Dirt, Daisy Alioto’s Newsletter, Is a ‘Container for Taste’

“I think everybody has acknowledged that there’s a shift back toward blogging and voice and perspective that’s occurring,” Mr. Janowitz, Vulture’s top editor, said. He added that Dirt’s willingness to take a risk on younger writers enabled the rest of the industry to learn about those writers and give them more opportunities.

Daniel Spielberger, an occasional Dirt contributor and the executive editor of Study Hall, said Dirt belonged in a lineage of websites including Gawker, The Awl and Real Life Mag, which continue to be mourned years after they shut down. Those sites were places for “writers to experiment,” he said.

“Because you’re tapped in, and because you’re working with a smaller team, you can just hit on new ideas early and be the publication that signal-boosts them to the wider online sphere,” said Walden Green, 21, an editorial fellow at Dirt, who wrote about “heirloom chic” for the newsletter.

With its sometimes esoteric essays, Dirt might capture readers of magazines like The Paris Review or Harper’s. But it has also caught the attention of tech and finance readers who may be drawn in by its posts on Gen Z venture capitalists or meme coins.

“Often when people say they are at the intersection of tech and culture, it’s quite lame,” said Dani Loftus, the founder of DRAUP, a digital fashion company, and the author of the meme coin essay. “Daisy has made a publication that’s actually cool.”

Ms. Alioto herself writes as capably about software as she does about Joe Brainard or the recent eclipse. But, she says, she is “not a technology-for-technology’s sake person or a hyper-futurist or trying to go to Mars.”

“My motivation for being future-forward comes from a place of: We just can’t lie down and admit defeat.”