Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
I've said it before, but Julie absolutely loves the idea of being a sports/social media personality, but either doesn't understand what goes into it or is just too plain old lazy to give herself a decent shot of achieving it.
For instance, she thinks her newsletter is sufficient as her only creative product, but doesn't realize that the big ones have a newsletter that is packaged with a podcast that's tied to a Patreon that feeds a YouTube channel which gets spliced to TikTok, etc., etc. And they definitely don't deactivate their twitter accounts, and most certainly don't exclusively post their hot takes on Blue Sky.
She seems to expect immediate, effortless success because, hey, it's out there, why aren't you watching/listening/downloading? She's literally the embodiment of George Costanza's "[you're watching it] because it's on TV!"
If Julie wanted to reach a large audience, she would do all those things, but I don't think she's ever really wanted a large audience. What she really wants is to be read by fellow members of the media class and turn that into some sort of sinecure: kind of like a Matt Yglesias for people who are very concerned about the WNBA. Her greatest success came when she was playing attack dog on Twitter for more established media personalities who couldn't be seen rolling around in the muck with fish profile pictures and JoshMcCownGroyper. Now that JoshMcCownGroyper has been promoted to vice president of Twitter and the scene died, she's lost her niche in the ecosystem.
Ethan Strauss is enjoying some success on substack doing very inside-baseball sports-media coverage, but that's because he says things that aren't popular with the establishment media and the audience finds him and pays him. Julie not only doesn't deviate from what the rest of the media class says, she enforces it.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.