In my early twenties, a huge part of my job was to convince older journalists in my newsroom to use social media. This is the kind of job that only a young person could have, not just because of my total facility with the social media apps I was proselytizing, but also because only someone with the hubris of an undeveloped prefrontal cortex could summon the confidence to tell a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic that her journalism would be immeasurably improved by her posting on Snapchat. I sincerely believed that, by the way.
I rarely managed to convince anyone to view social media as more than a chore; most of them saw it as a pedestrian medium that watered down ideas and discourse. It was a poison to our industry, a threat to everything they held dear. This was wild to me. The internet was clearly where the most interesting conversations were happening, and anyone who wanted to continue to have a career in media must accept that, and adapt. It turns out we were both right.
I promised myself I would never become one of them. And then one year became 10, and I aged out of the demographic whose consumption habits drove the Next Big Thing. I think I first heard of video podcasts in 2018; my sister, who was in high school at the time, mentioned a podcast she “watched” and I laughed at the anachronism. But as the years passed, they went from a strange, niche idea to the dominant mode of the industry I’ve spent my entire career in.