interview: kat tenbarge, influencer watchdog

accountability, blue collar influencers, and repeating the tech industry's mistakes

Some time ago I had a chat with Insider’s resident ‘influencer watchdog’, digital culture reporter Kat Tenbarge, as research for my upcoming book. If you don’t already know her, you will definitely have read her work, either her voracious reporting on influencer scandals or that David Dobrik scoop that broke the internet in March.

You can read about Kat’s journalistic process for that story here. ‘In the wake of Tenbarge's investigation, brands including Dollar Shave Club, EA Sports, and Door Dash have cut ties with Dobrik. On Sunday, Dobrik also stepped down from the board of Dispo, a photo app he cofounded', Insider noted. Kat’s story was picked up by everyone from NBC to the BBC, and David has also released two apology videos, one of which has been viewed 13m times:

Kat kindly agreed to the publication of a (very) abridged version of our (much) longer conversation discussing her career, internet accountability, truth sleuthing, the blurring lines between journalism and tea/gossip channels, and ways that old and new media can collaborate, rather than compete, on the scooping of influencer stories. (You’ll have to wait for the book is out for all that!)

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Livvi: How did you land on your ‘influencer watchdog’ label? How did that become your brand?

Kat: For a while I didn't know how to encapsulate what my beat was because it was more than just influencer coverage… I knew I wanted to write about digital culture and internet culture, and I wanted to write stories that weren't just noise and brought something new to the table. That was how I really went from just covering like, ‘oh, David Dobrik went viral for this prank’ to like, ‘here's the hidden history behind David Dobrik.’

I was really inspired by a lot of Taylor Lorenz’s original work. I remember when she broke the story of Jake Paul's neighbours filing complaints about his parties - that was the kind of stuff that interested me, because it was like you were starting the conversation, versus just partaking in it. I landed on ‘influencer watchdog’ because someone actually suggested it to me in a tweet! I was like, oh, I've never thought of it that way, but that is so true.

Livvi: I love how the title ‘influencer watchdog’ also plays into these contemporary discussions that we're having around the influencer industry needing watchdogs, being unregulated and relatively un-legislated…

Kat: For sure. When you're in journalism school… political reporting is such a deeply entrenched and understood type of investigative reporting. There was no framework for that when it came to influencers. There was a little bit of a framework with the entertainment industry following the Me Too movement; this idea that there's all these powerful men in Hollywood, and they have so much money and they shape our cultural tastes but nobody is focusing on the watchdog element of their conduct.

Everyone knows that really wealthy entertainers or people in the entertainment industry have a lot of power. People don't get that about social media. David Dobrik isn't just something to laugh about; he is actually really powerful and influential. We're still in the process of getting people to understand how rich these people are, how many actual followers they have. The numbers on the screen actually translate to wealth and influence and power dynamics that can be abused.

We're starting to close that gap, but there's so much work to be done. The influencer industry should really be regarded as on par with the entertainment industry at large, but I honestly think that the influencer industry is even more powerful than the traditional entertainment industry, because traditional celebrities don't have as much power or proximity to their fan bases.

Livvi: When you talk about closing a gap with influencer coverage, I have a similar sensation of almost like, reporting on the edge of a cliff somehow. People can’t quite grasp the full picture of influencing now, but they will very shortly. Influencers are still widely regarded as individual oddities. It’s like, ‘oh, Ryan Kaji made $200m last year,’ or ‘oh, David Dobrik said that or did that,’ but then it’s just left there - there’s no real sense that any of this is connected or what the implications are.

It feels very prescient - that’s what I mean about being on the edge of a cliff. We are imminently about to fall off and that’s when people will wake up and realise what’s happening around them. It’s exactly what happened with the tech industry, this pattern of move fast and break things, and by the time you notice it, it's too late. It’s like we learned nothing from that original cycle...

Kat: …That really fast cycle with tech where it was at first all innovation, but then when you look at it in retrospect, it's all scorched earth?! [Here we both laugh - hahaha Facebook destroyed democracy!] The influencer industry is the phenomenon of the tech industry, combined with the mainstream mass appeal and personalities of the entertainment industry: it’s so potent, it’s fascinating.

I love the word ‘oddity’ to describe how people view influencers. In general we only hear about the biggest of the biggest. We hear about Ryan, we hear about Mr Beast, we hear about PewDiePie; but there's a working class of influencers, a blue collar class of influencers.

There's thousands and thousands of people that none of us have ever heard of, who make a full time living off of monetizing their online content, and there's this whole framework of management and digital rights people and lawyers, publicists, PR people. There's this whole industry that is so alive and so unregulated and people don't even know it's there: they think it's just YouTubers doing it all themselves.

Livvi: The ‘potency’ of the influencer industry is a really interesting concept, too. It relates to this idea I have had percolating in my mind for a while, which is that ‘the influencer industry’ is an inherently false concept. Yes, at the moment we're in an ‘influencer industry’ but ultimately everything is going to be ‘influence’ and there will be no solidified influence industry, just as now there is no such thing as the ‘internet industry.’ Influence is political, social, cultural… like tech, it’s not a vertical, it’s a horizontal. We see it as this siloed industry now, but very imminently that will dissipate.

Kat: I completely agree with that and I feel like I already see that with politics. We were having a discussion on the digital culture team at Insider, asking ‘what is an influencer?’ One of the questions we got stuck on was, is Donald Trump an influencer? He wields influence in a very online driven way. You cannot deny the way that he uses influencer tactics to accomplish his political goals, and by that framework, AOC is in a lot of ways an influencer. Influencers and politics is such a cursed thing to mix but it also makes perfect sense; of course it’s becoming part of the influencer world and vice versa.

Livvi: This is one of the things that I find so frustrating when I speak to people about why am I writing my book. Like, why do I care so much about people who stream and take selfies? The answer is because it’s not actually about that at all; it's a much larger and more pervasive and - to use your word - potent activity. It’s not this isolated occupation of posting travel or lifestyle content or whatever, it's actually a fundamental restructuring of the way that information is created and shared and the way that culture is produced and consumed.

Kat: Absolutely. We’re reaching a point - we may be there already - where everyone who is online is an influencer in their own way. That’s my takeaway from influencer culture: it’s so easy to think about it as a billion Paris Hiltons, but that’s such a one dimensional way of looking at it. The way that Tana Mongeau has risen to fame and is portrayed online is something that’s happening to all of us. We’re all dealing with our own miniature social spheres and how they’re affected by online engagement.