About six or seven years ago, I was sitting in a fruit shop in Cluj that had been temporarily converted into the editorial office of a festival marketing magazine. The editorial team had received a visitor from Bucharest. In some American action films, a provincial group of police officers/lawmakers receives a visit from a central government official who either ends up integrating into the team or messes everything up and only confuses the local hero. The envoy from Bucharest was a frail, quiet person wearing a sailor shirt. He didn’t ruin anything, and he didn’t help with anything.

He had a skinny Mac in his lap. The envoy had been sent by a quality magazine in Bucharest. The Cluj festival and the quality magazine in Bucharest had teamed up that year (and probably in others), intending to produce quality content for quality channels about a quality event.

The man from Bucharest was physically with us, but writerly and intellectually elsewhere, in the ideological/editorial cloud of the Bucharest editorial office, of the context of Bucharest, of the sensibility of Bucharest. The sensibility of Bucharest did not exist only in Bucharest, but also in the crème de la crème of prestigious Western journalism: The New Yorker, Atlantic, etc. This identity is not reserved exclusively for richer and more polished places. With a little ingenuity, franchises with local charm may be established, much like a Fornetti place that appeared in a double-glazed window between a public notary and a currency exchange.

Quality journalism à la The New Yorker/Atlantic, at least the basic package imported by Scena9/Decât o Revistă, considers that social/historical dynamics/crises can be explained through narratives (stories). Thus, history and people have an internal logic that can be mapped onto the structure of a three-act story. Just as Marius Moga’s music sounds good even to anti-pop ears, because Moga uses harmonies that sound naturally good, storyteller-journalists have formulas that sound/work well with the class sensibilities of the paying audience.

A favourite topic is the popularisation of science. A classic text of Romanian quality journalism (Astrofizicienii, Decât o Revistă, 2013-2014) playfully and admiringly reviews the achievements of Romanian astrophysicists. DOR did not invent the appreciative text for scientists; it is a kind of bedside reading, invented to convey admiration for the scientist, and is a staple for flagship publications, such as The New Yorker. The class that is intimately interested in science is concerned, in fact, with the hierarchies that deference to science facilitates. Behold, scientists produce knowledge, and this knowledge will organise the way we relate to each other, especially in turbulent historical periods.

Then, as an informed consumer of popular science journalism, I will have access to the products and services produced by such a system of values ahead of others. Texts about science, eccentric and dedicated scientists, and the imagination of a universe of research centres, conferences, and tweed jackets with worn elbows soothe a fundamental fear: that the outside world that narrative journalism orders and explains might, in fact, overflow with things that cannot be ordered into neat stories.

In fact, America’s finest sent hundreds of narrative probes into areas that heavily voted for Trump. In general, journalists went in with their homework done, but there is still no unanimously accepted version of the phenomenon, a sign that ready-made stories are harder to come by. But this is precisely the key – we cannot have anything other than ready-made stories, because this readiness (even when it seems playful and avant-garde – see the still-unfading obsession with gonzo, especially at Vice and what remains of Casa Jurnalistului) makes life easier for authors and evenings calmer for readers who fear the power of irrational forces. 

The texts produced by that envoy were short, dull, meaningless scribbles – how many people were in Matei Corvin Square at a certain time, whether it was sunny or not, whether people liked a certain screening or not. There was also something about the central park, thus reaching the peak of Cluj’s soporifics. The reporter and the texts disappeared after a few days, leaving me with the impression that something so banal would surely have serious consequences for Romanian journalism. 

I don’t know if the envoy has since become one of the award-winning journalists awarded yearly at Superscrieri and celebrated by the creative community at every bacchanal of editors, special reporters, and so on. Most likely, yes. He had a martial confidence in his ability to produce banality to fill spaces of 800, 1000, 10.000 characters. He had energy and probably had no major doubts about the directive to describe the people in the market, their feelings, the trees in the central park, or the cabbage soup that non-Cluj residents associated at that time with a certain Cluj bonhomie.

