📢 Deez Q&As
A wide ranging chat with Delia Cai, writer of the popular media newsletter Deez Links
Welcome to The Jerky Loudspeaker - an independent sports and culture newsletter, I’m super excited to have you here! Before you dive in, let me quickly break down how the newsletter is structured. Think of it like a mini newspaper, with three sections:
Balls, Bats & Baskets - Sports comes first, and in this section I’ll geek out about the happenings in this world of balls, bats and baskets.
Consumption Corner - A weekly review of what I’m watching, reading and listening to.
Deep Dive - Each piece/series in this section will be an in-depth analysis of the thoughts and emotions that arise from my interactions and experiences with the arts.
Passion Projects
Passion Projects is an attempt to break down the emotions, challenges and toil that goes behind following this inexplicable intuition we all have in us.
Finding your calling isn’t hard; answering it is the real challenge.
In this section, I’m going to feature interviews with people from different creative and professional backgrounds. The aim is to give the reader an intimate understanding of the journey of making a passion, a profession.
Delia Cai is the BuzzFeed Growth & Trends editor, currently based in New York. Along with her full time role, she runs an immensely popular media newsletter called Deez Links that has been featured on Vanity Fair.
In The Jerky Loudspeaker, I’ve written about the increasing popularity of independent newsletters and how they’ve become the new blogs. Delia was one of the early adopters of the medium and today her newsletter inspires a loyal readership.
Follow her on Twitter and check out her newsletter here!
What’s the most important thing you learnt in college?
It sounds very cliche, but always ask for what you want! I didn’t have any experience in journalism before I started at the J-school at Mizzou. So I spent a lot of time agonizing about how much farther behind I was than everyone who’d worked on their high school newspapers. But then I went to the campus paper and asked if I could interview a band for the arts section even though I had no experience doing something like that, and the editor was like, sure! When I was looking for my first internship, I literally googled “magazines in Chicago” and just emailed around asking if I could be an intern. One of them responded and took me on writing a few blogs over the school year, and then I moved to Chicago to intern for them during the summer. It’s hard to ask people to take a chance on you, especially when you’re just starting out. But then you realize everyone’s been in that position before, and most of the time people want to help you out.
What’s the most important thing you learnt outside college?
Like a lot of millennials, I was always taught that if you do your work and keep your head down, people will magically notice what you’re doing and throw all the promotions and raises and amazing opportunities you want at you. That usually doesn’t happen. People are busy! So you have to be the one who advocates for yourself. You have to document your wins, push for visibility, and be the squeaky wheel if something isn’t working out for you. This applies to money especially. I know a lot of people who feel like that kind of careerism is gross, and there certainly are distasteful ways to go about it. But you absolutely have to be your own marketer, if that makes sense. I don’t know if that also sounds gross. I ended up choosing advertising as my focus area in j-school, so to me it’s just being pragmatic to see yourself as “the brand” and to run your own “PR campaign.”
People are busy! So you have to be the one who advocates for yourself. You have to document your wins, push for visibility, and be the squeaky wheel if something isn’t working out for you.
What does your role as Growth and Trends editor at BuzzFeed entail?
I’m on the audience development team, so as a whole we’re always trying to figure out how we can adapt our content and publishing strategies to fit with what’s going on in the rest of the world. I spend a lot of time looking at our data and traffic trends to help give recommendations on, say, how we cover awards season during a pandemic. But I’m also constantly scanning social media and the news to see how we can cover the biggest stories in the best BuzzFeedy way, like whether it is sourdough memes or covering celebrity reactions to the capitol riots.
What’s living in New York in the middle of a pandemic been like?
The city feels very subdued. When I go for walks, I’ll stop and think about how weird that it’s so quiet. But overall, I think our experience with the early days of the pandemic has made New Yorkers extremely vigilant about wearing masks and social distancing. I’m from a small town in the midwest, and I’ve toyed with the idea of going home to see my family, but I really do think it’s safer to be in a place where everyone agrees that the pandemic is like....real.
