In defense of Clavicular profiles
Plus: A writer crashout, hiring near-misses, and award-winning AI.
Welcome to media_gossip, Embedded’s special weekly edition of … media gossip, sent every Friday. You’re getting this because you subscribe to Embedded, but you can opt out here.
There was some good micro-discourse on Substack this week (none of those words appear in the Bible btw) about our media “sliding doors” moments, the job we did or didn’t take that altered the trajectory of our careers. Of course, the close calls are the ones most fun to read about. I never interviewed anywhere particularly salacious (although this one was probably the weirdest), but what happened with Rolling Stone is probably my version of this trend (if you want to see the email I sent after that happened, scroll to the bottom). If that had panned out, however, I never would have had a Refinery29 colleague refer me to her husband who was hiring for an internet culture publication a year later—the husband, spoiler alert, was Nick.
I do genuinely feel that everything happened the way it was supposed to happen (although I’ll admit I’d make some tweaks), which means I can now look fondly at a screenshot like this:
— Kate
Why I Assigned a Profile of Clavicular (and Stand By It)
By Nick Catucci
“Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds—which is most of them, most of the time—can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.”
That’s me. I’m the editor who gets his ideas from social-media feeds. In fact, I assigned a profile of Clavicular, one of the very internet celebrities that Lane Brown—who wrote the (admittedly somewhat devastating) call out above in his great New York magazine piece on clipping, The Feed Is Fake, last week—uses as a key example of this paid simulation. I also published a profile of Cameron Winter’s band Geese, the other key example. (As I mentioned in last week’s media_gossip, I’m leaving GQ at the end of May.)
Why did I do this? Was it because I was taken in by clips of Clavicular’s livestreams created by workers who were paid $1 or $2 (or $30) for every 1,000 views they were able to gin up on TikTok and other platforms?
