R.S. Benedict
Welcome to Rite Gud. The only podcast that helps you write good. I’m R.S. Benedict. And this is my very whiny cat Harley. In this episode, we’re talking to Matt Wolfbridge about his new online magazine Typebar, which just launched very recently. Thank you for coming on the show, Matt.
Matt Wolfbridge
Thank you for having me, Raquel. It’s a pleasure to be here.
R.S. Benedict
For our listeners who might not be familiar with your publication. How would you describe Typebar? Sure.
Matt Wolfbridge
So we’re officially described as an irreverent online magazine publishing literary analysis, cultural criticism, and stories about typewriters in less kind of serious terms. You know, I like to describe us jokingly, as an interesting thing to read on the internet. And it’s kind of like our tagline. You know, we’re kind of a literary journal that publishes interesting essays, right? So like, we’re something between like London Review of Books, and like, tour, right? So we don’t just do like the highbrow literary stuff. But at the same token, we don’t just do kind of like super recent science fiction listicles or
R.S. Benedict
whatever, right? Yeah, that 2014 BuzzFeed type? Yes. Right. So
Matt Wolfbridge
we analyze it all. And tonally. We’re in between those two publications as well. So we’re not like super stuffy and formal, but we’re not engaged in that kind of like ubiquitous internet writer voice that became popularized in the early 2010s. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. Now, why is it called Typebar?
Matt Wolfbridge
Yeah, people, a lot of people have this question. So last spring, about a year ago, I got really into typewriters. I wanted to find a way to write while being totally unplugged from anything digital. And some people would just say, Well, why not just use your handwriting, but I have like chicken scratch, like first grader handwriting. Like my handwriting has never gotten better since I was like eight years old. So it’s hard to decipher even my own handwriting. And I’m a pretty fast typist. So I was thinking about something called a free writes. And those are way too much money. And so I just decided to get into typewriters. And so when I was coming up with a name, I was like, Okay, well, let’s let’s try to think about something typewriter related. And so I was thinking of actually calling the magazine type slug, because it would make the most sense thematically. Right. So a type slug on a typewriter is the little metal square that has the letter embossed onto it? Yes, that is the part of the typewriter that makes contact with the ink ribbon that leaves the impression of the letter. So it would make the most sense thematically to to have that. Because that’s like the part that’s actually leaving an impact, right? And I want type bar to leave an impact. But I didn’t like that the name slug was you had the name slug in it had the word slug in it, right? Yes. It’s just Yeah. And so I was like, Ooh, type slug. I don’t like that. But the type slug is connected to the type bar. So when you hit a key on a keyboard, it raises the type bar, and then the type slug hits the ribbon and leaves the impression right. So it’s like, okay, well, type bar is literally the next best thing. So that’s why I called it Typebar Magazine. All right,
R.S. Benedict
because because you love typewriters and being unplugged. So why not start an internet magazine?
Matt Wolfbridge
Yeah, I mean, pretty much, right. That’s a good point. You know, being online, I suppose is what is my advice?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, no kidding. So given that, given your love of being unplugged, and offline, and old school typewriters and all that stuff, why did you start Typebar?
Matt Wolfbridge
Sure. You know, I hope that I started it because I wanted to read it is not a cop out answer. And if it is, I’ll give you kind of a bit of backstory into how I got to this point. So I think a lot of people who listen to this show can probably relate with being internet obsessed. You know what? Yeah, right? Oh, I was online basically, all day every day from like, eighth grade onward. Right. So in the earlier days, it was like wasting time on forums. Yep. I think it’s really funny that they call blue sky retirement home from Millennial forum posters, because that’s what it feels like. Oh, no. I felt very personally attacked by that. Because like, I can still remember a bunch of moderators from forums I was on when I was like in middle school in high school, so
R.S. Benedict
hurtful for me. as accurate as it is, but
Matt Wolfbridge
as I got towards the end of college, I started spending that time and like other places like reading articles on places like slate salon, the Atlantic, whatever. And then posting on Twitter, in 2011. I got kind of obsessed with like media Twitter because I was in media industry. aspirant, right, I want it to be a capital W writer. And what’s funny is I remember people in the early 2010s, when I broke into media kind of bemoaning the state of the industry, but like the 2011, media was practically like virail and full of vitality compared to today. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
it had a lot of venture capital money just sort of getting poured onto it.
Matt Wolfbridge
Yeah, we’re like today, it’s the New York Times and then like 20,000, shitty contrarian sub stock newsletters. But when I started, the Internet was this interesting place, right. And there were interesting essays abound, I remember there was this great essay on the all, one of my favorite personal essays, where this woman had a van door to door vacuum salesman having an existential breakdown about adulthood in her living room. And, you know, there are all these kind of new and interesting things to read every day. And now it’s just like sludge, it’s just sludge everywhere. And basically, online publishing has taken the human spirit and kind of condensed it into this like algorithmic gray goo. And there’s nothing nowhere to go and nothing interesting to read anymore. And so I started type bar, because I wanted there to be somewhere else to go online somewhere that was like exciting and interesting things to read. Somewhere that reminded me of older websites like the all or the outline or the toast, they say be the change you want to see in the world. So here we are,
R.S. Benedict
why do you think so much of online writing has turned into just goo? Is it just the money’s not in there anymore? Yeah,
Matt Wolfbridge
I could talk for hours and hours about the media industry. I’ve been working in the online I hate to call it the online content industry. But I’ve been working on
R.S. Benedict
that. I mean, that is literally Yes, yeah, it is what it is.
Matt Wolfbridge
I have been working in the online content industry for a very long time since 2011. So I could talk for a very long time about it, I’ll try to keep it relatively condensed. The over simplified version is all of the people in charge got in their heads that scale was the only thing that mattered when anyone who was actually like hitting the publish button on their articles. could tell you that that wasn’t true. But it was a thing all the C suite jerk offs were obsessed with. Even when it became harder and harder to deny that scale was essentially worthless, you still had guys like Jonah Peretti, putting forth these insane fantasies of like BuzzFeed binding, binding together with Vox to somehow strongarm, Facebook and Google into paying publishers more money. And I do think it’s interesting that Jonah Peretti likes collective bargaining for massive corporations, but not for his employees. But the ownership class kind of became obsessed with scale at all cost scale, as in getting immense amounts of traffic, they became kind of obsessed with scale at all costs, even though it’s essentially worthless, right. And the only things that you can scale to that degree Are these like fast, quick things that are easy to do or easier to do. And you have every 22 year old writer pump out like 50 of them a day. And now you have aI generative ai do it. So you have a lot of SEO SPAM for people who don’t know that search engine optimization. You have listicles you have quizzes, you have trending gossip, whatever. And I don’t want to get over idealistic here, because most people say, Oh, the audience wants good stories. But it’s the junk that gets kind of all the clicks and people kind of click on the most. So like there’s always going to be an audience for junk on some level. Right?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah. And I’m sure that social media the way it works, it kind of incentivizes chunkiness. Yeah, I know, because I worked for a content mill too. And I know like quizzes get a ton of engagement. They spread fast. And they’re there to they’re silly, they’re fluff. Nothing wrong with them. I do them to their fun, but it’s not like hard hitting journalism. Yeah.
