Tremendous Content: Standout Media in Extraordinary Times
In a 2015 tweet that he would never subsequently live down, then-ESPN commentator Darren Rovell wrote, “I feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.” Part of why this quote refuses to die (to Rovell’s chagrin) is that he was right: the media does its best and most essential work during times of upheaval.
This has been the most eventful January I can remember, and I’ve never been more glued to the news. Events and stories that could (and in a normal year would) permeate the entire zeitgeist have all crash-landed simultaneously. CES, the X-ification of Meta, the looming TikTok ban, the Pacific Palisades fire, the ceasefire in Gaza, the Cabinet hearings, and more are all consuming my consciousness: I feel like if I blink, I’ll miss the whole world changing again.
But how can you track those changes without getting overwhelmed? When Rovell first wrote those infamous words, Twitter was still the digital town square. Now, feed rot pervades the biggest social platforms. My X “For You” page is awash in content that is, to put it mildly, not for me. My various Meta feeds are stuffed with AI slop, ads, and…hoof-cleaning videos, somehow? I’m not on TikTok (I share a life and a WiFi network with a government contractor who holds a top secret security clearance, and he has been told in the strongest possible terms that no one in this household is allowed to learn any of those dances) – and regardless, that might not even be an option for anyone in the U.S. for much longer. There is tremendous content out there that can help make sense of an increasingly mad world, but it no longer feels possible to rely on social media for discovery.
So what to do? My brilliant colleague Lexie Gardiner recently shared stellar brand social strategy advice, and some of it holds true for individuals looking to navigate the media landscape as well. Two of her points resonate strongly for me as someone who avidly consumes (and sometimes seeks to shape) the news:
- It’s the year of decentralization: We have to be looking broadly, across platforms, to see the whole story and find the most engaging content creators and engaged audiences.
- Influencer voices will be a guide in the wilderness: Especially as projects like the Fediverse and Free our Feeds pick up traction, engaging with individuals will be an effective way to communicate across platforms.
Experimenting with new platforms like Bluesky has given me the opportunity to put this advice into practice, curating my new feeds so they’ll be maximally useful in helping me understand the world and do my job. At the same time, I have the best possible influencers available to me in-house: no one is better at tracking trends than the Caster crew. While we’ve always shared specific, relevant stories within account teams, we’ve resolved to be more proactive about sharing macro news stories across the agency, highlighting the best reporting, the most insightful analysis, and the sharpest predictions we find.
We each have our own obsessions, so this makes for a nicely diverse set of recommendations. I can’t get enough of the unusual angles unearthed by 404 Media, or the incisive insider analysis of Silicon Valley found in The Information and Platformer. Alex Crabb relies on tldr.tech, The Deep View, and Techpresso to make sure she misses absolutely nothing, especially with respect to AI. Pete Girard is so tapped into smart home coverage at The Verge, Tech Hive, Digital Trends, and The Ambient that I suspect he’s got a group chat with the editors.
Right now, Caster slack is probably my most important news aggregator – though as I’ve previously shared on LinkedIn, we’re all committed to sharing the best reads on our public feeds as well. As the first two weeks of 2025 have already proved, the news is going to move fast this year, but there will be tremendous content.
