The New York Times recently published an article titled “They’re Here to Save Indie Media,” about two women, Gutes Guterman (26) and Megan O’Sullivan (30), embarking on a new publishing venture called Byline. It’s a peculiarly formless piece, somewhere between a profile and a report, but it mostly reads like a comic play of sorts, every word dripping with what could be savage satire or genuinely clueless affection. Or, given that all three—the subjects and the writer Cara Schacter—are denizens of the largely fictitious “Dimes Square” scene, perhaps it’s both.1
Descriptions of what Byline will be are laced with detailed observations about their surroundings and attire, all of which confirm every cultural stereotype about a certain moneyed lot. This passage reads like set directions for a satirical play:
Gutes Guterman [sits] on an antique French farm bench in Pig Bar, a craft beer shop overlooking the scene-y slice of Lower Manhattan known as Dimes Square. Reaching for a gherkin, her hand in a lacy fingerless glove, she paused to gesture toward the former site of the Drunken Canal newspaper box.
Even the details about the bar where they’re all meeting reads like satire:
[A] recently opened pub with studded leather floors, cured meats, Amish butter, Sabrett hot dogs, something with quinoa called a Dream Bowl and miscellaneous essentials like Visine eye drops and Camel Blues.
And then there is what should become a classic line, “She paused for prosciutto.”
While this is all very funny, the piece leads one to wonder if the joke is on the two women or on the reader. And perhaps, in an age of hyper-self-awareness where a contemporary writer who wants to be taken seriously is expected to exude un-seriousness from every pore, the joke is on Schacter. But, of course, deliberately so. Byline itself has the carefully crafted appearance of a homespun blog that evokes a Geocities website of yore, but is in fact put together by a team of professionals. Perhaps it’s all just one big joke and none of it ought to be taken seriously.
Except that Byline—along with the people at its core—is the foetid, rotting corpse of contemporary American media. Everyone who writes at this new publication works for free, because they can—not one hour of their labour is compensated (it’s unclear if its technical team is paid). In its origins, antecedents, and structure, this new publication naturalises the conditions of exploitation that make it impossible for writers to be paid and impossible for writing to be considered labour. Breaking off a piece of parmesan (the Times diligently records her motions), O’Sullivan tells Schacter that what “young writers need…is a place that feels informal and fun and champions the individual.”
Well, no, actually: what writers of all ages need is for their work to be compensated. O’Sullivan naturalises the conditions of a publishing world where it’s now widely assumed that, of course, you don’t begin a writing career by working for pay: that would be just so, well, ewwww and icky (here, I’m echoing her language, as reported in the Times). A probe into her and Guterman’s writing careers indicates that writing mostly for free and on the side is how they came to a place where they can demand that others do the same but that’s an awful, deleterious model for publishing. And, as it turns out, both women have more than ample resources with which to pay their unpaid cohort of contributors: they just choose not to because Byline is less a publication and more a springboard for their careers as IWPs, a combination of influencer, writaaaaah (distinct from a mere writer), and personality: that’s far more lucrative than something as plebeian as paid writing.
The Times article deliberately obfuscates and even hides crucial details about the women’s bios in favour of a tale of two young women bravely taking on an “indie” project. All the amusing little details about clothes and hangouts divert from the fact that the Times has no questions at all about how this venture is to be funded, and why it is that they will not pay their writers—coyly referred to here as “contributors,” in much the same way that a wealthy New York-based publication might write off its executive lunches as “incidental expenses.” About the lack of payment, it notes simply, “For now, contributors to Byline will be unpaid, but Ms. Guterman and Ms. O’Sullivan said they had been in talks with possible sponsors including the furniture company Knoll, the astrology app Co-Star and the kink-friendly dating app Feeld.” 2 But what are those sponsors’ ads going to pay for? How do two women with supposedly no connections and no money to pay writers also have the resources to find such significant sponsors?
Unpaid writers, big name sponsors, two white and privileged women putting out a publication that’s made to look like a DIY project out of someone’s bedroom but is in fact a professionally curated enterprise: we’ve seen this home movie before. The DNA of Drunken Canal courses through the bloodstream of Byline.
