Adapting is the only way to survive

I’m on TikTok now. A place I said I would never be. A place I never wanted to be. A place I never studied to be. But I’m here, and so are my peers. I keep thinking to myself, it’s almost complete: My influencerfication is nearly finished.

I bought a tripod and a mini microphone. I googled how to style hair and makeup. I practiced my smile, my angles, my lighting, and my posture.

When I was in college, a multimedia journalist was someone proficient in broadcast and print. Today, that definition has expanded greatly. Can you write a Substack? Can you produce a podcast? Can you make a Reel, a TikTok?

Do bylines even matter anymore?

Suddenly, I find myself sipping wine with my media friends, talking about our media strategies — jobs that celebrities hire robust teams to perform. We knew it was coming — and next year, the lines between presence, popularity, and prose will reach their final coming together. As young people, we talk about what it means to work our way up in an industry where the rules are shifting from under our feet.

Online, the hierarchies of the newsrooms don’t exist, and we all do what we can to keep our current jobs while posturing for what may or may not be the next one. As layoffs and AI reshape the media industry, it’s very clear that next year we will still be fighting in this online battlefield, even more than ever — even harder than ever — for the attention of whatever lies within the digital abyss.

One of my friends told me he used to read pretentiously prestigious outlets all the time, but now he just follows niche Substack writers who tackle those subject areas more deftly. There are so many layoffs, and with them, less and less memory in my Gmail. Surely, one day, someone is just going to buy up a bunch of Substacks and create one massive publication that covers a bunch of niche topics under one brand. Kinda like the re-bundling of streaming services.

I’m relaunching my Substack soon. It’s all part of the brand. It has to be. Just like quickly mastering the art of the podcast, and how to make an online video, and how to write social copy, and how to stay in this industry we all hope to dedicate our lives to. Make no mistake: I do find this as interesting and fun as the research and writing part of the job. But I can understand those who don’t.

I remember a journalist this year saying at a media dinner that front-facing skills will be more important than ever. It will be the one thing that news outlets can’t really replace with AI. I started telling younger students those sentiments, though my rehash is not quite as eloquent. The industry is not dead, it’s just evolving, and we are at a bottleneck that may or may not expand. In the meantime, just learn everything and be open to learning anything. That’s how it’s always gone, and that’s how it always will be.

So I find myself early in the morning googling, like a boomer, how to make a green screen appear on a TikTok. It’s harder than it looks, but I like to learn, so I sit down and figure it out. I couldn’t go another year without having video content on my profiles. It’s just part of the job.