Somewhere in America, there is a 20-something-year-old social media manager frantically explaining to their boss why the company needs to make a joke about eye bologna before noon.

This is reactive marketing in 2026. Sometimes you spend six months planning a campaign, and sometimes the internet hands you something completely batshit insane on a Tuesday morning, and you have about three hours to decide whether your brand is being called to serve or just STFU.

And if you don’t work in marketing, you may be wondering why you should care about any of this. If I were you, I would want to know what people like me are plotting to do with your brain and budget. Behind the curtain, we’re pulling tiny psychological strings designed to make you click, care, remember, want, and ultimately hand over your money. I have spent a significant portion of my career figuring out increasingly creative ways to mindfuck my way into your wallet on behalf of many brands you know, love, and subsidize.

But I’m also standing on the other side of the curtain right now, doing my best impression of Scrooge McDuck, except instead of hoarding my wealth in a vault big enough to swim laps in, I’m working with more of a kiddie pool situation and trying not to blow it all on cheap crap from Temu like I usually do. Life is expensive. I don’t have the luxury of throwing $40 at something just because a brand successfully poked the exact nostalgic part of my brain that remembers what I was doing when Enema of the State came out. Since I know how some of these strings are being pulled, I might as well show them to you too. There is a why behind almost everything being put in front of you, and somebody has already thought very carefully about why you might give them your money.

Which brings me back to deli meat slapped on your face.

Several beauty brands recently unveiled versions of what appeared to be the exact same new under-eye product at almost exactly the same time. The product itself is already wonderfully ridiculous: a tube of hydrogel gets pushed through a little slicer so you can shave off a fresh under-eye patch whenever you need one. It’s basically a tiny deli counter for your eye bags. Give me two slices of cucumber Jell-O, thin, and throw in a pound of Boar’s Head while you’re back there.

Fenty Skin had one. Glow Recipe had one. Huda Beauty had one. Vitamasques had one. Beauty Internet immediately launched an investigation into who stole whose salami machine, and the answer appears to be that nobody did. The mechanism came from a supplier offering the technology to brands, and the format had already appeared in Korean beauty. Several companies essentially bought the same dress and then showed up at prom together, each having presumably spent months preparing a campaign about how nobody had ever seen a dress like this before.

Once consumers noticed, the brands could no longer control the original story. The conversation wasn’t “look at this innovative eye patch” anymore. It was “WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE THE EYE PATCH?” And abracadabra! The smartest marketing move wasn’t sticking stubbornly to the launch plan. It was acknowledging the thing everybody else could plainly see and becoming part of the joke instead of the butt of one.

That is the part of reactive marketing I find fascinating. You don’t always get to choose the moment. Sometimes the internet drops one directly on your desk, and your job is to figure out whether your brand has a legitimate way into it before Legal finishes typing “I have some concerns.” Other times, you can see the jokes writing themselves.

Take the sudden corporate interest in emo and pop punk this fall. When We Were Young is taking 2026 off, leaving a conspicuous hole in October for a very specific population of elder millennials who normally spend an irresponsible amount of money flying to Las Vegas to recreate 2004 with worse knees and better credit limits. I cannot prove that marketers across America have a spreadsheet labeled UNSPENT EMO MONEY, but I would like to see their Google Sheets history.

7-Eleven currently has a Blink-182 collaboration, and Wendy’s has released an actual six-song emo album. Not an emo-themed Instagram post. An actual album. From Wendy’s. At first I wondered what the hell Wendy, her pigtails, and square patties had to do with emo, but then I remembered how many emotionally catastrophic conversations my generation had in fast-food parking lots and realized they may actually have more authority on the subject than I do.

Here’s the string they’re pulling: your product doesn’t necessarily need an obvious relationship to the cultural moment. Your audience does. When a brand touches something you genuinely care about in a way that feels authentic, you feel seen. You think, Oh, they get me. That tiny bit of recognition builds affinity, and someday, standing in front of two functionally identical products, you may reach for the one that feels familiar without consciously knowing why.

Hello. It’s me again. Behind the curtain.

But we also know you can feel when we’re faking it. If a brand shoves some completely unrelated trending thing into your feed because everybody else is talking about it, the message isn’t “we get you.” It’s “we would like some of your attention, please.” Nobody wants to wonder why the company that sells them dishwasher detergent suddenly has opinions about Chappell Roan. The rule behind the curtain is supposed to be simple: if we’re going to interrupt your day, we should at least bring something you actually care about.

And this is one of those places where human judgment still matters. AI can spot the trend in seconds and generate 40 ways to participate. It can’t reliably tell you whether your brand belongs in the room. Reactive marketing requires understanding the difference between affectionate and pandering, delightfully unexpected and completely fucking random, and joining a conversation versus barging into one.

That’s also why virality isn’t really the prize, even though we marketers absolutely lose our minds over those numbers. Four million people can watch something, laugh, send it to a friend, and forget who posted it before they reach the next video. Congratulations, we entertained The Internet for nine seconds! “Will anyone give a single, solitary shit in six months?” should be a metric considered more often. What matters is whether, after the moment passes, you understand the brand better, feel more connected to it, or have another reason to care about what it does next.

When you see Wendy’s making an emo album or four beauty brands suddenly joking about their suspiciously identical deli slicers, enjoy it. Buy the fun thing if you actually want the fun thing. I’m certainly not here to take away anybody’s emotional-support Blink-182 Slurpee cup, and I’ll honestly pick up some of that crap myself if I can spare a few dubloons from my Scrooge McDuck kiddie pool. Just remember that none of this is accidental. Somewhere behind the curtain, somebody has already spent a lot of time thinking about what you care about, how to make you feel seen, and whether that feeling might eventually open your wallet.

They’ve done their thinking. Now you get to do yours.

