In a time while the headlines are dominated with the aid of wars and a divisive presidential marketing campaign, the magazine-world rivalry between The Atlantic and The New Yorker doesn’t amount to an awful lot.
So you may have overlooked it while, on April 2, The Atlantic beat The New Yorker in three huge classes on the 2024 National Magazine Awards.
But to Rusty Foster, who chronicles the media industry and net lifestyle in his daily publication, Today in Tabs, The Atlantic’s victory turned into massive news.
Shortly after the awards ceremony, which befell at Terminal five in Manhattan, Mr. Foster tapped out a fanciful report for his audience of media obsessives. Under the headline “Shutout on the TK Corral,” he wrote that David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, “solemnly folded up and ate each of his prepared speeches as he watched The Atlantic win every category.”
Mr. Foster then grew to become his interest to Anna Wintour, the editorial director of Condé Nast, the publishing massive that owns The New Yorker, Vogue and other publications, writing that she “donned an emergency second pair of shades” in reaction to the organisation’s negative displaying.
A sudden thing approximately Today in Tabs — which has a understanding, satirical tone that has made it a long-lasting hit among media insiders — is that Mr. Foster writes it from the bucolic putting of Peaks Island, Maine, which is wherein he became when the National Magazines Awards rite came about.
He says he unearths New York’s nonstop noise and crowds tiring, and his maximum recent go to to the town became final May, whilst he and the youngest of his 3 youngsters stayed at a Times Square lodge and noticed “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway.
One of his pals, Paul Ford, a writer, editor and tech entrepreneur, referred to that Mr. Foster, the person, appears to have little in not unusual with the media chronicler of Today in Tabs. “He’s a very New England man,” Mr. Ford said. “When you meet this guy, if he advised you he’s going to make a timber canoe, you’d pass, ‘Alright.’”
A Peaks Islander
Mr. Foster, forty seven, began Today in Tabs in 2013, when the enterprise he covers with a mixture of affection and scorn became going via a disaster added on, in element, by the upward thrust of digital generation.
The news media business is in even worse shape now. The Los Angeles Times recently announced that it might lower its newsroom with the aid of extra than 20 percentage, Sports Illustrated has been gutted, and more than 400 union staffers at Condé Nast walked off the job this 12 months after the organization announced it planned a layoff. Vice, a onetime colossus of virtual media, has filed for financial disaster; and Gawker and The Awl, a pair of on-line guides that had a power on Today in Tabs, are long past.
Amid the economic gloom, Mr. Foster has what many media shops crave: a committed readership inclined to pay for content material.
Around 10 percentage of his 36,000 subscribers are paying readers, he said, who fork over $6 in step with month or $50 in line with year. That’s not pretty 3-bedrooms-in-Cobble-Hill money, however it permits Mr. Foster to make a dwelling in media at a time whilst many veteran reporters are suffering to locate jobs.
From the start, he has written Today in Tabs from Peaks Island, a nearly one-square-mile patch of rocky land in Casco Bay. Reachable handiest via ferryboat, it has kind of 900 complete-time citizens. Aside from a few homey eating establishments (consisting of Milly’s Seaside Skillet Kitchen and the Cockeyed Gull Restaurant) and a fundamental supermarket, there’s now not much trade to talk of.
The locals have an independent individual. Many stay in weather-beaten cottages and pressure junker motors that don’t require a kingdom inspection decal if stored on-island. Since the Eighties, Peaks Islanders have installed six unsuccessful campaigns to secede from Portland, that’s 3 miles away and governs the island.
On a fab, breezy morning, Mr. Foster led me from the ferry to his 2001 Chevy Suburban, which he had converted to an “overlander” car to take his family on avenue trips to Yellowstone National Park and other websites. The indoors had integrated beds. The roof held elongated water garage tanks.
He didn’t say tons for the duration of the fast pressure. The pavement gave manner to a dust road, and he came to a stop in the front of a modest -story fixer-higher built within the early 1900s.
In the returned yard, Mr. Foster’s island automobile, a Jeep Liberty, changed into up on jacks. Nearby changed into a chicken coop he had built for the flock of laying hens his own family stored while the children had been little.
Inside, he sat on the kitchen desk and unwrapped a croissant that I had introduced along from Portland. As his Rhodesian Ridgeback, Sam, shuffled underfoot for crumbs, he spoke in quiet tones approximately growing up in Massachusetts and spending glad childhood summers on Peaks Island, wherein his grandparents had a cottage.
At the College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., he changed into all set to most important in film studies, best to drop out in the course of his senior yr. While there, he met Christina Fischer, a history primary. They married and moved to San Francisco in 2000. Mr. Foster worked as a programmer for a web startup in the waning days of the dot-com bubble, but he didn’t care for the town or the tech scene, and the couple made the move to Peaks Island in 2001.
