Previously published December 17, 2025
Cami Fateh very well may be the future of media, less because she is the associate editor at Feed Me (Slay.) but because she represents what the trajectory of a journalism career will look like for writers just starting out. We say this given a conversation we had on the latest 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 where Cami had two very interesting observations.
First, The Free Press has a popping party culture full of young people, which Cami noticed given her nightlife reporting. I suspected that this is because the outlet is in the money with CBS — but she had a better idea: “There’s a lot of kids who maybe felt — I don’t know — alienated by wokeness,” she explained. “Or they wanted to be in an upstart media publication. It’s a lot more exciting to be somewhere that’s new and on the up than a dying dinosaur.” Very fair point.
Second, Cami’s a fairly recent journalism school grad — and she feels like she’s one of the few success stories given how terrible the jobs market and media market is now. “For people my age who want to work in media, we don’t have a lot of choice,” she says, before sharing where her peers have ended up, from working off-beat beats or voyaging to distant locations to maintain career momentum. “If there’s like an opportunity in front of you and The Free Press is saying ‘We want to hire you.,’ I think a lot of kids would take that.”
This signals a lot, but mostly that young journalists are in search of work and finding no one to take them in: there isn’t a talent drought but indeed an opportunity drought. Things change, sure, but we must do better for young talent instead of letting them get swept up by the right. Come on, anyone in leadership reading this! How can we fix this? Listen to the full conversation with Ben Dietz and Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick above.
