I’m Heading Back to Puck News, so What’s Happening to Posting Nexus?

A quick little update about this little blog

I didn’t think anyone would voluntarily read Posting Nexus when I started it. Who needs another newsletter about the internet? But less than a year in, nearly 1,000 of you chose to subscribe, read, share, and send some incredibly thoughtful responses and brilliant insights. The fact that anyone reads anything (like, ever) is a shock to me. Having a handful of people choose to read my work is unfathomable. 

I wrote my first Posting Nexus at an interesting point in my career. After nearly a decade in media, I went corporate, working inside one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. Disney was an unforgettable experience, working alongside teams that taught me more in my time there than any MBA program could ever try to sell me on.

But despite all the intense learning and despite all the immensely sharp people I was learning from, I missed sitting down to research, think deeply, and write. I missed connecting with people — with you all! — over these complex problems we were all trying to understand; the root of attention, who owns it, and what impact that has on our actual lives. 

If attention is currency, and everything is attention, then isn’t the next stage of late stage capitalism unparalleled access to and control of our every blink? I said at the end of last year that I’m pretty sure if I didn’t blog, I’d just die. It took leaving media to understand how important all of ~gestures wildly~ this is to my sanity. But I digress.

All of which brings us to this post. I’ve rejoined Puck News as a Media Correspondent!! To say I’m thrilled beyond measure wouldn’t do the ecstasy running through me anything close to justice. I missed the truly remarkable people at Puck every day I was away from their Slacks. More details on what this new role will look like in the weeks ahead, but the main thing I want to address today is Posting Nexus’ future since a few people have asked.

Let’s cut to the chase upfront: I don’t know yet. I’m a big believer in side projects. My first ever newsletter, Musings on Mouse, started because my day job (a culture reporter at The Verge) encouraged Disney reporting but wasn’t a Disney-focused blog. Deeper dives into the strategic side of Disney+ and Hulu didn’t make much sense for the main site then. So I started a Substack. It grew to a couple of thousand free subscribers, including a bunch of Disney folks. That rocked. Then, when I was at Parrot Analytics, I co-founded the Downstream podcast with my pal Jason Snell because I wanted to dive deeper into streaming as a business. And I just love yapping. Downstream also did unexpectedly well. That rocked, too.

To say I’ve been so fucking lucky in my life — so, so, so fucking lucky — is barely scratching the surface.

Will Posting Nexus continue? I want to continue producing it in some capacity. I’m not sure if I can. And I’m not sure what it would look like if I do. I hope to figure out answers to those questions soon. Posting Nexus, like Musings on Mouse before it, is home to a few pieces and theses I’m quite proud of today. Here’s what I do know: I’m someone who reads, reads, reads in order to write, write write. There are certain things I won’t be able to write about in Posting Nexus because I’ll be writing about them at Puck News (streaming media being at the center of it), but I have interests far beyond streaming media. 

I’ve spent the last several months writing about my theory that media’s future is empires and islands. Puck is an empire made up of some pretty popular destination islands. Substack is its own empire made up of thousands of islands. I’d like to think Posting Nexus will continue as an independent island, floating serenely in the vast open sea. But I honestly don’t know. 

Tl;dr? Consider this a BRB, not a GG for now.