There’s a lot of fresh faces in here. Welcome! Thank you for joining this little pocket of the internet I’ve been creating over the last sixteen weeks—come on over, there’s plenty of room.
Several housekeeping notes. First, I’ve been using this space to check in every Sunday with some of the thoughts that are stewing and things I’m seeing within my purview—in particular, the relationship between creator culture and social infrastructure.
Some of my favorite blogs of late have included “A Hot Wind Blows,” “The Irony Epidemic,” and “How to Live a More Whimsical Life” (you can read those here, here, and here, respectively). These have served as a bridge into my next big project; I’ll explain more as the month progresses.
Second, I’d like to address two white lies from Wednesday’s surprise blog. It was not, in fact, the last email you’ll receive from me here. I intend to continue sharing new essays every Sunday afternoon, and eventually, maybe even an additional weekly entry (given you all expressed interest in my latest poll).
I also said I would be taking today off—which I did. Sort of.
Below, you’ll find my Letter from the Editor from November ‘22. It was featured in Edition 4 of the indie zine I started, Creator Mag, the last edition I shipped before joining Publish in 2023.
I was rereading Mag.4 recently over the holiday and thought a lot of the ideas still felt pretty relevant. Given it’s been two years—I was a spry twenty-three then; *cracks back* I’m a wizened twenty-five now—I figured it’d be interesting to look back at (an edited and condensed version of) the letter with you, too.
I still feel the same way about most of the ideas presented here. Others, not so much.
My third and final piece of housekeeping…
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Grab a plate of leftovers and a warm seat by the fire. Let’s get into it.
— NGL
I spent the whole day in my head / Do a little spring cleanin’ / I’m always too busy dreamin’ – Mac Miller, “Good News”
I’ve been listening to a lot of Mac Miller lately. Given how many times I’ve played his music as I write, I might as well owe the late rapper a royalty check from our sales.
The reason I connect with Mac and his music so much might be because of the birthday, January Nineteenth, that we share. The more realistic explanation is the themes he aimed to explore through his creative work, along with his natural disposition.
Friends and family described Mac as someone who couldn’t stop thinking, constantly agonizing over every small detail and sinking deeper into his process. The rapper was thrust into the limelight at eighteen, and though the outside world deemed him to be a thorough (albeit messy) success story, he often found it hard to see what they saw—all the way up until his unfortunate passing at just twenty-six.
Mac wasn’t one to give many interviews, as he preferred to express his thoughts and feelings through his music and leave the rest up to interpretation. His last two albums, Swimming and Circles, explored how he felt stuck in life, and the process of learning how to move on from his problems in order to improve himself as a person. The albums join to form a continuous loop, as the former starts right where the latter ends, showcasing the constant state of reinvention we go through as we move forward in life.
When making all of the pesky decisions within a creative project, after a months-long sprint, we oftentimes have to go right back to the drawing board. For a product—media—that’s so inherently outwards-facing, it can be difficult to explain our progress to outsiders (even those we’re close to) when it might seem like we’re stagnating. Further, we don’t want to appear as if we’re acting erratically as we redefine and refine our creative output.
The boring rebuttal to this is quite simple. A lot of building the thing—whatever that thing is—consists of testing a hypothesis with the information we have, then iterating from there. Still, stop me if you’ve ever heard the words “iteration” and “sexy” in the same sentence.
Maybe I’ve been way too stuck in my head because I’ve been publishing Creator Mag for almost a year now, and with that fundamentally arbitrary anniversary comes all sorts of preconceived notions regarding what registers as meaningful progress. The truth is, I took a swing last fall, with the crazy-bordering-on-irrational belief required to launch any sort of early-stage venture. And when the doubt starts to seep in at a more frequent clip, it’s hard to not let it overcome pretty much everything, regardless of what the rational voice has to say about all of the tangible small wins we’ve experienced.
In the creative world, sometimes, the only way we know how to flush all of those swirling thoughts out of our heads is through our art. For Mac, that was his music. For me, it’s my writing.
More specifically, my aim since the beginning has been to use these letters as a method of sharing the human side of making this damn thing, the vulnerabilities and insecurities that are just as much an ingredient as the dedication and irrational belief. It’d be easy to wield this space as a tool, a mirage, telling you—the reader—how this is going to be the next hundred-million-dollar media startup, and listing off all the big names who have come into our orbit in the last year.
But that’d be doing all of us a disservice. We’re not here purely to profit off the likenesses of the creators we collaborate with. There’s more to our mission than that.
After publishing Mag.3, I sent out a feedback form, asking questions about the zine’s quality and value as readers perceived it.
