“Ours is a period of increasing noise,” Jason Parham wrote earlier this year, for Wired. “Everything is bleeding into everything around it. All trends, large and small, now suggest a new cultural mood—but only until the next Vaseline-smeared obsession comes along.” Parham is one of several writers tasked with covering the internet and its subcultures—a sprawling beat that defies clear definition. The best of these journalists are immersed in the internet but do not obsess over viral moments, which fly by too fast and seem, in isolation, to be trivial. By focusing on creators, communities, and the algorithm-based platforms that drive trends, these writers find ways to cut through the noise—and surface a deeper understanding of life, online and off.
Recently I spoke with five reporters, each of whom casts a different gaze, drawing from different areas of expertise and defining their own beat within the beat. Journalism, strained for resources, often fails to reflect the diversity of the world, and certainly the internet; as Rebecca Jennings, a reporter for Vox, told me, “I think there needs to be way more people covering this beat that are not middle-class white women and white men that live in