Dancing in the intersections
JD Shadel on how good stories can still make a difference.
I first connected with JD on Linkedin, a lifetime ago, in 2015. We were both new-ish to Portland, Oregon, both writing about travel (they were working full-time as an editor at Travel Oregon, I was freelancing), and JD was launching their own travel magazine. Their request to connect came with a message about this new publication they were very excited about and a question: would I be interested in writing something for the inaugural issue? I responded with some pleasantries and quickly jumped to the kicker: What are your rates?
(Their rates, friend, did not exist.)
As a newbie freelance journalist, I was already practiced in the pleasantries of deflecting requests for free labor. Today, I would still advise new writers to ask about rates upfront. But also, the memory of this exchange is kind of hilarious because it was the start of something a billion times better than $200 for 1,000 words. What I got was a creatively collaborative friendship that has invigorated my writing life (and my life-life) for years. Also, they introduced me to all the best dance nights in Portland. This exchange is now a reminder that we’re all buzzing around out here with our creative ideas, anxieties, and aspirations, sending messages and stories into the ether, just trying to connect. We all need to get paid. But also, sometimes, a friendly professional message turns into a decade-plus of friendship and geez, lighten up, would ya?
I did end up writing for that first issue and the next one (RIP Limbo). Neither of us ever made any money from it, but we made something we were proud of, and it was a lot of fun. Ten years later, they dug up those LinkedIn messages to read aloud at my wedding.
JD lives in London now, and their career has taken many exciting turns over the years. They’re now a columnist for the Future of Travel series at Conde Nast Traveler, an editor-at-large at Good On You, and founder of the new newsletter and media platform, ESC KEY .CO, featuring sharp and entertaining analysis for "terminally online pros.”
As I’ve been slowly resubmerging myself in the ice bath of freelance travel writing (it will feel good eventually, right?) while simultaneously grappling with the rotten billionaire core of all these social media platforms we rely on for work, I knew JD was the person I needed to talk to first.
I wanted to know how they are showing up online these days when everything feels so dark and twisted. And how we continue to embrace the joys of travel in the age of unavoidable darkness. I had some lighter questions, too. So, let’s get to it…
B: Pretend we've never met, and we find ourselves standing awkwardly at a high top with sweaty cocktails at some industry meetup. After initial introductions, what do you want to talk about?
JD: The conversations I crave are about how we do more thoughtful work at the moment. Lately, I’ve become that person asking how everyone’s making their creative work sustainable — financially, environmentally and, yes, mentally speaking. I'm both frustrated and fascinated by how we navigate these intersecting crises in our fields. Take the climate emergency — we need to radically rethink travel journalism in that context, but there’s little appetite to question the ethics of our individual over-tourism problems. Meanwhile, we’re watching synthetic media threaten creative careers while dealing with shrinking budgets and unstable platforms.
But equally, I’m done with the total grouch crowd who’ve made cynicism their personality trait. I have no time for energy vampires who know how to argue and debate but rarely do anything beyond that.
The world needs more of what some dismiss as trivial. Look at the lessons from queer and trans liberation movements — you can pair direct action with radical club culture as one example. People having fun are more likely to sustainably change things in the long run.
As someone who travels regularly for pleasure and also for work, how has your role as a journalist influenced the way you visit new places?
That’s a deceptively loaded question, isn’t it? Well, when I travel, it’s a challenge to turn off my sometimes unhelpful lifestyle media instincts. If you’ve been a travel journalist for long enough, then this will probably sound familiar. Everywhere I go, I’m always in “destination research mode.”
While I realize this may sound strange since I’m a travel journalist, when I’m traveling somewhere that’s new to me, I try to flip off that switch.
One reason is that I find the legacies of travel journalism can often push us to unconsciously have an extractive relationship with the “new” people and places we cover, and not really consider how mainstream media production is a part of global systems that we sometimes unknowingly perpetuate. It’s an obvious example, but I like to frame conversations about travel journalism by reminding other writers as well as myself that the history of our profession is fucked up in so many ways — promoting white supremacist narratives, “exotifying” other cultures, and too often leaning on lazy stereotypes that rob local people and places of their beautifully rich nuances.
At the same time, good stories can make a difference. And there are many good stories. I frequently go back to those oft-quoted lines from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
In modern times, humility and curiosity are two of our rarest resources. So when I travel, I am actively trying to move away from that extractive kind of destination research. I aim to work with a humbler mindset, that of a curious student. In practice that means moving the inner dialogue away from common questions like, what’s trendy and new in this city? The answer is often gentrification. Instead, I try and figure out who are the people who make these places tick? And how can I respectfully hang out in your orbit for a while? Ideally this process includes some gossip with new friends over a few rounds of drinks.