The Drunken Canal was another homey-seeming project co-produced by Guterman and her last business partner Clair Banse, a free monthly publication. The newspaper began and ended as a monthly print publication at the start of the pandemic, in 2020. It ran once a month for two years before Guterman and Banse retired it at the end of 2022. Throughout its brief life, they paid for its publication—2,000 copies of each issue, in colour—out of their own pockets. And as pointed out in this Interview profile, the paper was a chronicle of Dimes Square, a wedge of a neighbourhood in Manhattan (named either for the Dimes diner or for its people who are “dimes” or perfect tens—yes, even writing that makes me want to vomit).
What was Dimes Square really? Schacter quotes Dean Kissick, listed only as “a contributor to The Drunken Canal,” who “summed up the ethos surrounding the publication in a 2020 tweet: ‘On 6th street around 11 last night we passed a girl kneeling on her stoop, facing the railings, reading a copy of the Drunken Canal with no socks on.’”
This is the kind of hyperbolic rubbish that conjures a scene that exists only as a figment of the imagination, one that generates and incites not just a fantasy of a social world but of New York writah life itself. The girl might just as well have been outside because she got tired of listening to the coital screams of a roommate who occupied the living room closet converted into “a fourth bedroom.” She might have been without socks because it was a warm night. She might just as well have been reading Shakespeare or Jonathan Livingston Seagull or My Little Pony: that she happened to be reading a paper that Kissick wrote for is a coincidence, not emblematic of any “ethos.”
Drunken Canal’s arrival set major outlets like Vanity Fair, Vogue, New York and the New York Times afire, supposedly with the excitement of such a rare thing—a new print entity—created by two young women (both were 26 at the time) from a generation that is said to live only online. The narrative, then and now, about Drunken Canal is that it was a fun, feisty DIY enterprise run by two women with scarce resources. But the truth is that its start and duration were much more like something funded by venture capital or, at least, by wealthy families and friends (details are unclear because none of the reporters writing about the paper bothered to ask real questions). The buzz surrounding them wasn’t that print was coming back to life (it has never left, but that’s another story). Reading the various reports at the time, it’s clear that those “reporting” (few hard questions were asked, and the pieces were mostly fluff) were breathlessly excited to inhabit the same space as two people who were redefining what it meant to be the “in crowd.” The Vanity Fair profile of Drunken Canal notes that “Banse still holds down a waitressing gig, but Guterman quit her job at an art gallery many months ago to work on The Drunken Canal full-time.” In this world of hidden privilege, “a waitressing gig” is what you take on to develop your persona, something that you later mine for a memoir at the doddering age of 34: Hard Times In Dimes: My Life Behind Bars and Tables. We’re expected to believe that Guterman quit her job to work full-time on a free publication distributed at kiosks, with nothing but unemployment and savings to carry her through.
Drunken Canal scored ads from major brands and fashion houses like Balenciaga and Eckhaus Latta. The latter sells zip shorts for $480 but, hooray, offers free domestic shipping for orders over $250. Balenciaga sells men’s pouches made of calfskin and lambskin for $1,790, with free shipping: again, hooray. In the spirit of entrepreneurs who insist they would never advertise items they didn’t believe in: Banse showed up wearing an Eckhaus cardiganfor a Vogue interview with fashion writer Steff Yotka, for a profile about Drunken Canal’s September issue, a satirical (but not really) take on Vogue’s famous autumn issue. The parody, which seemed to be neither tongue in cheek nor satirical, was styled by Thom Browne, the luxury fashion house and photographed by Daniel Arnold, a well known fashion photographer for, among other places, Vogue. The two spoke casually about what they were “deeming so right now: Banse is into basics, early Prada, and low-rise vintage D&G pants; Gutes is into ruffles, frills, and anything Rachel Tashjian recommends in Opulent Tips. Both agree, meal-wise, it’s about shrimp cocktail and dessert, and Fashion Week-wise it’s about going to friends’ shows (Saint Sintra and Carter Young), a couple parties, and maybe trying to crash a few more just for fun.”
