Is there something in the air this week? I feel like I have to brace myself whenever I get a New York Times alert now, thinking that another Great One has passed. On that note, one of the best music journalists of our time, Lindsay Zoladz, did a beautiful write-up on Dolly Parton’s legacy that you should read if you haven’t. Her piece deftly explains this incredible duality—how she could be a larger-than-life artist while also being an advocate for the marginalized—in a way I haven’t seen anywhere else. But of course, that’s what makes Lindsay’s writing so damn good.

Today’s newsletter marks Brittney’s writing debut for La Fronde! She interviewed Rachel Janfaza for this week’s Maxed Out. Rachel talked with Brittney about how she carved out her own beat at CNN by making the case for dedicated coverage of young people. She now runs her own research firm, where she works with companies on Gen Z research.

xoxo,

Stephanie

Rachel Janfaza saw something most news outlets completely missed.

Her college years spanned Trump’s first term, when young people like her were leading protests and acting as forces of change—but not really getting credit for it. After a senior year spent at home thanks to COVID restrictions, Rachel pitched her idea that news outlets were missing a key audience: young people. Her pitch landed her a role as CNN’s first youth politics reporter.

After a few years, Rachel took the youth beat to her own start-up, The Up and Up. What started as a stand-alone newsletter has expanded into a research firm, offering key insights on young people to brands and corporations. She holds focus groups and listening sessions with young people across the country on “everything from politics and AI to dating and relationships, gender and identity, workplace culture.” That’s how she coined the “theory of two Gen Zs,” a viral idea that explains why one part of her generation was actively organizing the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter protests, while another resisted COVID protocols and views MAGA as counterculture.

We talked to Rachel about defining a beat that went mainstream, translating her journalism skills to the research field, and what media gets wrong about Gen Z.

How did you define youth culture and youth involvement in politics as a beat? It wasn't something that was really being covered back then.

No, it wasn't being covered at all, which was part of why I wanted to cover it. I felt like it was an untold story, and now it seems like every other headline is about Gen Z.

I think the reason I honed in on this was because it was the world that was happening around me. I felt like my generation had a really different relationship to politics than other generations. Because of social media, the organizing tactics were very different and also the relationship to authority was very different. And that's what I started to lean into. Then, of course, the pandemic happens and everything amplifies tenfold.

I think that by living it, I started to see the differences in how my generation was engaging with politics and authority, and then that only cemented more and more as our generation has grown up and started entering positions of power ourselves.

How did you land your job at CNN? Was that something that they were hiring for, or something you created?

No. I was basically just pitching anyone and everyone who would listen to me that I thought young voters should be something that was covered, and I got very lucky. I had amazing mentors, and I was able to advocate that I thought this was something that should be covered and should be paid attention to. I was also doing breaking news coverage and campaign reporting [at CNN], but this was always what I was most passionate about. I think sometimes it drove my editor crazy, but here we are.

Because of how big of an organization CNN is, I was able to work with different teams across the organization to find ways into the Gen Z beat in any way possible. I was working with a group who were interested in launching the network's TikTok account at the time, and did a bit with CNN 10, which was the educational product of the company. So, any youth-oriented angle … I tried to get my foot in the door somehow.

Then you founded The Up and Up. Tell me about its launch and what the concept was.

When I started The Up and Up, it was mostly a newsletter to cover young voters in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms and then the 2024 election. I simultaneously started doing listening sessions with young people across the country in 2022, first as part of a [client] project, and shortly thereafter developed this model of listening sessions as a way to get a bunch of young people in a room, either in person or virtually, and have a group discussion about a range of issues, whether it be mental health, education, AI or politics. It was after the 2024 election that I really launched the strategy side of what I'm doing as well with The Up and Up, where we do research for individuals, companies and organizations who want to better understand Gen Z across many different industries.

I still write about the takeaways from those … and I also will hold listening sessions based on topics that I'm just most passionate about, and then write about those as well.

How did you go from being a journalist, doing breaking news and honing this beat, to building a company where now you're mainly doing research and holding these listening sessions?

I think that the skill set is more similar than people might imagine. On the reporting side of things, you're having one-on-one conversations, and in a focus group or listening session, it's just a group conversation. I see the reporting process and the research process as one and the same … as another form of storytelling.

Something I noticed while working at Teen Vogue in 2017 was that Gen Z was fired up. They were holding marches. They were activists. They were changing the world. And then post-COVID, there was this really weird shift away from the activism that defined the first part of the generation. Your theory of two Gen Zs was fascinating in that way—can you explain it?

I saw a massive shift in how young people were talking about the world around them and their place in it before and after the pandemic. Basically, the theory of the two Gen Zs is that Gen Z 1.0, which is anyone who had graduated high school before the start of the pandemic and had had a taste of independence prior to COVID, had a really different adolescent experience than Gen Z 2.0, who was still in high school at the time of the pandemic and therefore had a different relationship to education, to authority, to institutions, and also grew up with different technologies, such as TikTok and AI.

