The first newsletter content house?
The first newsletter content house?
How journalists are adapting to a digital creator world.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
For Morgan Sung, losing her job last month as part of media’s relentless massacre was one pivot too many. After seven years in the industry, writing under the shadow of increasingly looming layoffs, she decided it was time to embrace to what seems like the all but inevitable future of journalism: independent content creation.
“This was never in my plan,” she tells me over Zoom, just a week into her freelance journey. “In journalism school, I avoided the broadcast side so hard. I never wanna be on camera. I want to just work behind the scenes and do my own thing.”
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But as a digital culture reporter, she is more fluent than most in platforms like TikTok, and had already found success translating her work at TechCrunch and, before that, NBC News, into short-form video content. Now, with the launch of Rat.House—a newsletter co-op of sorts shared with fellow writers Alison Foreman (IndieWire), Rebecca Roland (Eater), and Sarah Vasile (Sports Illustrated)—she’s determined to not only carve a foothold into journalism, but actually bring fun back to it as well.
“We always joke about being a lesbian content house, because we're in LA, we're all very online,” she says. “But we're like, what if we had a content house that was full of very, very pretentious highbrow writers?”
I wanted to speak to Morgan about her work not only because we’ve long been in the same internet culture group chat, but also because she’s one of the first journalists I’ve seen fully adapt to what the industry now demands of us in a way that’s fun and inspiring. What does being a journalist-creator actually look like? And what if they had opportunities to fix the industry, instead of just being a casualty of it? What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about just that, and where all this might lead.
First, why don't you give me a rundown of your media journey.
I've been doing this for seven years now, but I feel like an absolute veteran at this point, which is insane to say. I feel like I've been to war, because it's like, even if you have a job, it's gonna be exhausting and terrible. I graduated college in 2017 and I worked all through college, had internships, and came out here and interned for NPR 'cause I was really on that public radio track. I did the whole contractor thing and then was like, “I hate working overnight.” I applied for a fellowship at Mashable and got it, and then that led to a full-time job and my beat kind of developed there. I didn't know I could have internet culture, digital culture, tech culture as a beat. So that was exciting, 'cause I was like, this is actually something that I understand. I always felt kinda apprehensive about adopting any specific beat, 'cause I was like, I don't know if there's anything I can wholeheartedly throw myself into. And it turned out it was this.
Then I went to NBC and I was doing the same thing, and then I got recruited and went to TechCrunch, and then I got laid off like right under a year after I got recruited. The entire time in the last seven years that I've been a journalist, I've just been constantly waiting for that other shoe to drop. I was like, “I have a job now, but for how long?” And I feel like that's what every journalist feels constantly. When you have a job, you're just grateful that you have it, but it's exhausting. If you don't have a job it's exhausting. So it's just like, what is the way out of this industry?
The first media job I had full time was at HelloGiggles, in the New York office, and after six months they laid us all off. And so I immediately got a crash course in it. And then it's been a similar story of stops and starts. I've been freelance now for a year and it is somehow more comforting not having a staff job right now, because not everyone can pull the rug out from under me at once. But that's not accessible for all, and the only reason I was able to do it was my boyfriend and I, we got a domestic partnership and now I'm on his insurance.
My first year living in LA and also first year out of college, I was also freelance. I feel like it's a completely different experience from then to now, 'cause then I was trying to prove something and being like, “I have no clips but I promise I'm worth hiring.” But now I feel a nice safety net just 'cause I've been more established in my career and I have more of a platform. I hate saying it, but I think I've been very lucky that I've been able to build a brand identity for myself. And I hate that journalists have to do that. I also feel lucky going into this whole freelance thing because I have Cobra for three more months and my girlfriend is like, I work for Vox. Let's just get married.
It’s wild that we both had to do something like that.
It's funny to have to drastically move some timelines up because I need healthcare. I need to get my meds.
What's interesting about the creator thing is it feels like I'm lucky, and maybe you feel this way, because my beat is internet culture, it meant I grew up watching creators and influencers. There was a part of me deep down watching it that was like, “What would it look like if I did this?” And so in some ways I'm like, “Oh, fun that this is becoming normal and not weird and I can try out TikTok and all this stuff.” But that is so specific to this beat and to ask, like, a politics reporter to suddenly become a personality and report on fraught things like abortion and put their face on it, it's totally different.
We grew up kind of entrenched in the internet, and we also grew up at a time when you could get in early enough to be a creator, but now it's so saturated.
You're someone whose videos come across my For You page. What has TikTok been like?
I don't think I can ever really monetize TikTok as a platform, both as a journalist and also leaning on any kind of monetizing is not really viable. But I think it's a place to promote yourself. It's a place to push out your own work. And at the same time it's exhausting. It's expected almost at this point for journalists to have some sort of social media presence, but to curate that and maintain it is like a second job. If I'm recording a video, I have to write a script. I have to record myself. I have to set up the lighting. I have to edit and produce this and basically translate a long form feature I wrote into this three minute video. It's like a four- or five-hour process sometimes.