Matt Wolfbridge
And so there’s always going to be an audience for junk on some level, just not invested audience right. So you can’t get somebody to pay you $10 A month or $10 a month for a Patreon. For a viral tweet round up about the solar eclipse or the Panera lemonade that kills people, you know what I mean? So you have all these big media sites, thinking because this goes all the way back to like 2014. And even earlier with like Facebook, turning on a traffic firehose, as people call it right, where they were sending immense amounts of traffic to all these publishers like BuzzFeed, right? And then they get everybody hooked and then they they turn off the firehose, right, and then all these publishers are fucked. And all these big media sites essentially committing Harakiri to appease these algorithm Gods
R.S. Benedict
during the video when it turned out because Facebook falsely claimed that like there’s videos are traffic, and they really did you count
Matt Wolfbridge
by like 900%. They were essentially alleged. Right? And so they learned the hard way, all these publishers that the Facebook audience was not their audience, they were basically renting one, right. And so once Facebook gets out of the news business, we’re seeing the results of all these places, kind of building their, their, the foundations of their business on a house of cards, where you have vice, getting bought out and shutting down the website, completely BuzzFeed, getting rid of all the whole news division and saying, we’re gonna do pivot to AI generated quizzes, you know, you have
R.S. Benedict
a bummer. I know, Buzzfeed did a lot of trash, but they did sometimes have some really solid investigative pieces, or kind of in depth pieces. And it was like, Well, you know, the silly listicles we get the traffic so you can fund that stuff. Just like you know, Playboy like the TD pictures paid for circulations and met, you managed to get incredible articles write legitimately brilliant stories and interviews in there. And now, it’s just like, No, that yeah, because like our stuffs gone,
Matt Wolfbridge
I used to work in, like I said, I’ve worked in the online content industry for a while, a large chunk of that was spent in digital news. And I used to work for what I jokingly call like a Buzzfeed light, like a Diet Coke version of BuzzFeed. You know, one of several, and I’m not going to say which one, obviously. And I, my assigning editor was basically crowdtangle. Do you know what that is? Crowd. So crowdtangle was this program that would kind of crawl Facebook and see what the most trending links were. And so that was basically my assigning editor where the editor would be like, Okay, go into crowdtangle on right up was that whatever is most trending right now? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I work for a content mill that had very similar thing we found people are searching for such and such search terms. Right. You know, however many words that includes these tags, mostly boy, I feel creative. And
Matt Wolfbridge
so I believe it was John Harmon, who did this when he was running the ole, where he would write up John Oliver algorithm, lottery sweepstakes. I forget what he used to call it. But basically, after every episode, what’s John Oliver’s show called on HBO, I don’t even remember now, Last Week Tonight, whenever when that show was big, this was like 10 years ago, every single publisher would write up like the top sketch that would be on YouTube, and they’d aggregate it repackage it. And one of them would win the algorithm lottery and get tons and tons of traffic I use after right, this kind of shit. SNL recaps, you name it. And every place was basically chasing the same story and not even trying to package it differently, right. And so that’s kind of the water we’ve been swimming in for at least 10 years. And so you have writers who got out of that by pivoting to newsletters, and that worked very well for some people. But the problem is we live in an attention economy. And that incentivizes a lot of like contrarian ism or otherwise over the top takes that you have to keep, like, right, I always liken everything back to professional wrestling, because I grew up watching professional wrestling. And so it’s like, okay, if you’ve got a weekly wrestling show, and this week, you put a guy through a table, what are you going to do next week to keep people watching? Well, I’m going to have to put them through two tables. Okay, what are you gonna do after that? You know what I mean? And so, right you wind up with this problem where you have to kind of keep your subscribers happy and how do you do that? That’s kind of how we how we get there and then kind of the water we’ve been swimming in and that’s kind of what type bar I don’t want to say is born out of but born in contrast to because I was so sick of reading this shit. Just I like I just want a website that’s fucking normal. Okay, you know what I mean? Like
R.S. Benedict
yeah, I get it Yeah, yeah, there’s and it’s frustrating because even kind of mainstream publications that I feel like once had a better reputation are kind of pivoting to they’re doing a lot of the clickbait outrage shit are here. Here’s an insanely stupid hot take. Although I feel like with the death of advertising money that that’s not even working anymore either. So
Matt Wolfbridge
you can just say the New York Times it’s fine. Or like fucking
R.S. Benedict
whoa have them do that like sleep does it like the Atlantic does it Holy shit. Does the Atlantic ever do it? You know all of them fucking do it and it’s embarrassed. Granted, the Atlantic has been like that for a long time. I was I was doing some research for for a piece I’m working on I was just looking up some stuff that stupid influencers have done and I remember an incident a few years ago when when a bunch of influencers got criticized for taking a bunch of like sexy, scantily clad selfies in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Like because here’s the show like people were just taking you know, semi nude with their with their hazmat suits hanging off of them to show their asses doing sexy fireman photoshoots in like the horrific you know, radioactive hell zone right. I And I looked it up and one of the first things that came up on the first page of Google results was a defense of them. Published in the Atlantic. By Taylor Lorenz. Yeah. Cool. Of course. That’s not a surprise from 2019. Like, look, that’s it’s fun to do this. No, it isn’t. It’s not okay to do this. I’m sorry. Yeah, I draw the line, taking sexy selfies in Chernobyl. Where a bunch of dudes melted. I am not cool with this
Matt Wolfbridge
poisoning, but I got a lot of like, so who’s to say if it’s bad? Yeah, you
R.S. Benedict
know, pretty good. Just incredible. Anyway, sorry, I
Matt Wolfbridge
just completely, because I go off on tangents as well. So
R.S. Benedict
yeah, it just blew my mind seeing that. I’m like, Oh, my God, who wrote it, who published this? Oh, my God, the Atlantic. Oh, my God, it’s fucking her. Because he was just this trifecta of incredible
Matt Wolfbridge
history and media strategy of the last like, 10 to 15 years. Like, that’s something I could talk about forever. Or, like, I’ll be talking to my fiance about it. And like other things, too. And she’s like, we have to go to bed.
R.S. Benedict
Sweethearts topics are unique. It’d be normal and stop yelling about this. No. Just handing you a typewriter to calm you down. But
Matt Wolfbridge
yeah, I just wanted a website that was fucking normal. That was like that existed independent of all this shit. It’s like, what if there was a website that just published good essays, and there was no kind of weird appeal to like, outreach bait or social media or search engines, right? It’s just like, okay, is this a good interesting pitch that deserves to exist? And that is good on its merits? If yes, we’ll publish it. If no, you know, try again next time and pitch us again. And that’s that’s it? You know what I mean? There’s there’s no other kind of broader considerations. That’s why I was like, so shocked when people were saying, oh, Simon McNeil’s article was just, you know, to get people pissed off. It’s like, what’s
R.S. Benedict
a very thoughtful writer and you might not agree with him, but everything yes, that I’ve his that I’ve read is very carefully reasoned and well considered. And he put a lot of thought into it like he. It’s incredible. He will put like, weeks and weeks of thought into a post about some some obscure drama between two sci fi bloggers and I’m like, God, damn you. How did you Why are you citing Kirkegaard? In this bit about a Twitter fight? How, what the fuck is going on Simon? It’s incredible. He is He’s a very smart man. But yeah.