“A lot of things passed off in a totally brief time frame — and then we moved here, and not anything passed off,” Mr. Foster said with a laugh.
He recalled his first brush with the net inside the past due 1980s, whilst his father, who worked as a franchise developer for Dunkin’ Donuts, signed up for CompuServe, one of the first on-line services. Mr. Foster found out to type on its chat feature, CB Simulator. For a self-defined shy, nerdy youngster, the capacity to meet humans on line changed into revelatory.
“What I observed was that writing is the very best way for me to talk to people,” he said. “And it’s the manner I feel the maximum that I’m expressing myself.”
Mr. Foster is something of a Zelig-like figure in internet records, popping up in key roles at various degrees inside the web’s improvement. He changed into an influencer long earlier than that turned into even a thing. A institution weblog he created in 1999, Kuro5hin (motto: “Technology and Culture, from the Trenches”), become one of the first web sites that allowed customers to post remarks and create their own weblog pages.
Kuro5hin have become a gathering location for early adopters and — along with Slashdot and Wikipedia — helped form the open-source lifestyle of the early net. Mr. Foster, then referred to as “Rusty from Kuro5hin,” made masses of buddies online as he built a profession as a contract programmer.
He became an early shareholder in Sports Blog Nation, the precursor to Vox Media. In 2013, he turned into hired by using Stephen Colbert and the comedy creator Rob Dubbin to assist expand Scripto, a scriptwriting software used by “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show.” Now and then, the ones jobs took him to New York. But even in his coding days, Mr. Foster observed that he got along higher with newshounds than tech humans.
“There aren’t a lot of tech leaders that I find interesting,” he stated in his kitchen. “I’m a language character. Media people come from phrases. I like their approach to the arena. They have skeptical curiosity.”
He started out Today in Tabs almost on a whim, way to the encouragement of Caitlin Kelly, who became then a senior internet manufacturer for The New Yorker. (The e-newsletter’s key-word, “tabs,” is internet shorthand for browser home windows as well as slang for the today’s articles and memes that humans have been getting labored up approximately on line.) Mr. Foster laid out the Today in Tabs origin story in a 2021 version of his newsletter.
“One day in 2013, underemployed and losing time on Twitter, I tweeted ‘Today in Tabs,’” he wrote. In respond, Ms. Kelly tweeted, “wait is that this a e-e-newsletter I can subscribe to?”
Mr. Foster persevered: “‘A e-e-newsletter?’ I idea, in the a laugh vintage-timey patois of 2013, ‘Why ever no longer?’ So that afternoon I sent the primary Today in Tabs to 25 subscribers, starting with this NY Post tale about love and misogyny and sandwiches.”
Soon enough, he was monitoring “the insidery squabbles and hate reads and high-minded-if-fleeting-feuds” within the media world, as The New York Observer placed it in a 2014 profile. Today in Tabs fast became a favorite of the web-savvy newshounds who labored at Buzzfeed, Vox and different virtual stores.
Mr. Foster close it down in 2016 due to the fact his activity at Scripto demanded an excessive amount of of his time. By 2021, he turned into lower back up and posting, first on Substack and then at the publishing platform Beehiiv. Restarting Today in Tabs, he said, became his try to leave programming in the back of and make a living as a writer.
Though he has written for The New Yorker, The Awl and different publications, Mr. Foster has never held a team of workers function as a journalist. And even though he now makes his dwelling tracking the media, he said he nevertheless thought of it as a interest — “and it’s a peculiar interest to have.”
Some humans golfing or game-fish. Mr. Foster likes immersing himself in burn reviews of the new essay series by way of Lauren Oyler and going down the rabbit holes of the Kate Middleton saga. In different phrases, placing together a newsletter about the media and on-line life comes clearly to him.
“It’s not a activity a lot as a factor my mind does,” he stated. “If I study a certain quantity of content each day, then my mind will produce 800 phrases about it. As lengthy as I can sit and write that down, I’m
appropriate.”
Deadline Days
Unlike other enterprise newsletters, Today in Tabs, that is posted four or five days every week, does now not supply scoops or unique interviews with boldface names. Billed as “your favorite publication’s preferred newsletter,” it is an 800-phrase photo of what people (normally newshounds) are speaking about within the second.
What readers are simply paying for is Mr. Foster’s sensibility.
He writes in a cynical but nonetheless vibrant-eyed, quirkily punctuated, jokey style — internet voice — as a way to be recognizable to everybody who remembers Gawker, The Awl or, further lower back, Suck.Com.
Matt Levine, an opinion columnist for Bloomberg, known as Mr. Foster “a tremendous stylist,” including that Today in Tabs was an concept for his very own newsletter, Money Stuff. “I’m at the internet all day, on Twitter all day, and it’s this shared psychosis,” Mr. Levine stated. “Rusty captures the nonsense of the day but in a stylistic manner that makes it appear to be literature.”