It’s been very isolating, but it’s given me new appreciation for how walkable the city is, the small and big ways neighbors take care of each other. And how creative and determined people are to still make it “New York,” you know? A few weeks ago, I went to go see an impromptu stoop jazz concert. Over the summer, I got a bike and took it on the ferry a lot to explore different parts of the city. Without being able to meet up with friends in parks or do outdoor dining as much, this winter has definitely been hard. But nothing makes up for the fact that I can always walk outside and be around other people. I think being somewhere more spread out and insular would be even more difficult.
What made you decide to start Deez Links? And more importantly, how did you come up with the name?
I honestly can’t remember how it came up. I remember there was a funny news item during the early days of the 2016 election where a teenager ran for president under the name “Deez Nuts” as a joke, so that probably was buried somewhere in my brain when I started the newsletter a few months later. I found out a lot later that Deez Nuts goes back to the 1992 Dr. Dre album. At the time I just remember liking how deez links sounds a little like these links, and also that it sounds like “D’s links.”
Could you share some of the strategies you adopted to grow your audience?
It’s always funny because “strategies” make it sound like I knew what I was doing. Which I didn’t. I was just trying random stuff and going with what worked. I started doing Q&As because I thought it would be easier than writing a whole extra edition each week (this was a huge mistake; Q&As are a lot of work as I’m sure you know!). But then I eventually figured out that oh hey, if you interview someone with a decent following, they’ll share your interview and expose their audience to your work.
Newsletter swaps with some lifestyle brands like Of A Kind and The Good Trade were a huge boost to get up to 2,000, as I talked about for Substack here. And then I never want to pretend like getting a job at BuzzFeed and getting verified on Twitter and things like that don’t have anything to do with it. Those things gave me credibility to ask for bigger interviews or even just to get retweeted, you know?
How do you think the increasing popularity of platforms like Substack and Patreon will impact traditional media houses? Will there be a change in the status quo?
I don’t think so. Traditional media outlets operate at a totally different scale, with millions of readers, and as a result, they can charge advertisers huge amounts of money. Advertiser money is a whole different ball game. There will be maybe a few dozen big-time writers who can turn their existing followings into a lucrative Substack income, but I don’t see that really interfering with the power and audience and credibility that say, any Conde Nast title has.
How do you balance running a daily newsletter with a full time job?
Ha! The short answer is that I don’t have a lot else going on in my life, especially during quarantine. I end up reading a lot of stuff on the internet during the day as part of my job anyway, so usually by dinner time I’ll have something saved that I saw earlier in the day. And then it’s just a matter of taking an hour or two to write it and schedule it. But I actually changed to weeklyish, because it was getting too hectic.
What’s your daily routine like - pre and post pandemic?
God, I don’t even remember my pre-pandemic routine. It was a lot of half-hearted yoga in the morning, followed by reading newsletters and the news on my phone during commutes to Union Square. I’d usually get drinks or dinner with friends once or twice a week after work. But that all feels like a faint memory now. I feel exhausted even thinking about all the things I’d try to cram into one day.
These days, I’m up around 9 and do yoga or take a walk. I work through the day, with a lunchtime walk in between. Then I finish up work around 6 and go for another big walk. (I suddenly think I know what my family’s dog feels like). My personal pandemic treat to myself is “allowing” myself to watch at least an hour of TV every night as I eat dinner. And then I’ll catch up on magazines or books afterward. Usually the night ends in me watching an hour of TikTok and then going to bed at like, 11? Which makes it sound like I get ten hours of sleep every night. Which is kind of true, I guess. I guess I sleep a lot!
When I was in college in the US, I noticed that the newsrooms at the publications I interned at and even the student newspaper I worked at, were predominantly white. Have you experienced something similar? Do you think there’s a diversity issue in US media?
