If getting into the media business, it’s best to start with what the actual interests of the audience. Okay, the New Yorker magazine — which has been publishing continuously for 99 years — can afford the luxury of ‘not thinking about what readers want’ as I understand its editors were to have said at one time. However, for the rest of us, stubbornly giving readers one thing when all of the dashboard lights are screaming they want something else is a recipe for driving straight off a cliff.

“Sadly, that knowledge could’ve have helped me” as Jerry Seinfeld said in The Slicer episode.

This pithy bon mot occasionally comes to mind as I continue to contemplate the still smoking hole in the ground that is the New RC Soaring Digest. Actually, this is overly harsh. The time spent on the 30 issues as its Managing Editor were amongst the most satisfying of my professional career. However, there simply wasn’t a sustainable business in it even though it was a tonne of work which had to be produced on a merciless schedule.

This lesson was so cruelly wrought, one might wonder why I would contemplate for even a moment doing something similar all over again.

Thinking back on it, if there was a single spectacular success in the New RCSD story, it was its Instagram feed. Starting from scratch it built to nearly 3000 followers. Not a single one of these good people were bought, baited or otherwise bamboozled into signing up.

Rather, every last one of them somehow found @rcsoaringdigest on the platform, scrolled through what was on offer, presumably liked it and clicked the Follow button — 2,935 times so far. Even now, nearly nine months after the doors swung shut for the last time, new followers continue to join seemingly oblivious to the fact there hasn’t been a post since June of last year. I’m still thrilled, humbled and — candidly — a little puzzled by this part of the New RCSD experience.

Of course, at least part of this success can be credited to the beautifully simple idea of Instagram itself: a picture or two, a little text and a substantial emphasis on aesthetics. Assuming a given account picks its images well, with very little effort Instagram makes their presentation look good either as a feed or as an individual post. Perhaps its just me but Instagram’s attention to design detail — which includes lots of white space — quiets my mind and makes the use of the app much more pleasant. And, therefore, super ‘sticky’.

Instagram also has a simple, narrrowly defined mechanism for viewers to obtain more information if it’s really wanted — which, it turns out, is way less often than one might hope. This isn’t conjecture. It’s fact. With the New RCSD the number of times a story with the ‘link in bio’ was clicked was abysmal. Near zero for most posts. But that sure as hell didn’t seem to slow down people wanting to scroll through the outstanding pictures and the short quoted texts which were gleaned directly from the stories in a given issue.

Also, almost without exception, the material which made up a typical RCSD ’gram post was being used at least a second time, maybe more. With a little cut-n-paste, it was a gift-with-purchase which came with the original article at no extra charge.

Given readers seem to enjoy the Instagram feed — and setting aside there wasn’t much evidence it made them want to actually read the articles it advertised — I was left to restlessly wonder whether it was possible to have an Instagram feed for the New RC Soaring Digest and simply skip all the incredibly hard work actually writing the articles. Focus exclusively on the sizzle and not the steak. Better yet, bin the steak entirely if that was possible.

Hmm, interesting. Let me get back to you on that in a bit.

The Prime Directive for social media platforms is to make money. As much as we may wish for them to have a higher purpose, they simply don’t. Setting that aside for a moment and despite popular opinion to the contrary, there is nothing intrinsicly bad about social media. So long as the aforementioned Prime Directive doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Following the money explains the wall-to-wall advertising, the creepy microtargeting which knows our every move and — of course — the opaque, constantly changing Black Mirror-nightmare algorithms which determine what we see and when we see it. In short, our eyeballs and the indelibly attached, precious attention span are constantly being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Don’t like social media and all the baggage that goes along for the ride? Don’t use it. That said I’m willing to bet you can’t bring yourself to look away.

At its core, however, the fundamental concept of social media is actually pretty good — levelling the playing field so quiet voices can easily be amplified in order that they are heard right along with really loud voices. Bi-directional, point-to-point, networked, democratised communication as opposed to the centuries-old concept of one idea being centrally broadcast to the great unwashed without fear of much comeback — or any accountability at all, for that matter.

Except social media stopped being like that a long time ago. Almost at the same time accounts had more than handful of followers. If you're living with the hope that all that's separating you from internet fame is one like from @taylorswift, the odds of this happening are about as likely as getting struck by lightning. Twice. On any given Tuesday. Notifications about the likes of us to the likes of her were shut off a long, long time ago.

In reality, social media is really just a slight re-invention of the concept of a small number of people broadcasting their ideas to the rest of us without much in the way of us being able to hold them to whatever it is they say.

What makes commercial social media platforms particularly insufferable is the insufferable jerks a lot of normal, pretty decent people become when they’re given the shield of anonymity. So when they inevitably start behaving like the jerks they may have always wanted to be, there have to be ways of either shutting them up or shutting them down.

Something with a bit more leverage than “does your mother know you talk like that?” thumbed out with indignation, of course.

A number of years ago I wrote an article* which proffered the elimination of poster anonymity on social media as the only certain way to clean it up. I stand by that today. However, there’s yet another problem. Most social platforms either don’t care about it — call yourself what every you want! — or so poorly enforce their own rules for ‘real names’ it’s somewhere between laughable and pathetic. I have never actually met a Seymour Butts. This is surprising, given how many of them there are on Facebook.

Taking all of the above into account as well as a plethora of other sins — you might legitimately wonder why a new, aspiring publication wouldn’t run away from social media like it’s the raging toxic waste dumpster fire everybody knows it to be.

Instead, I’m thinking any new publication — in particular, one that aspires to pick up where the New RCSD left off — might actually want to start with it.

In fact, I’ll go one step further: the new publication has to embrace social media — poxy warts and all — and put it at the core of the new offering. 🛩️