Elizabeth Lopatto, a senior writer for the Verge, says Mr. Foster’s attraction lies in his geographic and psychic put off from what he writes approximately. “As a lot as I love media reporters, there’s some thing to be stated for that outdoor perspective,” Ms. Lopatto said.
“People read to have amusing,” she added. “I get the feel that Rusty is writing that publication looking to make himself chortle.”
Though a creature of the net, Mr. Foster is not unlike an old-college newspaper reporter in his adherence to a daily cut-off date.
Mr. Foster’s wife works as a facts systems expert for the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, a nonprofit, operating from domestic or in Augusta. His three kids, Mica, 19, Calvin, 16, and Ash, 11, are all in college. That leaves him padding around the house for tons of the day.
He receives up around eight a.M. And moseys down to the kitchen to make espresso. He takes a mug upstairs and gets again in mattress, in which he sits along with his computer, catching up on what’s going on on-line. If some thing piques his interest, he bookmarks it in a file.
“That’s my pocket book,” Mr. Foster stated. “It’s sincerely just a listing of hyperlinks. And with a bit of luck I take into account why I bookmarked it.”
He tests in with a Slack channel that consists of reporter buddies who provide him a feel of what reporters are speakme about. A institution of Today in Tabs fanatics on the social media platform Discord drop off more hyperlinks — in impact, they are Mr. Foster’s volunteer stringers.
He makes lunch and takes Sam for a walk down the dust street. He ambitions to start writing by way of 1 p.M. And to put up by means of 4 or 5. If he hasn’t gotten getting in earnest by way of 3, panic sets in.
He writes at a small table in his bedroom. On the wall is a plaque he had made that says: “Rusty Foster, Weird Media Gremlin.”
Tabs is established like a past due-night speak display, beginning with a monologue that allows Mr. Foster to riff on a trending subject matter at duration. One day in February, his establishing challenge changed into the financier Bill Ackman, whose public combat towards his alma mater, Harvard, had made him the situation of several articles, a phenomenon Mr. Foster dubbed “the Ackmanaissance.” Mr. Foster wrote that a Washington Post profile of Mr. Ackman made him seem like “an overconfident dimwit”; from there, he dove right into a New York magazine piece on the person to provide you with “the 8 first-rate New York Magazine roasts of Bill Ackman that he received’t understand.”
The Today in Tabs opener is accompanied with the aid of a center section of fast-fireplace links to articles and news objects, many of them written in insidery lingo. Here, Mr. Foster may additionally display his puppy reasons and puppy peeves (One hyperlink reads: “Molly White On Chris Dixon’s Dumb Crypto Book”). Each installment of the publication ends with a musical guest — or, instead, an embedded song video, normally through an indie band.
His fellow Peaks Islanders have little idea what he does for a living or that in sure circles he’s known as “Rusty from Tabs.” He has now not been profiled in The Portland Press Herald or The Peaks Island News. He tells folks that ask that he’s a creator. When they ask him what he writes approximately, he struggles to provide an explanation for what it’s miles that a weird media gremlin does.
“I generally tell them, ‘I make jokes approximately the information,’” he said.
For a person who has been on-line 35 years, Mr. Foster retains a outstanding ability to disconnect from the device. He’s an engaged figure, as well as an avid kayaker and hiker. He also belongs to a wilderness search-and-rescue crew that does summer shifts in Baxter State Park, in northern Maine. On weekends, he usually stays off the internet.
“I compartmentalize loads,” he stated. “I try to be doing the aspect that I’m doing once I’m doing it.”
His readers will soon should suit his potential to control an online obsession. Starting July 2, Mr. Foster is taking a smash from Today in Tabs to hike the Appalachian Trail together with his oldest toddler, who is set to graduate from college in May and flow remote places inside the fall.
In addition to a great pair of path runners and a water-resistant tent, Mr. Foster plans to percent a six-ounce folding keyboard and his telephone for the two,two hundred-mile journey. As he has already informed his subscribers, he’ll begin a brand new newsletter known as Today on Trail. More than 2,000 human beings have signed up to pay Mr. Foster a to-be-decided fee for his “chronicle of what happens in my mind on a 5-month hike.”
As he spoke similarly of his planned hiatus from Today in Tabs, he considered what it would be like to spend several months with out a Wi-Fi signal, a prospect that would strike terror, and perhaps a chunk of envy, into his readers.
“I was like, What if I got offline a little bit to look what’s in my own head?” Mr. Foster said. “It’s been about three and a 1/2 years of doing Tabs always. I surprise if there’s some thing else for me to discover that I may want to write, if I were no longer constantly living in that facts-soaked environment.”