KIRBY just dropped her first EP last year and two of its tracks are already on the Insecure soundtrack. Before that, she wrote songs for Beyoncé, Kanye AND Ariana Grande. So let that be your incentive to click into her “Can we be friends,” a big old soul track that calls in an organ and some power drum hits to convince an ex to stay friends. (You’d sort of have to say yes, right?)
Let’s all congratulate former-independent-newsletter-person Delia Cai on one of her first pieces as a staff writer at Vanity Fair, all about The Gated Internet, a place where fans are ok but people who love you enough to pay you are really where it’s at. Now that the platforms (twitter substack etc) allow you to segment your audience into dabblers (free followers) and superfans (people who pay), she explains, we’ve basically got two tiers of content: one designed to rope people in, and another to provide substantial value. And the kickback of all that for the rest of us is that, for content creators and regular humans alike, there’s an increasing need (and ability) to differentiate between the online people who are generally aware of your presence and the people you’re actually connected to.
On that note, anyone who wants to join the Lorem Ipsum inner circle (which bucks the trend in that the content you get there is identical to what you see from the outer circle) should do that today— I made you a discount!
Oh, you’d like MORE NY media gossip? Happy to oblige. Off the Record, the new venture by ex-New-Republic/Gawker-guy Gabriel Snyder, just published some very intriguing reporting* that we can’t access because it’s paywalled at $99 per year, which seems steep without even a sample article to go by, although Choire recommends it. That was a long and obnoxious sentence and you don’t even know what the article’s about yet SO, without dropping a hundo, here’s what we know: “A small army of underpaid editors is quietly lurking behind the scenes of the newsletter platform dedicated to ‘writer autonomy.’” (That’s Substack! The platform we’re all using RIGHT NOW.) As you can see, I do not have a secret editor, nor do I have inside info on this one. Who’s got a login so I can decide this piece is too good *not* to pay?
*not by Gabriel but by my small-liberal-arts-college classmate Julia Black
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