Matt Wolfbridge
A brilliant writer. I’ve read his stuff before and you know, and I read his blue sky posts, obviously, because I follow him on blue sky and said a commit or accused him of committing outrage bait is ridiculous.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it’s, it’s ridiculous. But we’re I’d like to get to Simon’s article a little bit. Before we get into that. Let’s talk about how you started type bar because I think it’s cool. You’re not the first person in the right good orbit to start your own magazine, which I think is really cool. I think it’s really cool that so many of the people I’ve I’ve met doing this thing that I do have looked at the publications around and not just complain, but said, Fuck it. I’ll start my own magazine with blackjack and hookers and went on to did it went on to do it. So how did you do that? How How did you start type bar? How did you get funding? How did you assemble writers? Take care of web hosting, design, editing, beta testing, promotion, all that stuff? How do it why
Matt Wolfbridge
did it with great difficulty? I can’t I assure you. So I actually it’s funny. You mentioned that other people in the orbit of the show have done that. Because I listened to the blood knife and sees the press episodes of the show probably a dozen times each no joke. Just to like reinforce in my brain that this was possible. I’d like to give a shout out to Kurt Schiller of blood knife for answering some questions that I had. If you haven’t listened to his episode of the show where he talks about starting blood knife. You should listen to it because he has rules. Yeah, he has more insightful things to say about it than I do. But to answer the question, I had been running the operations for my MFA programs literary magazine for almost the entire two year duration of my degree. I do. Okay, don’t hold that against me, please. So I knew I could handle kind of the logistics doing the WordPress stuff, like running the social media and like I had kind of done that stuff in the quote unquote, big leagues. I mean, I’m not trying to do that to people in big league them, but like, you know, I had run the social media and done some WordPress stuff for websites that were getting like 20 million uniques a month, right? Oh, yeah. So like, I knew I could do that stuff. It was the editorial stuff. I was a bit intimidated by. I had initially wanted Type R to be a fiction magazine kind of like sees the press but with a more kind of like less genre stuff and more focused on like weird or literary fiction, but even after an MFA I felt I was not qualified to run a fiction magazine, like I didn’t have the experience. But I’d worked in nonfiction in the media industry in one capacity or another for a very long time. You know, I’d worked for major websites either as a writer editor or doing like insights analysis. So I felt much more confident, because I had over a decade of experience dealing with all that stuff. So the first thing I had to do is come up with a name, which we already talked about, then I had to come up with a logo. I hired an artist on blue sky named Dymocks there at Moxie assist dot art on blue sky. So that’s at sign mo x i e s t dot art on blue sky. They did an amazing job on the logo. Then I had to find a WordPress theme, which was actually a nightmare, because the theme I chose and fell in love with had all of these like optimization issues. And I had to Yeah, I had to get an image optimizer to help with the load times. And what’s so funny is the images on the site don’t load for me, but they load for everybody else. Because like, they keep asking people like, Can you all see the images? And they’re like, Yeah, you’re like, yes, fine, dude. Yeah. And so at some point, I have to consult like a professional WordPress guy, because like, I’ve run up against my own knowledge barrier of WordPress. And like, I was able to teach myself some things. But there’s just a lot to know about like WordPress, like, I’m not a professional, web designer or anything. I just like kind of know, I can like feel my way around WordPress and kind of Google things that I don’t know, like, I know enough to be able to Google my way through most problems. But then there’s other stuff that’s like more advanced, that I’m not an expert in. But then of course, I needed articles, right. And that had me the most nervous, I was afraid we would get zero pitches. Since we were brand new. I solicited some writers that I knew I wanted. And thankfully most of them said, yes, so issue one was nine articles. And four out of those nine, out of those nine, were ones that I had solicited. The rest were pitch to me, I think what helped most was being part of the right, good discord, which is a strong writing community filled with good writers. Oh, you’re welcome. I also have a great writing community from my MFA program. And so all of these people would be able to trust me, since they’d known me, they would know that they could pitch me and that I would actually pay them if I said I was going to pay them. And I wouldn’t try to like Screw them or anything. And they would share calls for pitches out to other good writers. And so if I think if I’d done that, as just some guy on the internet who had no writing community at all, it would have been a lot harder.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, just trying to field random pitches from random people not knowing what the fuck it is. Yeah, yeah. All right, well, um, how about like getting funding? How do you how do you alright? We
Matt Wolfbridge
basically don’t have we have a Patreon. I basically, kind of eat shit financially on every issue. And so it was something where I had some money saved up and I was like, okay, I can spend this amount of money in totality on tight bar before we start, like, not losing because we’re already losing money. But like before, I would have to like shut it down, basically. Right. But it’s something that I really wanted to do, because it’s like, okay, like, money isn’t real, nothing is real. I’m gonna die one day, like, what what does it matter if I lose the money on this? You know, and so it’s just like to be able. It’s ominous to quote the fire festival, guys, but they say like, let’s just do it and be legends. Yeah, you know, but it’s just like, Listen, I have kind of, I had the idea to do this. Since I listened to the episodes of the blood knife episode in the series, the press episode, because I was like, Okay, I’m in this MFA program. And I’m basically running everything but editorial for this literary magazine. All I would need to do is the editorial stuff. And I already felt confident with the nonfiction and so cool. And I was talking to professor’s about it. And they were like, Oh, I think you’d actually do a really good job of this. And I’m like, Okay, let me think about it. And then eventually, I was like, let’s just go for it. Like, this is the only thing that’s kind of getting me out of bed as far as like writing is concerned. And like, once I edited the first essay, I was like, perfect. This is what I was meant to be doing. It just felt really, really good. And then we had some essays that like, I’m so glad got a chance to exist in the world. We have Jr. Bolts essay about the edge city. I remember when he told me about that book, like a year and a half, two years ago, and I read it and it blew my mind. We have Christopher slow chase essay on the channel. Awesome trilogy, right. That’s another great one that I’m so glad gets a chance to exist. So this was like a great thing. It is currently self funded. We do have a patreon that I’m hoping we can eventually get to cover the costs of running the magazine and then some because my ultimate dream is to have an artist hire an artist for each issue and how Have them do the like featured image for every article to get be cool. Yeah, to give each issue kind of its own visual theme as well, but like hiring good artists is expensive, right?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah. So you’re gonna pay him what they’re worth a lot of money.
Matt Wolfbridge
And so that’s like kind of my ultimate dream and then also to have like a PDF and ebook version like, right could has that I think Clarkesworld has like a bunch of magazines have that. You know, but that’s another thing where like, I would have to hire somebody, because I don’t really know that much about doing layouts like that. That’s something that’s entirely new to me. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. Yeah. Now, what did you do to promote this magazine?
Matt Wolfbridge
So, yeah, the kind of dirty secret about promotion. And like, this actually kills me to like, talk about social media and be like, Oh, it’s actually great to have writers who have a following, right. So like, let me let me phrase it this way. Right. So like, I hate that, that part of my answer is get writers who have an audience to write for you. I hate that. I hate that. That’s part of the equation. Because like, that is the real world. Because I myself am a writer. And I fucking hate that I have to like, sing and dance like a fucking clown on social media. Like, if if social media were a building, I’d fly a plane into it. Like, I hate social media. And not just because I’ve worked in it for like, a million goddamn years. It kind of preys on the worst parts of a human being. And it’s, we get
R.S. Benedict
- Yeah, it sucks. And it just feels worse and worse, like every platform just feels shitty, or is it like, occasionally I’ll peek in on Twitter, and it just feels bad. It doesn’t feel good to be there. I mean, it’s always been bad. But there was also like, sometimes it’d be really fun. Yeah. And it just doesn’t fucking feel fun anymore.