I cried over a Substack notification today, which is probably an excessive emotional response for someone who has only been doing this for nine days, but hear me out.

When I set up my Substack, it suggested a price for paid subscriptions, and I felt guilty even looking at it. I still feel weird charging people to read my writing, but Once Upon a Time, a boss told me, “You should be paid to exist,” so when presented with the opportunity, I YOLO’d it. I eventually set the asking price for a sneak peek at my soul at $80 for the whole year because somehow that felt reasonable when I broke it down in my head to “a couple bucks a month.” I’m aware that is not exactly how $80 divided by 12 works, but I don’t take math until next semester.

I honestly figured maybe one of my rich friends who love me would pay for it. Maybe two. Enough to cover my hosting or Canva subscription. I don’t even have anything behind the paywall yet. I have some cutesy stuff planned, mostly because I wanted an excuse to make another batch of insane, unhinged stickers, but right now becoming a paid subscriber is mostly an act of faith.

I was stopped in my car when I saw that someone new had subscribed, and I was already excited because I get genuinely sparkly every time it happens. I glanced at the name and got even more stoked. She’s a Facebook friend who has supported me forever. We don’t hang out in real life, but she’s one of a handful of people I recognize because they’ve been showing up and cheerleading me for years. She’s one of the first to like my Stories, share something I wrote, or read whatever I put out there. I notice that stuff. I notice her.

I messaged her immediately to tell her how much her support has meant to me over the years. I told her that if I ever get famous and actually make money off this thing, she’s one of the people I’m buying a car for. I have a mental list that could become a Google Sheets brainstorming session at any moment. If the Sandee Hunt Cinematic Universe somehow becomes a profitable enterprise, early investors will be rewarded.

And then I scrolled down and realized she hadn’t just subscribed. She had paid me $80 for the year.

I started crying.

Then I messaged her again: Forget the car. Damn, girl, I’m getting you a house.

This woman works really hard for her money. Really hard. I know that about her, and I deeply respect her. The fact that she took $80 of that money and bet it on me wrecked me. Especially because most of the time, I still feel like a raccoon who wandered into a Pottery Barn and discovered she quite enjoys the Egyptian cotton linens. I’m just waiting for someone to notice there’s a trash goblin in the bedding department and chase me out with a broom.

I’ve been paid for writing before, and I’ve also spent a ridiculous amount of my life giving it away for free or for empty promises of “exposure.” What got me wasn’t the novelty of someone handing me money for words; it was that nobody asked her to. She didn’t hire me to write something, and she isn’t my boyfriend showing up to support me because that’s part of the job description. She didn’t even pay for something I’ve already made. She paid for whatever I make next.

She owes me absolutely nothing, but she believes there’s going to be a show.

And she was the first in line to buy a ticket.

I have recently come to the horrifying realization that most of my management philosophy comes from Dewey Finn, a man who stole his roommate’s identity, fraudulently infiltrated an elementary school and kidnapped an entire classroom of children so they could compete in Battle of the Bands.

In my defense, those kids frickin’ rocked.

For anyone who somehow missed School of Rock, the 2003 comedy stars Jack Black as a broke, recently ousted guitarist who impersonates his substitute-teacher roommate for the paycheck, then discovers his painfully well-behaved students can play instruments and secretly turns the class into a rock band. What begins as a deeply illegal attempt to use students as free child labor/backup musicians turns into something unexpectedly sweet: Dewey figures out what each kid is good at, gives them a role that matters, and gets a bunch of insecure little weirdos to see themselves differently.

I realized how much I identified with that while rewatching School of Rock at the Palm Theater with our local Monday Night Movie Club, shortly after starting a human resources class for the first time. I took HR because I’ve supervised a lot of people over the course of my career and figured I should probably put some academic theory behind the management style I’ve smushed together through twenty-something years of trial, error, retail trauma, cheerleading, and occasionally telling grown adults to please stop doing an elaborate watercolor painting while on company time. Yes, she set up an easel at her desk and everything!

The timing is almost too perfect. I’m finally studying Human Resources at precisely the moment we seem hellbent on removing as many humans as technologically possible. Which has made me wonder what the human part is actually for.

Dewey, for all his chaos and deeply questionable employment practices, understands one thing instinctively: people are not interchangeable. He doesn’t walk into the classroom and rank the kids from most to least talented. He starts casting. Zack can play guitar and write music. Freddy belongs behind the drums. Lawrence can play keyboards but needs somebody to convince him he’s cool. Tomika barely speaks but has a gigantic voice. Billy thinks your outfit is a tragedy. Summer is such an aggressive little Type-A overachiever that Dewey essentially says, congratulations, tiny tyrant, you’re management. Even the kids who aren’t musicians get jobs.

This is also roughly how I manage, minus the felonies.

I’m autistic and ADHD, vaguely Type B despite being extremely ambitious, frequently running late and spectacularly good in a crisis, partly because I have accumulated decades of experience creating crises for myself and then escaping them. I don’t know where my credit cards are. I’m covered in tattoos and glitter. I have a fat mouth. I don’t necessarily walk into a room looking like the human embodiment of Corporate Leadership, but I know my shit and have a résumé that looks like a Cheesecake Factory menu to back it up. Pages and pages of stuff, none of it seemingly relating to the other, but still somehow hitting the spot.

And I am deliciously good at casting.

When I helped assemble the team for SLO County News, I knew we needed a visual arts magician and I knew exactly who I wanted: Trisha Butcher. Of course she was talented, but that wasn’t what made the decision obvious to me. I had worked adjacent to her before. I had observed that she was kind and sweet and wore her heart on her sleeve. People would feel confident getting important information from someone with her aura. She gave a shit. She was also fun and spicy and had the thick skin required for the particular shitshow we were producing. Her photography was enchanting, and I could see how our platform might give her more room to run with it. We needed what she had, and we had something she could use.

