No, if you think this is a review of The Devil Wears Prada 2, it is not. Relax. Put your Letterboxd expectations away. This is, instead, the mildly unhinged perspective of a Gen Z employee at a magazine. And no, I do not work at a fashion magazine – I know, disappointing. Please don’t come for me. Also, my boss is not Miranda Priestly (shoutout to my actual boss for letting this magazine be my creative playground… most of the time).
Now that we’ve cleared that up: I didn’t enjoy the movie as much as the first one. There, I said it. But whether I enjoyed it isn’t really the point. The point is – I felt seen. Uncomfortably seen.
There’s this moment where Andrea spirals about figuring out what people *should* know versus what they will actually *click on*. And I wish I could tell you I watched that casually, maybe even with a smug little nod like “haha, journalism problems.” But no. I sat there like… oh. Oh no. That’s my entire job.
Because here’s the thing no one tells you when you enter media in 2026: your words are only as valuable as their ability to survive the scroll. You can pour your soul into something thoughtful, layered, meaningful—and it might quietly disappear into the digital void while a “Top 10 celebrity outfits that broke the internet” piece does Olympic-level numbers. And you know what? I get it. I’m part of the problem. I, too, click.
We’ve entered an era where writing isn’t just about *what* you say, but how clickable it is. Headlines are engineered like bait. Content is packaged, optimized, and sometimes—let’s be honest – watered down so it doesn’t ask too much of the reader. Because asking people to think? That’s risky. Thinking requires time. And time is something the algorithm refuses to believe we have.
And I’m not even blaming readers. Truly. We’re all tired. We all want quick, digestible, mildly entertaining content that doesn’t demand an existential crisis before lunch. But somewhere along the way, I think we traded depth for dopamine. We scroll, we like, we move on. No lingering, no questioning, no uncomfortable reflection.
Ask my team – they’ll tell you. Our most thoughtful, well-researched, genuinely interesting articles? Modest engagement. Respectable, but quiet. Meanwhile, the lighter, more “entertainment-forward” pieces? They fly. And again, I get it. Sometimes you don’t want to read something that makes you rethink your entire worldview. Sometimes you just want to know who wore what and why it mattered (even if it didn’t).
But watching the film made me wonder – what is journalism now? Is it informing? Is it entertaining? Is it performing? Or is it just… competing? Competing for attention, for clicks, for relevance in a space that moves faster than we can process.
And it’s not that people don’t care about meaningful content anymore. It’s that meaningful content now has to fight harder to be seen. It has to be sharper, smarter, and yes – sometimes a little bit clickbait-y just to earn those extra three seconds of attention.
Maybe the real challenge isn’t choosing between what people should read and what they will click on but figuring out how to make them the same thing. And if that sounds slightly idealistic… let me have this. It’s either that or I go write “10 Times the Internet Broke This Week” and call it a day.
Also – on another note – did we need this movie? Debatable. What I would have absolutely devoured, however, is a Miranda Priestly prequel. Give me the origin story, the rise, the first legendary eye roll. But I’ll get into all of that in detail… in another article.
And if you’ve actually read this far, congratulations you’re already not the target audience the algorithm had in mind. So maybe there’s hope for us (and for long-form writing) yet. Or at the very least, you’ve proven one thing: people still read… occasionally.
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