Certainly, the envoy’s type has germinated and now populates the alpha horde of quality text production. A bunch of other .ro domains have appeared that publish investigations, portraits, interviews, editorials, excerpts from novels or pop sci books not yet published by button boutique publishers, texts on theatre, recommendations for the weekend, travel notes, or texts about laziness. Even a staff writer at The New Yorker gets lazy from time to time, but the privilege comes from distilling this into a text with a beautiful font and references to neuroscience books (an obsession of quality journalism, much like polarisation). We have it all.

It’s good that there are many .ro domains, and sometimes a paper magazine that publishes all these kinds of words together. What’s not good is to ignore the fact that many of the texts, podcasts, infographics, and audio clips produced by these creative enterprises are bad. 

Bad Texts

They are bad because any cyclical production of content will produce content to confirm the validity of that system of content production and distribution to exist and grow. A text (Scena9) about a student from Bucharest who lived in England and Spain and returned to Bucharest to sing in bars and in general to be indie has the major merit of reinforcing the idea that a regular flow of texts about creative people is worth having precisely because this flow is well supplied, looks good on screen, and is written in a candid-baroque style for people who are still looking for the missing link between Șeli and Șora. 

With every text published, journalists and readers develop their linguistic sensibilities and emotional stakes. It would not be absurd to ask ourselves why a) this text exists, b) why we look at the pitchforknache tattoo on the character’s back, c) why the article is the narrative equivalent of a battered Instagram-green Telecaster, but rather to no longer see such texts on the portrait journalism pages. It’s like in capitalism, empty shelves scare us more than shelves full of questionable canned goods.

It’s true, even before DOR/Scena9, there wasn’t much to read. Dilema was and remains a nest of grumpy conservatives and various freelance authors who can either write news items for epigrammatists or nostalgic Kapuscinski-style pieces about villages and small towns. Idei în Dialog existed only to adorn coffee tables bought with discerning taste and new money, not inherited. Political satire magazines have split and become trivialised, but they have remained yellow. 

Quality journalism emerged because, between 2005 and 2010, no group in the creative field had assumed the broad role of sorting and disseminating the new sociocultural hierarchies. New species had already appeared on the Romanian public scene, from socially engaged chefs to video artists who had declared Bucharest superior to Berlin and Seattle. A multitude of people and energies in a scene without rhyme or reason, without narratives, without rituals of validation and resource transfer. Transient hyper-local prestige (which is now in high demand) was being secreted, and there was no way to gather all the raw material and distribute it to an audience eager for something-interesting-in-my-city. 

The portrait is the journalistic genre that organises quality production in terms of meaning and content. It is also the cheapest of genres, at least cheaper than an investigation or a trip to a war zone. It is flattering for the writer because sketching the personality/physical traits/life story of the person being portrayed is considered the most invigorating manifestation of storytelling photosynthesis. It is flattering for the character because it is all about them, and the immediate capital gained is considerable. It is flattering for the readers because it gives them the impression that there exists an order of local social and cultural groups, and an emotional logic to everyday life beyond that of consumption.

The portrait is the professionalisation of a state of grace that appears in adolescence and post-adolescence: sitting with someone interesting on the stairs/at the back of the classroom/on vacation and sifting through the basement of their socio-behavioural conformation in search of snapshots with some cultural exchange value.

The most conclusive manifestation of this ethos is not an article or a publication, but the Pe Bune podcast, produced by DOR. The guests are mostly members of various creative cliques in Bucharest, and most of them present similar itineraries – the mythologizing of the summer between high school graduation and the first year of college, the glorification of their entourage, and the attempt to give a whimsical touch to their own trajectory (often artistic talent/intellectual inclination was discovered by chance, it was a game, actually I was supposed to study Economics-Banking, but I ended up with a degree in Philology, etc.).