Oh yeah. U.S. media is very much dominated by white people (not to mention affluent, able-bodied, straight, cis-gender folks). I have had the experience of working at a place where I was regularly confused with the one other Asian girl in the office. But I’ve also had the experience of working somewhere (BuzzFeed) where I can join the Asian American Employee Resource Group and generally enjoy a culture where differences are celebrated. So it varies between companies. But overall, yes, media is very much still the white man’s game here. You see it especially in who’s allowed to mess up, who’s allowed to have second chances. Who’s allowed to say crazy stuff on Twitter and not lose their jobs.
So it varies between companies. But overall, yes, media is very much still the white man’s game here. You see it especially in who’s allowed to mess up, who’s allowed to have second chances.
How important is Twitter to a journalist or to anyone working in media for that matter?
I’m personally obsessed with it, probably to an unhealthy degree. But especially in times of the pandemic, when you can’t just go to a networking event or get introduced to someone else’s work friends, it’s the best way to meet people. A big fraction of my friendships in the industry started out as us just following each other and liking each other’s tweets and eventually DM’ing each other about stuff we’re both interested in. So I think it’s mostly useful for that, and as an avenue for figuring out what the big stories/controversies/good gossip of the day are.
Three pieces of advice you’d give to someone who’s just started their own blog/newsletter/podcast?
Don’t do it just for the money. For one thing, it took me four years of doing Deez Links before I had a big enough audience and started making money from the newsletter by running classified ads. But in those first four years, working on my newsletter gave me invaluable experience writing and editing and formulating an opinion on a daily basis.
Figure out what’s going to make your blog/newsletter/podcast different. What’s an area of expertise or a niche that you alone can speak to? Maybe it’s your voice or your method of storytelling or formatting that sets it apart. Get used to telling people about your project and emphasizing that difference.
You have to really love the work. Like, imagine you don’t ever get more than a hundred followers or more subscribers. Are you still going to enjoy the process of writing or recording or whatever? Because if you go into it expecting to build an audience overnight or you’re not clear on why you’re even doing this, you’re going to hate working on it in like two weeks and quit.
Who are some of your favorite writers on the internet?
Too many to name, of course. I really loved Allison P. Davis’s recent cover story amongst her whole range of work, which includes giving us the gift of elevated BDE discourse so many eons ago. R. Eric Thomas’s column at ELLE always hits the right note between scathing and hilarious. Ed Yong’s pandemic coverage has been a lifeline. Anne Helen Petersen’s reporting and writing consistently paints a nuanced portrait of American life through a decidedly non-coastal city point of view. The teams at both MEL Magazine and the Cut are, I think, writing the most interesting stuff on the internet concerning modern masculinity and feminism, respectively.
Consumption Corner
What I’m watching: I watched the first season of the newly released French Netflix original series, Lupin. ‘Inspired by the adventures of Arsène Lupin, gentleman thief Assane Diop sets out to avenge his father for an injustice inflicted by a wealthy family’ is how IMDB describes the show. Lupin feels like a throwback to the crime shows that used to be made in the pre Netflix era. The thief in disguise, the police officers staring at whiteboards in a precinct, the backdrop of family revenge and the whiff of romance give it a AXN vibe. It’s an easy watch. The quintessential 7/10 show.
What I’m reading: Nassim Taleb’s definition of success. Do you agree with him?
What I’m listening to: How I Built This with Guy Raz, as the name suggests, is a show where the host Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies. It’s ridiculously addictive. Last week, I listened to the episode with Bumble founder, Whitney Wolfe and another with the Headspace founders.
I’d love to hear what you thought of this week’s edition! To share your thoughts, comments or if just want to chat, hit me up at shubhank4@gmail.com!
Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram and Twitter !
In last week’s edition
The underutilization of the loan market in football
Reading recommendations - NYT profiles, chilling subreddits, sharp copywriting and Guardian essays
Biography Series pt.1 - Analyzing Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs
Read it here!