Matt Wolfbridge
It’s just like, having to debase yourself, and even just do things that are so like, what I would call I suppose, like, mundane cringe, of being like, that’s it. That’s the tweet. You know, like, that kind of shit. It’s just like, god dammit. However, you know, writers, you have an audience, you know, I’m not trying to sound like I’m exploiting these people when I’m like, Okay, if you if you hire a writer who has an audience, they’re actually promoting the magazine, not you. Because like, okay, when I started typing our magazine, on blue sky, when I started the blue sky account, we had zero followers, obviously, because yeah, brand new magazine, right. And so, Gwen Katz, who wrote the amazing essay on the death of the sun, she has over 12,000 Twitter followers and over 1000 followers on blue sky, which in my opinion, at this point, is actually worth more than 12,000 Twitter followers.
R.S. Benedict
Especially since at least 6000 of your Twitter followers are going to be porn bots, respond to everything with pussy and bio. Yeah.
Matt Wolfbridge
And so before we got links on Hacker News, blue sky was our number one referral source from our writer sharing their articles on blue sky, right? So
R.S. Benedict
not from Twitter. Yeah,
Matt Wolfbridge
in the first few days, it was blue sky. And then it ended up being then it was Twitter. And then it was Reddit. And then it was Hacker News. And right now, it’s still Hacker News.
R.S. Benedict
Not Twitter, is Twitter. I’ve heard that Twitter kinda like doesn’t really show links very well, or something.
Matt Wolfbridge
From the terminal it has, like they used to have no text on them at all. And now it has like a weird little tiny headline on the bottom. Yeah, Twitter did eventually supplant blue sky, but it took some guy I hadn’t, he had a lot of followers. I hadn’t heard of him. But he linked Simon’s posts, and I got a lot of traffic. That’s cool. But that’s like kind of an important thing. Like Jr bolt is another person who has a lot of followers on blue sky and gets a lot of
R.S. Benedict
engagement posts really good. Yeah, he’s very good at it.
Matt Wolfbridge
So you have to have writers who have a following and are maybe a little more established. Like because I kind of liken it to almost pro wrestling. And so I think building a roster of writers for an issue of the magazine is like building out a professional wrestling card. You need writers who have their own audiences who can like attract people to the to the magazine to the brands, so the products, but then it’s also helpful to have writers who maybe don’t have a huge audience online yet, but are still writing really, really interesting stuff. Right? So you have the people who are like drawing the crowd, so to speak, and the crowd while they’re there, you know, you as a publisher, and as an editor, you’re trying to showcase these other voices to you know, so that people can become familiar with them and their work. And I know that’s a little idealistic, but that’s how it would work in an ideal issue of the magazine right? Because truth is, I as much as I hate to say this, we are in an era of individuals and not institutions, right. And having writers able to promote the site via promoting their own work is very helpful. I on the radar, I understand how much that sucks. So I try to like promote other people’s work from the type bar account as much as possible because I hate That, like, publishers, if you’re a novelist don’t really do any promotion for you anymore. You got yourself and so, okay, right now type our magazine, we’ve got like 200 followers on blue sky, and I think like 200 270, or whatever on Instagram, and I try to promote the work of all of our writers there as much as I can. But until the magazine develops a very large following. In the early days, it is kind of dependent on, as they say, in wrestling being put over by writers with an audience.
R.S. Benedict
All right. Now, how involved? Are you? As an editor? Like, do you take a really light hand? Do you? Are you really, really involved in suggesting how the writers shaped their pieces? Like what does the process look like? So I
Matt Wolfbridge
try to fill in the cracks of a piece kind of as needed. So this could mean I’m, I’m doing like tons and tons of line edits and leaving the structure alone. Or it could mean I’m moving all the paragraphs around, but leaving the sentences alone. And it all depends kind of on what the writer brings to me. And as someone who is a writer, himself, I think the most fun thing about editing is actually working on a piece while trying to make sure the voice of the original author is still coming through. Because it’s not a matter of just saying, Okay, here’s how I would write it, it’s helping the author’s voice be as clear as possible. And the argument kind of be as clear as possible. You know, I hate to go back to because I’ve mentioned being in an MFA program several times, and I swear to God, I’m not a guy in your MFA. You know, but I really liked being in an MFA program. And I learned so much about writing, and I thought it was really awesome. And one of the kinds of drills that we would have, they called it an imitative annotation, which is where you took a piece from a writer, and then you wrote a piece of your own, but you tried to imitate that writer’s voice. And that’s fun. Yes, it was, it was some of the most fun I’ve had, and some of the most interesting pieces I’ve written because I’m like, Okay, let’s try to write something that completely doesn’t sound like me, that sounds like someone else. But it’s an idea that I have, you know, and that was super fun. And that actually, believe it or not, taught me more about editing than like, editing exercises, you know what I mean? Because you’re almost kind of doing the same thing as an editor where you’re like, Okay, this paragraph needs to be kind of sculpted, massaged, or whatever, or this thing needs to be rephrased. How can I kind of do this? If I if I was trying to help them, you know, illustrate this point better? How would I say it as them right, and then seeing if they agree or whatever, right? And so editing is actually a ton of fun. I really like it. You know, I was tempted as many are tempted to think and this is wrong, that like, Oh, if you’re an editor, and you’re just like a failed writer. But that’s it’s so not the case, because it truly is a different skill set. There’s like similarities that overlap. But it’s just
R.S. Benedict
is it’s probably a skill set. I could not do personally, I don’t think I could do it looks really hard.
Matt Wolfbridge
Because it’s, it’s like, I almost liken it to Tetris. So like, my fiance is really good at puzzles. And like, whenever I tried to organize like a shelf or anything, it always looks like shit. And like austere, I scan it immediately and be like, Okay, you should put, she’ll be like, You should put this here this year, this year, this year. And suddenly everything is like neatly organized. And so like, for me, I kind of get the same thing when I’m looking at a nonfiction piece. And I like do a scan of it be like, Okay, this paragraph needs to go here. This paragraph needs to go there. This sentence should be two sentences ago, papa, papa, and it just kind of starts falling into place. And so like, people talk about enjoying writing, and to an extent I do enjoy writing, but I enjoy editing more. And so like, when I’m editing, I’m like, is this what people who say they like writing? Is this what they feel like? Is this what I’m supposed to feel like when I’m riding, I don’t know. But it’s, it’s been a labor of love. For sure. Like, I’ve really enjoyed it. And some pieces need more work than others, of course, but I’m always happy to help people shape things into a piece that’s really good, so long as they come to me with a concrete pitch already. Like if you have something vague, like Yeah, I’m gonna help you bring it into something that’s, you know, I’m not gonna, like come up with the idea for you. But if you’ve got a really great pitch, and you you know, write a first draft, and it’s still a bit kind of amorphous, you know, I’m happy to help you shape it into something, but do come to me with a very laser focused concrete pitch first,
R.S. Benedict
the first issue made a surprisingly big splash when it debuted, like, you can put brilliant content out there. There’s absolutely no guarantee that anyone’s going to look at it and you can promote things really well. That still isn’t a guarantee. It’s really fucking hard to find an audience for something new, especially when it’s not a C E. O ish, you know? And you somehow managed to make that happen. So how the fuck did you do that? How, how did that happen?
Matt Wolfbridge
Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for the praise. Second of all pessimistically I don’t think it’s ever gonna happen again. So issue one was unique and that it was released all at once for free as part of the like promotion for the first issue, right. So like, it didn’t make sense to put issue one behind a times paywall, because nobody had read any of it yet, right. So like who could possibly know if it was worth paying for. So future issues are going to be behind the times paywall that’s for patrons only. And so we’ll be releasing kind of one at a time. So the next issue launches in late June. And then, you know, as the weeks go by, we’ll release one article at a time. So like having a ton of attention immediately right away on two essays that are being linked in various places and blowing up. That’s probably unlikely to happen again. But I think the answer kind of goes back to building a good stable of writers for an issue you want people who have a following have their own. And then you also want a kind of myriad of essays that are covering like different topics that are going to draw people in it just so happened that the two that went viral were both about science fiction. But we were running the gamut from like Barbie typewriters all the way to the fucking Nostalgia Critic. Yeah, you know, that helped a lot, I think. But it does go back to what I was saying earlier, unfortunately, that like, Yes, we had people who had established followings online. And, you know, when I was going into discover on blue sky, I was seeing people sharing type our magazine articles, right. And so I think that was something that was very helpful is having people who were kind of known quantities in the issue, especially if you’re new, because you don’t have any institutional clout or prestige or whatever you want to call it
R.S. Benedict
of your own. Yeah, yeah. They were known and they’re also really fucking good writers. Yeah,
Matt Wolfbridge
I mean, that that helps you know, that they’re writing stuff that was really well researched. And in the case of Simon’s article, for some reason, controversial that justifies right.
R.S. Benedict
Well, let’s talk about that. Actually. Let’s let’s jump ahead to talk about Simon McNeil wrote a piece for the first issue called, nobody wants to buy the future, why science fiction literature is vanishing. And it ended up making a whole lot of people in sci fi publishing really fucking mad. Really there. There was some a lot of arguing with it a lot of floundering trying trying to debate it. I remember a lot of people insisting science fiction literature is doing fine. Look, there’s a bunch of popular sci fi movies music wasn’t talking about movies, I was talking about books and magazines, which aren’t doing so good. No, and I’ve heard that in like private forums and private publication discords I’m not going to name names. There was some real wailing and gnashing of teeth. Yes. Did that respond to surprise you?
Matt Wolfbridge
Yeah, it did. So I had no idea that people would be apoplectic over assignments essay. And this as you note, this peroxisome of rage seized an entire section of the Online Writing Community like it was in the capital D discourse for like two days. I did receive several messages from writing friends about a discord that shall not be named being like broad your magazine has been put on blast to this month discord.
R.S. Benedict
But is this the same discord we’re talking about? That is the discord of a rather prominent sci fi publication,
Matt Wolfbridge
which is a publication I’m a fan of you know what I mean, make no mistake I you know, if they want to, they want to drag type bar, that’s fine. I’m not mad I you know, the more magazines there are the better right? So like, Okay, if people got upset, I don’t, I don’t care. I just I was shocked because to me, the article contained nothing explicitly kind of provocative. It didn’t resort to to make another professional wrestling comparison. In wrestling, there’s something called cheap heat. And that’s like, if you go and you’re if you’re a wrestler, and you’re a heel, right, a bad guy who wants to be booed and you’re going to show in Madison Square Garden you wear like a Red Sox jersey or something like that, right? It’s something that’s gonna It’s a cheap way to piss off the audience right? Assignments essay, there was no cheap heat in it. It was all for me a very calm, relaxed discussion of the landscape and of the numbers, but Reddit was very upset certain rarefied discord servers were very upset. And what’s funny is I like genuinely don’t like upsetting people. But if a sound argument calmly stated gets you fuming, maybe that’s a huge problem.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, like, like, I would note, I don’t think there was anything in an article that was gloating. So yeah, Simon is a sci fi writer, he, I’m sure he wants sci fi publishing to be very good. I’m sure he wants sci fi to be selling a lot of books because that would be good for him personally, financially. So when he’s saying Like, yeah, our industry is not doing so good. Let’s maybe talk about why it just strikes me as someone who’s like very trying to rationally look at the situation and create his analysis and I and I can understand, like, maybe you disagree with his conclusions, that’s fine. That makes sense. But the idea that like, actually, American sci fi publishing is in a really good place like right now like, No, it isn’t. It’s not. No, it isn’t.
Matt Wolfbridge
Yeah, cuz like, I’m not gonna claim I know everything like I’m not a position not in a position where I see all of like, the sales data. I’m not head of a publishing house or a bookseller or whatever. Yeah. What I asked myself, when I, when this discussion happened was like, Okay, what was the last time I heard anyone outside of the science fiction fantasy space? Like the online bubble mention a science fiction book published recently? Like, in other words, when was the last time I can recall, a recently published sci fi book kind of breaking containment? To a degree that normal people were talking about it? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
it’s been ages. I guess. It’s just Jeff VanderMeer, who doesn’t really publish within the Sci Fi sphere. He’s very, despite being a sci fi writer. He’s kind of separate from that whole scene for various reasons, and actually very critical of the scene. Yeah.
Matt Wolfbridge
And so like, every, like, so many people who I know who don’t even read, like, they know, like Colleen Hoover, I hate to say, but like, say, like, science fiction has not broken containment since like, I can remember and I’m sure people are gonna come in, and they’re gonna say, Oh, well, actually, there’s the three body problem because it got on that flick show. And it’s like, okay, that book is from 2008. That’s almost 20 years ago. And then, of course, oh God, right.
R.S. Benedict
Why did you have to remind me that? I’m old guy, there’s
Matt Wolfbridge
dude. But that book is from 1965. It’s so in my own reading, I find like less and less science fiction ends up appealing to me. The last science fiction book I got jazzed about was a memory called Empire by Arkady Martine, right? I didn’t get to finish it because I was reading it kind of recreationally in the middle of my MFA reading list. And I had to focus on my required readings. But the book is very thorough, very richly written and contain this passion for kind of poetry and lyricism, as opposed to like passion for absolutely nothing other than like exhausted cultural references, like, whether it’s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or fucking Marvel or whatever. Yeah, you know, and before that, the last science fiction book that really got to me was way back in 2014. It was this wonderful little book called Elysium, by Jennifer Marie Brissett. It was a really unique exploration of form, that I don’t often see in science fiction, it’s the story of the eradication of all humans on Earth by an alien species that terraforming Earth into a desert, which itself isn’t terribly, you know, out of the ordinary for science fiction, but it’s told from the perspective of a malfunctioning computer program that humans embedded into the atmosphere. So the story Yeah, the story is basically the same story told over and over again, as the computer attempts to repair itself and reboot, and you get more and more of the cycle each time. And the cycle kind of changes. But some things are similar. And it was just like really weird and interesting and kind of sad. And I would recommend anybody read it. It’s a it’s a short book, you can read it in a day if you really want and that’s actually why I really particularly why I love it, because like, as cool as I thought a memory called Empire was it’s a fucking doorstopper, and it’s like, I ain’t got time for that. Sorry, you know, and it’s like a part of a whole big series. I really wish science fiction could kind of be svelte and interesting. It’s like, I personally, when I was younger, I like door stoppers because I had a shitty job where I had to work till two in the morning and so it’s like, okay, absolutely nothing is happening between midnight and two in the morning. I can just read but as I have more responsibilities, it’s harder for me to commit to like a 600 page novel or whatever. Yeah, I
R.S. Benedict
don’t I don’t really have time for that. Unless it’s like a really thoughtful important book if it’s just like, supposed to be adventure like just fucking just get to the adventure just get to show me some aliens and get the fuck out. You know, like, I don’t want to I don’t want genre movies to be three and a half hours I want them to be a tight 90 minutes. Good tight, 90 minutes of a zombie movie or whatever the fuck. That’s what I want. I’m sorry, I got I got shit to do.
Matt Wolfbridge
You have cats to play fetch with and
R.S. Benedict
I got a job. I gotta record another episode that makes people mad for reasons I didn’t predict I got it. I got it. I got I got to work on the novel that I’ve been working on for like five years now.
Matt Wolfbridge
Is it the last real because I remember Yes, a sample of it. It was really really good. Where it was. Thank you. The woman going to the party where there was like the rich girl everybody knew she was a rich girl. And everybody was like a fucking sociopath. Thank you. It was having been surrounded by people like that in the media industry. It was a very realistic depiction of that kind of scene.
R.S. Benedict
Oh well thank you some some day I’ll finish that someday. I hope I just but anyway so so yeah that that got a ton of traffic and a lot of people say I’m accused Simon McNeil of being a contrarian or writing like rage clickbait or something which is so strange because he’s never done that in his life and that was really frustrating. I
Matt Wolfbridge
wouldn’t devilish rage bait because no, I’ve been like, I hate to be like, the media industry makes me fucking sick. But But like, I’ve been surrounded by this ship for a really long time. Like I remember peak, like Thought Catalog, like outrage bait articles from like, 2014 they had one that was like, I’m tired of pretend it was like, I’m a rich girl who’s tired of being poor to be liked by you. And it made the front page of The New York Post. Good. Yeah, like I remember being mired in that shit for a really long time. So I would not publish rage bait and so the fact that people were saying it was I was like, you haven’t seen rage bait if you think that’s what this is no.
R.S. Benedict
Rage paint might have been that recent piece about like that girl talking about how she loves older men and define convention with their May December romances. And then you find out that she’s dating a man who’s three years older than my God,
Matt Wolfbridge
or like the Atlantic article that was like, I bet you all feel fucking stupid for shaming Kate Middleton now. And it’s like, well, they were deliberately misleading people in lying. So so no, no,
R.S. Benedict
I don’t know. All right, so so away from from Simon McNeil. Let’s talk about another one of your your really big articles. You ran a piece a really good piece by Gwen see cats that examines science fiction literature about the death of the sun. what interested you in running this one? So
Matt Wolfbridge
I wish I could say there was some cleverness on my part, like, Oh, hi, I’ve spotted a gap in the market in the form of a lengthy essay on the interplay between science and fiction. But really, when, you know, she emailed me and pitched me this article, and it sounded exactly like what ended up being published because it’s just, I hadn’t read anything like it before, right? And what kinda can be frustrating about novel writing is you’re looking for similarities, you’re not looking for differences, right? What I mean is, agents want you to pitch things that are kind of like other things, because they know there’s an established track record for that kind of thing. Right? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
my book. It’s like Hunger Games meets food and vegan toilet. You
Matt Wolfbridge
know, and even like, when I worked in media sometimes, you know, I’d have editors be like, Oh, we want our version of this other essay that’s going viral. We need some kind of like offshoot.
R.S. Benedict
Oh, yeah. Yeah, there were a lot of those. I’m sure. Tor blog did its own fucking multiple versions of everyone is beautiful known as Barney. Yeah. And shout out to you. I see what you’re doing. And
Matt Wolfbridge
so this is something I never seen an essay like this. And Gwen did such a great job of pitching it to me. And I was like, Oh, wow, this sounds really really interesting. And then the first draft kind of blew me away. It just how well researched it was and well, she
R.S. Benedict
she fucking dug deep. Yeah, so many books and writers I’d never heard of and like, oh, yeah, and here’s this novel from like, 1871 like, what the fuck
Matt Wolfbridge
yeah. And so there was this like London Review of Books caliber essay suddenly in my inbox, and I was like, holy shit. It’s so it was, I wish there was more to say other than it was a really brilliant, well researched, well written essay that gets into the weeds to a degree that a few other places do. and analyze is a fascinating topic. That is the relationship of fiction, particularly science fiction, to scientific breakthroughs, a various era and how those breakthroughs influence what happens on the page, right? With the focus on the science around the sun, Gwen would obviously have a lot more to say around the process, and maybe you should interview her for an episode because I could do something that’s very interesting.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, that was a really interesting piece and really like melancholic and just took some really deep deep dives into a lot of stuff I haven’t seen before
Matt Wolfbridge
for other people who want to say we’re trying to do outrage bait like Gwen’s essay, which is as far from outrage bait as you could possibly get. That is the number one essay on type bar magazine by a wide margin. So if you’re gonna say we’re like an outrage bait like quote unquote, unquote clickbait website like first of all, we don’t run ads. So there’s absolutely zero incentive to run clickbait because we have to we’re not we don’t monetize the traffic. First of all, second of all, that is the least rage bait thing ever. Like we want people to come to a type bar and either feel good or feel informed. And that was, you know, an essay made it’s about The depth of the sides of me might not feel good. But
R.S. Benedict
yeah, I guess timely with the Eclipse and everything, you’ll definitely
Matt Wolfbridge
feel like really informed, right? Like, yeah, so this was kind of everything I wanted type bar to be that essay, and people responded to it. So I’m really glad
R.S. Benedict
it struck me reading it. It was like, actually feeling like I’m being informed and not necessarily being sold to. Yeah, because it’s very typical in a lot of other literature, blogs or magazines. Today, it’s more of the like, 10 new novels about queer women turning into dogs or something. It’s like, okay, half of these. Oh Torey Rana, you ran a Buzzfeed style listicle of that lists 10 essential books that your publisher is putting out right now this is just this is an advertisement. This is just, or if this doesn’t belong to you, that’s full of Amazon affiliate links, where you get a little bit of the kickback if people buy it from Okay, when I didn’t feel like you were trying to sell me on shit. It was it was like one of the books was like, Yeah, this is this. This really deep book is fucking terrible to read. It is horrible to read, but it’s about the sun. So I’m gonna examine it. Yeah,
Matt Wolfbridge
