“Oh yeah, my dad reads The Washington Post”

Our sister publication Nieman Storyboard has a great podcast interview with Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell about his recent feature on “Emilycc,” who has livestreamed her life on Twitch 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for three years.

I loved a bit from the interview where Harwell tells Storyboard editor Mark Armstrong how he convinces creators who already have big platforms to let him write about them for the Post:

I’ve been at the Post now for 10 years, and as we have all seen, the media has changed. There was a time when we could go to people and offer this kind of opportunity, and people would jump at that because a platform to get a story about yourself was a huge thing.

Now, when I’m doing stories about creators, it’s just one of many platforms, and [the Post] may mean nothing to them, because their audiences may never read a paper, may have never picked up one in their life. There’s still kind of an imprimatur and a validation that comes from being in the legacy press…but in terms of, like, raw attention-gathering, that effect is smaller.

When I went to talk to Emily, the first thing she said was, “Oh, yeah, my dad reads The Washington Post. My dad goes on The Washington Post. He would see this, he might even leave a comment on the story.” This was not a property that she had ever really thought about, except for as a function of her dad.

When I was talking to her, I was just saying, what you have gone through is probably really enlightening for people. The people who read The Washington Post are probably not the people that are watching your Twitch stream. There might be some overlap, but the people who are reading our stories are coming to this completely fresh. They may be really curious about something like Twitch, or really worried about it, or just interested in it. This is a way to reach those kinds of people and help them understand that everything that goes into your life, and help help bridge those connections. So it’s not just the weirdo on her webcam all day, but to really understand more.

I’ve done that with stories about OnlyFans and other platforms, too. I make the suggestion that this is a way to reach other people and process your life in a in different way than the way you’re used to all day, which is to be on video all day.

You can listen to the full podcast here and see all of Storyboard’s podcast episodes here.