a phone and an internet connection, who has time to learn the skills and their craft, can become a journalist online. Over time, they might find their voice or become AI-assisted in their deep research. They might discover a flair for script writing that leads to a whole other career. They may even become Pulitzer worthy YouTuber... or at the very least make the same amount as a minimum wage role whilst speaking truth to power.

A Theory

Let's go a step further than establishment snobbery and say the negativity edges toward conspiracy. While 'The Great Replacement' theory is nonsense, we're witnessing established media figures fear a 'Create Replacement', where lone wolves with iPhones replace traditional journalists and entire newsrooms adhering to editorial codes. These bedroom streamers challenge the idea that only those with professional equipment and studios can be journalists. I mean, who needs an outside broadcast truck and a branded mic muff anyway?!

The truth is important and you would think that journalists, spinning ever faster in the death spiral of the ad-supported newspapers and declining linear broadcast media industries, would favour reality over pointing the finger at upstarts. The bitter belittling of people who do a similar role, just without all the bells, whistles and protocols, seems ill placed, to put in mildly. I mean, you won‘t see Rupert Murdoch starting a Patreon anytime soon.

Taylor Lorenz, who was one of the first bloggers to get a White House press pass, put all of this us vs them-ness really well in her latest Substack post:

Many in legacy media institutions perceive the rising influence of content creators as a direct threat to their long-standing dominance, and their concerns are justified. The influence of content creators is part of a broader transformation in the media landscape that is dismantling the old guard, empowering millions who previously had no voice or influence in our political system, and creating vast new sectors of the economy—all while rendering many traditional institutions, whose business models were already crumbling, increasingly obsolete.

As I argue in my book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, which chronicles the rise of the content creator industry, this shift in our information and media ecosystem is one of the most significant and disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

To put it in terms forum users would understand, this^.

Anyone who dreams of being a journalist, whether it's because you listen to BBC World Service, gorged on Clarissa Explains It All, were moved by the She Said movie about Weinstein or just because you enjoy someone talking to you on TikTok about the economics of streaming, the why doesn’t matter. If you have been bitten by the bug, whatever format you choose to speak truth to power or share stories, be they yours, those of experts or those of someone you just met on the street for a vox pop, it's all valid, it's all journalism. Isn’t it?

And Finally...

The boundaries between traditional media and new content creation will continue to blur (or at least have their windows steamed up by all the friction for a while longer). The rise of influencers and content creators isn't just a trend; it's a fundamental shift in how stories are told and who gets to tell them. While the often pale, male and stale old guard may resist, the democratisation of media has the potential to breathe new life into journalism—making it more inclusive, diverse, and reflective of the audiences it serves. It may also become more actionable and inspiring, and who knows how that might change a world in peril.

Journalism’s survival lies in embracing change, ensuring it thrives in a world where anyone with a voice isn‘t afraid to contribute. The future of journalism may not look or feel or be anything like its past, but that’s exactly what it needs.

All of which is all a long-winded way of saying that if you got credentials to the DNC or Reading Festival or whatever that is for you, you are legit; don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise. And if they do, point that finger right back at them.

If you want to go deeper on the DNC influencers, the latest episode of the aforementioned Taylor Lorenz's Power User podcast is great: