Latest news with #FeedMe
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Ever Worried About Being Laid Off? Read This.
Steve Jaffe was laid off for the first time in 2001. But that wasn't the last time for Mr. Jaffe, now 52 and a self-employed marketing strategist in Altadena, Calif. He was laid off three more times over the course of his career, he said, and wrote a book about his experiences that he self-published in February. In addition to writing about jobs he has lost, Mr. Jaffe has been reading the layoff stories of others in Laid Off, a new Substack newsletter. 'A support group like this for laid-off people has always been needed,' he said. Melanie Ehrenkranz, 35, started Laid Off last August, about a year after she lost her job at a financial technology company that has since closed. After being laid off, she said, 'I didn't really feel like I had access to a community or to stories of layoffs outside of a group chat with two of my former colleagues.' By the time she introduced the newsletter, Ms. Ehrenkranz, who lives in Los Angeles, had started working for Business Class, an online entrepreneurship course created by the '#Girlboss' author Sophia Amoruso, where Ms. Ehrenkranz is still employed. Within two months of debuting, Laid Off had about 5,000 subscribers. It now has about 9,000, with more than 150 paying $5 a month or $50 a year for full subscriptions that include additional resources like access to private group chats. Many subscribers work in layoff-prone industries like media, marketing and advertising, Ms. Ehrenkranz said, adding that she had recently noticed an uptick in subscribers with careers in government and technology. Laid Off's audience is a fraction of the size of more established Substack business publications like Feed Me. Its growth in readership comes at a time when posting about work online has become commonplace, whether it be 'LinkedIn-fluencers' sharing hot takes on corporate trends or people making TikTok videos about office outfits. And at a time when there have been growing concerns about a recession and a rise in unemployment. Some of those featured in the newsletter reached out to Ms. Ehrenkranz after losing jobs; others were chosen after completing a survey that she had posted on LinkedIn, which 'received hundreds of responses right away,' she said. More women have been featured than men, Ms. Ehrenkranz added, because more women have approached her about participating. Among the layoff stories the newsletter has told are those of a former Wall Street Journal editor, a former recruiter for Meta, a former content manager at Tesla and a former financial analyst at Disney who was with the company for nearly a decade. Laid Off's Q&A interviews touch on topics people sometimes avoid when talking about unemployment. Ms. Ehrenkranz's go-to questions for subjects include 'What were the reasons given for your layoff?' and 'What was the first thing you did after getting laid off?' She said the newsletter's tone was meant to be edgy and fun; a tagline on its website reads: 'The coolest place on the internet to talk about being laid off.' 'It's definitely that vibe,' Ms. Ehrenkranz said. 'The whole point of Laid Off is to show that it's not a personal failure.' Anu Lingala, 33, spoke to Ms. Ehrenkranz about losing her job at Nordstrom in a feature published in March. 'Her interviews are so humanizing,' said Ms. Lingala, who lives in Brooklyn and now works in marketing at a jewelry company. 'They unpack the shame around being laid off.' The newsletter has a confessional-like quality that Lindsey Stanberry, a former editor of the Money Diaries column on the website Refinery29, appreciates. 'There's a voyeuristic element to it,' said Ms. Stanberry, 44, who now writes The Purse, a Substack newsletter about women and money. 'It's like, it could happen to me, or it has happened to me, and, like, I want to feel this camaraderie.' Maya Joseph-Goteiner, 41, was among Laid Off's first subjects: Her interview about losing her user-experience job at Google ran in the newsletter last August. In it, Ms. Joseph-Goteiner recalled going bowling with her family the day she was laid off and how the experience pushed her in new professional directions. Participating was an opportunity to offer a 'counter narrative' to the desperation and shame that can bubble up when talking about losing a job, she said. 'My story felt like one of resilience, and I want there to be more stories like that,' said Ms. Joseph-Goteiner, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M., and now runs her own research and design agency called Velocity Ave. Ochuko Akpovbovbo, the writer of As Seen On, a Substack newsletter about business trends that is geared toward her fellow Gen Z-ers, said some in that cohort had shown less interest in careers in media and technology than members of older generations. Laid Off's interviews with people who have lost jobs in those industries have helped contribute to 'the end of Big Tech and journalism worship,' added Ms. Akpovbovbo, 26, whose newsletter was introduced last May and has about 22,000 subscribers. For Joya Patel, Laid Off is a platform to remind people of the importance of certain careers. She pitched herself to Ms. Ehrenkranz after losing her job as the director of communications and external affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services in February. Ms. Patel, 34, who also subscribed to the newsletter around that time, said she had been motivated to share her story after reading another Laid Off interview with a former communications specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development. 'I really wanted people to understand, OK, what does working at H.H.S. mean?' said Ms. Patel, referring to the federal health agency. 'The American people don't know what each agency does for them and what we sit in there to do.' Ms. Patel, who is now consulting and whose Laid Off feature was published in April, likes how the newsletter lets readers 'hear from the people,' she added. 'I'm tired of companies being able to direct us and lead stories. As humans, we have that power, and I like to hear from people like, 'Hey, I walked in, it was awkward. Things were awkward that day. This is why they told me they're doing it.' Because no company is ever going to say that.'
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Foster the People's 'Fever Dream' of a Music Video Features Lead Singer Mark Foster's Wife Julia Garner: Watch!
The latest Foster the People music video features a star-studded cameo — from one of the band member's real-life partners. On Thursday, May 1, Foster the People are preparing to their double-feature music video for their new tracks "See You in the Afterlife" and "Feed Me" — and leading man Mark Foster's wife Julia Garner makes an appearance in the video. In a press release, Foster — who has been married to the Ozark actress since 2019 — opened up about the songs from their latest album, Paradise State of Mind, and shared what it's like to collaborate with his wife on a project like this. Related: Julia Garner Is Married! Actress Weds Foster the People Frontman Mark Foster "These videos are transmissions from somewhere between a fever dream and a digital afterlife," Foster, 41, says. "If 'See You In the Afterlife' is a satirical take on what life feels like now, 'Feed Me' is the hell that follows. It was interesting to tie these two songs together in a short to explore the two sides of consumption – the dopamine rush of intake, and the void that follows." According to Foster, his scenes with Garner, 31, helped to create a "lucid hallucination" that conveys the two songs' themes of otherworldliness and beauty. "Filming 'Feed Me' with Julia felt like stepping into a lucid hallucination – a secret world stitched together by static and memory," the leading man adds. "One where fear and desire intersect and the result is something beautiful and deeply unsettling. The line between the digital and the divine is thinner, and stranger, than we think." Although the couple often keep details about their relationship private, Garner and Foster have shared that first met at the Sundance Film Festival nearly seven years before tying the knot in an intimate courthouse wedding in December 2019. "We went back and forth from having a big wedding to eloping in Vegas," Garner told Vogue at the time of their wedding. "We ultimately decided to get married at City Hall in New York City, just like my parents did 40 years ago." Related: Julia Garner Shares Sweet Throwback Photo with Husband in Rare Tribute on 3rd Wedding Anniversary In 2019, Foster was also by Garner's side when she took home her first Emmy for her role as Ruth Langmore on Netflix's Ozark. In her acceptance speech, Garner gave her then-future husband a special shoutout, calling Foster "the love of my life." The couple have also appeared in fashion campaigns together, modeling for Gucci during the holiday season in 2024. In January, Foster and Garner shared that they had rung in the New Year together with a series of photos on Instagram. The couple could be seen skiing and cuddling up together in Switzerland on New Year's Day, as Garner captioned her post: "🤍 First day of 2025🇨🇭." The music video for "See You in the Afterlife / Feed Me" — directed by ' Laura Gordon, Jackson James and Ryan Ohm — is now streaming. Read the original article on People
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Where the Dealmakers and Strivers Get Their Gossip
It took about three minutes for Emily Sundberg to secure an invitation to her first inauguration party in Washington this January. She had asked for invites on X, adding, as a selling point: 'I am so funny.' Bari Weiss answered the call. The founder of The Free Press, Ms. Weiss was co-hosting a party at a five-star hotel with Uber and Elon Musk's social media network. Her guest list included the former British prime minister Liz Truss, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Ms. Weiss and Ms. Sundberg, 30, are both stars of Substack, their shared publishing platform, though on considerably different scales. The Free Press, a center-right publication, recently reached one million subscribers. Feed Me, Ms. Sundberg's daily business newsletter combining zeitgeist analysis with link aggregation, has only about 60,000 readers. But over the last two years, Ms. Sundberg has become an object of fascination in media and finance circles. Though many readers are young (or youngish) worker bees, Feed Me's subscribers include high-profile venture capitalists like Kirsten Green, well-connected rising editors like Willa Bennett, and Bloomberg personalities like Matt Levine and Joe Weisenthal. In November, Ms. Sundberg was a co-host of an off-the-record dinner along with Paul Needham, chief executive of The Infatuation, a restaurant recommendation website owned by Chase and favored among upwardly mobile city-dwellers hunting for spots for a first date. It was attended by a mix of scene-y creators and power brokers: Kareem Rahma of the web series 'Subway Takes,' Chris Black of the podcast 'How Long Gone,' Peter Lattman of Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective and Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times's DealBook. While that gathering was invitation-only, an upcoming party for Feed Me readers around Valentine's Day ('a really chic, cool singles party,' as Ms. Sundberg wrote on X) currently has a waiting list of 500. Feed Me bills itself as being about the 'spirit of enterprise,' but its true subject is consumption: How do people make their money and spend it? In her writing, Ms. Sundberg has assumed the identity of an insider — sometimes with the bite and braggadocio of a 'Succession' character. Her bio reads: 'I write the hottest daily business newsletter.' Her newsletter reads: 'Dior's golf collection will be a flop.' 'It was first described to me as a finance newsletter,' said Janice Min, the former longtime editor of Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter who now runs Ankler Media. 'It is definitely not a finance newsletter.' Until recently, almost every edition included a pouting selfie of Ms. Sundberg, even if the headline was about Goldman Sachs interns. ('There's a lot of guys,' she said of her subscriber base.) Feed Me is preoccupied with a certain slice of millennial culture in New York City. The restaurants they patronize, the media they consume, their picturesque vacations, their online shopping habits, their obsession with Gen Z. 'She's almost like a Carrie Bradshaw of her generation,' said Ms. Min, whose company also publishes its flagship newsletter, The Ankler, on Substack. On the platform's leaderboard of popular business publications, Feed Me is now at No. 4, one spot below The Ankler. Like the divisive heroine of 'Sex and the City,' Ms. Sundberg writes in the first person, usually to place herself in a scene ('I went to dinner at The Odeon last night …') or to emphasize her connections to one ('I texted a few friends who work on Wall Street this morning …'). She is not, however, a confessional sex columnist. But that was not the point of Ms. Min's comparison: 'If 'Sex and the City' was about the search for romantic fulfillment, Emily's voyeurism is about money — and that same sense of it being possibly unattainable, frustrating and, for some, something that comes easy,' Ms. Min said. Because of its gossipy core, Feed Me also sometimes reminds people of Gawker — written by young people in New York, self-assured in its own taste and authority. Max Read, a former editor of Gawker, said that he might not understand or occupy the 'parallel New York City' that Ms. Sundberg had built, but that he still loved to read about it. 'The exercise of creating a 'scene' like that is way more difficult than people credit,' he said, adding, 'I suspect if it were 20 years ago she could equally have been a Gawker writer or a Gawker character.' On the Colostrum Beat Ms. Sundberg began publishing Feed Me on a dailyish basis in November 2022, around the time she was laid off from Meta. Until then, her career was in 9-to-5 digital marketing. She worked at The Cut, Condé Nast and Great Jones — a cookware company where she saw venture capital and consumer goods collide close up for the first time. Now, for Feed Me, she trawls job board openings to speculate about the direction of companies. She tracks trends with CNBC vernacular; in 2023, she was 'bullish' on both Ozempic and vaping. Real estate tycoons and Instagram chefs interest Ms. Sundberg equally, especially if she can reveal which spas they frequent. No observation or rumor is too minute to itemize, like a prebiotic soda brand flooding Manhattan bodegas, or Jeff Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dining at a private club, or 'I can't open Instagram without hearing about colostrum.' She often includes a bulleted list of external links. Recent subjects include protein bars; return to office; plastic surgery; and Rhode, the skin care company founded by the model Hailey Bieber. David Ulevitch, general partner at the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz, said the newsletter enriched his professional understanding of cultural shifts. 