2026 will be the year of the party reporter.
"In the future we’ll all be a bolded name for 15 minutes."
Hello everyone. I woke up early this morning, partially because of jet lag but mostly because I was excited to write about my single media trend prediction for 2026. On the record. So far.
It started while I was reading while I was reading a newsletter by a 24-year-old woman named Evie. I like how she fluidly writes about life in New York — last year she announced she was having a socialite summer full of conversations with bartenders and inviting friends over to eat cobbler. Last month she wrote about attending a Partiful x Substack event hosted by Matt Starr. And this week, she wrote about going on a date with a comedian. After reading through it, I realized it was a Hinge ad.
Today’s letter is about: The party reporting boom we’re about to experience, where Choire Sicha has been, a new media podcast, why I’m more excited about restaurants than fashion brands on Substack, and the man who spends $28k/year on Substack subscriptions.
2026 will be the year of the party reporter.
A prediction: Your inbox is going to experience a party reporting boom next year. You will see more bolded names, anonymous quotes, subject lines including the phrases “you’re invited” and “off the record,” marketing and events teams rebalancing their invite lists to accommodate more diaristic Substack writers instead of influencers, duplicative party coverage on your Substack feed, magazines rebranding party reporting with clever newsletter names (Mark Guiducci, hop to it), and a dull anxiety spreading across certain group texts that nobody will confess is about FOMO. But it will be about FOMO.
Several stars are aligning for 2026 to be the year of the party reporter.
First: There are inarguably more parties to cover. We’ve written about how brand events are taking over peoples’ social calendars, and how book releases (and newsletter debuts, and zine launches) are becoming excuses for a spectrum of celebrations from restaurant buyouts to weeklong bacchanals. The uptick in writing about these events is the logical next step.
Second: Paywalled, voicey writing has become a growth hack. I wrote about this in 2024 (“I’m noticing this platform has become a really good way for women to monetize their diary entries.”) Axios’s Sara Fischer and Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright discussed the rise in personality-driven media models with Brian Morrissey last week (“The new age of the journalist… [is] somebody who can cultivate audiences… you have to be really social.”) Every whispered word, lipstick-smeared tooth, and backseat Uber conversation becomes potential for sellable copy.