Witherspoon

As I said in class, I'd never heard of Vype before a few weeks ago. And I've never really been into high school sports.

But I am definitely someone who could be into high school sports. And I love the style of article Vype puts out there. So why have I never heard of this thing?

I'm going to sound like a broken record, but I just can't quite understand why Witherspoon seems to ignore the power of social media in expanding a following. I'm not trying to be a shill for Twitter, but his response when I mentioned it was that "people need to know you're there already before they follow you." Yes, fine, but the people who are really able to grow themselves help people know that they're there. I checked his Twitter feed, and he had 28 followers. I'm just some regular guy who has absolutely nothing interesting to say, and I have four times that many. (Trust me, I'm REALLY not bragging about my Twitter followers, I'm just making a point.) Worse, though, he's only following 23. People aren't going to know you're there if you don't tell them.

I say all this because I'd like to see the guy succeed. And maybe he is succeeding, and he's perfectly satisfied with his level of readership. I don't know his numbers. Maybe they're fantastic. But the fact remains that I didn't know about the magazine, which means a lot of people just like me don't know about it. Which means there are a lot of potentially interested people (read: $$$) living in ignorance.

But maybe he feels like he doesn't have the time to mess with the social media stuff. I can appreciate that. I was taken aback when he described how small the Vype staff is, and how much work he, himself, has to do. I guess that makes sense when we consider what a "niche" publication actually is, but still, I'd never thought about that before. That's a lot of work. And it's impressive.

Does he truly love what he does? I couldn't tell. He's obviously driven. But it sounds like he's been that way his whole life. I admit that I'm not like that. Not professionally, anyway. It's something to admire, yes, but only to a certain extent. How much does he give up to maintain that drive?