Rise of the media artisan

Dear readers: The Media in 60 Seconds column is long dead but since many of you were so kind as to take an interest in my work and subscribe to this channel, I thought you might be interested in my new media project, Borderline, a podcast and newsletter for defiant global citizens. In it I talk about lives lived across borders, identity, belonging and what home even means. What am I doing building a whole media by myself? That's what the below column is all about. I originally published it on Borderline a couple months ago.

Subscribe to Borderline here for the full experience, become a member to support it and stay tuned to this (soon-to-be-rebranded) channel on LinkedIn as well. A new season of Borderline starts tomorrow!

By your reading this newsletter, dear readers, and by my writing it, we are part of a hot new media trend. Individual journalists are striking out on their own to create mostly newsletters, sometimes podcasts or a Youtube channel, without the backing of a larger news institution. They connect to and monetize their audience on their own. It’s not just you and me; it’s a thing. 

We are the darlings of the media trade press. We have stars (Casey Newton), people who did this long before it was cool (Thomas Baekdal) and a dearth of women. There have been hot takes about why this will revolutionize journalism and why this will undoubtedly fail. There have been sniggers from the safer corners of famous newsrooms, encouraging case studies about that one Patreon group that makes $12k a month and call-outs of the lack of diversity. I’ve even seen a Twitter thread deconstructing why the naming of this trend is “problematic.” We just need a plagiarism scandal and we’ll have gone full circle in about six months. 

Some call it the “passion economy,” others the “creator economy.” I prefer a different term. (Creating new names for existing concepts is also a thing in the media industry.) I like to call myself a media artisan. Here’s why. 

The allure of independence

Artisans are independent professionals. They usually work alone. They can take on an apprentice or collaborate with others, but it’s a gathering of individualities, not a corporation. That is the most obvious feature of this new media model. Journalists have through circumstances (times are tough) or through choice (I was that crazy one) severed ties with larger employers and become their own boss. 

I’m not here to speak for all indies, but I had underestimated how much this would matter to me. The rein to speak only for oneself, to decide where the day takes you and what work is worth doing is the true joy of the self-employed. Of course, the consequences of those decisions are yours alone too. But freedom once tasted… 

The joy of ownership

There have long been free agents in media. Freelancers are knights without banners, literally selling their lance — their pen in this case — to the highest bidder. Artisans, however, enter the arena under their own banner. It’s modest but it’s theirs. They own the means of reaching their audience. They’re not selling their skills to a business; they are using them to sell a product to a customer. (There is no hierarchy implied here. We each work as we like and as we can, and artisans are frequently also freelancers.)

Ownership is independence’s enabler. Without it, you are at the mercy of a slow-paying (or never-paying) publisher. You’ll only earn income from the time spent laboring, not from any assets, and there will be a ceiling to that. An artisan can — theoretically and it’s incredibly hard — grow passive income streams and a self-sustaining business. Come retirement, they own something worth something. 

The consequence of tools

Nothing is more valuable to an artisan than her tools. They fascinate me, lined up like soldiers over a workbench. The twelve different ones it takes to bind a simple notebook; the absinthe spoon, the berry spoon and the bonbon spoon, all slotted in different ways; the hollow needle that revolutionized medicine… (That’s my next newsletter by the way, if I ever find the time: Weird tools throughout history.)

Point is, in media too, tools are essentials. They and the artisans appeared concurrently. Substack, Patreon, Zoom, Descript, Squarespace, Anchor… not to mention cheap hardware and reliable internet. Without the technological advances of the last decade, this sub-industry would not exist. 

The value of staying small 

I’ve been called an entrepreneur a lot lately. Thanks, I guess, but I balk at the term, perhaps because it’s been co-opted by Silicon Valley. Scale is not the goal here. We are not the Buzzfeeds and Quartzes, the Vices and Axioses of the last decade. We are small businesses, not start-ups. If we take over the media world, it’ll be by the sheer number of us, not the size of any individual outlet.

For me, staying small means staying close to the work. It’s about resisting the alienation of labor by making sure that each day I make something concrete. Even the best corporations will overload you with processes, emails and meetings and eventually distance you from the essence of your work. That’s where burnout comes from. Artisans may not have the most influence or the most glory, but they are connected to craft and to community. That’s where I find meaning, for the moment anyway, and where I hope I can offer value. 

When I think of what I’m trying to build with Borderline, I picture the cobbler in my old neighborhood in Paris. He occupies a one-room shack by the side of an old railway, organized, he says, by a system only he can understand. His workbench sits by a large window so he can see the community and we can see how he works. No one would dare take their shoes anywhere else. He makes a perfect heel.

If the sound of this project appeals, do subscribe here.

Curious for more? Here are a few places where I've discussed being a media artisan: Hacks/Hackers London with Federica Cherubini, the journalism.co.uk podcast with Jacob Granger and the Baekdal / Plus podcast with Thomas Baekdal.