'Plus, I'm a sucker for news that is just a degree above gossip,' he said. Sophia Amoruso, a venture capitalist whose best-selling book, 'Girlboss,' made her a target of journalists, said that 'Emily's voice feels insidery without the overwhelming, self-important snark that so many 'in-the-know' journalists have.' High-profile readers sometimes join what Ms. Sundberg has called her 'really fat Rolodex.' She notices when a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter begins following her on Instagram. She notices when Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News emails to say Feed Me introduced him to Ghia, a stylish nonalcoholic aperitif. When the fashion writer Derek Blasberg upgraded from a free to a paid subscription, Ms. Sundberg offered to take him out for a martini. 'Listen, I'm basically a middle-aged uptown gay dad at this point,' said Mr. Blasberg, a celebrity 'partner in crime' who attended Ms. Sundberg's dinner in November. 'I can't be in the East Village bumming Zyns from out-of-work actors at Lucien anymore.' Outsider to Insider Ms. Sundberg was an observer of money from a young age. She grew up in Huntington, a town on Long Island, where her parents, an artist and a public school administrator, had also been raised. 'I had neighbors who were lobster fishermen, and I had neighbors who were cleaning up on Wall Street in the '90s,' said Ms. Sundberg, who later studied advertising and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She also liked to write. In 2021, Ms. Sundberg used her newsletter to occasionally publish short fiction, including a horror story about a female founder whose employees toiled in the basement of her brownstone. (Ms. Sundberg has, incidentally, consulted for various female founders, such as The Wing's Audrey Gelman and Outdoor Voices' Ty Haney.) After seeing 'The Nutcracker' while high on mushrooms, she wrote of the well-dressed audience, 'I wanted to suck the pearls off of all these women's ears and roll them around in my mouth like gum balls.' In New York, her social circle had the same mix of well-off and less so that she'd grown up with in Huntington. And yet the money managers and bartenders in her group texts were equally enthusiastic about one thing, Ms. Sundberg said: business news. Not the minutiae of the market, but information about apps they used routinely, like the restaurant reservation app Resy. That sensibility formed the core of Feed Me. 'A menu change at Balthazar would get as much traction as a credit-restructuring deal at Rent the Runway,' she said. 'People wanted really fun, juicy takes.' Feed Me's early dispatches read more as Ms. Sundberg pressing her face against the glass of an unmapped world — this moneyed junction of tech, culture and hospitality — than as her being ensconced in it. Just because you're at the party doesn't mean you're at the party. Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, described her voice as an outsider 'looking in, with one foot but not wanting to totally be in, not wanting to take it too seriously.' Soon her writing began appearing in major outlets. A Grub Street article about 'shoppy shops' drove a surge of new subscribers to Feed Me; an article for GQ about members-only clubs landed her talent representation from WME. But as the newsletter grew, Ms. Sundberg lost her anonymity. She did not enjoy being recognized in public or the speculation on Reddit forums about matters like the size of her lips, which are not cosmetically enhanced, she said. She cut back on selfies, which she said earned her the nickname 'thot Jim Cramer.' ('Being hot on LinkedIn and saying 'slut' on LinkedIn has been a funny experiment,' she explained to the hosts of the shock-jock fashion podcast 'Throwing Fits.') She now works from both her apartment in Brooklyn's South Slope neighborhood and the affluent private club Casa Cipriani. While Ms. Sundberg declined to disclose her finances, she is most likely earning a minimum of $400,000 in annualized subscription revenue. (In 2024, she charged $50 for paid yearly subscriptions, of which there are nearly 10,000. Ten percent of these earnings go to Substack, along with payment processing fees to Stripe.) That estimate does not include revenue from Feed Me's advertising, sponsored posts or merchandise. She made 10 advertising deals last year, she said, which represented 'maybe a quarter' of her subscriber revenue. Those deals included various sponsored newsletters, as well as a dinner co-hosted with the wealth management app Titan and a book-club discussion of Miranda July's novel 'All Fours' at a Warby Parker glasses store. Ms. Sundberg has since raised the price for new annual subscribers to $80. This falls somewhere between a New York magazine digital subscription ($60) and access to Puck's industry newsletters ($150). She currently has no paid employees, although Feed Me has three paid columnists who write monthly about transit, restaurants and entertainment. The downtown publicist Kaitlin Phillips also assists Ms. Sundberg, though she works for free. 