There was another part I didn’t say much about at the time: I suspected my own time there was limited, and I was looking for my eventual replacement to be the lead singer of the band. I wanted my replacement to be better than me. And, Jesus Christ, did I succeed.

That might be one of Dewey Finn’s most underrated leadership qualities. This man has an ego the size of my thunder thighs, but when Zack writes a better song, Dewey recognizes that the kid has the goods. The band stops being a collection of children assembled to make Dewey look like a rock star, and he becomes invested in making them rock stars. If everybody you hire needs to remain slightly less impressive than you so you can continue feeling important, you haven’t built a team. You’ve assembled a tribute band.

Cheerleading taught me the same lesson in a much more literal ensemble. You get every variety of personality, body type, confidence level and learning style, and somehow all those people have to hit the same eight-count. I once coached a girl who was newer to cheer, seemingly forced into it by a very overbearing stage-mom type of parent. She clearly didn’t have the confidence some of the other girls did and seemed to carry some impostor syndrome into the gym. Except I knew that outside of cheer, this same kid could stand in front of the Future Farmers of America, lead people and sheep, and not take anybody’s shit.

So my question was basically: Where the heck is that girl? You can Boss Babe over there on the farm. I have seen you do it! You tried out just like everybody else, and you made this team just like everyone else. This wasn’t a Make-a-Wish situation where we gave you a sympathy spot on this team. You belong here. Act like it.

She eventually became captain and went on to cheer in college.

I didn’t put leadership into her. It was already there. I just happened to know enough of her story to recognize that she had apparently left it on a hay bale back at the barn.

That’s the part of management I’ve always loved most: figuring people out. Walmart, of all places, taught me the phrase “management by walking around,” which is corporate language for the revolutionary concept of getting out of your ivory tower and actually engaging with the people of The Store. Walmart was one of the greatest crash courses in human sociology and biohazard management I’ve ever received. You learn very quickly that fairness does not mean speaking to everybody exactly the same way. Some employees wanted direct feedback: tell me what I’m doing wrong, tell me how to fix it, and then, please leave me the fuck alone. Honestly, I respect that. Others needed more explanation, reassurance, and a true human experience. Same expectations, different route there.

_{Every team needs a Billy to prevent your organization from becoming its own worst enemy and making critical fashion errors. Sometimes “You’re tacky and I hate you” is constructive feedback.}

The trick is knowing when someone needs a Dewey Finn pep talk and when someone needs Principal Mullins to show up with a furrowed brow. I’ve been told that I struggle with that second one. I much prefer to arrive with Stevie Nicks playing in the background. A former boss once told me I see so much potential in people that I give them too many chances. Because she managed by walking around, she got to see me in the wild and notice something I couldn’t see in myself: the same instinct that makes me good at casting can also make me a little delusional. I can see the person somebody could become so clearly that I occasionally forget to check whether they have any interest whatsoever in becoming that person. Sometimes I’m seeing something in them that they haven’t seen yet. Sometimes I’m just writing fan fiction. Unfortunately, you cannot Dewey Finn somebody against their will.

I learned this at Walmart from a cashier who developed an ingenious labor scheme in which he would disappear into the bathroom for fifteen minutes immediately before his scheduled fifteen-minute break, return to his register and announce, “Oh wow, would you look at that? Just in time for my break.” Real sly.

Eventually, I got tired of the grift. One day, as he headed toward the bathroom, I stopped him.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Oh, good. I was just coming over to tell you to take your break!”

He looked at me with disdain, with a dash of fury. I had foiled his XXL paid-break scheme, and the scaffolding of the scam was crashing down around him. Twenty minutes later, he came back and told me he needed to go home.

“Why?”

“I shit myself.”

Apparently, because I had told him to take his break, he had decided that using the bathroom during the break he routinely spent in the bathroom was no longer an option.

“I told you I needed to go to the bathroom. You told me to go on break.” This grown man shit his Dockers to make a point. Dewey Finn never had to deal with this.

I didn’t put an end to the Great Bathroom Heist because I cared about Walmart losing fifteen minutes of productivity. I don’t give a single shit about padding the wallets of those demons in Bentonville. The other cashiers could see what was happening. Every time I let one person abuse the system, I was telling Bev, Deborah, Gloria and the gang who weren’t abusing it that being responsible made them a bunch of suckers in stupid little nametags.

Sometimes Tomika needs you to notice her voice, Lawrence needs you to convince him he’s cool, or you need to tell someone they have taken their last plus-size paid shit session. This isn’t the Happy Friends Club. We still have to get shit done. Preferably not literal shit, thanks. Cleanup on checkstand 4.

I’ve probably found the ideal habitat for this particular management philosophy at my current workplace. After about five years of remote work, I landed a gig doing marketing for a luxury van upfitter, in an auto shop populated largely by twenty-something-year-old men who burp, fart and cuss their way through the day. All the things you imagine are happening in an auto shop are absolutely happening in this auto shop. There’s also a snake.

It is perfect for me.

I am weird. I am a physical comedian. I give everyone nicknames, which I realize would be an enormous HR liability and walking lawsuit in a more conventional workplace. To me, a nickname is basically a codeword for how I have you filed away in my heart. If you ask me who my coworkers are, my teammates are Grocery Store Baby, Wreck-It Ralph, Not Lucas and Cutie/Cranky Cowboy, depending on his mood that day. The company president? Grandpa. To his face.

Dewey does the same thing. He looks at a classroom full of children and almost immediately starts renaming them according to the role he sees in them: Mr. Cool, Posh Spice, Brace Face, Turkey Sub. It’s completely inappropriate. It’s also strangely intimate. You’re no longer Employee Number 437. I have observed you closely enough that you now have lore.

