The Monday Media Diet with David Cho

David Cho (DC) is a man of many talents. He touches media, creative direction, and soon is launching an entrepreneurial endeavor which he will share below. I’m letting him softly violate our “no news hook” policy.  Have a great start to the week. -Colin (CJN) 

Tell us about yourself.

We (CJN and I) have talked about doing this for a few months now and I told him I would save it until I had something to actually say or share*, and since then, I’ve been dreading this question and reading every single entry to see how people were able to navigate this in a self-aware way, so here goes nothing.

Like many people, I feel mostly defined by the work I’ve done, so the quick list is: I’ve had a very varied career, first at a company, which at the time was in one room in a loft in Tribeca, called Connected Ventures (that made the website CollegeHumor and then, an afterthought at the time, Vimeo), which then led to a brief stint at IAC, after which I transitioned into proper media at a small independent magazine called Radar that shuttered in 2008 because of the recession. At the time two of the writers from Radar and myself decided to start what would end up becoming a series of websites called “The Awl Network”, of which the most broadly known is the last one I started, which is The Wirecutter (now “the product recommendation service from The New York Times”). I left The Awl because of an opportunity I got from Bill Simmons to be the founding publisher of his new website Grantland, which led me to work at ESPN/Disney, where I then was part of the recruitment of Nate Silver to join and create the current iteration of FiveThirtyEight (where I was also the founding publisher), and then also a consulting producer for the documentary series 30 for 30. 

Once that was done, I started doing a bunch of consulting for brands like Nike, Apple, Google, etc. (through various agencies) which then led to me start an in-house creative agency for Omnicom Media Group. An experience, while educational, that was also soul crushing, but it led me to my last office job: as an “advisor” for a travel focused private equity fund called Certares, where I learned a lot about how extremely insular the travel business can be and then had the idea for the company I started almost a year and a half ago: a travel recommendation platform that’s in private beta right now called Postcard which brings together experts/brands/people with good tast, the ability to connect with your friends, and a very robust dataset to help people figure out where to go and what to do. So, for example, you can see my list of places I think people from out of town should go eat in New York. The goal is to make sharing and discovering a lot more accessible and organized.

*Which is why I’m here writing this now and also why I’ve listed what is hopefully a very confidence-inducing list of my professional work, because we’re about to formally begin our next/seed round of fundraising the week after Labor Day. And while we seem to be in good shape for it, I’m a big proponent of “better safe than sorry”, so if  If you’re a person who invests in early stage consumer products, we have a very compelling case — both in product and also actual results in audience acquisition, engagement, and monetization — that shows why we’ll make this work where other people have failed. Feel free to reach out! 

But on to why you’re really here, to see/judge the media I consume!

Describe your media diet. 

I have two main ways of consuming new content these days: Twitter and just a wide range of text/DM conversations with people. I think the 2022 version of the Internet makes it so easy for all of the content that’s right for a person to end up as a tab on their phone or computer. I really just don’t find myself going to any publisher’s homepage almost ever. Aside from those two sources, I also have a few newsletters that have become must reads for me, but more on that later.

Additionally: I love a passively consumed podcast, specifically in the categories of: news and politics (don’t want to say which to avoid the ire of this snobby readership, but trust me, they’re the most popular, basic, and progressive ones), some NBA shows, and then some movie and TV related podcasts, like, I’ve really been enjoying Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson’s Unspooled, as well as Dave Chen’s recap podcasts for various TV shows and his long running movie podcast The Filmcast and all of these are genuinely fun and allow me to not think of the tick-tock of our world spinning wildly out of control. I also love to just put on YouTube and watch video essays passively or cooking content actively.

What’s the last great book you read?

Two books I’ve read recently that I really enjoyed were: Bad City by Paul Pringle and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. I’m sure neither are new to this discerning audience, but while they’re extremely different, I found them both really compelling.

One (Bad City) just keeps making you want to read more and more because of how well the story plays out, and the other (On Earth) I had trouble even getting through because it’s just really emotionally taxing (in a good way, I think) as it’s about a very hurt person going through life as it continues to relentlessly hurt them, but in a really beautiful and raw way. If you haven’t read either, you should definitely try both!

