A former journalist argues that reporters are click-driven and unreliable, pushing founders to build direct audiences instead. Lulu Masserby and others in Silicon Valley champion the "Go Direct" movement on Substack, letting CEOs bypass traditional media entirely. The speaker claims over 100,000 followers using this approach.
Rule number 1 of PR: never trust a journalist, only use them. You can't trust journalists. Let me explain why. Journalists are mostly parasites, 99% of them. They are broke English majors or comms majors who have nothing else to write about, so they only write about people that they're assigned to write about. And how do I know this? Because I was a journalist. Oh, right. So I was a journalist and every day I'd get yelled at to write about whatever story it was. Type, type, type, type. And I wouldn't know much, but by the end of the day, I published a story. And then every Friday we'd go through and we'd You look at who has the most clicks. It's literally just a clickbait slop factory. There's a big movement going on right now in Silicon Valley called Go Direct, and it's spearheaded by a friend of mine named Lulu Masserby. She was head of comms at Anduril and Activision Blizzard, Substack. Basically, the idea is why should founders and CEOs go talk to journalists who don't even understand the idea that the founder is building when the founder could just go build the audience themselves, right? You could just build a newsletter yourself. You don't need the journalists anymore. This is Elon's idea of you are the media now. Anybody can be the journalist. You tell your story. You don't need to rely on journalists. You don't need to fear them. Who cares? Who cares? I have an audience of 100,000 plus. I don't need a journalist. Sure, when the journalist comes knocking, I'll answer some questions. But remember, never trust a journalist, only use a journalist.