So much has changed in the world and in your life since you were a travel editor back in Portland, Oregon. Now you're in London, still writing about travel but also sustainable fashion, technology, and the ethics of the internet. How has your approach to travel writing changed since then?
I’d say my approach over the years has evolved to embrace the multitudes I contain, if you can permit this one Whitman allusion. I’m often working to explore the overlaps between seemingly unrelated themes. I increasingly want to dance with the traffic in the busiest intersections, so to speak. It’s when distinct ideas and topics overlap that I find a more detailed picture of our time emerges. It’s in the middle of all of that where you spot the real trends — and I don’t mean the made-for-PR trend reports that start every year off, but the real stuff reshaping our lives.
I’m motivated by a curiosity to unpack how our world is changing, and I’m drawn to specific examples that illuminate something bigger about the direction of travel, if you will.
Travel journalism can reveal truths about our times that other beats might overlook or sideline.
So I try to push my personal sense of the boundaries of travel journalism’s remit. That’s because the way we move through the world tells us so much about how the world is really changing. Travel journalism can reveal truths about our times that other beats might overlook or sideline. If you want to, say, understand the potential and present harms of emerging technologies, then seeing what happens with that tech in the streets, in the hands of people going somewhere at this very moment, becomes rich territory to explore.
For example, I’m deeply concerned about the state of human expertise on the internet with large language models being thrust into the search experience. Some might think of that as a tech story. But as a travel journalist, I ask, where do our trips begin? Usually it’s Google. Or it’s TikTok. It’s often with a search query or an algorithmic recommendation. And that “dance at the intersections” point of view is where stuff gets really interesting. Identifying those areas of overlap helps us understand so many trends in the world, micro and macro, whether it’s something like the toxic rise of synthetic content challenging creative professions or social media’s role in overconsumption. I like to get into those foamy zones where different currents converge.
I've always admired how you position yourself as an expert on a variety of topics and continue to pursue a range of experiences. It's so hard to establish yourself in just one niche these days, let alone many. What do you think has been key in achieving variety throughout your career?
I mean, girl, I clearly admire your questions. And I’ve asked myself this over the years — often sleepless, staring at the ceiling, like “JD, can’t you just pick one?!” It does feel sometimes like I’ve had several careers already, which go beyond writing and editing into “content” leadership and strategy. I don’t even try to explain “content” to taxi drivers and leave it at “I am a writer.”
The serious answer is that I’ve had an almost academic interest in learning about what’s changing around me, wherever I’m at. And as much as I love writing about changes in the world, I also crave change in my personal life. I live by trying to say the word “Yes!” as often as I sensibly can. If something piques my curiosity or captures my imagination and I get to learn from smart people along the way, then I want to know more. I’ve been lucky to get to say yes to some pretty cool opportunities, too.
The second answer is that I’m a massive nerd — and I think that’s honestly the key that will motivate you to maintain an intellectual portfolio of interests in a meaningful way. What suitcase should you get? I could write a master’s dissertation on wheel manufacturing at this point, for instance. I want to know how new tech works, how this new-to-me city’s transportation system runs, why you put a slice of orange in one drink and not another, and so on.
Nerdiness is what connects those dots. Most of my career has been driven by trying to answer the questions I find fascinating, challenging, and even hilarious. Oh, and to bring this back down to reality, a lot of the variety has just been me working to pay my own rent. I hate the hustle culture but I’ve still got to hustle after all!
What is one story idea that came to you unexpectedly and where did it come from?
A couple years ago, I was logging in and out of my iCloud account on my new iPhone, and dozens of voice notes I thought I’d lost suddenly reappeared. A few of those were the full transcripts from an interview I did with Portland’s legendary drag queen Darcelle XV, the world’s oldest working drag queen according to the Guinness World Records. The interviews were originally for a 2016 Vice article. The voice messages reappeared around the time Darcelle passed away at the age of ’92. This turned into a long-form profile, “the lost Darcelle XV interview,” which ran in Condé Nast’s Them along with archival images of Darcelle’s drag and activism throughout the decades. The miraculous origin story for that assignment still gives me goosebumps — like Darcelle had access to my iCloud password from the great drag world beyond.
What do you do when you feel fresh out of ideas?
The first stop must always be the nearest public library. On one library trip in 2023, for instance, I went down a rabbit hole reading about the history of space tourism. And learned there was this guy whose main academic interest was documenting the history of hotels, specifically the history of the Hilton hospitality empire. That rabbit hole turned into a feature about the weird decades-old quest to build space hotels, one of my favorite pieces I’ve written for my Future of Travel series in Condé Nast Traveler.