What are you reading now?

Mostly the internet, and if not that, like, if I’m on a long plane, train, or car ride by myself during non-work hours, then a book (currently Interior Chinatown)? But really I’m just always reading things on the internet, there’s just so much content. Some of it is even compelling! 

There are some tabs that I for whatever reason keep open forever because I just like to revisit them once every few months: The NYT interactive about Jasper Johns’ work, the official Christo and Jeanne-Claude recap for Floating Piers (which explains how and why they conceived and constructed it), and also, inexplicably, I have like several different tabs of just the Twitter homepage because I just have a problem of wanting to consume too much.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I used to love (and be jealous of) magazines because they were the exact opposite of the casualness and laziness that is a lot of writing and content on the internet, for better and for worse. Every decision was made with a lot of thought and consideration, literally the placement of each letter on a page was a forever decision that at least four people, usually more, weighed in on and decided was best. The internet was, and has continued to be, just an exercise in putting more and more out there in whatever format on whatever device and platform because of a largely broken monetization system (and also how our brains interact with content now).

But now, even with that nostalgia and respect for print, I just don’t find myself reading physical magazines as much as I used to, in large part because they’re just not timely. Inevitably, every good piece in a magazine is presented to me online first, in frankly, a more convenient, albeit ugly, way. I think especially now there are more, really well and beautifully conceived, precious (not in a bad way) smaller magazines that don’t exist online and put real care into their product, but I just haven’t found myself making the time to consume them like that. Which makes me kind of sad (for myself).

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I think Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day is the most interesting, informed, and media/internet literate thing I read in a week. It avoids the extreme binary and/or hot takes that the rest of the internet seems to traffic in, I think in large part because of how rooted it is in either reporting and/or just a ton of knowledge. I feel like I am always either learning or entertained, more often than not, both.

Brian Morrissey’s newsletter The Rebooting is also really smart, but with a much more narrow scope as it’s specifically about how media businesses are run, but it’s also, like Garbage Day, generally, really smart and nuanced and not as circle jerk-y as a publication about the media can be.

I also really like Max Read’s newsletter, although sometimes it being entirely in Courier can hurt my frail old eyes. 

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

I mean, I’m extremely biased, and while it’s still a good ways away from being the best (it’s still so nascent), I am very excited about the app we’ve built for Postcard. I feel like it’s genuinely made sharing, tracking, and discovering places and things to do both at home and abroad much easier. Especially as I now have replaced what was previously just an Evernote file of things I saw on the Internet that I want to eat.

Plane or train?

Planes are obviously “better” just because of their speed and where they can get you, but overall I’d say every train experience I’ve ever had has been significantly more enjoyable and just less detrimental to my overall wellbeing. Like when you see what happens to a water bottle on a plane, it’s hard to not to imagine what kind of havok it’s wrecking on your body and internal organs? 

(Just to be clear, I know it might not be doing anything bad and none of this is rooted in science, but it just… feels like it?)

What is one place everyone should visit? 

This was the other question I was really confused about how to answer, just because I think what a person likes and is right for them feels so personal and there’s definitely no right answer here. 

I think overall, for me, I’ve really been into places (extreme pretension incoming) that are remote, naturally beautiful and special, but also interact with well considered and intentional man made things. So a place like Marfa, that Donald Judd built with the intention of making permanent art away from all people, or Naoshima, an island town in Japan where Tadao Ando has installed forever works from James Turrell, Lee Ufan, and Claude Monet, fit the bill for me. Obviously, to that note, a place I’d love to go when possible is Roden Crater by Turrell as well (below).

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I’ve really gotten into a lot of the weird niche Tiktok accounts that explain sleight of hand magic tricks, but also this one Tumblr account that posts translations and breakdowns of viral content on Douyin, a different social video platform from China which is really hard to explain but you just have to see it. 

Finally, the most recent meme that makes me consistently laugh is the adding of Linkin Park’s “What I’ve Done” to the end of all movies, inspired by Michael Bay’s use of it in the first Transformers movie. (DC)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & David (DC)

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