that was like, kind of one of my mission statements for type bar was I was kind of sick how so much of fiction writing today when I say fiction writing, I mean, like writing around fiction. Yeah. You know, writing about fiction, I suppose, like, you know, is essentially just part of a PR campaign. Like, it’s, it’s either thinly veiled or not, really. And so I wanted writing about fiction that existed independently of Publisher marketing campaigns, right? Yeah, PR. And this is something like, okay, we’re writing about requin is writing about or was writing about, did write about works that in some cases, were literally hundreds of years old, that like, nobody is going to be profiting from right. And so we’re writing essays, just to like, inform people. And because art and writing are really kind of one of the only things that make, or maybe the only thing that makes being born tolerable, right. And that’s why I like Jr, bolts essay about the edge city. That’s why I like Eric D Roulettes. essay about a woman of the sword, right? We’re just talking about literature and books for the sake of it, we’re not fucking trying to sell anything. We’re like, okay, either this book was really cool. And here’s why. Or this book was bad. And here’s why. Or, you know, this body of work was really interesting. And here’s why. Or here’s the history of these kinds of societal forces and how they shaped the fiction of its time, right? And all that stuff is really kind of fascinating. And it kind of, I don’t want to say it doesn’t exist anywhere, because that’s not true. It’s just, it’s been occupying a shrinking and smaller and smaller and smaller percentage of online writing, and I had to try to fix it. Being a man of modest means I had to put what I could to try to fix it before I died. Not that I plan on dying anytime soon, but you never know. So I had to tell myself I at least gave it a
R.S. Benedict
shot. Yeah, so now what article did you expect to blow up the biggest but didn’t
Matt Wolfbridge
so it’s funny. The Barbie type Broder essay was wonderful. The author Sarah screen Yeah. Sarah Everett, the author of the article, she is the world’s foremost expert in Barbie typewriters. And she operates a great typewriter focused YouTube channel called just my typewriter. Right now, she’s also on Instagram under the same name. And I think of an article about the Barbie typewriter was posted somewhere with like a wider and more general audience it would have blown up like an NPR or something or like Huff Post BuzzFeed, whatever, I think it would have blown up there because since it’s such a strange and funny thing you have this like hot pink Barbie typewriter that could secretly write hidden codes and even got used by a gang in Ireland to write hidden messages to each other. But I guess the readership the first issue attracted was more interested in the science fiction stuff first. Yeah, a weird kind of little typewriter toy Yeah, just
R.S. Benedict
kind of would have thought because of Barbie you know, people Barbies and feminism and stuff is like kind of kind of big right now that I guess I would have predicted that one to blow up pretty big.
Matt Wolfbridge
I feel like what’ll happen is like a year from now, someone will post it on like the Today I learned read it and be like today I learned there was a Barbie typewriter that could do Ba ba ba ba ba and then it’ll you know, blow up a year after it’s been published. It’s like one of those types of articles.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that’s definitely a unique piece. That’s not something I don’t know if people are doing a lot of Barbie typewriter SEO right. Now, why did you run not one but two articles about Doug the Nostalgia Critic Walker of channel awesome entertainment in your first issue. And can we look forward to even more Doug walk Her articles in the future.
Matt Wolfbridge
So what’s funny is I initially did not plan on having to I just wanted one. But both pitches came within literal seconds of one another. And they were both so good that I just accepted both of them. Because I didn’t want to have to tell somebody No, because they were both really good. And I hope this isn’t a cop out. But the answer to the question is kind of in the essays, right. So the dog walker movies, and if you’re not familiar with Doug Walker, he’s a guy who is the Nostalgia Critic, the Nostalgia Critic was like this kind of offshoot of the Angry Video Game Nerd, but instead of looking at old video games, he looked at old movies. And eventually, he started a website called channel Awesome. That was almost kind of like a youtube multi channel network in a way right where he Yeah, this website called channel Awesome. That was a video website. And this is when like, online video was still kind of in its infancy.
R.S. Benedict
It was before YouTube kind of was everything. Yeah. And he had all these other reviewers
Matt Wolfbridge
on Channel awesome. And they would host these anniversary films where he would like, browbeat all the other reviewers to like, go somewhere or travel somewhere and do like a movie and it eventually, years later, this document came out where there are all these alleged abuses and one podcast called it the most illegal movie set since the Twilight Zone. Yeah, so if you don’t know the Twilight Zone, people were decapitated by a helicopter. cavitated.
R.S. Benedict
Several ships, several actors with a helicopter onset, right? Yes, yeah. Two of them were children. So
Matt Wolfbridge
yeah, so the channel awesome movies have this place of infamy and like internet history, right. And so. But those movies, they encapsulate a very specific and transitory time on the internet. This is like late aughts, early 2010s, better than any other cultural artifacts, you know, and it’s so clear to me that these movies above all else are kind of a Rosetta Stone for a certain time period. So you have this early aughts internet, that, despite its flaws, is more open and more interesting and weirder, right? And then you have the internet of the 2010s. That starts rapidly corporate tising and consolidating, until you have the internet of today, where there’s five websites, and to paraphrase Max reads, newsletter, everybody acts like there’s a gas leak nearby, you know. And so, the channel movies kind of hint at that arc, right? So you have the first one that’s almost kind of like, you know, a celebration of what’s possible you have, you know, Doug creates this website of media reviewers, and they do this big anniversary celebration, in the form of a movie called kick Cassia. But by the third one, the most infamous of the three called to boldly flee, their dream of channel awesome is over, everyone is fucking miserable. And you can even tell on camera that no one wants to fucking be there. And even in the content of the movie, even in the narrative itself. Dog has this base awareness that as the movie says, The Age of the reviewer is coming to an end, right? Even Doug can see the changes in the internet on the horizon, that it’s it’s going to the way of corporations and consolidation right on the essays put it more eloquently than I do. But I like in I hate to compare it to boldly flee to fucking blood meridian. But the end of blood meridian, right? That’s something I’ve read about where so you have the judge who either kills or does God knows what to the kid. And then it has this sort of almost non sequitur ending where it’s a guy putting poles in the ground in the dirt, right. And people have endlessly speculated as to what that means. And the interpretation that from what I have read seems to have the most acceptance is that it’s a guy putting in fence posts and his fencing off the prairie. And that is kind of the symbolism of the end of the prairie and of the end of the open frontier, right? And so in a way to boldly flee is is kind of like the end of blood Meridian and that this is a symbol of the end of a certain era of the Internet of the open frontier of the internet. Right? And as Christopher slow Chang noted, if I’m saying his last name, right, apologies if I’m not, you can yell at me in the discord. dog walker, he used to be able to find his content on Channel awesome, which he owned. Now the channel awesome.com website redirects to his YouTube channel. His YouTube channel is owned by Google, right? And so it’s very much is this closing of the frontier moment? Kind of like the end of blood meridian? I know. That’s gonna be like, if anyone has ever dragging me online. Like if I piss off people, they’re gonna look for this soundbite. They’re gonna like this fucking jerk off. Compare blood Meridian to the fucking histology credit shows.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah. So I do think that’s very interesting that you you No, most people would probably not say, Yeah, Doug Walker definitely deserves not one, but two deep dives. But I felt like both of them did feel like they, they were justified to exist. I do think it is worthwhile, you know, like it or not internet personalities as ridiculous and cringy as they are, they are the culture at least they’re a huge part of the culture now, you know, shit like Mr. Beast is like, whatever the fuck that is, is huge. The shitloads of people are watching them. So it’s, I think it is worth examining them in a thoughtful way, as opposed to the usual either, you know, Stan accounts versus reaction or drama channels. Yeah, I
Matt Wolfbridge
was gonna say, because like, you, if you look at something like, you know, to some degree, I don’t want to say film criticism doesn’t exist anymore, because that’s not true. But like, a lot of criticism has kind of just been iced out because there’s no real financial incentive anymore for it to exist, because you’re just gonna, like, piss off. If the industry if the media industry is predicated on access, which to some degree it is. You don’t want to be criticizing people, you don’t want to be criticizing anything, because it’s gonna jeopardize your access. And so that’s bad for film criticism is bad for book criticism. It’s bad for all kinds of, you know, while film criticism exists, you know, you have TV criticism, too. There’s never really been kind of like YouTube criticism in the same way. And like an intellectual way, at least that I’ve seen. It says, as you note, it’s fucking drama channels, its reactions. It’s all this like, weird kind of stuff that is part of the ecosystem. And it would be so curious to imagine like, Okay, what, what does, you know, internet criticism, or like YouTube criticism, whatever you want to call it? If you adapt film criticism to like YouTube, right? Like, what does that look like? And I feel like those essays actually did a really kinda great job. But they’re also it’s worth mentioning kind of historical and cultural analysis as well. Because these are, you know, a decade old. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
it is. It is very easy to point at someone like Doug Walker and say, like, look at this asshole. Yeah, but you gotta say something a little more, more thoughtful than that. Okay, what does this asshole say about us? You know? Exactly. Yeah. So what lessons, if any, are there to learn from the surprising success of the first issue of type magazine?
