Reinvigorating the Media Wasteland

Forming Positive Identity in an Age of Rage

Locals continued streaming in. They were mostly middle aged, those with skin in the game, who set roots here over the course of decades with growing children. Inside the civic center of a small city in Metro Detroit, the auditorium adjacent to the library was packed. They came that evening to listen to a talk with a local city council member regarding what lay in store in the coming years. It wasn’t a Trump rally. It didn’t involve a congressman they rarely saw in town. It was a local guy talking about local topics. Still, solid attendance showed a need for such conversations, where individual voices have a possibility of being heard instead of screaming into the void in Washington D.C’s direction. And it wasn’t an old-stock newspaper handling the event, as most papers relinquished such grass-roots events.

It was also heavily Republican leaning, an anomaly given the proliferation of progressive NGO’s and other left-wing organizations with the financial war chest to fund political activism and organization with ease. This particular event was planned by an up-and-coming media outlet, unabashedly right-wing but avoiding the sensationalist and embarrassingly kitschy format of conservative media. Jay Murray, a contributor to the outlet, held the conversation with the councilman. Mark Naida (Naida, Mark) was the facilitator. In an age of constant slop, an up-and-coming news outlet named Michigan Enjoyer has successfully sidestepped the pitfalls of alternative news.

Institutional media began its rapid descent with the dawn of the internet and has shown no signs of revitalization. Cable news channels cater almost exclusively to the geriatric, and paper newspapers have turned into something more resembling a pamphlet. While prestige publications like the New York Times have managed to transition to the new ecosystem, your more everyman news sources have had their reporting staff pulverized, relying more and more on “access journalism” that relies on officials practically dropping a finished article on their desk.

Local news has been hardest hit. Where once a newspaper could have significant staff devoted to getting to the story or funding long investigations, medium-sized cities now find themselves with a miniscule number of staff, with many being forced to consolidate into larger organizations. This consolidation has only accelerated the extreme bias and isolated nature of the media class, increasing the power of those who own the only news media for wide swathes of the state as well as politicians who can blacklist reporters from events.

While news reporting has been notoriously left leaning for its entire history, even those who don’t share the newspaper’s politics have been hurt. It’s hard to spread the word for local events, oftentimes relying on network effects on social media. A common paper of record to base water-cooler conversations around no longer exists when everyone goes to their specific niche to get their information. As much as reporters themselves are guilty of misinformation in the current age, a responsible newspaper could ground those who heard the wild theories of Aunt Brenda regarding council affairs.

With an aging viewership and a lack of a sense of balance in reporting, this is a prime opportunity for an innovative mover and shaker. On the right, news media is still saturated with reactionary, hot-take culture that spreads outrage at news rather than doing the grunt work of deep-dive investigation. Websites are an eyesore of advertisements and surface-level “analysis” in the classic Team Red vs. Team Blue framing. For large media, the counter to the slop that is pasted on the front page of CNN is slop posted on FoxNews. Right-wing media has been almost universally focused on national politics, much to the detriment of the cause as a whole. Left-wing radicalism has made its way into many cities with a minimum of resistance as big donors focus on Washington instead of their own towns.

Michigan media is in rough shape, and much of the country is no better off. Most of the state is consolidated into a few conglomerates: MLive, The Lansing State Journal and The Detroit News. For those who still get the Lansing State Journal, what was once a thick and robust newspaper has been trimmed down to its bones. While this would seem to be the case of smaller companies getting swallowed, it was probably for the best, as many of the small city newspapers would not have survived if MLive did not grab them. The number of reporters on the ground in the state is miniscule, and Governor Whitmer has taken advantage of the sparse media landscape by blacklisting reporters that give her negative coverage.

While five years ago the right could complain about the lack of institutional capital to build infrastructure necessary to support local media, that’s no longer the case. There’s money flowing around looking to overtake and replace the ossified organization of Old Media. Mark Naida’s Michigan Enjoyer is proof it can be done.

Mark is a veteran with a wide swath of experience in classic and new media. He’s worked with CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Pirate Wires. He navigated their structures, found their strengths along with their flaws, and concocted a different strategy. Instead of having full-time employees, the work would be crowdsourced to the population itself, and those who had a solid scoop would be compensated. This format has allowed Mark to set up a vast network of reliable reporters all over the state. Instead of the stodgier professional format of Old Media, he allows contributors to write in their own voice.

Probably the most visionary direction he took is having a clear political direction while not being consumed by it. The reporting, instead of taking a side in the daily fracas of factional fighting, is largely focused on one’s identity as a Michigander and the state’s uniqueness, a cozy mitten surrounded by vast bodies of water. It oftentimes gives slice of life pieces and giving space to little known attractions and historical markers, such as O.W. Root writing about the location of one of Hemingway’s short stories in addition to political fights. Instead of focusing on solely on squabbles or relying on rage-bait, it’s focused on fomenting a sense of place to its readers, giving a kaleidoscope view of the unique heritage they share.

It seems to be working. Their Social Media growth has been impressive, clocking 100k followers on Facebook and almost 50k on Instagram. And a lot of the current success is on Instagram, where the personable style and sense of fun play well with Millennials in a time where most news outlets would kill for a younger audience. For a small operation of just two that started in 2024, this is impressive output. It remains to be seen whether growth can reach a critical mass and expand enough to form a sustainable revenue model, but the future looks rosy.

One of Mark Naida’s main focuses is creating an accountability mechanism to the left that is as powerful as legacy news sources go after the right. He rightly stated conservative media is incredibly reactionary and puts little effort into real investigative journalism. Instead of doing the work to dig and find the stories, most media focuses on putting a spin to an already existing story in the ecosystem. This has allowed progressives to dominate the frame of discussion for decades and keep focus on the malfeasance of conservatives while ignoring rampant corruption from the left.