It’s easy to mock this kind of emo-Build-a-Bear-discursive nonsense. I’m fed up to here with this kind of discourse that persists even in people well over 30. But more relevant than my grumbling is that this practice reveals the manufacturing of discourse and meaning that is central to quality journalism.

Firstly, and in favour of quality journalists and their subjects, is the fact that the portrait has been matured from the personal stories of people who (for the most part) have lived in an environment where nothing much has happened beyond the austerity of various degrees, a lack of means of expression or production, improvisation and identity tailoring, and calm. Interesting personal anecdotes can arise from such conditions, but it often takes a lot of mental gymnastics to get something interesting out of going to a good high school in the city, studying literature, and getting a job at an agency/a scholarship.

Then there is the fact that this very nothingness, given an indie couture brine, from which individuals and stories worthy of podcasts/magazines are sifted, is the ultimate stake of this guild – the turbonothing.

Turbonothing

Turbonothing is a set of editorial practices and commercial tactics (a sensibility) that seeks to codify and reward the reactions of authors and readers to portrait journalism Scena9/DOR. DOR/Scena9 activates all sources of cultural coal for journalists – the farce of editorial offices modelled on The New Yorker, the presence of the E D I T O R S as a synthesis of strategic intellect, creative acrobatics, and priestly dedication, websites as beautiful as a MUJI storefront, networking, the delirium of the storyteller who inspires.

Subscribers and supporters also have something to gain. The pursuit of quality journalism helps separate discerning consumers from the masses who consume media through channels over which they have no control. S9/DOR readers start with long reads, take part in events, follow artists/creators in various appearances in good magazines, and enjoy the conspicuous consumption of buying trinkets for their cultural display case. In fact, a label for announcing financial support in Facebook comments has even been developed. A creditworthy person is, above all, good.

Turbonothing has less to do with content and more to do with building an intellectual consensus between individuals who produce and consume content. One can discuss this content at length. Although I use the term bad to sort the texts from Scena9/DOR, the term is inconsistent and just as sinful as good. The texts themselves, beyond their fleeting humour and a good dose of irritation that arises when super-writers no longer know whether they are Gellu Naum or Masha Gessen, are stuck in the same formal and aesthetic dampness as they were eight to ten years ago.

Quality journalism is still stuck in the 1950s American nuclear family phase, where DOR is a man with a pipe and a suit, and Scena9 is his wife popping the turkey into a brand-new GM oven. This intellectual establishment does not want to disrupt or change anything, but rather to solidify the sensibilities (or, as the super-writers would say, to ‘tell good stories’) of a class that still has anxiety about its own cultural and social reach. Doubts arise only on a full stomach, so further on.

The turbonothing industry is fundamentally conservative. On the surface, the content appears cosmopolitan, inclusive, and progressive. Many of the topics are deliberately chosen to place turbonimic within the thematic net of the woke global creative industries. In contrast, its editorial and image practices are conservative. The portraits in Scena9/DOR/PressOne, etc., are built around the idea of providence. Individual X has been passionate about something ‘since childhood’, has built something through hard work, has had luck/done things by chance, and now has succeeded. Beyond the minute and score of each person’s life (often high school – some college – a scholarship), we are quite sure of why/how an individual will become exceptional. This psychology is so on the nose and somehow so American. No cracks, no big doubts. The need for heroes and successful people remains high, and excellence is challenging to gauge, yet easier to romanticise. A journalistic Caritas that favours everyone.

Another reason why the turbonothing doesn’t want to destroy anything is its dependence on the economic context that allows it (admittedly just barely, if we are to believe the pleas of super-editors/managers) to survive in a market largely uninterested in the opening of some gallery or in how cute a dog is in Târgu-Mureș (yes, DOR has online content, pictures of cute dogs from Târgu-Mureș, a sign that they too realised that this kind of cute band-aid works well in these anxious times for a financially frivolous audience that can afford a subscription this month, maybe not).

