Many years ago I rage-quit from my editor job at a digital youth media publication.
It was the beginning of the pandemic, my team had been slashed to an exhausted handful who cried every morning, and my freelance budget had been cut to zero – all while I was still expected to reach traffic targets. A spree of insane business decisions were made that trickled down to me like sewage water at a music festival. So I quit. I was tired and being overly dramatic of course, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t justified in being upset.
They announced that they were selling the publication only two weeks later, which explained basically everything.
Like many elder millennial journalists, I was sold a particular, rose-tinted version of what working in media would entail. Carrie Bradshaw, Bridget Jones, even the titular Sally from When Harry Met Sally all poisoned my weak developing brain with a fantasy of wearing cute blazers and smoking cigarettes in my apartment and writing silly little stories that somehow saved the day. No movie exemplified this fantasy more than The Devil Wears Prada, a film that weaponises millennial hustle culture into an aerosol and through its protagonist, Andy Sachs, sold me the dream of becoming a journalist and impressing Meryl Streep through my hard work and can-do attitude. I was good at writing and I wanted to write for a living and maybe change the world for the better.
Now, many years later, not only is smoking passe and apparently bad for you, but the millennial journalism fantasy has been transmuted from a dream into a depressing capitalistic reality, dominated by mass layoffs and redundancies, constant media buyouts and endless ruinous tech pivots, all in a field owned by ridiculous amoral billionaires and fascist-leaning media monopolies.
In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the iconic legacy fashion magazine Runway is on hard times – its physical edition little more than a book of brand ads, its glamorous and cruel editor, Miranda Priestly, forced to fly economy and eat in the cafeteria. When a new owner takes over, things get even worse. Andy, meanwhile, has been working as a journalist at a newspaper and finds out, while accepting a journalism award, that she and the entire paper have been made redundant after being bought out by a new owner.
I don’t know a single journalist my age who hasn’t, like Andy, ricocheted around the rapidly shrinking media industry, through multiple buyouts, redundancies and pivots to video.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 can be read as a eulogy to both the era of glossy print fashion mags and also parts of the digital media era that replaced it. It was this style of journalism that I started out in, working at an online outlet that juggled, often unsuccessfully, the tension between reporting on real news for a young audience along with silly online content, and between progressive ideals and earning our minimum wage from advertising. I saw the best minds of my generation writing lists about which of the Muppets were most fuckable.
Like Andy, who had to “slum it” in fashion magazines, it wasn’t what we might have initially dreamed of, but even in this strange new space we were able to live out our journalism fantasy. Sure, we were ranking Disney princesses based on how likely they would have been to die in the Challenger disaster but BuzzFeed journalists were also winning Pulitzer prizes. To be clear, I loved writing the stupid stuff the most but it was important to me that I occasionally wrote some real journalism too. I believe in the importance and function of journalism in society – even if my contribution is mostly deep dives into a large hat Harry Styles wore once.
But what I’ve discovered in my career is that my dream of doing any form of reporting is usually hindered by the rich amoral puffer vest-wearing idiots who keep buying up or taking over media companies. In one of my previous roles, I came on board just as the site was being bought out by a big corporate advertising company. It seemed that they wanted an in-house media publication to provide news to put on their outdoor advertising billboards. At one point they even tried to force-pivot every journalist into a billboard copywriter but gave up when the only text we submitted to be advertised on billboards all around the country was “Help! I’m stuck in a billboard factory”.
I have as many stories of profound ineptitude and negligence as I do NDAs which mean I can’t write about them but it all boils down to one depressing realisation – like Andy in TDWP2, I still love the work but my fantasy is just hoping there will be an industry for me to work in that manages to survive the ravages of the idiots in charge.