My Internet: Christopher Robbins
The Hell Gate co-founder encourages government officials and corporate executives to keep posting to LinkedIn.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Most weeks, we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.
Today we welcome Christopher Robbins, an editor and co-founder at Hell Gate, a worker-owned media outlet whose reporting on New York City The New York Times called “clear, sly and humorous.” Chris has a group chat for exchanging chumbox screenshots, admits that Hell Gate has a part in the dog discourse getting out of control, and has lately been reading Columbia Daily Spectator and Bwog. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS:
EMBEDDED: What shows up on your TikTok For You page?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Don’t have one.
EMBEDDED: Do you make TikToks? What format works best for you?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Nope.
EMBEDDED: Do you still tweet? Why?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: For 13 years, Twitter has been the place to post my stories and laugh at jokes and … I can’t stop now.
Where else can you see the literal police department scold a delivery worker for supposedly breaking the law while standing next to 15 cars illegally parked on the sidewalk?
EMBEDDED: Have you found any good alternatives to Twitter? Do you have an opinion on Threads?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: As bad as Twitter is, it’s still a place where you can see people react to news in real time. And for a journalist covering a protest, or budget negotiations, or whatever else is unfolding, it's still pretty useful—like, 51 percent useful to 49 percent garbage. But until that ratio flips, I’m here.
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: We take turns posting Hell Gate stories to Instagram, so I’m on the corporate account daily. My personal account rarely gets used. I have been known to watch Subway Oracle videos.
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: What Is The City But The People? (New York City Department of City Planning, 1969)
1986 - Penn & Teller (Rodent Roulette:)
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: I very quickly skim some newsletters, scroll through Twitter, then visit a bunch of different homepages. Hell Gate has a morning link roundup, Morning Spew, so we try to be pretty thorough: Politico, the Times, the CITY, the Post, the Daily News, Gothamist, City & State, New York Focus, City Limits, Curbed/NY Mag, Streetsblog NYC, the AP, the BBC, etc. These days, we’re also reading the Columbia Spectator and Bwog.
I also check EV Grieve pretty regularly to keep up with what’s going on at my local Key Foods. Defector keeps me fed with fun blog posts.
I also have print subscriptions to The New Yorker, NY Mag, Wired, and the New York Review of Architecture.
EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Mainly through links my colleagues drop in Slack, or Today in Tabs. It only feels important if one of us is weighing in with a blog post and I “need” a grasp on what is going on.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: The dog discourse is getting out of control. This is partly Hell Gate’s fault, but we all just need to take a deep breath.
EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS:
EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: It doesn’t matter what generation you are, you WILL try and take a shitty video of the concert you’re watching.
EMBEDDED: What are your favorite Substack or other independent newsletters?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS:
EMBEDDED: Do you have any favorite media company newsletters?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Politico New York’s morning newsletter is pretty darn comprehensive. Dinner Party is fun.
Also, I’m from Virginia, my family still lives in Virginia, so I get newsletters from Cardinal News and The Virginia Mercury to keep an eye on the menhaden controversies.
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Attempts to tax tech companies to fund journalism.
Attempts by tech companies to block journalism in response to the attempts to tax the tech companies.
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: 5-4, “a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks,” is one of my favorites. That's made by Leon Nayfakh’s company, which also makes his history podcast Fiasco that I also really enjoy. I regularly listen to On the Media, and former WNYC colleague Nancy Solomon’s podcast Dead End is jaw-dropping New Jersey politics skullduggery. Also: Ear Hustle, Death Sex and Money, and Inconceivable Truth, which is from another old colleague, Matt Katz.
If you’re still “not a podcast person” I recommend the second season of In the Dark. It really doesn’t get any better.
I generally listen when I’m cleaning my apartment or when I have a long train ride.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: When everyone at DNAinfo and Gothamist got fired for unionizing in 2017, I tweeted that I had come back from the bathroom to discover that they pulled the plug on the site, and so a bunch of news stories on the shutdown were all like, “Robbins, who was probably taking a giant shit in the bathroom at the time, tweeted…”
That was my first taste of fame.
EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Colson Whitehead recently posted about Hell Gate’s hot take bracket on Bluesky!
That’s an extremely lame thing to type but a pretty cool thing to happen.
EMBEDDED: How has using LinkedIn benefitted you, if at all?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Not at all. Government officials and senior corporate executives should keep posting stuff to LinkedIn. It’s a safe space. No one is monitoring it.
EMBEDDED: Do you use Slack or another chat tool for work? What’s the best thing about Slacking with your co-workers? What’s the worst thing?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Slack, though sometimes I miss Gchat.
The best thing about Slack is conversations like these.
EMBEDDED: Do you typically start searches on Google, Reddit, TikTok, or another source? Have you found Google’s “generative AI” summaries helpful?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: I was going to make a stupid joke about Ask Jeeves but now I see Ask Jeeves is still alive? Who is using Ask Jeeves?
EMBEDDED: What most excites you about AI chatbots and text and art generators? What most concerns you?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: See below.
EMBEDDED: Are you currently playing any console, computer, or phone games?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: I play spades on my phone.
EMBEDDED: Do any of your group chats have a name that you’re willing to share? What’s something that recently inspired debate in the chat?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: For years, two good friends and I have been exchanging the best chum we encounter on the internet. The taxonomy the Awl ran back in 2015 is remarkably resilient, many of the same rules still apply, but we’ve seen some pretty amazing innovations. There's AI-generated images of course:
Even more of an emphasis on body horror:
And my favorite development, a new kind of New York Timesian headline formulation:
EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: The emoji wearing sunglasses and smiling. I generally add it after I say something a little stupid.
EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: No, but I should start sending them. I keep a ton of voicemails and I have one from a decade ago of my grandparents singing me happy birthday that I listen to when I miss them.
EMBEDDED: What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: I've been enjoying the new Mannequin Pussy album. Also, as someone who is deeply immersed in the On Cinema at the Cinema world, I gotta say the singles that Dekkar has released over the last few months have been both extremely funny and outrageously catchy.
EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? When was the last time you bought a music download or vinyl record, CD, or tape?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: Spotify. The last vinyl record I bought was for my local bar: I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight by Richard and Linda Thompson.
EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? In general, do you prefer to get ads or pay more for ad-free tiers?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: I guess Criterion? Though I think to some degree, watching ads is important because you need a reminder, “Hey, this shit actually sucks, stop watching so much television, go read a book or go outside.”
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: NYC Compost App.
EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?
CHRISTOPHER ROBBINS: I still get a thrill from getting a good email from someone.
Thanks Chris! Subscribe to Hell Gate.
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