The power structures through which the economy controls content production are more subtle. There are no imposed themes, undesirable people, and so on. Instead, much of the thematic horizon of content is built around the elites and the contexts that produce and promote them. Of course, there is no shortage of poetic texts about slums; it is an established genre that allows readers to reassess their distance from the margins. It would be interesting to measure how many texts per month or per year cover the margins (Roma, villages, poverty) vs. the centre (artists, events, festivals, portraits such as Laura Codruța Kövesi). The proportions are never random, as any vintage tailor or vegan chef would agree.

The coagulating agents of quality content are beautiful people, a group of consumer-subjects who occupy both a symbolic-aspirational place (how we would like/should be in a less corrupt society), and also represent a synthetic demographic slice (urban, educated, socially and politically involved in certain centre-right issues: corruption, inefficiency of the state apparatus/bureaucracy). 

Scena9/DOR journalism organises the energies of beautiful people in terms of cultural identity and entertainment (with the necessary exceptions when it publishes serious texts), while G4Media, Recorder, and Să fie lumină order their political pathologies and martial impulses. We still don’t know what Republica is. No matter how much it wants to be an anarchist-Berlin-microbrewery, turbonothing is a retail store that tries to sell everything, and the most profitable product is still admiration for beautiful/interesting people.

Enter The Power of Storytelling and other events with and about storytelling, writing, creativity, the power of stories, and so on. If elsewhere people are tired of Joseph Campbell, in the turbonothing microcosm, people are still fascinated by the TEDopatias of narratives, human nature revealed through interviews, and the power of stories to mark/change lives. It’s a new layer added to the insectarium of cultural commodities that can be purchased for about the price of a one-day ticket to a summer festival. It’s a way to monetise the anxiety of being left behind when it comes to cultural events and gatherings from which you can leave with a tote bag. 

The new guilds that emerged after 2000 —beer, coffee, anti-PSD software, burgers from selected breeders, and long-form journalism—are not only concerned with the production of goods and services, but also with educating and seducing consumers about the specific practices of their guild. Just as in craft breweries, the beer production facility is visible from the shop floor, the mechanisms of quality content production are made available to the curious, a symbiosis between transparency (a national anxiety that has somehow turned into a virtue) and ticket cutting. A newly launched editorial project is even promoting itself as The Largest Editorial Office in Romania. It is an intellectually-commercial centrism uniting armies of elves and dwarves to combat misinformation and/or tabloids and/or the PSD. But it is also an attempt to build civic consensus in the quality press, even though it will only spoil things further in the future. 

Rushing toward nought

Content production, however high-quality it may be, is moving towards smaller, non-standard narrative territories and essentially non-informative ones. The content of Scena9/DOR/ PressOne, with its allure of Helmut Kohl wrapped in a Diadora tracksuit reading Burda in a Swiss mountain resort, will be less and less appealing to a (future) large and willing-to-pay audience. On the other hand, the current paying/contributing audience exhibited hysterical uncle-like behaviour in 2019 in a scandal: Șeli. 

DOR published an extensive article about a highly successful Romanian teenage vlogger, Șeli. The article was an opportunity for DOR to showcase its expertise in explaining the star ecosystem and the sensibilities of the generation that grew up with YouTube. The reaction of the DOR audience was delightfully virulent. They were accused of promoting non-values, saying that there are so many deserving artists who do not receive the same attention. These are the trials and tribulations of DOR/Scena9, namely that their enthusiasm is inversely proportional to the public’s willingness to reconsider their priorities and hierarchies. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not as if DOR/Scena9 tried to chop away at the André-Rieu-bourgeois sensibilities of readers. They just tried to realign the order of the media-culture consumers’ market a little and make room for some new products. They ran full on into the public’s habits of associating performance and cultural status with the production of hard goods: books, movies, tours, and the already established array of awards and rewards. The millions of views of a 25-second online sketch mean very little to them. 