Matt Wolfbridge
So I think to some degree, we’ve kind of mentioned this, there is pent up demand. I don’t know how much. But there’s clearly some level of pent up demand for interesting essays, right? To another degree. More broadly, we’re kind of seeing this reformation of media on the margins right now. Right? So you have the core of the industry that was essentially shattered over the last few years, right? Look at what happened to all the Gawker Media properties. Whatever, I look at what happened to Vice look at what happened to BuzzFeed. And you have slowly coming together writers, starting places like aftermath, right? So aftermath, if you’re not familiar listening to this, all of our all of I don’t know if it’s all of them. But a bunch of the ex Kotaku, people who love to talk through the gaming website, they started their own gaming website, Co Op called aftermath. They already have over 3000 paid subscribers, and I don’t even think it’s been a year, I’m not even sure if it’s six months. So there’s demand to some degree for interesting essays and coverage of topics that people like that’s not just a bunch of shitty press releases, or spam or whatever, right. And so you also have things like defector, they’re very open, I don’t remember their subscriber numbers off the top of my head, but they openly kind of talk about how many subscribers they have. And it’s a pretty impressive number. You’ve got flaming Hydra, there’s others, I’m probably forgetting to mention, but you’re seeing this re formation of online writing and what it means to run a website in this new age of the internet, were the kind of I don’t want to say means of production. But where they, you know, the means of production have kind of just been been destroyed, right? Where these kinds of like vultures came in, chopped everything up, sold it for parts, and then there’s just kind of nothing. It’s like shitty Facebook memes, and the New York Times, basically, and some contrarians on substack. And so we’re seeing kind of things start to like reform on the edges, and we’ll see how it ends up playing out. I think type bar is one very, very, very small part of what’s going on. But hopefully we’re one drop in a month soon, that’ll inevitably change the way writing happens on the internet. Either that or we’re gonna flame out and be completely forgotten in short order. You know, who knows?
R.S. Benedict
All right now, we’ve been talking for a little bit over an hour actually, which is pretty cool. So Oh, One more question before we go, if one of our listeners wants to send a pitch to type bar, what’s a good way to do it?
Matt Wolfbridge
So yeah, you can pitch me it’s Matt ma TT at type bar magazine.com. I have a if you go on the website to the Submission section, it really should say pitches instead of submissions. I should probably fix that. There’s like a guide on how to do it. So like, I like very specific pitches. Vague stuff, I’m less likely because like, I’m less likely to respond positively to it. Not that I’m gonna like yell at you. But like, this needs a bit of refinement, you know, so don’t just pitch me like, hey, the edge city was like a cool book. And people should remember the edge study because it was really cool. Pitch me like, Okay, why it was cool, what’s unique about it, right? You know, make your case for it. And make sure there’s kind of like a so what? Athletic, you know, like, Okay, well, why is this? Why is this important? You know, like we have, I don’t want to go out spoilers for the next issue. But we have some really cool essays. We have like a really good one about Neopets, and promise of the early internet and sociology and live spaces. You know, as it pertains to Neopets you’ve got a great one on on Sherlock Holmes, we do accept pitches on like game design. I would love some stuff on tabletop game design. Simon Simon McNeil wrote a really brilliant essay on his blog, about the game wingspan. It’s this like game where you have to build a bird habitat. And he talked about how that the design of the game was actually about post capitalist futures. And it was one of the most fascinating pieces of game design criticism I’ve ever read. And you don’t see a lot of tabletop game design criticism. I would love some really interesting critiques of criticism. And they say criticism, I don’t mean like bad things. I mean, analysis, right? To some degree, criticism has become a dirty word. And it shouldn’t be. But really good and interesting pieces of game design criticism. Right now I have enough video game stuff, there’s going to be three video game pieces and issue too. So I don’t need any more video game stuff. I would like some book stuff right now, particularly, because like, for as much as like I don’t, I don’t want us to get a reputation of like a bad place that like writes about how books are bad. Because I never we’re gonna have at least one critical review of a book an issue too. I would love an essay kind of like Jr, bolts, the edge city essay, or Eric de Roulettes essay on a woman of the sword, which are looking at a book and explaining why it’s either an old work that deserves to be remembered or a new one that kind of defied expectations and was was better for it. Right? Um, so things like that. And you can pitch me mad at Type R magazine.com. We pay right now $50 per essay. Hopefully when we get more Patreon subscribers, I’ll be able to afford to pay more. But yeah, that’s that’s how you can pitch me. Okay. Well, thank
R.S. Benedict
you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me, Raquel. And before we go, what would you like to plug aside from of course, type or magazine.
Matt Wolfbridge
Oh, I’m on. I’m on blue sky. I’m at Wolfbridge, dot Blue Sky dot social, I think whatever the default blue sky thing is. And then I also have a newsletter abridged thoughts.com. That since type or has launched, I haven’t been able to update quite as frequently. But I like to post about what I’m reading and then that kind of thing. So if you’re curious about my non-Typebar thoughts, you can follow me in those places. All right. Well, thank
R.S. Benedict
you so much.
Matt Wolfbridge
Thank you for having me, Raquel.
R.S. Benedict
And thank you all for listening. If you like what you heard, please head to patreon.com/write Good and subscribe. Subscribers get access to our Discord where we have a little writing group going on. And we also like to trade gossip because we’re messy bitches who love drama. Sometimes we’ll stream movies sometimes we’ll stream video games and goof on each other. It’s generally a pretty good place. Although we do argue sometimes but you know, that’s also fun only on Christmas Eve only on Christmas Eve then it becomes Thunderdome all fucking bets are off. But that’s all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, keep writing good.