Do you have to be hot to be a journalist now?

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This has been a pretty rough week in news, from Bari Weiss attempting (and failing) to censor a 60 Minutes episode about a Salvadoran concentration camp to new Epstein files, including what looks like a letter he sent to Larry Nassar about Donald Trump. I’m planning to explore these topics more after Christmas, but first, I want to talk about something a little different.

Last week, New York Times columnist and social media power user Jamelle Bouie posted on Bluesky that anyone who is seriously interested in “influencing people” these days needs to be posting front-facing videos on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Bouie is right, but this sentiment still ruffled some feathers among the slightly older, reader-heavy demographic of Bluesky.

As an independent journalist and “creator,” whatever that means to you, I can speak to this from experience. Both Bouie and I have our largest followings by the numbers on Bluesky, but I know most people reading this newsletter found me through other avenues—primarily, YouTube. I don’t have a significant YouTube following of my own yet, but I frequently appear on my friends’ podcasts. Whenever I do, I get a spike in subscribers. The comparative influence of front-facing video is evident to me in a bunch of ways I’ll get into. But the reality that video is the dominant force in our media ecosystem raises some other, more uncomfortable questions.

As other folks on Bluesky pointed out, people who are more conventionally attractive tend to have an advantage in the field of video content. So if influence today increasingly requires being on-camera, does that mean you have to be, well, hot to succeed? It’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the past couple of years, as the opportunities in traditional media shrink and all kinds of industries are pushing workers toward social media. And I don’t love the conclusions I’ve arrived at.

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