Currently — January 18th, 2023

January 17, 2023

What you need to know, currently.

Currently and Project Mushroom’s founder, Eric Holthaus, wrote a powerful essay for Nieman Lab about his predictions for journalism in 2023 and the ways in which marginalized voices have come together and gained more power amid Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.

“My prediction is that in 2023, social media will fragment — spurred by Twitter’s ongoing collapse as a left-leaning organizing space — and the social media platforms that emerge will accelerate the rise of the political power of marginalized people in U.S. politics.

I founded Project Mushroom to amplify the voices of marginalized people to achieve climate justice — and our work was just made about 100x easier because of Twitter’s ongoing collapse.

In just four weeks, starting from scratch, Project Mushroom was able to assemble a waitlist of more than 30,000 people, fully fund a $200,000 Kickstarter, and land tens of thousands of dollars in advertising deals from organizations perfectly aligned with our audience — people working for climate justice and willing to partner to make it happen. We were able to charge advertising rates at 3x the national average because of that alignment.

In short, Elon Musk just created a new era of social media: Niche verticals of like-minded people that can charge premium advertising rates and accelerate the interests of their communities.”

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