'I just believe in the cause,' said Ms. Phillips, who was recently persuaded by Ms. Sundberg to start her own newsletter on Substack. She now earns around $99,000 in annualized revenue from it. Scoops as Currency Why did Ms. Sundberg go to Washington? Feed Me does not cover politics. She is, however, interested in vibe shifts. After she received The Free Press's invitation to the inauguration party, Ms. Sundberg booked a room at the Riggs, the luxury hotel where it was held. (She also tried, unsuccessfully, to score an invite to Mark Zuckerberg's black-tie reception.) 'I had a prediction that nobody else was going to cover the party in the same way, and I was right,' Ms. Sundberg said. Her report included details like 'a lot of incredible tans going on,' and a video showing Linda Yaccarino, chief executive of X, singing to Dierks Bentley. The coverage earned her new subscribers, she said, but also new scrutiny. Days after the inauguration, Ms. Sundberg wrote in Feed Me about having a 'phone call with Tucker Carlson.' She was promoting her new feature for GQ about Zyn. The article included interviews with Feed Me readers, as well as Mr. Carlson, who owns a rival nicotine pouch company. (Ms. Sundberg, a social smoker, said she was 'trying to use Zyn less.') On Substack, Caro Claire Burke, a writer and co-host of the podcast Diabolical Lies, called it a 'little puff piece push for Tucker Carlson and big nicotine.' In an email, Ms. Burke said she thought Feed Me reflected a worldview of 'how a certain group' had 'become empowered to stop caring about politics altogether.' There is a centrist desire 'to enjoy wealth aspiration and conspicuous consumption again.' To her, Feed Me was 'much less a newsletter about building and maintaining businesses, and much more about the business of sounding rich, which is probably why it's found such success,' Ms. Burke said. 'It's hard to start a company. It's much easier to learn how to speak like someone who has.' In D.C., back at her hotel, Ms. Sundberg semi-clarified her personal politics: 'I wouldn't say I'm like a social-justice-warrior super progressive, but definitely care about people,' she said. 'There's still a Bernie poster in my apartment.' She knew her readers were more politically mixed: 'People on the right are inherently pro-business.' Sometimes Ms. Sundberg said, she longs for the camaraderie and resources of a newsroom. She gets lonely. Yet she has decided not to work for a media company or let one acquire Feed Me. 'I don't know if any traditional media company would be able to afford it, and it's growing too fast for me to even consider,' said Ms. Sundberg, who also prefers to sell her own ads. She ended her business relationship with WME, the talent agency, last month. Her team there had recently asked if she wanted to pursue sponsorship around her wedding, and she declined. (Ms. Sundberg is engaged to a man who works in tech.) When she first moved to this city, Ms. Sundberg learned that money bought access to the world she wanted to inhabit. But when she started building Feed Me, she learned that scoops were currency, too. 'The networks that I've developed definitely give me an edge,' Ms. Sundberg said. She referred to Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who also financed lawsuits against Gawker: 'He really believes that secrets give people edge.' In January, Ms. Sundberg had been the first to report on a West Village resident's application to install a tourist-deterring stoop gate; the landmark building had been used for exterior shots of Carrie Bradshaw's apartment. The story, which came from a reader tip, was picked up by dozens of news outlets, many of which credited Feed Me. 'If I don't get something, then Puck will,' she said, referring to the power-obsessed digital media site. 'And if Puck doesn't get it, Semafor does. And if Semafor doesn't, The New York Times will — eventually.' Though she often writes about unsourced gossip in her newsletter, she said she had not yet encountered any legal challenges. Ms. Sundberg has been trying to raise her standards as the newsletter grows, such as reaching out for comment when she publishes a rumor about a company. 'A habit that I've been getting better at: Act like you might be working at real place,' she said.
