Anna Merlan: Sharing this one more time because my GOD did I spend a lot of months reporting it

Sharing this one more time because my GOD did I spend a lot of months reporting it

For Business Insider, a story I spent four months on: Joe Arden is the romance audiobook world’s biggest narrator, a bestseller maker and a bona fide star. Now, his sexting scandal is having a huge fallout that almost no one outside the industry knows about: www.businessinsider.com/joe-arden-ro...

Joe Arden's voice made him the hottest narrator in romance. Then, a sexting scandal turned BookTok against him.www.businessinsider.com Arden's reign as the "king of fuck" was threatened after multiple women posted online about his inappropriate and manipulative behavior.

Tomorrow TikTok will find it and I may have a bit of a Day

Luckily it will be my literal birthday and I will reserve the right to not really notice

Happy birthday! And two think, Book Tok, a thing I should know nothing about, has now inspired two pieces of very interesting journalism. Yours, and this one www.pajiba.com/celebrities_...

Krack My Back: Booktok, The Seattle Kraken, and Why You Shouldn’t Turn Real People Into Your Playthingswww.pajiba.com Fandom is a complicated thing. For many, it can be a safe space, a community of creativity and solidarity where you find new ways to enjoy your favourite things. It can provide solace, inspiration, an...

Oh wow I hadn’t seen this but did hear about this incident. Reading now!

Enjoy! Pajiba is like if Jezebel had been a small indie blog and stayed solvent & cool. Yes, they changed the excellent tagline 'scathing reviews for bitchy people' to something more advertiser friendly, but they've still got soul.

I’ve read and enjoyed lots of their stuff!

Maybe we can get them to fight the Mormons so both groups will leave you alone?

DezNats, meet spicy book people 🤝

As a former journalist, I will read this to help your metrics. As a former broadcaster, I gave this guy a listen and… NGL, I can deliver sexy content in circles around this guy. Guess I need to find a way to pick up the slack in this audio book world!

Microphones: amplifying the power fantasies of lackluster men since 1925, or something like that.

hey not sure what journos think about Apple News Pro or Plus or whatever, but BI stories are included with it.

Joe Arden sexting scandal rocks the romance communityapple.news Like the nature of desire itself, the question of what makes a voice sexy is highly subjective. But there's no denying that a large number of people, mostly women, found Joe Arden's voice to be exceed...

Good to know! Hope more people see it there

it’s actually made me pick up a sub to a few different pubs. was kind of surprised…

Considering everything else in this article, I thought Tailgram would be a lot spicier than it was when I looked it up and visited 😹😹

Holy cow, wild.

Gosh this is so good. Really great work!

Thank you!

tangential, but given only the name "Ghostface Gulf Coast" I would not have guessed that guy's occupation in one thousand years. what a little loop-de-loop in there

This was a really great article about something I knew nothing about and now don't want to know any more about. Parasocial media zones like this sound so impossibly shot through with dangerous (and familiar) power dynamics. How do you protect communities from abuses like this? Ugh

(He then wished Anna Merlan happy birthday on Bluesky)

Thank you! And yes 😬 the dynamics are… troubling for sure

Social media has given us Asshole-as-a-Service and I want to give it back

Really thorough and engaging reporting on this!

Thank you!!

Guy sounds like the audio book version of the Tik Tok guy who would stare and women would gush over him

He would just… stare?

Yeah he called it the female gaze or something like that

💀

Whoooooaaaaaaaa!!!!!! I feel like this Arden guy needs the red flags guy from tiktok to show up!!!

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