In a way, I agree with these grumpy retirees, but for different reasons. In the text and the accompanying social media buzz, there was no criticism of the medium, the producers, or the new hierarchies. Yes, DOR/Scena9 will write funny texts about the flat earth society/Dacians/Romanian Academy and the oddities produced by the former cultural establishment (which is still connected to funding, but not to the public/living cultural circuits), but they are completely seduced by the occultism of vlogging, subscribers, views, and are incapable of criticizing the medium, the content, and the content producers themselves. DOR has proven to be more in tune with a large part of its audience, but that doesn’t mean much. At the same time, they have also shown a lack of interest in investigating the internal rumblings of a colossal system of content and money production that adores journalists. 

The affluent audience interested in content quality is buzz! and quite conservative, with fixed ideas on who deserves and who does not deserve to be a super character. Sure, the woke masked men have balanced the playing field with many righteous raids on the minds of the angry (unadapted to new technologies, to the fluidity of cultural/identity exchanges), but that doesn’t change the fact that the angry ones have money to spend. 

The class that consumes quality journalism is reluctant not only to accept shifts in the official culture (books vs. vlog episodes). Attempts by marginal cultures to penetrate the mainstream, such as the case of manele music at Gopo and other events coded as white (music festivals for Uber Eats youth), are just as denigrated. 

Under these circumstances, quality journalism has little room for manoeuvre if it wants to satisfy its audience and is pushed towards promoting a culture that is already validated, but which needs new marketing routines to ingest and detoxify the borderline. The lack of critical (internal) impetus does not help. Of course, validated culture can be challenging, but validated culture (jazz, theatre, film, and literature festivals) wants to be promoted and amplified and has a market interest in doing so. Pious texts about jazz in the mountains or American writers parachuted into Iași or interviews with actors from HBO series taken by 10-15 journalists from all the countries where HBO has a local presence, crammed into a rented room, bring nothing new, nothing critical, nothing damning to the dominant systems and the values they promote.

No one denies that DOR/Scena9/PressOne have covered relevant/urgent topics, but these are topics that do not touch on the cultural/class sensibilities of their supporters. We (almost) all agree on domestic violence or the lack of resources in rural areas, but it is more difficult to agree on what constitutes the cultural libido of the nation and how to stir it up. Turbonothing is in the unenviable position of being a woke and progressive machine, but one that will have to get more and more used to advertorials or two- or three-sentence posts about the cutest dog in Târgu-Mureș or something about millennials making blackberry jam. The system of quality journalism is articulate enough to produce content endlessly; the stories are there. Like other capitalists, superjournalists will realise that abundance produces more neurosis than producer-buyer harmony. 

Moreover, all the hagiography surrounding data journalism after 2010 has deflated, just as some of the enthusiasm for nerdy journalism on local government/urban planning/infrastructure issues popularized by NPR and taken up here has been lost. They have their place, but only if they can sustain the current culture war. Cultural peace, which is the healthy but bland direction of turbonothing, does not have much to offer.

The goal is for these two components of quality journalism – narrative-bobo and expertly-comprehensive-data – to create a cultural industry that can regenerate and replicate itself indefinitely.

I see mostly collapses, disappearances, and sinkings when it comes to cultural production and consensus, especially for those that have as their model growth – more and more categories or sections, more blobs with contributors’ faces, more events on one ticket disseminating cultural products.

It’s not just cynicism at play here; I think there are already enough people who want to see what will come after the frenzy of sponsorships, contributors, two- or three-part lengthy texts, excellent text by X about Y, I felt Z. There must be something after all this, but I don’t want it to end too soon. But when it does end, I hope it will be different from a sober, dignified Facebook post and a farewell party that we have no business attending anyway. 

This text was originally written in Romanian and published in 2019 in a book titled Hipsteri, bobos și clase creative (Eds. Ciprian State, Dinu Guțu).