I don't think that this is a generation that is apathetic or that is completely tapped out. In fact, I ask in my focus groups all the time, “What is the biggest misconception about your generation?” and young people say over and over again, “We are not lazy, we are not apathetic, we do care.” But I think that the relationship that young people have to institutions, to authority, to corporations, to political parties, to medicine and science and literally everything looks really different than it did even six years ago. The reason why I talk about the two Gen Zs is because I think this generation is still marketed to and talked about as one behemoth, and it's just really not strategic to operate that way.

On that topic, Gen Z has a much different relationship to news and media than generations before. What do you think media is missing about young people right now?

I think a lot of the media talks down to Gen Z and sensationalizes them, when they're not too different from everybody else. And then the other piece of this, too, is that the way that Gen Z consumes media is just really different because of these different technologies and also because of the distrust of authority. They're looking for less produced, more organic, more authentic content, and also more authentic storytellers. And they understand that everyone comes to the story they're telling with a specific perspective, and so they just want the storytellers to be honest about where they're coming from and what their point of view is.

And of course, what are you reading, seeing, listening to—what are your favorite corners of the internet?

Okay, so I'm reading ‘Delusions’ by Cazzie David, and I'm embarrassingly not yet finished with ‘Yesteryear,’ despite having started it at the beginning of the summer. I just finished ‘Sterling Point.’ I'm obsessed with that and just finished it last night. I think as a result, I've been kind of leaning into the soundtrack. My all-time [favorite] music is disco remixes.

I'm a huge newsletter person. I get my news from a million sources. I subscribe to the traditional political newsletters. I'm a big Axios gal. I subscribe to Semafor, Politico, Punchbowl, all of those ones. Then in the Gen Z news space, I'm big on Substack, so shout-out to Casey Lewis, who is a friend. I love reading After School. I read Rachel Karten’s newsletter, and I just did a Q&A with her a couple of weeks ago. And Feed Me.

The big question: what is your average phone screen time?

Okay. So I was just looking at it and this week, it was four hours, 53 minutes. I think I'm roughly around five hours, pretty much.

That’s pretty much the average that we hear! How do you feel about that time? Good, bad, indifferent?

Well, I mean, it's embarrassing, but at the same time, it's my job. I'm sure I could spend less time scrolling. I could spend less time talking to my friends. But I read on my phone, I listen to a lot of music. So, I'm not sure how I would really cut that down significantly and still be able to keep up with the trends in the way that I do.

What we’re seeing and hearing around the industry.

Axios cuts. August has been a truly awful month for journalism layoffs. Earlier this week, Axios made cuts to its newsroom and eliminated its data visualization team. Managing Editor Danielle Alberti was one of the people impacted and shared the news on LinkedIn. “I sometimes joked that I was trying to automate myself out of a job. Whoops,” she wrote. Danielle was with Axios for over six years before she was laid off. She posted her email address in case anyone reading this has any leads for her!

Twitter is back? Virginia-based startup Operation Bluebird, Inc. has launched the website Twitter.now in an attempt to recreate Twitter’s blue bird heyday, when it was just slightly less problematic than its X successor. The founders are asking people to reserve their handles for $20 a pop. If you’re thinking that this project is ripe for a big ol’ lawsuit from Elon Musk—you’re not wrong. X sued Operation Bluebird last year, but a judge tentatively indicated that the company appeared to have given up some of its intellectual property rights tied to the old Twitter brand. Despite the case still being in limbo, Operation Bluebird is forging ahead with its reinvented Twitter, according to Ars Technica. While the whole nostalgia of it all is fun, it’s hard to make a convincing case at this point for another social platform. Especially when you’ve got to fork over money to use it. I’m good!

More August culling. Besides Axios, producer Megan Ellison’s indie film studio Annapurna reduced its staff by more than 15%—roughly 30 employees—in response to “shifting market conditions,” a spokesperson told Variety. The studio operation itself is small but mighty. Over the years, it’s churned out some critically acclaimed films, including the Oscar-winning ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ in 2012. As a testament to how small the media world really is, Megan is also the sister of Paramount chairman and CEO David Ellison and the daughter of Larry Ellison, whose family controls the company.

Have a tip for me? Send it to stephanie@la-fronde.com or my Signal if you want to keep things confidential (itsstephwill.94).

Puck gets a hefty valuation. Reuters was the first to report on Puck’s advanced talks for an investment from RedBird Capital Partners that would value the newsletter venture at $250 million. The broader RedBird media universe already includes Front Office Sports, which has expanded rapidly over the last few years from a suite of newsletters into larger ventures like a nationally syndicated nightly TV show premiering in September. It’s pretty surreal to see these kinds of startups commanding valuations comparable to legacy media companies now. But at the same time, outlets like Puck are the media companies of the moment. What a time to be alive …

Bloomberg’s exposé on Ashley Flowers’ Audiochuck. A few of my friends sent me the Bloomberg story last night about the alleged staff turmoil happening behind the scenes at Ashley Flowers’ Audiochuck podcast empire. Reporter Ashley Carman detailed instances of alleged micromanagement by Flowers that reportedly contributed to low morale and a wave of staff turnover, with around 30 of the company’s 100 employees leaving over the past year, including Audiochuck’s chief executive and chief growth officer. The story is just another example of the growing pains that can come with turning a hugely successful creator-led brand into a full-fledged media company (see VF’s Unwell report).