Anyone else need a fainting couch?
reviewing the business models for art and stories with Haley Joel Osment and others
A reminder: if you listen to Death, Sex & Money, please support our team's work by becoming a Slate Plus member. Get an ad-free stream of our show and exclusive episodes — like my Plus conversation about pop music’s evolving definitions of womanhood.
I am writing this on a flight from San Francisco to Richmond, Virginia, where I’m attending an audio storytelling conference called Resonate. I gave a speech at this conference last year, and the mood in the podcast industry was…bleak. I leaned into it.
At the time, my corner of the podcasting industry felt like it was imploding, and I was wading through my own uncertainty, unsure if Death, Sex & Money was going to live beyond 2023.
A year later, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the future of journalism, media, and digital culture, so much so that I find myself counting my (many!) blessings for landing at Slate in the way we have.
But the scar tissue is just under the surface. Earlier this week, I read this piece in New York Magazine, where leaders of many of New York’s most storied media outlets admitted that no one really knows what the business model will look like in five to ten years. It gave me a stomachache.
For those of you who aren’t in the podcasting or journalism business, let me remind you that things are very fragile because the way we’ve traditionally paid for this work is crumbling. The internet made news available for free, which meant people stopped subscribing in the ways my parents did, and then advertisers moved to other platforms and channels to reach consumers.
And now, we are in a time when there is more content than ever competing for your attention, tech platforms control the spigot of who sees what, and there are fewer reliable ways to pay for it all.
That’s why you hear me asking for you to join Slate Plus. Journalism and art and storytelling need their fans to help chip in to keep things financially solid because advertising alone is fickle.
Hollywood is dealing with its own version of a major business reset, as streaming has replaced box office and DVD sales. On the show this week, I talk with Haley Joel Osment about working as an actor before and after these massive structural changes in the film industry.
Haley and I also talk about how his dad, who is an actor and artist, helped me learn about emotional rhythms when he was starting out as an actor as a little kid:
HJO: From the very first stuff that I did a very young age, being four years old on Forrest Gumpa, for example, a big part of that was learning lines, was just the technical aspect of that about how to go through your scene and highlight your dialogue and to rehearse it until you were comfortable with the words. But then my dad, having been a theater actor from a pretty early age, it was also going through subtext and marking out beats and charting the beat changes and the emotional shifts that would happen in a scene which, even for characters I was playing as a young child, that stuff was still there.
AS: What do you mean? Like, beat changes for somebody who’s not an actor? Is it like a rhythm thing, or…what do you mean?
HJO: Rhythm has something to do with it, but it’s mostly just if you start off a scene shooting the breeze with someone and then another character comes in and gives you some tragic information or something like that, that’s a beat shift. And for a kid, when you’re four years old, textual analysis isn’t really second nature. So it was nice to see that be very diagrammed out of this happens. This person says this thing and it changes the way that you’re feeling.
Listen to my conversation with Haley Joel Osment here.
What I’m Dancing To.
As we ask you to support Death, Sex & Money by joining Slate Plus, we are also working hard to make it worth your while, by making some new drops **just for our members.**
This week’s Slate Plus drop was partially inspired by this great Variety profile of Maya Rudolph last month, where there was a passing reference to her family’s current soundtrack: “her household has been a Taylor Swift stronghold for the past few years, and now Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan are also on repeat.”
My home has undergone the same abrupt shift. I have listened, danced and sung along to this music with my two girls, and thinking about the Taylor to Charli/Sabrina/Chappell transition, I started wondering what they were picking up about modern womanhood.
Other Recommendations.
Something I keep talking about this week: This book!
Holy moly. I just finished Martyr! and what a beautiful ride it was. There are so many ideas, lines, and references in it that feel like shiny gems. I found myself picturing a little shoebox where I wished I could collect them all for easy access and safekeeping.
Another recommendation: Breeze Airlines!
My flight to Richmond is my first experience on Breeze, which was created to connect more mid-size cities directly without having to go through hubs. I am right in the middle of their target demo because I love many, many mid-size American cities and have also lived in big cities long enough to become snobby about avoiding too many connections.
Lucky for me, Breeze has a bunch of direct flights from San Francisco, including this one to Richmond. And they just added a direct flight to NYC from my hometown of Charleston, WV, for all the people I love in and around Kanawha County who want to get their Big Apple fix without having to risk a missed connection and an unplanned overnight in Charlotte or Chicago. (This is not a paid endorsement for Breeze, just sincere appreciation.)
Until next week,
Anna
Listen to our latest Death, Sex & Money episodes
10/22 Haley Joel Osment Is Not Your Typical Former Child Star (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
10/22 Plus: The New Era of Pop Womanhood (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
10/15 Search Engine: When Is It Time To Stop Drinking? (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
10/8 My Father Planned His Death. I Didn’t Stop Him. (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
10/8 Plus: Two Sex Columnists on Tapping Turn-ons (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
10/1 My Secret Life as a Hoarder (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
9/24 Bob the Drag Queen Says Polyamory is Expensive (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
9/24 Plus: A Succession Star’s Guide to Giving Away Money (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
9/17 Martha Wainwright on Post-Divorce Confidence and ‘Folk Tits’ (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
9/17 Plus: I Wrote About Getting Scammed. The Internet Wasn’t Kind. (Apple|Spotify|Slate)
Hah! I never see "Kanawha County" in print. I may die if I see "Coal River."