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Out With the Old and in With the New
The traditional way of covering the influential world of online video just won’t cut it anymore. So we’re doing something new.
Ever repeatedly slammed your head against a wall?
That’s what it feels like to be a digital culture journalist in the year 2019.
Big things are happening, and massive changes are afoot. We see platforms like YouTube, Twitch and TikTok in the headlines on a near-weekly basis, but dig beyond the headlines of most coverage and… well, you won’t find much.
I focus predominately on YouTube, and have made a significant chunk of a living trying to explain how this platform with two billion monthly active users has an outsized impact on the world — and how we’re sleepwalking into it taking over our lives without thinking critically about it.
But the reality is that the stories published by the number of excellent publications I work for are just the tip of the iceberg of what I pitch to editors.
It’s part of the reason why I ended up writing a book about YouTube: to better educate people about this massive platform that has an enormous impact on our lives, but we haven’t really considered in any depth. And judging by the reactions to its publication (Jamie Bartlett, one of the most clued-up people about technology, said: “Read it — but prepare to be shocked by how little you know about YouTube”), there’s an enormous knowledge gap.
It should be fixed. But doing so is difficult.
I reckon that — when suggesting stories about YouTube, I have a 10% success rate. That’s a level I’ve not had with my general freelancing career since about 2012.
The reasons are multifarious. Some of it is that I’m pitching stories before they break into the public consciousness: part of the job of digital culture journalists is to try and see what trends will be big in the near future, and to explain them to an audience — and with something as bizarre and big as online video, you can often spot the first ripples of a…