As Yotka noted approvingly, these two were emblematic of the perfect vibe of the then and now, their (pretend) DIY aesthetic upending fashion trends because, “No one wants to seem too rich, too polished, or too right—the veneer of perfection puts you at risk of cancellation or worse: being deemed irrelevant and out of touch.” Oh, horrors, anything but that: irrelevant and out of touch?
In 2022, the paper hosted a “Battle of Bands” event in conjunction with the Tribeca Film Festival and Banse and Guterman got to attend Art Basel in Miami with a sponsorship from Soylent. And yet, with all this access and adjacency to money, Guterman and Banse couldn’t be bothered to pay writers. At some point, they decided to upgrade the look of the paper and paid graphic designers to do the work. Graphic designers and illustrators are, in publishing, even more underrated and unrecognised than writers and often badly paid, and they deserve every penny paid to them. But it’s unclear why Banse and Guterman felt the need to hire professionals when their supposedly indie, self-designed publication (only available in print and in select repurposed kiosks) had been doing more than well by any standards. Why not funnel sponsorship money towards writers as well?
Nothing about Byline’s antecedents suggests that writers will be compensated because, at its core, it’s built on the premise that only “content” matters and that the aim of a “publication” is to garner recognition so that some of those associated with it might go on to careers that are a heady concoction of influencer-plus-writah-plus personality-plus whatever. It’s the kind of public existence that gets you a lifetime of not doing very much but always being in the news while publishing memoirs and tell-alls every five years and perhaps even indulging an acting career, without a lick of talent in sight. Chloë Sevigny, by now a Senior Resident of the scene (at a shocking 48 years of age in an ecosystem where most flame out by 28), has sustained a nearly thirty-year career in films with a single expression.
Like Sevigny’s lacklustre acting, Byline isn’t particularly interesting—it reads like a newsletter-y blog seen by a few friends, the kind that come with tips on where to score the best vintage clothes and get rid of candle wax on tablecloths. And that would be fine if it were in fact a blog. But it’s really an influence-generator and, more importantly, it’s run by two people who could, if they wanted to, call on massive resources and actually create, at the very least, a decent publication—but that would mean putting in the hard work of actually editing actual articles instead of the frothy pieces scattered throughout. The various “contributors” seem to spend more time crafting their bios than working on their pieces. Uniform in their attempts to be unique, all the bios vie to be cute but not cloyingly so, trendy and edgy but not too spiky, goofy but with a hint of darkness lurking underneath.
Byline is a launching pad for people who write for nothing because they can afford to, thus effectively creating and reifying conditions where those who’d like to write for a livelihood are left out of a system that makes it impossible to be a writer unless: you come from wealth, are connected to very specific networks that include certain private schools and universities, are able to work at unpaid internships while living in the most expensive city in the world, and flit around birthing free publications while pretending to hold down day jobs. No one in this ecosystem, this swamp of indolence, needs to work for a living or, rather: no one here would dare to ever disclose they need to work for a living unless that can be turned into a memoir. But they will seek employment, more than likely through parental and other family connections, and it’s always the sort that lets you make more connections that spiral outwards to appearances at events and parties where more connections can be made, and so on.
Everyone at Byline works for free. But this publication has among its advisers the tech writer Taylor Lorenz alongside “Ben Dietz, a former longtime executive at Vice Media; Taj Alavi, the head of marketing at Spotify; and Trevor McFedries, creator of the robot pop star Lil Miquela.” There’s no dearth of money here—note that these are among the magazine’s advisers, not all of them. The issue is not whether or not these individuals have money that they can give to the publication but that they are adjacent to and are able to connect Guterman and O’Sullivan to funding sources: they occupy worlds of influence and power that most people trying to enter publishing can’t even imagine. Outside this world, there are “influencers” who think that their videos on TikTok and Instagram translate into some kind of power when the truth is that a single, rage-filled and inaccurate accusation could wipe out their careers. The influence in this world is far more opaque and far more substantial. This world is not inhabited by silent people milling about in dark robes, and there’s no cabal because there doesn’t need to be: you’re in or you’re out, and if you have to ask what the rules of inclusion are, you’re definitely out. But a sure sign that you belong is that you think of a publication that you’re starting from the ground up not as a paying entity but as a country club of sorts: recall O’Sullivan’s words about “a place that feels informal and fun and champions the individual.”
