🔴 Social media presence as career insurance

Today’s guest is Kofie Yeboah, a sports and video game-focused creator working primarily on YouTube and TikTok. Three days before I published this newsletter, Kofie was laid off from his day job (where he also worked on YouTube and social media) — so I scrapped my draft and wrote something completely different. This is not our typical profile piece.

In this issue:

• 💼 An examination of media layoffs and indie journalism trends

• 🫂 How Kofie’s audience reacted (and grew) when he announced his layoff

• ✂️ Repurposing long-form content for short-form channels

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Kofie or watch it on YouTube.

P.P.S. Want to reach 350k+ Creator Spotlight subscribers? We’re looking for partners to sponsor the newsletter. Inquire at [email protected].

This is not the profile I set out to write

In the last year, I’ve interviewed at least five people about a project they started after being laid off, most of them from a media job.

When I interviewed Kofie Yeboah for the Creator Spotlight podcast three weeks ago, he’d recently marked eight years as an employee of Vox Media’s sports network, SB Nation, working on their Secret Base team (focused on video and multimedia production). I expected this issue of the newsletter to be about balancing a full-time job working on video content while growing a presence as an independent creator practicing those same skills.

This Tuesday, February 11, Kofie and two colleagues were informed they were no longer employed. This is the first time I’ve interviewed somebody who was laid off after I interviewed them but before I was able to publish the interview.

Awful Announcing reported on the layoff earlier this week, including an email from Vox Media group publisher YuJung Kim. It implies a need to increase revenue and a bet that this talent cut will help them do so.

There’s no need for me to regurgitate Andrew Bucholtz’s reporting in that Awful Announcing piece here; read it at the above link. But, among his observations: SB Nation has been “bleeding talent” while adding “more executives” for about half a decade. And many of the “people sites, and shows” affected by layoffs have “gone on to success elsewhere.”

Two weeks before publishing this newsletter, I published an issue featuring Jenna Stoeber, who was laid off from Vox Media’s video game publication, Polygon, 2.5 years ago. Two days after Kofie was laid off, I interviewed another person for an upcoming issue, Matt Brown, who was also laid off from SB Nation, though 5 years earlier.

I described to Matt a future where traditional media businesses are seen as a grad school or bootcamp for independent journalists because of the unreliability of employment therein. You join one, develop your beat, learn from more experienced journalists, and inevitably leave to start your own thing. He agreed:

He mentioned a period “around 2017, 2018,” when he still worked at SB Nation and this was a regular topic of conversation with his bosses. They were constantly losing both contractors and full-time writers to bigger outlets like ESPN and The Ringer. He argued they needed to keep those people:

Kofie was at SB Nation for 8 years. It’s been his entire post-college career to date. He was only assured a severance package because of the hard work of past colleagues across the Vox Media portfolio — they successfully unionized 7 years ago last month, just a year after he joined.

Cheers from the crowd

When I first watched Kofie’s YouTube video reflecting on his layoff, it had been up for 1 hour and had just over 5k views. His subscriber count was just over 63k. 24 hours later, the video had 68k views, and Kofie had 68.5k subscribers. The video had 1,326 comments. It was his 13th-most viewed video on the platform out of 1.4k total uploads.

Kofie’s tweet (84.7k followers) sharing his news, 24 hours later, had 13k likes and 455 replies. His Bluesky post (27.7k followers), 24 hours later, had 3.7k likes and 287 replies.

In Kofie’s video announcing his layoff, he says:

He’s built a form of content-capital insurance.

What’s next?

In his layoff announcement video, Kofie says he’s unsure if his future holds full-time independent content creation or a return to full-time employment. I wouldn’t expect him to know yet.

When I spoke to Kofie for the podcast, besides his full-time salary, his income included Patreon subscriptions, YouTube AdSense share, the TikTok Creator Fund, and some brand deals. Creator equipment company Elgato (I use a light and camera mount from them) had been a flagship sponsor, though he was due to renegotiate.

I’m struck by another brand partnership he mentioned, with Homefield, a sports apparel company. When, during the pandemic, many of his colleagues at SB Nation and Secret Base were furloughed, Homefield raised around “$90,000” for them. He messaged the brand’s president and offered to help to promote their products for free. They would send him gear for “a long time,” and he’d promote it, taking no fee. Solidarity goes a long way in this industry.

