SDC Weekly 87; Axel Dumas Interview; 12 Lions Water Clock; The Four Idols
Watch Enthusiasts and Long-Reads, AP’s New Crown-Set QP, Rolex Stamps Out Another Modified Watch Seller, The Birth of Modern Independent Watchmaking, Shifting Perspectives and more.
🚨 Welcome back. Nothing like a clickbaity image of a watch from Rexhep and a title about a Dumas interview to whet your appetite right? Well, prepare to be entertained.
Estimated reading time: ~33 mins
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Watch Enthusiasts and Long-Reads
Ross Povey’s recent piece on WatchPro explains how watch collectors are growing tired of doom-scrolling through Instagram and are returning to more in-depth content sources. Of course, given what you’re currently reading, I obviously agree with him!
Ross explains there is a growing appetite for deeper content free from “advertorial shackles” and traces this evolution from early 2000s watch forums (VRF, TZ, Purists etc.) through Instagram’s rise to the current emergence of platforms like Substack.
His key point is that enthusiasts crave substance and authenticity, and this is something which will never be delivered in a 15-second clip or crammed into an Instagram caption which spills into the comments. The article mentions SDC directly, and I am branded a “horological agent provocateur” 😂😂😂😂
Gotta love it. Thanks for the shout-out Ross, much appreciated!
Povey is obviously onto something here, but let’s not pretend this is some grand industry-wide epiphany. The watch media landscape has been broken for years, and I’ve been banging on about it since SDC’s inception; in fact, it might have been the primary driver for SDC putting out a weekly newsletter.
The reality is traditional watch media got caught in a toxic loop of accommodating brands’ needs in a silly loop: access (to watches and launch scoops) requires positivity, positivity requires avoiding criticism, avoiding criticism means failing readers. Repeat. Eventually, readers noticed they were being fed BS dressed as journalism and they started to look elsewhere. Is it rocket science?
I’d say the status quo is less of a “return” to long-form and best labelled a “flight to authenticity”. From what I’ve observed through SDC, people don’t necessarily want longer articles – they want honest ones, and I’m actively trying desperately to shorten my articles as people seem (?) to prefer them shorter! Above all, people want commentary which isn’t compromised by brand advertising budgets or the writer’s desire to maintain access or protect revenue.
The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m writing here about a mainstream publication which discusses the very shift which its own practices helped create, but in this instance it’s an independent writer on a mainstream platform; so technically it gets a pass! So yes, perhaps long-form content is experiencing some sort of renaissance, but it’s definitely not because watch nerds suddenly developed longer attention spans. They just had their bullshit detectors fine-tuned.
I’m curious though… Do you find yourself reading more in-depth watch content these days, and do you actually prefer longer content? Or is it rare for you to spend hours reading watch content?