It’s unnecessary, in present company, to describe the information landscape’s change over the last two decades. We live the answer. What you see in a day, where you see it, and the way it leaves you feeling are illustration enough.

Relatedly, few would contest that the way we consume information now has contributed to a crisis of meaning in contemporary mainstream culture. Exponential growth in the availability of images and information has not elevated taste but the opposite. A digital frontier that promised the wild west turned up a suburb. Bad art well marketed by excellent PR teams, laundered through institutional bastions whose rubber stamps nobody really cares about anymore, merchandised in high-gloss on newsstands. There are many reasons you’ll encounter a piece of art, music, film, fashion, photography, history, or news in this landscape. That reason is rarely because it is good or meaningful. The narrative has slipped, reduced to dust swept up the scrolling feed.

We all know this.

Here’s the proposition: This situation is not absolute. The informational prison was built. The artistic hellscape is someone’s design. And you don’t have to stay.

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In 2019 Alex Sarkissov made an Instagram page. Its purpose was to distill the content glut into a living archive founded on taste-based curation, and assemble meaning across disparate mediums, eras, and industries. An information format built for a new information landscape.

For 6 years that live archive has lived almost exclusively on Instagram. That’s changing now. This is Welcome Editorial.

At its most basic, Welcome Editorial is an elaboration of the Instagram page into an organic media platform unrestricted by Meta’s latest design update or algorithmic notions. It will feature expansions of information featured on the Instagram page, subjects impossible to treat in that format, long form pieces, interviews, new curatorial voices, and more. All to say: It’s an editorial website.

Just as @welcome.jpeg is not like other editorial accounts, Welcome Editorial will not be like other editorial websites. Welcome Editorial will apply a live archive framework to the conventional editorial format. Content will engage past as well as present, touch all mediums, and prioritize beauty and meaning over structural systems of selection.

To understand why this is important we need look no further than traditional media where accelerating information inputs and narrative breakdown (among, obviously, other things) are rotting brittle legacy brands with dogmatic scope of coverage mandates. These brands (or their parent company) are mistaken in thinking that the old mode will satisfy the desires of this generation's culturally-minded, desires that have much more to do with meaning and feeling than they do with specific personas, industries, sub-cultures, or image resolution standards.

The live archive approach does more than broaden content scope. It also allows for the coverage of conceptually and formally inventive contemporary work that stands no chance going upstream against the backroom financial and social incentives that (now as always) determine what art is celebrated. The live archive has the flexibility to identify and platform the niche and emergent, the original and the inventive work that represent an underdiscussed bright spot in the information eruption.

An easy question: doesn’t the Welcome Instagram already do all of this? And yes. But the expediencies of Instagram undercut substance and encourage the superficial. Clearnet defrictioning will only progress. Welcome Editorial will introduce a depth not feasible on Instagram, one the subject matter warrants.

About all of this much more can (and should) be said. A Preface is not the place to do so, but it’s worth noting that as production accelerates and mediums flatten and institutions lose the public’s faith and the past and present collapse in, the live archive form of cultural coverage only becomes more suitable, more necessary.

To say: we’re glad you’re here early.

What follows is a 10-item North Star.

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The Welcome Editorial Manifesto

1. There is beauty in the world
2. There is meaning in the world
3. Culture should be driven by beauty and meaning
4. Culture needs curators
5. Cultural history is part of the cultural present
6. Context matters
7. The collective taste matters
8. Attention is a trainable asset
9. Taste is a trainable asset
10. Transcendent art is still possible

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Written by Noah Jordan (@nnoahaonn)