The Monday Media Diet with Oluwamayowa Idowu

On Culture Custodian, Chibuzo Emmanuel, and Empire of the Elite

Oluwamayowa Idowu (OI) was introduced to us by friend of WITI Ochuko, who writes as seen on. Very happy to have him with us this week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

Hi! I’m Oluwamayowa Idowu, and I’m a writer and media entrepreneur from Lagos, Nigeria. I work as Editor in Chief of Culture Custodian and lead our work across editorial, audio, and audiovisual formats. I’m obsessed with media as a whole and this has become my life’s work.

My original background is in Law but I was one of those frustrated lawyers whose outer interests were more animated.

Describe your media diet.

I grew up in Lagos as the son of a journalist, so this naturally informed my worldview by informing my obsession with the media. I remember reading Jeffrey Archer’s “The Fourth Estate” as a child and it taking increased resonance when I learned it was based on Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. In the nineties and early noughties, this lent itself to newspapers.

I moved to England for school at a time when Twitter and blogs really took off- leading me to set one up. These days, my diet tends to cut across a range of fields: Politics, Media, Culture, Design & Architecture, Sports (really, football…. Not “Soccer”, football!). I keep subscriptions for the New York Times, The Times of London, and Puck, so those tend to be my starting points. Modern House and AD are also really great for keeping in touch with home designs. I also consume random recommendations I find on Twitter and BlueSky. More recently, I’ve collected print editions of the New Yorker and Vogue. If it looks cool and feels like a collector’s item, I’ll buy it.

I also consume a lot of podcasts. Being a long-suffering Arsenal fan, my week tends to go one of two ways. If Arsenal wins over the weekend, the football podcasts are where I start on Monday mornings. I split between the Arsenal-specific ones like the Arsecast, Handbrake Off, and the more general ones like the Guardian’s Football Weekly, Totally Football, and The Athletic FC. I then move to Afrobeats: With An S, which is a music podcast under the Culture Custodian network that dissects Afrobeats forensically. Puck’s Powers That Be, Fashion People, and The Grill Room, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot, Peter Kafka’s Recode, and Semafor’s Mixed Signals are also in constant rotation. I also really love Modern Love and Other People’s Lives.

I tend to go to bed on YouTube, watching interior design videos and true crime documentaries.

What’s the last great book you read?

I spent parts of my summer on a media nostalgia tour, reading Graydon Carter’s memoir and Michael Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite. I don’t know about Carter’s being a “great book,” but I really enjoyed Grynbaum’s deep dive into the Conde Nast story and how it has impacted media and culture as we know it. It’s also instructive for me on how to run a media business in a period of abundance.

I also really enjoyed Robin Givhan’s book on Virgil Abloh which helped trace and situate Abloh’s achievements in the context of black men in fashion. As someone who was a big fan of the artist fka. Kanye West pre; the Slavery was a choice and Neo Nazi arc, it gave great context as to why the two former associates’ fashion fortunes diverged.

What are you reading now?

Everything Ezra Klein puts out. No one is doing a better job of contextualizing liberal ideology in the Trump age. He took a miss with his Charlie Kirk commentary but I generally think the breadth of his work has been unassailable in the last year.

As Seen By Ochuko is also really good at looking at global Pop Culture from a Gen Z lens.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

This is very boring, but it’s typically front to back. I tend to bookmark pages I either intend on going back to revisit or archive as references.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Chibuzo Emmanuel is my colleague at Culture Custodian, and I think he does some of the best writing in capturing youth culture in Lagos, whilst also reflecting how they are shaped by global trends and perspectives.

Dami Ajayi’s Substack on African music is also very instructive reading.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

I don’t know if these qualify as famous, as they’re only famous to readers, but Pocket, until it announced its demise. Now, Instapaper.

Plane or train?

Train. Phone signal works, the view is more scenic, and it’s generally less flustering.

What is one place everyone should visit?

I’m from Lagos, which is the most chaotic place in the world, which everyone needs to experience. It’s the perfect distillation of why Nigerians are as enterprising, resilient, and insufferable as the rest of Africa seems to have found out.

On a more personal note, I love city getaways, and Florence never disappoints. The food is amazing. The gelato at La Carraia is heavenly. It carries so many positive memories for me.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Recently, I went deep into Swiped, the film based on Whitney Wolfe Herd’s journey, and it opened up a rabbit hole on dating apps and their business models. I found myself studying how platforms like Bumble and Tinder scaled, how they position themselves differently in the market, and even how they built businesses on monetizing human connection. Naturally, this has led me into thinking about what this looks like in an AI world. (OI)