I'm always like, “I'll make a TikTok to go with this article,” and then I don't end up having the time. Not to mention the lighting outside needs to be good and I need to feel okay with myself to be on camera.
No human being should be perceived at this level, especially not one whose job it is to just report. This was never in my plan. In journalism school, I avoided the broadcast side so hard. I never wanna be on camera. I want to just work behind the scenes and do my own thing. And now it's like, well, my face has to go along with my work.
Like, is writing now more so a visual medium because you have to be visually present it in order for it to get any attention?
I mean, that's how I feel too. I guess three years ago you could have made it as a writer and just been on Twitter and been kind of faceless. But you know, Twitter's not gonna be around forever.
Well yeah, that was another thing I was thinking is that like, when I joined the industry, Twitter was it. And TikTok is not wildly different—well, in terms of labor, it is. But I remember when having a Twitter presence was the really important thing. Twitter followers mattered for bylines and that was where networking happened. That doesn't exist anymore. So it's a similar reason for journalists to use TikTok, I think, but it requires a completely new skillset.
I think starting in journalism when we did, having to curate yourself as a Twitter personality, helped me adjust to posting on TikTok. That motivation to post was the same thing, where it's like I have to post to promote myself even if I don't want to. It's just now so much more involved to post. Your face is attached. You're so much more perceivable. It sucks that to be a writer now you have to basically be a content creator. I don't think it detracts from the writing itself, but I do feel like, for me personally, it almost lessens the pride I have in my writing. That's not the right way to put it ...
It limits the pool of people who are gonna be able to make it as writers, and limits it in a way that's unfair, because you might have something really good to say, but you just don't perform well on video.
And I think for me too, it also has started to shape how I pitch stories. Because I've started thinking of writing in terms of content and how well it'll translate across multiple platforms, versus wanting to write something for the sake of wanting to write it. And I think that is very scary.
One of the things you started in the midst of all this is your newsletter, Rat House. Walk me through that.
So it's mostly me, and then every other week or so will be one of the other people involved. So it's called Rat House because my TikTok username is @ratsoverflowers. Every social media site that has not been connected to my professional presence has always been that since I was I don't even know how old. For me, rats have always been the fun little alter ego I can escape to, but now my two personalities have to merge. So I was thinking of, again, personal brand. I was thinking of Substack for a long time, but I didn't really know what I wanted. And then I was laid off and I still will be freelancing, but I feel like I have to have an outlet to regularly write for so I can remember how to write, but also remembering how to write in a way that isn't just straight reporting but is fun and critical and voicey.
I had been talking with a few friends who I basically live with. We all live super close to each other. There are four of us. We're all journalists. We're all gay. We all have very different beats and we're always telling each other like, “Oh my God. There's this thing in my beat that we're not gonna cover 'cause it's too niche.” And we'd always joke that we're a content house 'cause we're always hanging out, shooting ideas off each other. And so I got laid off and I was like, I'm gonna start a Substack like every other laid off journalist. But also I want it to be a space where I'm like a writer, not just a journalist. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna go in on making a whole brand identity for Rat House. We wanna write for very, very painfully online people. We're writing for the most annoying person you know.
I love the idea of a newsletter content house.
We always joke about being a lesbian content house, because we're in LA, we're all very online. But we're like, what if we had a content house that was full of like very, very pretentious highbrow writers? People who read Anne Carson, you know? We are on track to make currently a whole $2,000 a year.
Oh hell yeah.
I know. Shocking. But I dunno, between the four of us, like, I never want to add the pressure of making this our jobs. I've seen a lot of content houses rise and fall and as much as we joke about being four friends and starting a content house, it's also like, I value our friendships very deeply and I don't wanna add that extra pressure of having to work together. If we can break even—and break even as in like, I spent a whole $150 on the domain name, $14 buying graphic design assets—so if we can break even, this is just gonna be our little shared pool of fun money for us as a group. The four of us have really leaned into it and started running it like a publication. We all have had so much experience being journalists and editors. So we have an editorial calendar, we have a shared Google drive of all of our graphic design assets and our branding, and we're pitching to each other in our group chat and editing each other's work. And it's just been fun, having this, what feels like, very socialist worker-owned space. It's like, “Oh yeah, writing can be fun.” Being in media and working with your friends is not supposed to be hell.
You're recreating the feeling that got sucked out of digital media five years ago. What does your ideal job or situation in media look like? And I wonder how is it different from what you wanted when you first started?
When I first started, like every other 22-year-old in 2018, I wanted to be a staff writer. I would still love to be able to write full time and be paid for it and get healthcare. But it's also like, every job that I've ever worked in media has always had this fear looming over me the entire time. I could be laid off at any moment. And I think it really sucks the joy out of writing and left me very creatively drained. I have to figure out how to enjoy my job without this all-consuming anxiety. So I don't really know what I wanna do in the long term. I have two month’s buffer of severance. I have this breathing room to actually write and remember what it's like to be a writer, not just a very deeply anxious journalist.