Back in April, The New York Times reported that an estimated 36,000 U.S. media workers had been laid off or furloughed—or taken pay cuts—in the first month of the pandemic alone. One of them was this week’s guest and friend-of-the-pod Drew Millard, a North Carolina-born journalist who got his start writing about hip-hop at VICE’s Noisey and has spent the past few years writing about things like golf, politics, and Hustler founder Larry Flynt.
Drew was working as a features editor at The Outline until early April, when he logged in to a Friday-morning meeting and received the news that the beloved tech, politics, and culture site was ceasing publication immediately—less than three-and-a-half-years into its existence, and a year after its acquisition by Bustle Media. (Read Jeremy Gordon’s heartfelt post-mortem here). That day, Drew joined the ranks of hundreds of independent journalists and critics—our co-hosts Andrea Domanick and Emilie Friedlander included—faced with charting a meaningful path forward within a culture media landscape that, even before the coronavirus hit, seemed to be teetering on the brink of financial collapse.
This week’s episode of The Culture Journalist hits extremely close to home—not least because Drew indulged our request to walk us through what it was like to lose his job in the middle of a pandemic, triggering memories of our own lay-off experiences (are you really a journalist if you haven’t been laid off?). Mostly, though, we chew over some of the tricker, more existential questions that are coming up for us as we navigate this strange new chapter in culture journalism: How do we maintain our passion for reporting stories and writing criticism when it feels like the industry is crumbling around us? What even is the role of a culture journalist in this moment of economic and political turmoil—and when the artists and industries we cover are struggling for survival themselves? And is Drew playing too much online poker?
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