The journalist as influencer: how we sell ourselves on social media | Media | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/oct/20/caroline-calloway-writers-journalists-social-media-influencers
▻https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7e2b365b36cde4066ef8ba532ade1b1f83ada445/0_164_2592_1555/master/2592.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali
The most famous writers have always been public figures with their own media-fueled mythos, of course. We have the glamorous mystique of Joan Didion, whose aspirational “cool” has made her a persistent object of reverence for white women with literary ambitions; the wild lore of Hunter S Thompson with his drugs and guns, the cigarette holder and aviators instantly recognizable even to those who haven’t read him; and the literary “Brat Pack” of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and company, who were themselves objects of fascination as extensions of their depressive, decadent, druggy fiction. Benjamin Moser’s new authorized biography of Susan Sontag painstakingly attempts to reconcile the writer’s contradictory private self with her glamorous persona as a public intellectual. The book’s many reviews grapple with the unreliability of biographical interpretation and the insertions of the biographer’s own biases and blindspots.
But the image management that once seemed incidental, or at least parallel, to the literary profession seems now one of its most necessary, integral functions. In the age of Twitter and Instagram, an online presence, which is necessarily public and necessarily consumable, seems all but mandatory for a writer who reaches (or hopes to reach) a certain level of renown, especially for anyone dealing in personal essays or cultural criticism. In the way that the influencer uses her image to sell her swag, the writer leverages her life to sell her work, to editors and audiences.