Asking for this type of constructive criticism requires putting the ego in check in an effort to improve our underlying output. And I’m glad I did, because one suggestion has guided a lot of my thinking towards our next phase:
I think you have to consider what “meta creator” media companies in the space can / should be doing better, and go after that…it will need to be about more than just these “drops” from time to time, but actually starting to consider how people want to interact with the stories behind the stories.
It makes sense. Humans connect with other humans. Audiences nowadays expect to form a connection with not just the story, but the storyteller themselves. That’s why vlogs have evolved over the years into an incredibly popular and intimate vehicle to launch creator careers across industries.
Plus, the stories I’ve chosen to tell up until this point have been serving two purposes: to explore the contemporary human condition, while also sharing unique roadmaps in creative entrepreneurship. We’re contextualizing internet-centric societal trends through the lens of the curators and tastemakers of the moment, charting the rise of niche media ventures—now being built with a democratized slate of tools—and the individuals who innovated through the power of their voice.
In less abstract terms, as creator careers become the New American Dream, I believe it’s important that we not lose sight of the real people behind all of the numbers and hype—both those in front of the camera, as well as the small armies of fans they’ve raised.
With Dylan Lemay, ten years of scooping ice cream showed how no one’s truly an overnight success; mix in a defined niche and first-person film style, and you’ve got one hell of a sundae. With Cleo Abram, her experience at an established media company taught her world-class production skills, instilling confidence in an independent venture that was supported by interactive audiences from the jump. And with Steezy Kane, meeting viewers where they’re at—pranks—offered him a springboard for a career in Hollywood, as he grew up in front of a community that will now follow him wherever he goes.
Still, at a certain point, I do question how to approach the conclusions of each story. How can we evolve from the well-worn clichés—of entrepreneurs working hard and pulling themselves up by the bootstraps—to deliver real commentary, commentary that can lead to meaningful dialogue about our rapidly digitizing world?
That’s where I keep coming back to us. It’s the meta thing—if people want to invest in the storytellers just as much as the story itself, shouldn’t we take you along for the bumpy ride in building a damn magazine? Shouldn’t we do a better job of showing you those vulnerabilities and insecurities so you can be a part of our journey, especially when the small wins and irrational beliefs pay off in a big way?
Isn’t that what the creator revolution is all about?
The balance that’s then necessary to strike is between prioritizing trust with the creators we cover (a focus since the onset) and inserting ourselves into the world we’re crafting (a delicate feat without coming off as, for lack of a better word, clout-chasers). It’s easier said than done; after all, this whole thing was founded off the hypothesis that creators deserve to be taken seriously, and we therefore don’t want to push our subject out of the spotlight we’ve set up.
Nonetheless, iterating on that original hypothesis is, again, necessary. A re-evaluation of our approach to video is the first thing on the docket, figuring out how to engage audiences that might not be ready to consume longform writing. A hard look at our distribution is in order, especially if we not only want to keep our drops quarterly to ensure quality—but also want to engage folks in between seasons. Events and gatherings are a route that people have shown interest in, too; figuring out how to enhance our stories through physical spaces is a daunting hurdle I can’t wait to tackle.
Per usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. Directly in front of us, this season features a collection of stories and essays that aim to tackle the circular nature of creative pursuits, finding beauty within the process of swimming. The first cover, a self-taught musician who didn’t find his true calling until he grew and sold an award-winning podcast—all while raising a family. The second, a sketch comic born out of 2010s meme culture, taking several sharp pivots with his million-subscriber YouTube channel…only to publicly say goodbye.
Past this season, there will be time to refine our output, and redefine what it means to run a creator-centric magazine. With those decisions will come a whole new slew of problems to solve. Who knows—maybe I’ll be allocating more time to Premiere Pro and After Effects than Google Docs. Video editing was my first love, after all.
And if the thing that comes out of all of this—the flights and train rides and photo shoots and trips to USPS and hours and hours of interviews, all of which I could’ve just mailed in at any moment yet chose to undertake in pursuit of something more—amounts to nothing more than an eventual story I tell my grandkids, a Michael Lewis-style romp through the creator world, then so be it.
At least I’ll be certain it was worth the swim.
When I started this blog in August—with a format lifted from Peter King’s “Ten Things I Think (I Think)” column at that—I really approached it as a way to hone my craft while reconnecting with peers, friends, and family alike.
I’m proud of the weekly cadence I’ve kept, and I’m looking forward to sharing more original essays and interviews soon enough. I’m traveling back to Chicago this week for the first time since I moved in 2022, then I’ll be back in your inbox next Sunday with new things to think about.
Until next time.
Thanks for reading! Shoot me a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—I respond to them all.