Michigan Enjoyer has made FOIA requests to get to the bottom of Whitmer’s disastrous nursing home policy during covid, only to be given hundreds of pages of completely redacted docs, forcing them to file a lawsuit. They found out a campaigning senator didn’t even live in the state but spent most of her time in Washington D.C., they found local corruption with council members trying to give themselves a golden parachute. Because of many years of turning a blind eye to certain forms a corruption, digging them out is not a difficult task, but someone has to spend time in the trenches.

Probably the biggest white-pill to the entire endeavor is the move to live sessions. New web sites rise and fall like the seasons, but they become something special when you can make the leap to real-world organization. Given the numbers in their event last month, there is a deep yearning for coverage of topics close to home. As the media landscape has become desiccated, there is no limit to the amount of influence one can have with the right organization, personality, and will.

The mass turnout and increasing popularity also shows how much the landscape has changed regarding funding and the ability to operate out in the open. After the first Trump term and the Covid reign of terror, anything that even smelled of MAGA was blacklisted from any chance at financial capital. That doesn’t happen as much. Now there are venture firms who are willing to take advantage of the gaps in the social landscape and work with right-wingers with the necessary skills to pull it off. While many millions go to garbage like The Daily Wire, there are a new set of elites who understand the game has changed. Even for those without outside funding, no one is stopping a local sleuth from popping on his camera and going to town-halls, giving interviews, poring over financial records, and building trust with her neighbors. In influencer culture, anyone can have a little empire, and no one is constrained to hot takes. There’s a real want for people who will do the hard work of independent research.

While not as sexy as national politics, the inability to properly congregate locally has strong upstream effects too. There are open socialists gaining control of major cities. Soros funded the campaigns for many District Attorneys, winning with a pitiful sum of money when nobody was looking. The 2020 election was notorious for a lack of right-wingers on the ground that could tap the brakes on the mail-in-ballot juggernaut. All of this was the failure of local organization. What is necessary to organize is a source of truth, an oracle one can assume is accurate without suspicion.

It’s not just local news either, but culture as well. There has been a recent flare-up over Evie, a magazine started in 2019 as an anti-feminist Cosmo. Instead of the usual lewd women’s magazines talking about casual sex, casual misandry, and progressive politics, Evie praises motherhood, traditional sexual ethics, and femininity. And it manages to do so without sounding like an insufferable moral scold. Many argue the magazine is astroturfed, or it’s propaganda just as vapid as its left-wing counterpart. There’s some truth here, but the sexual revolution was hardly an organic phenomenon, and it’s going to force a lot of counter-propaganda to restore healthy values. There’s a lot of fake it till you make it here, and the fact it’s causing impotent rage that is bringing attention to a positive alternative is a win.

All of this is to say there are no excuses anymore, and we need a thousand outlets like Michigan Enjoyer along every realm. Instead of a bunch of pantywaist guys having “man talk” about current topics in a glossy, wholly artificial, and stifling intellectual atmosphere….

Even their “manly” study needs a woman.

or being enraged with “woke” hollywood….

or making eyesore “hot take” websites…

we have the opportunity to form countless small, coordinated, and sincere outlets to nurture a new media ecosystem.

We need new text media as well as video news. We need family and lifestyle content that’s aesthetically pleasing and gives a glimpse into alternative value systems. We need art and literary criticism that can serve to be new tastemakers. While theorizing is fine, mass support requires focusing on the tangible, the day-to-day concerns that give guidance and meaning to those who don’t delve into online politics.

While many of us can find the esoteric accounts on X that has the inside scoop, or the schizo-poster that is somehow always right, there needs to be a bridge to the common man. As much as the idea of misinformation has been weaponized against those speaking truth, there needs to be trusted outlets that can maintain quality control. Factchecking, balance of viewpoints, and journalistic integrity have been corrupted by institutional media, but they are necessary. Alex Jones gets a lot of stuff right, but there’s a reason your average Joe gives him no credence. While a guy with an Anime gif has an impressive skill in deep-diving recent topics, most of the not-extremely online see him as a weirdo, not a thought leader.

Success boils down to letting go of negative identity, reacting and basing your sense of self on what you’re not, whether it’s those damn Democrats or those bigoted Republicans. To have a sense of self that is based on your immutable qualities, what tangible things you value, what tangible things affect your daily life, and the lengths you will go to maintain them. Owning your enemies is cathartic, but your life can collapse into anarchy along with your worst enemy. A positive identity is able to give a vision for human flourishing instead of shrill moralizing. It can have a vision of the future without whining that modernity is nothing like advertisements from the 1950’s.

For those readers who are interested in a similar effort in transforming the media landscape, Naida, Mark, who generously gave his time for me to interview him, has also offered for anyone interested in beginning their own effort to reach out to him. I encourage such trailblazers to do so. It’s time to build, and enjoy every minute of it.

Update:

Enjoyer was supported in its branding by WILL, run by one of our guys. A spokesman said the following for those interested.

“WILL is a branding and publicity agency that specializes in brands seeking to capture market share in categories dominated by corporate actors. We believe the identity of a brand should arise from the authentic vision of its founder—from his WILL. Yet the marketing world has been overtaken by mediocrity, ugliness, and propaganda. WILL works exclusively with projects driven to disrupt this status quo by building something genuinely beautiful. This means web design, social media, video, paid media, email design, and growth. Here are a few fine examples of our work:

Galvanick, Chariot Defense, Polymarket, Enjoyer, SolveAI”

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