What is User Magazine?
User Magazine is an independent media outlet on Substack that keeps you up to date on the online world.
User Mag is founded on the belief that the real story of technology lies with its users. Instead of focusing on corporate earnings and boardroom conflicts, User Mag covers how people are using technology.
We document the people and movements that shape the internet – from weird online phenomena, to under-the-radar trends, to platform developments, to policy initiatives, to the powerful forces that shape our online world. It's about who has power on the internet and how that power is being wielded.
Right now, User Mag is written by me, but with enough financial support I would love to build out a network of paid contributors.
What does that look like?
User Mag will arrive in your inbox 1-3 times a week. It will primarily take the form of 600-1200 word articles but it will also feature deep dives, interviews, content recommendations, video series, interactive features, and more.
You can take a read through these recent pieces I've written on top of my regular work over the past few months to get a sense of the stuff I'll be publishing:
The TikTok duo remixing your favorite political soundbites (NYT published a story on this angle just a few weeks after my newsletter ☺️)
Stop letting right wing influencers cosplay as ‘independent’ media
Why subscribe?
It costs money to produce high quality journalism. I have zero institutional investors or corporate backing and your money keeps User Mag alive.
Your funding allows me to publish the type of reporting on the internet that has become increasingly difficult to do in corporate media.
Here's what you get as a paid subscriber:
Join the conversation with commenting privileges
Access to subscriber-only chats
Exclusive, deep-dive analysis pieces
Subscriber-only Zoom events with interesting online figures.
Your $7 a month allows me to cover my rent, food, and significant healthcare costs. Your money goes directly toward a sprawling array of costs associated with operating independently including design work, editing support, subscriptions to research materials, internet costs, data plans, travel for reporting, and more. It covers things like my laptop and phone bill. Your support pays for the time I spend writing and editing and generating ideas, along with responding to your emails and feedback.
If you want to opt out of purchasing a subscription through Substack for certain reasons, email me on hello@usermag.co with "alternative payment" in the subject line. If you'd like to gift a subscription to someone click here.
Why can't you do this work at a legacy media company?
Many reasons! One issue is that it's increasingly difficult to communicate the urgency or importance of certain stories to bosses who have zero understanding of the world I cover. In my years in legacy media, countless major stories and scoops on my beat have sat unpublished or been killed. I want autonomy over what I publish and deem newsworthy.
Reporting on the attention economy also requires navigating the attention economy, and legacy media does not allow for that. In the decade since Gamergate, leaders of all of these old school media orgs have learned nothing about how the internet and media itself can be weaponized. They constantly misunderstand manufactured outrage cycles and make decisions that feed into bad faith attacks on me and my work. This makes it significantly harder to report on bad actors online and negatively affects my reputation.
Legacy media companies are also very rigid when it comes to the format my (or any reporter's) work can take. This makes sense, they're big, sprawling organizations, and they like people to work within certain boxes. But as someone who's always preferred multimedia journalism, it's something I have found to be extremely limiting.
I want to work in a more diverse range of formats than legacy newsrooms allow. I don't want everything that I cover to have to take the form of a written story. I want to produce YouTube series, livestreams, visual and audio journalism, and leverage new tools and platforms. When I worked on the social media and audience development side of things, I was constantly able to experiment with new formats, but once I transitioned to full time reporting my work became limited to writing. I'm excited to get back to experimenting with new ways of storytelling!
I also want to inject more analysis and perspectives into my work. I don't want to cover things like online smear campaigns, or bad legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, for instance, and pretend to be neutral. I believe the legacy model of "view from nowhere" style of journalism is outdated. I will always be upfront and honest about my perspectives and where I’m coming from. This transparency is, to me, essential for trust in journalism.
What have you even written!? I've never heard of you
I am the author of the bestselling book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, which covers the rise of the content creator industry.
I was previously a technology columnist at The Washington Post and a technology reporter for The New York Times and The Atlantic. My writing has appeared in New York magazine, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, Marie Claire, Fast Company and countless other outlets.
I've profiled a 15 year old meme king making tens of thousands of dollars from his bedroom, exposed the Birds Aren't Real conspiracy movement, and revealed years of abuse and sexual assault allegations against YouTube star Jake Paul. I broke the story of then presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg running sponsored content on meme accounts and have published numerous pieces documenting the ways Kamala Harris' campaign is leveraging the internet.
I was first to profile Khaby Lame, the most-followed TikTok star in the world. I have written extensively on the increasingly dystopian ways people are pressured to commodify their lives online. When the Covid pandemic hit, I uncovered a vast network of e commerce scams.
My reporting has shaped the language we use to talk about the internet and I'm credited with popularizing the terms "ok boomer", "cheugy", "algospeak" and "nimcel" through my stories.
I published a story revealing the 14 year old girl who created The Renegade viral TikTok dance, setting off a wave of discussion around racial disparities in the influencer industry. Later that year, I helped produce the Hulu documentary "Who Gets To Be an Influencer?" based on a feature she wrote about the first all-Black TikTok house in Atlanta.
I have reported extensively on online violence and its real world consequences. I wrote about how student journalists are being driven out of the profession due to harassment campaigns and reported on misogynistic harassment campaigns against women YouTubers. I wrote a 6,000 word feature on how online violence is silencing women journalists in fragile democracies around the world. I exposed how an online hate campaign led to the dissolution of Biden's disinformation board.
I exposed Elon Musk's lies about a stalking incident, revealed the exploitation child influencers face due to lack of legal protections, reported on Facebook hiring a GOP consulting firm to smear TikTok, the app Triller screwing hundreds of Black creators out of $13 million, and Biden briefing TikTok stars on the war in Ukraine. I was first to interview Twitter star Dril on the company's future after Musk took over.
Along with my reporting partner Drew Harwell, I produced a large print package examining labor issues in the the creator economy, MrBeast's economic effect on his hometown of Greenville, NC, and the influencer industry's impact on the news media landscape among other topics.
I broke the story of the first influencer Senate candidate trying to reform campaign finance laws to make it easier for content creators to hold elected office, and documented how the State Department, NATO, the White House, and members of the Senate are trying to leverage influencers.
I've covered the TikTok ban extensively, debunking disinformation about the platform championed by lawmakers and the media and covering its potential economic and social impact. I wrote about Grimes developing an AI toy that will interact with your child, summer camps teaching children to become YouTube stars, and how YouTube Shorts phenomenon Skibidi Toilet became one of the most valuable franchises in Hollywood.
These are only a fraction of the stories I've published just in the past few years.
Thank you so much for reading, subscribing, and making independent reporting on the internet possible!