O’Sullivan’s bio demonstrates how power really works in this world: it’s less about money-money as in, hard cash or savings, and more about the immaterial ways in which influence becomes an item to be peddled, bought, and sold without a cent being exchanged. It’s a world where money doesn’t have to be pointed out as such—that might be just too, too crude.
I was among those who severely criticised O’Sullivan and Guterman (and their supporters like Taylor Lorenz) on Twitter for not paying their writers. In one response, O’Sullivan tweeted back:
O’Sullivan has so completely naturalised the idea that only writing for free can get you gigs in publications that she presents the trajectory of her writing career as completely normal: “Without it, I don’t know that I would have gotten a start.” Which reads as, “I faced exploitative conditions myself therefore I feel justified in exploiting others.” And, for people like her and too many others, this is in fact true but it hasn’t always been the case and, much more importantly, it should not be. As my colleague Nathan J. Robinson pointed out to Lorenz on Twitter, there’s never any excuse for starting a publication that doesn’t pay.
It’s no surprise that O’Sullivan thinks like this, given her economic origins. Her past experience includes being an (undoubtedly unpaid or deeply underpaid) “PR Intern” with/at the designer Diane von Furstenberg in 2014, that then led to a job as an assistant buyer at Neiman Marcus (or “Needlessly Marked Up,” as we call it in Chicago), and so on up the ladder (in a way—for the most part, she has moved laterally). But these were and are mostly jobs in very expensive cities (including San Francisco and New York), less about the pay (because they’re exploitative, not because they can’t pay well) and more about the ability to meet key industry figures and forge valuable networks. It’s likely that a nineteen-year-old O’Sullivan’s parents knew someone who knew someone who got her the gig at DVF, or that they were all yachting with the designer, who knows? However it happened, it’s unlikely that she got the job on whatever merit it required, but it allowed her a crucial entry point into what is essentially a well-connected career in public relations. It’s unlikely that the jobs are how she funds her life: she’d currently listed as a Manager, Brand Marketing at Cuyana, whose skills are described thusly, “Own [sic] marketing strategies, utilizing a storytelling lens and observation of market trends to develop brand/product positioning and 360-degree campaigns that ladder up to greater business goals.”
Guterman, who has a degree from the Parsons School of Design (2019) is listed as a Digital Marketing Executive at TKTK, mysteriously defined as a “media company operating in stealth mode and founded in 2022.”
No, I have no idea what that means either.
As for her origin story: Vanity Fair writes that she is a first generation Ukrainian immigrant whose father is in the medical supply business and mother a biochemist by training. Her grandmother, in Crimea at the time of the profile (July 2021), is a doctor. The word “immigrant” is often code for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”: it’s an easy way to signal a hard luck, bootstraps story, the kind upon which the American fantasy of belonging rests (as long as we forget about slavery and genocide). But left out of this discourse is the fact that immigrants who make their way to the United States as Guterman’s parents likely did, as educated professionals, have to prove that they have more than adequate resources to thrive in this country. They may not all be fantastically rich, but they’re probably at least moderately well-off (and much more likely to be somewhat wealthy, given the expense of everything from visa applications to starting new lives in a foreign country).
Given this context of wealth and connections and, at the very least, considerable and varied spheres of influence, how is it that Guterman and both her past and current business partners have managed to fly under the radar as just a bunch of freewheeling, daring “indie media” darlings?
The answer lies in the particular forms of corruption present in the world they occupy as well as the rank corruption among reporters at places like the Times, Vanity Fair, and the many smaller outlets that want to emulate them.
