Talking Stanley Tumblers
Lessons for the Future of the News Industry
Last month I made a TikTok video explaining the surprising Mormon roots of the Stanley tumbler craze. It went viral, collecting 1.9 million views. That won the attention of several journalists at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who interviewed me for an article and a radio hit. That in turn caught the eye of Substacker Caitlin Dewey, who featured our conversation in a post for her many subscribers.
One of Caitlin’s questions got me thinking about how this little piece of culture discourse illustrates the ongoing shift in how the “news” is produced and disseminated. Caitlin asked how I made the connection between Stanley tumblers and Mormon influencers, which prompted a little introspection on my part. I wasn’t the first person to posit a connection of some kind, but I might’ve been the first to analyze why it happened and what it signified.
Why me? I’m not Mormon. I’m not a culture beat reporter. I don’t even own any Stanley tumblers. If not for my video, I wouldn’t have been anyone’s first guess as a potential source of expertise on the question of Mormon beverage consumption patterns.
On the other hand, before becoming a think tank policy researcher, I was trained as a religious historian of 19th and 20th century America. For a non-Mormon, I have read fairly widely in the scholarly literature on the history of the Latter Day Saints. So I had a baseline knowledge of the Word of Wisdom and was familiar with the way Mormonism tends to sporadically surface in the secular public imagination (ie “Mormon moments”), both of which helped me understand the deeper roots of this little manifestation of Mormon particularity.
Furthermore, I was raised a Protestant fundamentalist, which has no formal overlap with the Latter Day Saints but oddly still shares certain habits of the mind. Growing up fundamentalist meant straining every little aspect of social engagement through a fine-meshed acceptability filter. That made it second nature to grok the nuances and implications of the internal LDS debate over whether caffeinated soda was or was not included in the prophet’s somewhat ambiguous ban on “hot drinks.”
Also, I’m a child of the 90s and remember Subaru’s famous marketing campaign to outdoorsy lesbians. It’s a perfect example of how corporate marketers can leverage small but passionate fanbases to maximize brand loyalty and eventually create positive spillover effects among the general public. If I had been any younger, I might not have spotted the similarity to Stanley’s collaboration with Mormon Instagram influencers.
Finally, I noticed all of this because I’m an active creator on TikTok. TikTok is where Generation Z is, and Gen Z is now at the age (11-26) where cultural innovation happens. And if a cultural trend is happening, you’ll find out about it light-years earlier on TikTok than on Twitter or Facebook or any other platform serving older cohorts. And sure enough, I first heard about the Stanley tumbler collection fad through my TikTok FYP.
Now, note how when you overlay these various aspects of my biography, education, and personal habits, you end up with an unusual combination: a former fundamentalist religious historian who is old enough to remember the 90s but young enough to be active on TikTok. That’s…odd. But it was the exact right combination to spark an insight into this very particular cultural moment.
Now think about how the evolution of what we call “the news” made it possible for this oddly specific expertise to burble up onto the radars of journalists and percolate out into the public awareness.
News isn’t natural; it’s a product, a thing that is crafted from selected raw information. But that information — both knowledge and expertise — is widely distributed. And journalists have always faced hard limits as they hunt for the information from which they can craft a story. They face natural limits of time and resources, meaning that they can miss relevant information, marring the end news product.
A thing happens. Say a car crashes into a storefront in a small town in Ohio. The local newspaper sends a journalist to interview those on site to ascertain why the accident happened. They might speak with the police, gawkers, maybe the shopkeeper, or, if they’re lucky, even the person driving the car. But they have a filing deadline, which means they can’t interview everyone who might’ve seen the crash, and so maybe they miss the real story. Maybe they’re forced to rely on the official, self-serving statements of local authorities. Maybe they miss an eyewitness who saw the driver on their cellphone just before the crash. Odds are they’ll miss something, just hopefully nothing too important.
That’s how it used to work. Today, information can surface in novel ways. A video of the actual accident might go viral on TikTok. A mechanic with a highly specific specialized interest in that vehicle model might post an analysis on Youtube of why the driver’s explanation blaming runaway acceleration doesn’t make sense. And so on. Localized knowledge and expertise are effectively being crowdsourced, bubbling up via new platforms and aided by more efficient algorithms.
And the Mormon origins of the Stanley tumbler fad is just another example. Someone at the New York Times, which is large enough to have a culture beat, must’ve noticed that a bunch of their friends or online acquaintances were carrying Stanley tumblers. But was that just the personal experience of a journalist living in a NYC bubble, or did it represent an actual, broader trend beyond the five boroughs? How to find out?
In this case, they did a bit of traditional reporting such as contacting Stanley for comment, but they also went to Instagram and tracked down an informal network of influencers who appeared to be ground zero for the tumbler fad. In that sense, they backtracked the fad to its point of origin.
But they missed something. Because knowledge and expertise are widely distributed — and the number of Mormons employed at the New York Times is presumably small — the Times reporters either missed or failed to report on the fact that many of the people they interviewed for the tumbler story had a connection to the LDS church and other Mormon institutions. (Several of the Instagram influencers mentioned in the article have publicly talked about being members of the church; others are graduates of Brigham Young University, a Mormon-run college.)
I happened to have that small piece of the puzzle. But back in the day, it would’ve once been lost information. Maybe, if I’d felt strongly motivated, I could’ve written a letter to the editor and hoped that my insight about the Mormon origins of the Stanley tumbler fad might appear on their letters page to be seen by a tiny fraction of their readers. More likely, I would’ve mentioned it as an aside to my wife or friends and that would’ve been that.
But news is created differently now. TikTok lowers the barriers to entry for disseminating information. My video surprised viewers which meant engagement. Engagement led to amplification by the algorithm, turning the video into a minor, viral bit. Then some journalists surfing TikTok spotted the video, realized that it represented a fresh take based off specialized knowledge, and reported on it via a more traditional outlet, albeit in the form of an abbreviated soundbite.
This doesn’t happen in a pre-Web 3.0 world. Now, obviously this isn’t the most important story given the stakes involved. (Mormon pun alert!) But the “new news” production process is also effecting stories that have more significant social impacts.
The example I often use is the story of the Ohio train derailment last year. As I told a Wired journalist at the time, it was an inflection point for the way algorithmic discovery would disrupt the future of the news. For days afterwards, traditional journalists mostly just regurgitated official talking points from local authorities and the railroad company. Meanwhile, surprising pockets of expertise — like from Nick Drum, an entrepreneur who knew the local area, had a background in engineering, and a side interest in digging into industrial accident reports — bubbled up and broke the deeper story of the chemical spill for an audience of millions on TikTok.
The way the news works is fundamentally changing. Newsgathers — well, newsmakers, really — surf the wisdom of the crowds, looking for local knowledge and hyper-specialized expertise that has bubbled up from below. Relevant information is less frequently lost, potentially leading to better reporting, although that might be offset by an increased risk of disinformation. (Then again, have you watched *any* cable news recently?? Talk about non-unique problems!)
Note also that higher quality future reporting will combine the best traits of both traditional journalism and the new style discovery process. We still need professional journalists to gain access to proprietary information and privileged sources. We also need journalists who understand the new information pipelines and who are willing to look beyond the routine sources of expertise.