If I had returned from remote work directly into a conventional corporate office, I am reasonably confident my fat mouth would have gotten me fired on the first day. Instead, I landed somewhere I don’t have to spend half my energy pretending to be Emotionally Regulated Office Lady. We are disgusting. We are gross. They all know my menstrual cycle, so they know which version of me is arriving at work that day. I would not have it any other way.

And weirdly, that may be the HR lesson underneath all the farting. We talk about professionalism as though it is synonymous with competence, when sometimes we’re really measuring how successfully someone can perform the culture of a particular workplace. Dewey Finn would be catastrophically wrong for most schools. I would obviously be catastrophically wrong for any office with an aggressively enforced business-casual policy and an HR department that objects to the phrase, “What the fuck is this shit, man? You’re wasting my time.” But Dewey doesn’t try to turn Freddy into Lawrence or Summer into Tomika. He figures out where each person’s particular flavor of weird becomes useful. Freddy’s chaos belongs behind the drums. Summer’s Enneagram 3 energy belongs in management. Lawrence doesn’t need to become cool by somebody else’s definition; he needs to realize that being a keyboard-playing little weirdo is cool as hell in itself.

That’s the human part. It’s noticing. A system can tell you what somebody was hired to do. It can’t tell you everything you’ve learned by actually paying attention to them.

That attention is how you notice that the timid cheerleader bosses around the cowboys or that the photographer you worked adjacent to years ago belongs on a team that doesn’t even exist yet. But it has a limit, too. You can see somebody’s potential, hand them the guitar and give them the solo, but eventually they have to decide whether they actually want to play. Otherwise, you’re not seeing the person in front of you anymore. You’re managing the character in the fan fiction you wrote for them.

Years ago, after I left one position, an employee I didn’t know particularly well reached out because they hadn’t gotten a chance to say goodbye. They told me they liked working for me because I was tough, but I was fair. That has stuck with me longer than any formal performance review I’ve ever received. Tough but fair is what I want my employees to remember about me. It’s what I wanted my cheerleaders to experience from me and, when I really think about it, what I hope my children eventually say about me too. I’m going to ask a lot from you because I think you can do a lot. I’m going to tell you when you’re screwing up because I know you can do better next time. But I’m also going to pay enough attention to know who I’m actually asking you to be.

Dewey Finn understood this better than a man committing identity fraud in an elementary school had any business understanding. By the end of School of Rock, Dewey doesn’t actually win Battle of the Bands, and the kids don’t need to win for the story to work. They get onstage as themselves, play Zack’s song and rock the face off the place while their horrified parents slowly realize that these strange little people they’ve been raising have entire parts of themselves they never bothered to notice.

Dewey noticed.

For all his lying, chaos, ego, and spectacular disregard for child endangerment, that may be the thing worth stealing from him. Your job isn’t to make everybody play your song. It’s to figure out what they can play, help them play it loud and, when they eventually become better than you, have enough sense to get the hell out of the spotlight.

And turn up the fucking amp.

I wanted to work in newspapers so badly that I considered being allergic to them a manageable career obstacle. Handing out fresh copies of our high school paper gave me a headache, runny nose, sore throat, and sometimes a rash. Years later, at The Tribune, even the ink smell trailing behind the press guys into the break room could make me sneeze. My body had registered a formal objection to my childhood career aspirations, and I had decided we would be proceeding anyway.

That probably explains why I took McClatchy’s latest cuts at The Tribune considerably more personally than someone reading a business story about a newspaper they occasionally visit online. Five journalists were reportedly laid off: three reporters, a photographer and opinion editor Stephanie Finucane, with longtime North Coast reporter Kathe Tanner among those affected. Nationally, more than 90 unionized journalists and media workers across 17 McClatchy publications lost their jobs.

These were people’s livelihoods, but they were also people who had helped shape mine. I knew what it felt like to sit in that building, desperately wanting to become someone whose words belonged in its pages. Stephanie eventually helped me do that. To the company, she was a position to eliminate. To me, she was a big part of the paper that mattered.

Which is also why, shortly before all of this, I responded to a Tribune story about Scarlett Johansson’s feet by messaging editor Joe Tarica to ask, “What the fuck is this shit?”

This was my very professional approach to expressing concern about local journalism. Joe had technically been my boss when I wrote a column for the paper, but in my defense, I’ve reached that feral perimenopausal era where the filters are gone, and he knows where my heart lies. I came to my hometown newspaper for information about my hometown, and I felt reasonably confident that TMZ or Goop had the resources to cover Scarlett Johansson’s itchy feet. Our column inches could be reserved for the Little League game down the street—or literally anything else remotely local that mattered.

My family moved to SLO County in 1987. My parents worked in law enforcement, and my dad was a Morro Bay police officer who regularly dealt with reporters from the Sun Bulletin, The Telegram-Tribune—as it was called then—and KSBY. Seeing his name in the paper was exciting. Seeing a friend, teacher or somebody’s parent felt like our little world had been recognized by the larger one.

My own contribution to the public record began with a tuna sandwich. Around 1990, KSBY showed up at Sunnyside Elementary School because restaurant pizza was being delivered to the cafeteria. This was a significant development for children whose hot lunches had previously come exclusively from the school kitchen. I was in first grade, but I had watched enough television to understand that “Pizza is good” would not secure me airtime. They needed a story, and I had a lunch that could be repurposed into adversity.

There was nothing wrong with my tuna sandwich. I brought one practically every day, as reliably as I showed up in the pink glitter cowgirl boots with fringe that everyone’s mom bought them from Mervyn’s that year. Despite my Italian lineage, I was going through a childhood food era in which frozen White Castle cheeseburgers and Chicken of the Sea were acceptable and pizza was a hard “hell no.” My Little Mermaid–themed birthday party had been at Round Table that year, and I had declined to participate in the restaurant’s primary offering.