Entire murder mysteries have been written around critics of all sorts being paid for positive reviews or journalists taking money to stay silent, but “corruption” here isn’t about actual cold, hard cash exchanged under a table. It’s about a larger, rotten system wherein an online publication whose founders come from money, have money, and have tons of access to tons of money and who are partying every night with people who, like them, come from money, have money, and have tons of access to tons of money have chosen to create a publication that will not pay anyone. It’s about a world where money and influence dictate who gets in and who stays out, and about everyone deciding to ignore obvious questions like, “Who’s paying for all this?” Or, “Who are these people anyway, and how did they get here?” Corruption also comes about when people don’t acknowledge their vested interests and serve as gatekeepers by quietly hiding crucial facts.
For instance, while Cara Schacter writes in the Times piece that O’Sullivan has written for “i-D, GQ and Vogue,” she fails to mention that she has also written fairly regularly for the Times, the very paper in which this profile-of-sorts appears. This is called a“conflict of interest,” and the Times—which frequently boasts about its reporting credentials—should have mentioned that.
And remember that rubbishy bit from Dean Kissick? What Schacter doesn’t reveal there is that Kissick is an editor at Spike where she contributes regularly. He’s technically one of her bosses.
It’s not unusual that people within a very specific kind of publishing ecosystem would know each other: it’s unethical not to mention the connections. If Schacter had revealed that O’Sullivan was also a writer for the Times and that a source in the piece was in fact her own editor at another publication, readers would have questioned the point of the article, possibly dismissing it as a fluffy bit that belonged in something like Drunken Canal, which never made any bones about the fact that it was about a specific group of friends.
The Times won’t interrogate the conditions that led to the creation of Byline because it doesn’t know how to. The paper is owned by the very wealthy Sulzbergers, but its current executive editor Joseph Kahn may be the first such who’s wealthier than its owners. It’s not that rich people can’t make excellent reporters but Kahn’s investiture (like the Pope, executive editors at the Times are ordained) and his wealth are part of a larger problem in publishing: that it’s increasingly saturated by people who come into their jobs through quietly humming networks and influence. They might, for instance, have coasted easily into newsrooms by performing various kinds of free labour that others can’t afford because they lack the resources to crank out work for free in exchange for a byline. Or, really, much more likely, they came into their jobs because they know people who know people who know people and writers who come into their positions in such ways are blithely unaware of the ethics of reporting, no matter how many journalism school degrees they may have between them.
By not reporting all the facts about the actors involved with Byline, the Times fails to treat the story as a story, operating on the assumption that culture is somehow separate from politics and finance. An article about two young women creating a publication that won’t pay for writers is treated lightly, but the very existence of Byline speaks to the degradation of writing and the slow death of a publishing world that is now subject to the whims of billionaires who imagine themselves as modern Medicis, patrons of various literary worlds—until they get bored and move on to the next thing (see, for instance, the constantly changing ownership of The New Republic, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and any of your local papers, should they still exist).
Like O’Sullivan’s words about free writing, the Times naturalises a set of exploitative conditions that makes it difficult to sustain a vibrant publishing world that’s not just about replicating power structures.
What lies ahead?
Byline will be fine, just fine. My critique here will be easily dismissed as Big Mad Aunty (BMA) energy, and it will more than likely galvanise a surge of support for Guterman and O’Sullivan who will be magically transformed into two, sweet helpless white women being attacked by an ancient brown woman somewhere in Chicago—despite all the evidence that they are in fact a couple of grifters who’ve survived quite well in some of the toughest cities. In the world they occupy, Byline’s exploitative system and any notoriety it may earn as such will only make it an even more desirable entity and thousands more will clamour to be published in its online pages. Like a two-headed Caroline Calloway who exists not as a person but as the subject one profile or another—all without actually doing anything—Guterman and O’Sullivan will survive and thrive.