The other place I go is Reddit. Spending too much time lurking Reddit has led to stories like one I recently wrote for ESC KEY .CO. It was a reported essay about how Redditers were trying to trick “AI” into promoting a tourist trap restaurant as a way of guarding the local favorites. That’s fascinating because Reddit powers so much of the current “AI” content landscape. And for a minute, the Reddit campaign worked — telling us a lot about the challenges of using large language models for search.
OK, so just over two weeks ago, we all watched a lineup of platform-controlling billionaires attend Trump's inauguration. And we all know what happened there, and the onslaught of chaos that’s rolled out since. As someone who writes about the internet, how are you feeling about our reliance on social media for news, information, and first-person stories (and story ideas!) with this dread and revulsion a lot of us are feeling about social media right now?
This question has been on an endless loop in my mind over the past few years. It’s led to story ideas of my own. In late 2022, my editor at Them at the time let me spend the first two weeks of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter reporting a piece that mapped the platform’s far-right death spiral. That was two years ago and you see how so many of the potential harms then have come to fruition.
I’m obviously not feeling good about the trends across social media. Some of that’s not new: I’ve always had a complicated relationship with social media. Personally, I’d rather avoid it. And yet, my career in digital media coincided with the explosion of the social web. And so, a part of my career has been spent working behind the scenes on major client and publisher social media accounts, factoring the social into editorial strategies, too. And so I’ve felt kind of trapped in the whole business of knowing these platforms. I can’t escape it, even if I personally log off, because of my career.
One person who has really blown my mind on this subject is the scholar and writer Katherine Cross who recently published a book, Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, that approaches this topic with more of an original and urgent angle. She argues that social media is good at creating plenty of its own network problems, but bad at changing much for the better in the real world. I spent several hours chatting with her for a profile on ESC KEY .CO.
Any advice for writers on how to distance themselves from troublesome companies like Meta and stay connected to the people and opportunities that we rely on to find and do our work?
You don’t need to be on every social media platform. In fact, it might be better for your writing if you’re not. Maybe we do need a “personal brand” to be media people in this day and age, but being everywhere at once is hard to pull off well. Choose a few channels where you have the healthiest conversations and which drain your batteries the least. Maybe that’s Bluesky, maybe not (I just made a Bluesky account @jdshadel.com — say hey!). And, most importantly, set screen time limits for certain “work” apps that zap your energy because this is not the year for letting our social “brands” burn us out when we have so many people who need us to show up for them in the real world.
Oof. I really need to work on the screen limit thing. OK, tell us about ESC KEY .CO!
ESC KEY .CO is a new media outlet and editorial consultancy that I, an internet writer, started with the sense that the internet had, in fact, broken my brain.
Maybe that resonates with you? If so, I’ve quietly soft-launched it this month with what I’m only half-jokingly describing as “the only lifestyle newsletter on the internet.” It’s a subtle nod to The Stranger’s iconic tagline, but also because we’re living in an era where everything is somehow “lifestyle,” a writing label I once hated and now reclaiming because why the fuck not.
It’s intended for terminally online pros in the creative industries — like writers! — who feel like they can’t really escape the internet. It’s a blend of original reporting and analysis, always grounded in the very pragmatic stuff about the forces reshaping our lives and careers.
What makes now the right time to launch something like this?
Three things: 1. Mainstream media has dwindling budgets for the kind of reporting that critically unpacks the hype. Lifestyle media, in particular, has hardly any venues for these conversations that go beyond surface-level trend pieces. I want to create a home for that kind of analysis and reporting.
2. Creative careers are increasingly on the chopping block, with synthetic media and “AI”-powered austerity threatening the very people who make culture worth consuming. We need space to parse these shifts without falling into either techno-optimism or complete despair.
And, 3., don't you kind of feel like you just want to hit the fucking escape key sometimes, philosophically speaking? The name, ESC, references that existential urge. It's also an acronym: Embrace Skeptical Curiosity. And in this weird era, we need that skeptical curiosity more than ever, I’d say.
I’m hoping the new wave of independent media can support some of this rebellious undercurrent and inspire more solidarity among creatives.
There is so much fear and stress swirling around our writing careers these days. What are you feeling good and excited about when it comes to journalism and writing?
Yep, it’s a super stressful time to work in the media. And yet, sometimes it’s these sociopolitical moments when we see the counterculture flourish in unexpected venues. I’m hoping the new wave of independent media can support some of this rebellious undercurrent and inspire more solidarity among creatives. It’s why I’d like to grow ESC KEY .CO into something that can platform other writing beyond my own. And I’m inspired by the many talented writers I’ve seen who are using the moment as the impetus to do their most challenging and original work.
To keep up with JD’s work and maybe unbreak your brain with them while they dissect the forces that pull at our time and attention, sign up for ESC KEY .CO and follow them on Bluesky.