None of this served my media strategy, so I approached the camera crew and lamented having tuna while everyone else got pizza. I rolled my eyes and delivered my assessment: “Ugh, ’cause tuna is just so down the drain for me.” Of course they used it. I had provided conflict, emotional stakes and a quotable, adorable victim in pink glitter with aggressively blunt bangs, all before afternoon recess.

My dad recorded the broadcast and thought it was hilarious, especially once he understood that I had auditioned for the evening news by disparaging a sandwich I loved. He took the tape to work and wanted to send it to America’s Funniest Home Videos. Even then, I understood that he was overestimating the national appetite for this material. This was sassy-little-kid funny, not David After Dentist funny. Bob Saget wouldn’t give a shit.

Dad later took me to watch the evening news being produced at KSBY, where I brought my Lisa Frank sticker book to collect autographs from people like Mitch Massey and Tony Cipolla. One night’s closing story featured an enormous pumpkin, exactly the kind of breaking agricultural development you’d expect in our slice of Mayberry. As the credits rolled, Mitch gestured toward me just outside the shot and said, “That’s a big pumpkin, huh, Sandee?” Technically, I was not on the news, but I was sufficiently adjacent to consider the evening a triumph.

Local broadcasters occupied a strange category somewhere between journalist and hometown celebrity. Sharon Graves, with her big hair and elegant delivery, might as well have been Cindy Crawford. Rick Martel was our Ron Burgundy before Anchorman existed. The cross-country team at my high school even performed skits that imagined an exaggerated Rick Martel in a variety of bizarre scenarios, such as not having enough ketchup packets to enjoy his Burger King french fries. You know you’re a legend when the kids create lore from your mythology. The Sun Bulletin brought that same familiarity to the page. I read about my friends, their parents’ businesses and the waterfront hooligans and belligerent beachgoers from Bakersfield populating Neil Farrell’s police blotter.

Before we opened an app to see what everyone was doing, we turned pages and found familiar faces. Somebody had decided that this person, this accomplishment or this very large pumpkin deserved space in the record. That mattered to me before I had the vocabulary to explain why.

My sister and I made newspapers, magazines, broadcasts and commercials at home. Taking journalism as a freshman at Morro Bay High School meant discovering that our hobby came with a classroom and a teacher. Julie Larsen taught yearbook, newspaper and French, and could see through bullshit while also seeing straight into the soul of a child. She took my writing seriously and gave me guidance when I felt like not a single, solitary adult in my life gave a shit about me.

Most of my spare time was divided between cheerleading and Room 408, where we made The Spyglass on old Macs. We sold ads, designed pages, ran the pieces through a wax machine and pasted everything into place before driving it to the newspaper’s presses. People were excited when we carried the finished papers into classrooms. I loved watching them read our work, even as my sinuses questioned whether fashion merchandising might involve fewer histamine reactions.

I still have those papers and spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks, along with clippings from the Sun Bulletin and The Tribune featuring me and my friends. They let me revisit a version of our lives that somebody took the time to notice.

I wanted to become a journalist, but I did not go straight to college. At 20, I took a circulation job at The Tribune because it got me inside. Sam J Lin was there as a copy editor. We had been editors together at The Spyglass, and now we worked in the building that printed it. His route had included a full-ride journalism scholarship to Harvard. Mine involved fielding phone calls from extremely angry people on Sunset Terrace who were missing the Sunday comic section. I’m not jealous all these years later. Really, I’m not.

Eventually, I moved into advertising, where I could still find ways to care too much about things like wedding announcements and how aggressively we could abbreviate “Datsun” while still allowing somebody to sell the car. More importantly, the move placed me near Bill Morem and Stephanie Finucane as they worked on the editorial pages.

_{The late GOAT Bill Morem gives a tour of the old SLO Tribune newsroom on South Higuera Street, and this was after it had been gutted to half its size over 15 years ago.}

Anyone familiar with those two will understand the education that proximity offered. I watched them consider what somebody was saying, what they left out and whether the argument survived scrutiny. Intelligence and humor could occupy the same space; you could love a community and still recognize that some of its people were being completely ridiculous. There was room for a voice and a responsibility to have something behind it.

These were formative years in less academic ways too. I celebrated my 21st birthday with enough enthusiasm to throw up in the bathroom at work the next day and stayed through planning my wedding. Tribune people were woven through the wedding itself; the woman who caught my bouquet worked with me in classifieds. These were the people around me while I figured out adulthood. The newspaper documented our community while the people inside it became part of my own history.

McClatchy acquired Knight Ridder in 2006, and in the upheaval that followed, I eventually left for marketing, PR, e-commerce and digital content. I was still finding stories and figuring out how to make people care.

In 2019, those skills converged around a story I had followed since childhood. Kristin Smart disappeared in 1996, when I was 12. I heard the case discussed around our dinner table, then read the paper and tried to reconcile what I heard with what was reported. When Chris Lambert’s Your Own Backyard podcast brought renewed attention, I helped with social media and public-facing communication, applying what I knew about growing an audience while treating Kristin’s story with the care it deserved.

Kristin’s mother, Denise, often used the analogy that we were preparing to land the plane. After years of circling the runway, everyone needed to buckle up and be ready. My role was closer to flight attendant: helping organize communications, make connections and help the attention serve a purpose while Chris continued reporting and law enforcement pursued the investigation from the cockpit. A story from my childhood had followed me into adulthood, where everything I had learned gave me a small way to help.

