These days, individual creators are the brand, the content, and the medium itself. The new studio system? Your phone. The new blockbuster? 15 seconds of viral fame. Meanwhile, I stubbornly clutch my cinematic dreams like a buggy whip. But first…

Junket

Local Media Moves

Publishing in P-Town

The Stable Book Group Launches in Petaluma. Publishing veterans Chris Gruener and Keith Riegert have founded The Stable Book Group, a new publishing collective headquartered in Petaluma and Brooklyn. The venture brings together four independent publishers—She Writes Press, Trafalgar Square Books, Ulysses Press, and VeloPress—along with the newly launched Galpón Press and partner Mountain Gazette Books. Gruener once gave me a copy of his grandfather Robert Cameron’s tome, The Drinking Man’s Diet. I lost weight. And inflamed my liver.

Easy(er) Living?

Local magazine Marin Living has sold. But to whom? Waiting on a source. In the meantime: “Entrepreneurship isn’t for the faint of heart, but the unwavering support of our clients, who believed in us from the beginning, will never be forgotten,” wrote the magazine’s four co-founders (Jessica Cline, Dina Grant, Daniel Jewett, and Casey Gillespie) in a farewell letter in this month’s issue.

Citizen Kane on the Brain

“Hearst Corp., the New York-based private media conglomerate that owns the San Francisco Chronicle, is nearing an agreement to purchase the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, according to sources close to the deal.” — Kevin Truong, SFStandard

Send Tips to dhowell@dhowell.com.

Encore

Press Pass Podcast: Rat Sandwich

In This Episode:

* The Field Mouse Factor – A deep dive into a bizarre PR crisis from Wine Country’s past, where a deli’s rat-related debacle spiraled into media chaos. Lesson learned? Sometimes the best PR strategy is saying nothing at all.

* My Favorite Press Release – A recent survey claims Stanford-to-Google is the ultimate career path in California. But where’s the love for artists, filmmakers, and musicians? Is finance and tech the only dream left? Let’s discuss.

* AARP at the Movies – How the organization for retired folks has become an unexpected player in Hollywood, bringing top-tier talent to its Movies for Grownups awards.

Creative Dept.

Does (Screen) Size Matter?

For decades, the fundamental unit of media was the magazine, the newspaper, the TV show, and the film—a discrete, branded entity around which audiences gathered. But that’s changing…

“The business unit itself is changing,” observed Dylan Byers on The Grill Room podcast. “The magazine used to be the unit, the show used to be the unit, the newspaper used to be the unit, and now it’s the individual itself. I don’t want to use the word influencer—it’s the person in their field who is the authority and who you can build the brand around.”

The new unit of media is the individual—a singular, charismatic (or algorithmically persistent) entity who commands attention. Consider Alan Chikin Chow, who has amassed over 80 million YouTube subscribers (and, in an odd bit of overlap, shares a film editor with Werewolf Serenade). His work? Hyper-short, highly produced comedy sketches optimized for social media feeds. He’s not just producing a show—he is the show—and specifically for the small-er screen.

Author, podcast host, entrepreneur, and NYU clinical professor of marketing Scott Galloway captured this shift well on Medium:

“The ROI on entertainment investment is increasingly the inverse of the screen size it’s produced for. Theaters are dying, streaming to televisions is maturing, and user-produced 45-second videos on phones are crowning new royalty.”

This is entertainment’s vertical urge—the gravitational pull toward the smallest, often vertical, screen has led to the fastest consumption and most direct-to-audience experience possible. Social media is not just the new TV—it’s the new studio, distributor, and promotional machine rolled into one.

And yet, not everyone’s on board. The late, great David Lynch, always a cinematic purist, has famously balked at this idea, declaring:

“If you’re watching a movie on a telephone, you will never, in a trillion years, experience the film.”

He’s right, of course. But also—irrelevant. Not only is David Lynch dead, but audiences aren’t watching Blue Velvet on a 70-foot screen at the Vista Theater (though they can stream it on AppleTV). They’re more likely watching a TikTok of some fashionista dancing between our texts about David Lynch having died.

The difference between an old-school San Francisco Bay Area indie filmmaker and a social video maker is the size of the intended screen (and the amount of vitriol directed toward LA in the meantime). Without the big screen, am I still a filmmaker or an online content creator? Perhaps I’m practicing a pursuit we might quaintly call “artisanal,” which seems increasingly predicated on preserving a waning identity than a viable venture. The future isn’t coming—it’s here, and here I am spinning the zoetrope.

If social media is the new TV, TV is the new movie theater, and the new movie theater is probably a museum. I can live with that.