But those of us concerned about the deathscape that is the publishing world today might want to take the story of Byline and its many histories more seriously. Make no mistake: not paying writers is exploitation, whether or not said writers can afford to write for free. For those of us on the left, the question of who gets to write and who is shut out by exploitative systems matters enormously, but the solution is not to seek some form of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) solution. That Guterman and O’Sullivan are both white is significant, certainly, in a world that’s still very white, but replacing them with people of colour isn’t going to radically eliminate the exploitation (at least two-thirds of their design team is non-white). One of the most powerful women in the publishing world today is Lisa Lucas, the first Black publisher at a major publishing house, and every profile of her brings up her race (a point definitely worth noting in an industry that is shockingly, blindingly white). Less commented upon is the fact that Lucas was once the publisher of Guernica, an elite arts magazine that refused to pay its writers until I excoriated it in public, more than once. Lucas’s background is similar to that of O’Sullivan, and it is perhaps even more rich with connections: her father produced Madonna’s first album, among those of many other artists, and her family connections had to have allowed her to climb up a ladder that included stints at the Tribeca Film Festival and the National Book Foundation, where she was the executive director. I don’t bring up Lucas’s background to echo some banal version of the thoroughly insipid “class first!” cry brought up by so many mindless people on the left who can’t see the complicated links between class and, well, everything else.3 Rather, my point is that the problems with Byline and so much of what goes on in publishing can’t be waved away by simply having people of “diverse” backgrounds enter the field. And they can’t be solved by making class into a diversity category either. Just as we don’t need publications to push ethnic and racial diversity as a solution, we also don’t need them to look for properly “working class” identified people to front their shoddy reporting.4
The problem with the Times piece on Byline is that it ignored the many strands of power and influence that brought this seemingly DIY publication into existence, and this is a widespread problem with even the left publishing world. At the end of the day, publishing is necessary and vibrant when it asks questions about power: Who has it? Where does it come from? What does it hide? What does it expose? Those kinds of questions have to be asked about any subject we write about, from fashion to elections.
If we end up with a publishing world that’s entirely dominated by people who write only because they can afford to do so for free or very little, what kind of analysis and reporting can we expect? What might we lose?
Karl Marx wrote much of his work in the confines of the British Museum, but his visits were sometimes sporadic for the simple reason that he often pawned his overcoat to pay for food for himself and his family. It wasn’t just that the lack of an overcoat precluded stepping out into the cold and wet outside, but that it marked him as a near-indigent man, an undesirable person in an august institution (anyone who’s relied on museum and library officials for access to documents and artefacts knows how important it is that one stays in their good graces). If it were not for the help of people like his friend Friedrich Engels, and that he was able to literally keep his coat on by producing paid journalism work, we wouldn’t have Capital in the world today.
In 2023, this may seem like a stretch but it’s not: the fundamental point is not that poor writers are all secretly brilliant but that there are giant swaths of people unable to produce excellent writing of all sorts because they can’t simply afford to write for free. If publishing is to survive, we have to make it shameful—even morally reprehensible—to suggest that anyone should write for free.
The problem is not that so many are inside, but that so many are left on the outside.
Many thanks to Nathan J. Robinson, who took a panicked “Help, this is getting too big and I need help” call, talked me through a sticky point, brought up Karl Marx’s coat, and read and edited a draft. Thanks also to Liz Baudler who also answered a last-minute and unexpected call and graciously read and edited a draft.
To read an actual magazine that pays its writers, consider subscribing to any of your favourites (once you’ve confirmed that they do in fact pay everyone). Consider, for instance, Current Affairs (where I’m a writer and an editor at large). The magazine recently began an excellent newsletter, also worth a subscription. And it’s also worth supporting your local newspapers. Please remember: actual writing costs money.
For more on my work about writing and pay, start here:
“Is Your Writing Ethically Sourced?“
But, really, just look under writing in the search box on this website, and you’ll find lots more.
This piece is not behind a paywall, but represents many hours of original research and writing. Please make sure to cite it, using my name and a link, should it be useful in your own work. I can and will use legal resources if I find you’ve plagiarised my work in any way. And if you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
- Technically, Dimes Square is supposedly a tiny part of Manhattan near Chinatown. But the name only began circulating in 2021 and is mostly an imaginary place concocted by people who need to create a “scene” in order to claim a measure of fame/notoriety.
- “In talks with” often means “We sent emails.”
- See Bertrand Cooper’s excellent work on race and class in this Current Affairs article, “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?
- It’s also likely that people of colour and those from lower income backgrounds will only be allowed to cover topics germane to their recognisable identities, which creates a whole other set of troubling issues.