There was another local reporter who shaped how I thought about what community news could be, although he didn’t work from a traditional newsroom. Matthew Frank was better known around here as SLOStringer. If something was on fire, upside down, blocking Highway 101 or otherwise requiring several vehicles with flashing lights, there was a decent chance Matt was already there.

He understood something deceptively simple about local news: somebody has to show up. You can repeat a press release from anywhere. Matt went to the scene. He photographed it, told people what was happening and built an audience because people knew that when something weird, scary or important was unfolding somewhere in SLO County, Stringer was probably on his way.

In March 2017, Matt died in a crash during a rainstorm while driving to cover a fire. He was 30. The loss hit this community hard enough that a stretch of Highway 101 now bears his name. But the hole he left wasn’t only emotional. We had lost someone who had made it his job—largely on his own—to be there.

That absence became part of the inspiration for what eventually became SLO County News. The model wasn’t complicated: when something was happening here, find out what was actually happening and tell people without turning the comment section into a municipal psych ward.

When COVID arrived, we needed timely local information without clickbait, comment wars or paywalls. Through SLO County News, now serving more than 40,000 members, we tried to provide that. Asking people not to comment unless they had something thoughtful or factual to add was surprisingly controversial. The internet has trained us to treat information as an invitation to perform whatever emotion it causes. We wanted people to find what they needed without “gunshots or fireworks?” appearing in 50 different ways. If you want to blame Obama for the potholes on South Street, knock yourself out. The internet has plenty of real estate for that. We weren’t donating ours.

After the June 2020 search for an active shooter in Paso Robles, several residents told me that refreshing our group for updates helped them feel safer. They could find information without a paywall or digging through unrelated posts. Knowing we helped somebody sitting frightened in their house meant more to me than any engagement statistic.

But doing that work also taught me its limits. I could organize information, verify what I could, moderate bullshit and help reliable reporting reach thousands of people. I could not spend my Tuesday sitting through a government meeting nobody cared about yet, spend months fighting for public records or build years of expertise on a beat while an editor paid me to keep asking questions after everybody else got bored. Community information can fill gaps. It cannot replace the infrastructure required to report what the community does not know yet.

The Tribune approached me in 2020 about becoming a columnist because of my community work. After the school newspapers, circulation and classifieds, I finally got to do the thing I wanted. Stephanie Finucane edited my pieces—the woman I had learned from while sitting in advertising was now helping me write for the paper.

I wish I had met the opportunity with confidence. I was timid and struggling with imposter syndrome, and even the overwhelmingly positive response was difficult to absorb. Someone would approach me in the grocery store to praise my Sunday column, and I wanted to leap into a bin of grapefruit and hide for eternity. As a child, I thought Sharon Graves was Cindy Crawford. As an adult, being recognized near the vegetables exceeded my nervous system’s specifications. Still, I wrote about Cal Poly’s handling of the Kristin Smart case, ethnic studies, school reopenings and our obsession with arguing about flags. I may wish I had been braver, but I became part of the conversation I had followed my whole life.

Bill died in 2015, and I cannot tell him now what that education meant. Stephanie is still here. Her judgment and talent did not evaporate when McClatchy eliminated her job. We still have people capable of doing the work we need, and the company has decided to stop paying them to do it. You should not have to know anyone in the newsroom to understand what their absence costs you. Most readers never sat beside Kathe Tanner. They depended on her to sit through things they couldn’t.

Kathe had been writing about the North Coast since 1981. In a 2021 reflection, she remembered a Cambrian staff with editors, reporters, a photographer, interns, stringers, advertising and circulation employees. By then, she covered Big Sur to Cayucos herself: “Now it’s just me.”

Consider what this means for something like the Cambria Christmas Market. Without Kathe at the helm, a minimum-wage Fresno Bee intern will use AI to assemble a cheerful article without ever standing beneath a single twinkling light or braving the shitshow parking situation. Kathe covered both the attraction and, with Stephanie Zappelli, the dispute over its 15-year permit: business benefits alongside residents’ concerns about traffic, noise, lights and the Monterey pine forest. A vacation destination is somebody’s neighborhood. Covering it requires considerably more work than regurgitating the bullet points from a glossy tourism brochure. You have to get your hands dirty, and maybe have a cup of cocoa.

You do not have to be born here to do this well. Newer journalists have brought fresh eyes and a willingness to question people this county has gotten far too comfortable with. But they need time to learn, experienced colleagues and enough support to stay.

Matt Fountain’s work shows what that investment can produce. He obtained and published surveillance footage challenging officials’ account of Andrew Holland’s death after nearly two days in a restraint chair at the County Jail. McClatchy itself gave that reporting a President’s Award. Apparently, it once understood the value of making powerful people uncomfortable.

Matt examined congressional candidate Justin Fareed’s ranching and oil ties in work recognized by the California Journalism Awards. He covered the disqualification of the District Attorney’s Office from Tianna Arata’s case and examined more than 1,600 pages of emails released after a Tribune records request. He kept asking questions about Tommy Jodry’s death, documenting the coroner’s change from suicide to undetermined and uncovering records of a prior sex-offense conviction involving David Allen Knight, the older man who had been drinking with Jodry. Knight denied causing his death, and police cleared him of wrongdoing, but would we know any of this if Matt hadn’t kept digging through courthouse archives and demanding records?

That is a lot of accountability attached to one byline. And it is exactly the kind of work my experience with SLO County News taught me I could not reproduce with a Facebook group. It requires a paid reporter with time to investigate, an editor to scrutinize the findings and an organization prepared to stand behind the work.

The opinion page gave us another kind of accountability: a place to argue about this county and talk back. If you have pounded out a keyboard manifesto under a Tribune editorial, consider what happens when the people producing them disappear. You were reading, reacting and thinking about something here. You gave a shit. There is value in having an argument substantial enough to engage with.