Journalists and content capital

The same day Kofie was laid off, Joshua Benton, former director of and current senior writer at Nieman Lab, published an article titled “If you ask New York Times reporters to spend less time on Twitter, will they? (Spoiler: yes)”. He shares findings from an academic paper studying what happened when then-New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet instituted a policy asking Times reporters to “to meaningfully reduce how much time you’re spending on the platform, tweeting or scrolling, in relation to other parts of your job”.

The study looks at “185,969 tweets from 549 Times newsroom staffers over the first six months of 2022 — roughly half before the policy change and half after it.” Among the findings: yes, people tweeted less. But that’s not why I’m bringing it up.

Had Kofie not built up a social media presence in previous years, he’d be worse off post-layoff. Vox and the Times are different companies, yes, but both conduct layoffs that aren’t necessarily due to the performance of affected employees.

The Times is among the most prestigious media companies in operation today; I’d imagine many journalists would readily stem their personal social media usage for a chance to work there, but I’d wager that becomes less true in the coming years.

What I do know: I’m rooting for Kofie and am gladdened at the outpouring of support from his audience.

Subscribe to Kofie’s YouTube and follow him on Bluesky, Twitter, or TikTok.

Due to the events between conducting and publishing this interview, this episode of the podcast is especially different from the content of this week’s newsletter. Topics include:

• 🎵 Learning how to do TikTok after years of making long-form videos

• 🐦️ How sports Twitter and sports TikTok affect broader sports media

• 🙅 Taking a stance against clickbaity, misleading trends in sports content

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

How to approach cross-platform re-purposing

Any long-form content producer should slice their newsletter, podcast, or video essay into smaller pieces for distribution on every platform available to them. Two purposes are to drive users on each platform back to the parent content and build audiences on each distribution platform.

I asked Kofie for advice based on his work for Secret Base. In long-form videos, he’d look for smaller, self-contained stories. “There has to be a start” and “it has to be a conclusion.” In other words, build self-contained stories into long-form videos or articles that serve the full piece and are well-suited to distribution on short-form platforms where they can stand alone, adding value for audiences on those platforms while encouraging navigation back to the full piece.

For example, past Spotlight guest Ryan Broderick, creator of the Garbage Day newsletter, posts a screenshot of a paragraph from his newsletter to Twitter and Bluesky as soon as he sends the newsletter, with a link to read the full version.

• He has 70.2k followers on Twitter and 50.2k on Bluesky.

• Identical posts promoting a recent issue of his newsletter received 98 likes on Twitter and 3k on Bluesky.

• There are a few factors at play here, and these posts have recently hit more in the 100-400-like range, but Bluesky has become a better promotion vehicle for his work.

Depending on the content being repurposed, there are many other ways of doing what Ryan does. Ryan’s version is about as simple as it gets beyond just posting a link alongside the text “My latest.” Another past guest, Rachel Karten of the Link in Bio newsletter, does a similar play to Ryan but tends to process her social posts more, translating them to the platform's demands.

A recent example, promoting a post where she interviewed the social media director for a Broadway play, “Oh Mary!”:

• On Twitter, where Rachel has 14.5k followers, she posted a 9-part thread. The first tweet has 1k likes. Subsequent tweets feature mobile screenshots of the interview, quote tweets of the Twitter account she’s writing about, Instagram screenshots, and a link to the full piece.

• On LinkedIn, where Rachel has 31k followers, she published one 158-word post without screenshots or a link to the full article. Most of it was taken up by a quote on the social media manager in question’s posting social philosophy. It received 174 likes.

Ryan is executing a quick distribution tactic. It generally works for him. Rachel is doing essentially the same thing on LinkedIn but complicating the process on Twitter. It works! And these aren’t hard-and-fast rules; she’s experimenting with specific posts on each platform.

I advise doing exactly that: when you’re strapped for time, execute quickly, like Ryan. When you have more time, lean into formally experimental, platform-native tactics, as Rachel did in the Twitter example.

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week we spoke with Jad Esber, CEO of Koodos Labs, about shifting the internet’s personal data model from companies to users, the idea of data gravity, and how taste aggregation apps do and should function.