Interview: Delia Cai on how she’s managing a daily newsletter in quarantine, finding comfort on Instagram, and having the right amount of order in this Weird Time

Hello and good morning! With more free time on my hands lately, I’ve been putting more time into this newsletter, and as part of that, I thought it’d be nice to do weekly Q&A’s with interesting people about how their relationships with technology are shifting in quarantine as we’re all still trying to figure that out.

For the first interview, I spoke to Delia Cai, growth and trends editor at Buzzfeed. She also writes Deez Links, a daily newsletter covering the media. We spoke about how Covid-19 and quarantine have shifted the way she covers media in her newsletter, finding comfort on Instagram, and plenty more!

Stay safe and be well, and I’ll talk to y’all next week!

First, can you just tell me a little bit about Deez Links? Why’d you start it, and how has it changed since you started it four years ago?

Right out of college, I had a fellowship at Atlantic Media where I was basically reading industry news all day and boiling it down into memos and decks. It was great because it served as a crash course in the digital media landscape — I'd gone to the journalism school at the University of Missouri and loved it, but I'd only ever had one class that talked about things like "what is a revenue stream" and what real outlets were up to. 

This was the summer of 2015, so newsletters were already a big trend that everyone was talking about, and I was inspired by ones like Today In Tabs and Ann Friedman's newsletter to start one myself, partly to give myself an outlet to write a little creatively (corporate memos are not a place to work on your voice, as I learned lol) and partly to have something funny to send to my friends every day about the stuff I was learning about. It honestly started as a way to pass the time from sitting bored in a cubicle all day, but I think giving myself this daily deadline to find something interesting and then to write about why I thought it was interesting actually helped me grow enormously as a recent grad who wasn't terribly confident about my writing skills. It kind of "forced" me to pay attention to the industry and have my own opinions and write quickly and not be too precious about anything, because who cares if it's just my friends seeing it?

It's been four years now, and so that part has definitely changed. Now Deez Links has north of 5,000 subscribers, and a lot of them are people in media who I desperately admire. So there's a lot more pressure now. But I still try pretty hard to write it as if I'm sending these emails to my circle of friends, because I think that personal tone is still the beauty of newsletters and why they're so ubiquitous now. The newsletter itself is less of a haphazard experiment now, so I've been trying a bunch of other stuff out to keep it fun, like making a merch store and throwing an amazing birthday party for it with Substack earlier this year.  

What do your days look like now? Have you found a routine that’s worked for you? 

So I'm still in New York but quarantined alone, and I still can't decide if it's awesome or awful. I think it depends on the day. I'm lucky to have a job where I can channel most of my energy + relentless need to be plugged in and be useful to people, so that's hugely helpful. I try pretty hard to stick to this routine where I'm doing yoga in the morning and going on at least an hour's worth of a walk each day, and then after work, I'll spend three weeknights either working on the newsletter, other projects, or reading. I feel like that probably sounds a little sanctimonious, like ohhhh she's being sooo productive, but that's because the rest of the time + weekends, it's the Wild West of Doing Whatever, and that's when I can watch 7 hours of "Sex Education" or lie on the carpet and watch TikTok all morning without feeling bad about it. I have also noticed that every few days, I will just feel unbelievably exhausted and do nothing at all, and that's okay, too. I tell myself that whatever amount of order that allows you to enjoy yourself + not feel like total crap is all we can expect right now. 

Since your newsletter’s daily, you’ve gotta be combing through a ton of content. How do you manage to do that without  letting it get to you too much? What’s your system? 

I subscribe to around 50-60 newsletters/listserv emails a day, and I try to make it a point to at least skim each one. And I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Most of my friends work in the industry as well, so we're constantly chatting and gossiping and dropping links to each other, too. A former boss from my fellowship once told me that, for the most part, most pieces of industry news go one of like, six directions — like, it's usually about some place making money or losing money or trying a new-fangled thing and not figuring it out right away, that kind of thing. And I've found that framework works pretty well for like mentally categorizing things whenever some news breaks about so-and-so pivoting to whatever, or so-and-so doing something different. Usually by the end of the day, I have one or two links that I already know I'll write about. And I also use Pocket a lot — whenever I'm writing a newsletter and can't think of a good link right away, that's the first place I'll look, because i save so much stuff in there.

How has the current news cycle, especially given how rapidly it’s changing, affected what you write about in your newsletter? 

I'm honestly still trying to figure that out. It's tricky because Deez Links is great for making fun of like, a juicy story about old school Conde Nast, or highlighting the 10,000-word longform article you should absolutely read, but now that it's really just one story in the news, there's only so many times I can be like "hey you should read what Ed Yong just wrote" (though I mean that would be a good rule of thumb). So I'm experimenting with it again. 

There are some days when Deez Links is just a list of funny TikToks I watched at 3 a.m. I'm like "oh yes this is for counterprogramming purposes" which is a little true because we're all being overloaded with information right now, but it's also definitely because I either slept 12 hours the day before or just couldn't get to it. And it's nice because people understand! And they'll send me TikToks back. That's the nice thing about having a newsletter with no money or sponsor or whatever attached. You can make it whatever you need it to be. 

I have started a thing recently where I'm posting classified-style listings of people who are looking for work and media jobs during the pandemic, though. It ended up being a little overwhelming because I don't think I'd really realized how many people have already been affected, but it makes sense to use this decent-sized platform to signal boost others in the industry. Because above all else, I just want the newsletter to be useful.

Are you using the same apps to pass the time that you did prior to quarantine? What’s been helping you not get too stir crazy? 

I'm definitely using Twitter less. Outside of the work day, I try to stay off of it now, only because I end up scrolling for hours and feeling cranky and jaded. I'm using Instagram a lot more, I think, because it feels different to see a friend's face on her IG story or videos of a friend's cute baby learning to walk. Quarantine has taught me that I'm the kind of introvert who will feel a bit cornered on Zoom or Facetime, but being able to observe my people's lives in this way keeps me feel calm.

Finally, what’s your favorite thing you’ve seen online this week?

Every Sunday, I look forward to reading these updates from Columbia Surgery's surgeon-in-chief, Craig Smith. They are so, so grim, but Dr. Smith manages to write them with such lyricism that I am usually, embarrassingly moved to tears.