I am writing again and enrolled at Cuesta College, taking JOUR 201—the class I never got around to taking at 20, when I went to work in The Tribune’s circulation department instead. Apparently, I needed a 22-year field trip before returning to the syllabus. I have more experience, plenty left to learn and a growing willingness to take this first love seriously enough to see what I can still do with it. Not that there’s a job locally for me at the end or anything. That’s true love, I suppose. Perhaps I’ll carry the torch for Mitch Massey and blog about giant pumpkins from this Substack.

Which brings us back, regrettably, to Scarlett Johansson’s feet.

I brought that story to class for a discussion about what makes something newsworthy. The garbage McClatchy splashed across my hometown newspaper had been upcycled into educational content at Cuesta College. See? There really is no end to what the journalistic minds of San Luis Obispo County can do with the material they are given. Imagine what they could do with adequate staffing and funding.

That means actual human beings who live here, show up here and experience the consequences of what happens here. People who sit through the meeting, walk beneath the Christmas lights, ask the uncomfortable question and then run into the person they wrote about in the produce aisle. Those relationships require judgment, boundaries and the willingness to publish something that might make your next Farmer’s Market trip awkward. When you live where you report, you have to stand behind your work long after you hit publish.

Some dork in San Jose assembling a story from AI summaries and TikTok videos can put “San Luis Obispo” in a headline. Giving us a newspaper that knows where it is takes people willing to be here—and a company willing to pay them to stay.

We deserve to read about our community through the eyes of people who will still have to look us in ours.

I found out yesterday that Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler was a journalist, and I am frankly a little pissed off that nobody told me this sooner.

There are certain pieces of information that arrive in your life masquerading as trivia and then proceed to rearrange the furniture. This was one of them. Dire Straits was one of the first bands I ever loved. Not one of the first bands I discovered as a teenager, when discovering music becomes an intentional act, and you start constructing an identity out of SPIN Magazine articles and a collection of band shirts cultivated from the local Hot Topic. I mean, the first. I was born in 1984, and some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor with my dad while Dire Straits played through speakers that were bigger than my entire body.

I can still see the living room. There was one of those enormous 1980s entertainment centers, back when televisions were pieces of furniture substantial enough to kill you in an earthquake. I remember the wood-grain paneling and the giant speakers, all of it bumped up against a wall lined with shelves holding my dad’s books, police memorabilia, and the terrarium where his leopard gecko, Margo, lived, nonchalantly perched on a rock under a heat lamp, giving exactly zero shits. I can remember the physical sensation of being there, sitting on the floor, thumbing through a 1970s pea-green album case and looking up. Listening. My dad would sing the songs to me, and he wanted me to listen to the words.

This matters.

Because one of the songs I was particularly fascinated by was Money for Nothing, a completely reasonable song for a preschool-aged child to contemplate deeply. I didn’t understand all of it, obviously. I knew there were microwave ovens and color TVs involved, and that somebody was very angry about somebody else getting money for nothing. I knew Sting, that one guy from The Police my mom thought was “a babe,” suddenly appeared, demanding his MTV. Mostly, though, I understood that this wasn’t just a song. Someone was talking. There was a story happening inside it.

_{Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” video, an early cornerstone of my musical education and a completely normal thing for a preschooler to study this intently.}

And when my dad told me to listen to the words, I took the assignment extremely seriously. I studied the liner notes inside the cassette. I wanted to know what Mark Knopfler was actually saying, which eventually created a problem because my dad did not always know what Mark Knopfler was actually saying.

One day he was singing along and got to the line about the appliance store: “We got some movies, refrigerators—”

I corrected him. “No,” I told him, “that’s not what it says. ‘We’ve got to move these refrigerators.’” Because, obviously, I had read the source material.

I remember my dad being genuinely taken aback. Maybe even offended. This was his music. He had introduced it to me. He was the person teaching me the song, and now the tiny child sitting on his floor had apparently conducted independent research and returned with corrections.

It would not be the last time this happened. He loved introducing me to things, and he loved when I became interested in them too. But sometimes I would become really interested—I would study it, learn everything I could, get good at it, and occasionally, get better at it than he was. That’s when the enthusiasm could turn almost territorial. Hey. That’s my thing. Which was unfortunate, because telling me something is interesting has historically been a very dangerous thing to do.

I might come back with sources.

Still, there was something genuinely wonderful about being invited into his world, and Dire Straits was only part of it. My dad had this wonderfully random collection of records and recordings he would pull out and show me: audio of the moon landing, The Star-Spangled Banner, Cheech Marin’s Earache My Eye. I was completely transfixed by that one—the title, the cover, the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. My dad told me he liked it because it was so ridiculous that he simply had to have it.

I would eventually spend an unreasonable percentage of my life making parody songs and poems about things that probably did not need little ditties written about them. I’ve also realized as an adult that this is one of the ways I understand love. Show me the weird thing you know too much about. Play me the record and tell me the backstory. Explain the obscure thing that has fascinated you for twenty years. I love people’s nerdisms. I want to understand why you think something is interesting. My dad did that for me when I was little, and one of the things he gave me was Dire Straits.

About ten years later, courtesy of the educational afterschool programming that was VH1’s Pop Up Video series, I learned where Money for Nothing actually came from. Mark Knopfler was in an appliance store in New York. A wall of televisions was tuned to MTV, which was still a relatively new cultural phenomenon, and a delivery worker standing nearby began providing his unsolicited review of the musicians on the screens. Knopfler realized almost immediately that the guy’s commentary was better than anything he could conjure. He got a pen and paper, sat down in a kitchen display in the store’s front window, and started writing the man’s words down.

That became Money for Nothing. The voice in the song, the resentment, the insults, the disbelief that these ridiculous people on television were becoming millionaires while ordinary guys were hauling appliances around, all came from the character Knopfler found standing there. He walked into a room full of General Electric’s finest wares and walked out with one of the most iconic anthems of the decade.

