How To Make It In Media: 2K25 Edition
A guide to get rich in 2025's current media climate.
Writing in 2025 feels like sharing a cell with poverty. And poverty has a knife for some reason and they stand over your bed while you sleep, smiling, knife in hand.
In an effort to maximize every single penny, digital media staff writers have been replaced by AI copy/pasting the same five paragraphs everywhere.
Media companies are folding in on themselves like Cobb teaching Ariadne how to design dreams—while the survivors huddle up in refugee camps, consolidating and merging—as they climb over piles of skulls, crawling to higher ground as the lava surrounds them.
I am envious—of everyone—but more specifically, the few individuals who’ve managed to maintain media careers out of the ashes of the Library of Alexandria.
Here are a few of my favorites out here crushing the game…
Candace Owens
I look up to Candace Owens. She’s like me in an alternate universe where I allowed white people to touch my hair.
People always tell me I should make videos but I am charmless and boring. Somehow, Candace Owens has managed a long digital media career without a hint of charisma. Candace is an inspiration.
She’s been in the content game for almost a decade now—the black woman telling black kids to pull up their pants and turn down their hippity-hop.
She travels the country telling women they should give up their careers and become full-time stay-at-home mothers, raising babies and washing out lipstick stains from their husbands’ collars—while Candace, herself, very much has a career and often isn’t home raising babies.
Her videos get millions of views. Personally, I’ve never sat down and watched a full hour of her work but from every clip I’ve seen, she has the energy of someone who wasn’t invited to the party, desperately trying to convince herself she never wanted to go to the party anyway.
Most of her work this year has been thorough, well-sourced investigations into some serious conspiracy theories.
I just visited her website. The big stories she’s hyper-focused on these days are the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, blaming Jews for Harvey Weinstein’s arrest and claiming French President Emmanuel Macron is married to a trans woman.
The latter, her deep dive into the genitals of France’s first lady, has resulted in a lawsuit filed by Emmanuel Macron himself.
The 218-page lawsuit, filed in Delaware on Wednesday, accuses Owens of publishing “outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions”, chief among them that Brigitte Macron was born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux.
Owens has also said the French president and his wife were blood relatives and that Emmanuel Macron was a product of a CIA human experiment or “a similar government mind control programme”, according to the Macrons’ court filing.
Here’s Candace’s response to the lawsuit:
Veryyyy cool and normal and regular to beg a random woman for nude pics. (Brigitte Macron has 3 biological children and was born a woman, by the way. Duh.)
I don’t think I have the intestinal fortitude to battle world leaders in court after spending hours spoon-feeding bigoted fan fic to mentally unwell folk who bathe in snake oil.
I’ll let my girl Candace hold down the narcissistic hero-complex corner of the internet.
For now.
Like, her show is one bad day in court away from being broadcast entirely in French.
Let’s see some other business models I can learn from. Hopefully ones that won’t bankrupt me or land me in prison.
Nelk Boys
Shout out to the Nelk Boys, two 30-year-old teenagers who just had Benjamin Netanyahu1 on their podcast—a man with active arrest warrants out by the International Criminal Court for committing war crimes in Gaza.
The Nelk Boys started off doing pranks and now their podcast is the home for some of the best and brightest among us. Looking over their guests, I see an array of Socrates-level scholars like Candace Owens (of course), Andrew Tate, RFK Jr, Tory Lanez (calling in from prison following his arrest for shooting Meg Thee Stallion), and most famously, their podcast with Donald Trump before the election.
Most of the bigger podcasts have rotating guest lists of celebrities or comedians or artists promoting their new, upcoming projects.
But The Nelk Boys aren’t sitting down with Michael Che to talk about how he comes up with The Weekend Update jokes.
Instead, they are a safe space for liars, cheaters, scammers, mysgonists and predators to come take a load off and kick it with two adult children who would have a difficult time getting through a densely worded book like The Cat in the Hat.
It was inevitable these two glue eaters would end up hosting a sociopath who is currently eradicating a race of people from history…
Israel is actively manufacturing a famine in Gaza and literally just blew up journalists attempting to report on it.
Very important to know Netanyahu’s Burger King order, though.
You know what? If I don’t have the stomach to accuse random world leaders of hiding their gender, I certainly can’t handle inviting war criminals into my home to giggle about what color Jolly Ranchers taste the best or whatever.
Let me think bigger. Perhaps I need to be more hands-off…
Jubilee
Jubilee is a media company known for its 1 vs. 20 debates, where 1 internet influencer is surrounded by 20 clout-chasing sickos—as all 21 people involved attempt to create viral “gotcha” moments, praying to advance their own media careers.
Sounds stupid but ultimately harmless, right?
Former Fox Sports broadcaster, Skip Bayless, participated in one of these—where 20 LeBron fans pleaded their case on why he’s better than Michael Jordan. Super harmless. Just do not Google why Skip Bayless is a “former” Fox Sports broadcaster. Always great to have a guest who is fighting for his life in court after allegedly offering his makeup artist $1.5 million to have sex with him.
Anyway, in recent weeks, the show has devolved into essentially one “progressive” person arguing with a room full of white supremacists.
It would be healthier to drink every paint can at your local Lowe’s than it is to watch a full hour and a half of these “debates”.
But thanks to the wonderful people at Jubilee, Connor—Fred Flinstone who, if instead of bowling, snuck away from Wilma to attend Klan rallies—created a GoFundMe after pretending he was fired from his job for sharing his beliefs and was gifted thousands of dollars by his fellow terminally online contrarians.
Jubilee is doing incredible work. FINALLY, a home for the Hitler Youth to spread their good word to millions of young people.
You know what? I think I’m gonna just stick to writing about the Knicks and movies I’ve watched. I’m just gonna go ahead and do whatever Candace Owens isn’t. I won’t be rich but I also won’t be subpoenaed. So.
Thanks for reading. All typos are splenic intuitions.
I spelled that correctly without looking it up. I have to read the news less, yo.