I’ve always loved that story because I wholly relate to the impulse.

I once fell asleep with the television on during a particularly dull episode of Grey’s Anatomy and woke up during The Golden Bachelorette. I had never watched The Bachelor universe in any capacity and felt rather proud of that accomplishment. I don’t know the rules. I don’t know why everyone is always crying near a hot tub. But I opened my eyes to discover an elderly man with a tremor performing a ribbon dance in what appeared to be some kind of bachelorette beauty pageant for men. I became instantly transfixed.

What the fuck is this shit?

So naturally, I wrote a song about it. Because why wouldn’t you want a musical number to accompany something that batshit insane?

This is what I do. Something completely mundane happens, and my brain puts a little box around it. Most people experience these things and go on about their lives. My brain goes, Wait. There’s something in that. Then yesterday, driving with Spotify on, Dire Straits’ Lady Writer came on. I’ve loved that song forever, partly because I am, conveniently, a lady writer. For reasons I can’t explain, after listening to it for decades, I suddenly wondered: Who actually was the lady writer?

So I looked it up. She’s simply some woman Mark Knopfler saw on television.

That’s the whole riveting story. She didn’t have to be historically significant or even particularly interesting. He noticed her, and that was enough to earn her a song. I found that delightful. Here I was, a lady writer who had spent most of her life listening to Lady Writer, only to finally investigate said lady writer and discover that Knopfler had apparently done what I do all the time: noticed some random person on a screen and decided there was something there. Knopfler later explained that around that period of his songwriting, he was beginning to realize he could write about anything. Songs didn’t have to be about some predetermined category of “Important Things.” If something caught his attention, that was enough to pick up a pen.

When I read that, I instantly thought, “Mark, bro. Same.”

Then I kept reading, and I learned that before Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler was a journalist.

I audibly shouted at my screen: “Are you for real right now?!”

Before he was a rock star, Knopfler worked as a reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Journalism taught him to observe, organize, and condense—to look at ordinary life, figure out where the story was, and get rid of everything that wasn’t the story. He has talked about journalism as part of what shaped him as a songwriter, teaching him how to take real life and find the few lines that tell the story.

And suddenly I was back on the brown shag carpet of the living room floor. I could seemingly feel it. The wood grain. The giant speakers. The books. The police memorabilia. Margo in her terrarium, gnawing on a mealworm. That ridiculous enormous television. Me, tiny enough that all of it towered over me, sitting there listening while my dad sang along with a former newspaper reporter who built songs out of things he noticed.

My dad and I do not have a relationship today.

That sentence could open an entirely different essay, and in some ways it opens this one too. My relationship with him caused me a tremendous amount of pain. I don’t need to soften that with age, nostalgia, or the cultural insistence that every complicated parent-child story eventually becomes a redemption story. Sometimes distance is the healthy ending, and I’ve learned that understanding somebody better doesn’t make you want them back in your life. I am not particularly interested in rehabilitating my father. I am, however, deeply interested in understanding myself.

And there are these strange little pockets in my childhood where I can see that he recognized something in me before I had any language for it myself. He intentionally let me stay up late on Saturday nights to watch Saturday Night Live because he thought I would like it. Not because it was children’s programming—it very much was not—but because something about my little developing personality apparently made him think, She needs to see this.

He was right.

SNL changed the architecture of my brain. Comedy became a language I understood instinctively, and eventually one I wanted to write myself. Satire, sketches, parody, absurdity, the ability to look at something everyone else accepts as normal and tilt it three degrees until suddenly everyone can see how fucking weird it is—that became part of how I process the world. But now I realize he had started showing me how to do that even earlier. Here’s this ridiculous Cheech & Chong record. You need to see this. Here’s Dire Straits. Listen to what this guy is saying. Eventually: Here’s Saturday Night Live. Stay up. I think you’re going to like this. He was sharing his world with me, and I was doing what I apparently always do when somebody shares their world with me: paying very close attention.

That is one of the difficult things about having a complicated relationship with a parent. We want the accounting to be cleaner than it is. If someone hurt you badly enough that you eventually had to remove them from your life, it would be much more convenient if everything they ever gave you could be placed neatly on the same side of the ledger.

Mine can’t. It’s a bookkeeper’s nightmare.

My dad caused damage that I have spent a lifetime trying to understand. He also showed a weird little girl things he thought she would find interesting, and sometimes he was spectacularly right. One does not acquit the other, and acknowledging the good does not require me to reconsider the distance between us. It only means I don’t have to surrender things that became part of me simply because I no longer want a relationship with the person who first put them in my hands.

Maybe that’s why finding out Mark Knopfler was a journalist rearranged the furniture. It gave me a new way to look at one of those memories without asking it to become anything more than it was. My dad was just a dad playing music he loved for his little girl, and I was a little girl who took him very seriously when he told me to listen.

I became the person who hears something ridiculous in an appliance store—or sees its modern equivalent playing on The Golden Bachelorette—and immediately starts wondering what I can make out of it. My dad didn’t give me all of that, and Mark Knopfler certainly didn’t. But I can look backward now and recognize some of the places where the pieces first landed. Something good survived a relationship that didn’t. What happened after that belongs to me.

For almost my entire life, I thought Money for Nothing was one of the first songs my dad taught me. Now I know it was written by a former journalist who walked into an appliance store, paid attention to some random guy talking, and realized there was something there. Somewhere along the way, I learned to do the same thing: take the random line somebody said, the comment that hurt, the weird interaction with a stranger at Target, the thing that made me laugh, or the artifact somebody showed me forty years ago that I still haven’t stopped thinking about, and make something out of it.

Money for something.