Study Hall Digest 5/6/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

A City Without News? “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” but Make it Local

This past week, owners of the New Orleans Advocate announced they had bought the Times-Picayune, a 182-year-old Pulitzer-winning paper that provided invaluable on-the-ground Katrina coverage. As a result, the entire 161-person staff will lose their jobs in 60 days, and the two papers will ultimately be consolidated into one. In retrospect, the road leading to the consolidation was littered with signs of impending doom, and the whole saga serves as a microcosm of the larger battle for local news:

• Print circulation at the paper had taken a nosedive: From 257,000 pre-2005 to 83,860 on weekdays and 88,530 on weekends.
• The paper hadn’t found a way to successfully transition to digital. As part of an attempted transition, in 2012 it fired 200 staffers and cut down circulation to three days a week.
• Ironically, these last-ditch efforts to salvage the paper may have helped usher in its demise. Vicki Mayer, a media professor at Tulane University, told local Louisiana news station WAFB that the investment in digital was misguided, leading to an emphasis on “soft” stories when  readers actually wanted hard news and analysis.

The Wall Street Journal, days after the Times-Picayune news was announced, put out a timely story with infographics on the larger local news crisis. It wasn’t especially optimistic! I recommend reading the whole thing if you can stomach it, but here are a few key takeaways:

• Quick stats on the damages: Nearly 1,800 newspaper closed between 2004 and 2018, though about 400 local news sites have also sprung up. Nicco Mele, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, predicts half of existing newspapers will be gone by 2021.
• Print circulation is down across the board, but unsurprisingly, it is metro papers that have been hit hardest (10 to 15-percent more than national papers).
• Digital advertising fetches far less than print ads, and once again it is local titles that are hit hardest. Google and Facebook take 77% of digital advertising revenue in local markets, as opposed to 58% on a national level.
• Digital subscriptions seem key to the redemption of local news, but winning over digital subscribers is a difficult feat. National outlets have been far more successful in this regard. Even when local papers do manage to grow web traffic and win subscribers, it’s rarely enough to offset the loss of ad revenue.
• There has been an outpouring of financial support for nonprofit news, but the vast majority – approximately 95% — has not gone towards local and state publications.

The Times-Picayune saga clearly illustrates how simply cutting resources and pivoting to digital is no solution to what plagues local news. People generally seem willing to pay for news, but it’ll take time to adapt to the new model and grow it to scale.

One of the problems described in the WSJ piece is that the extent of the damage to local news hasn’t been sufficiently publicized — 71% of Americans believe local news is doing well financially, according to a recent Pew study.

Awareness campaigns are usually superficial, but it seems a robust awareness campaign might help encourage subscribers. And I know this is asking a business to go against its bottom line, but maybe national outlets like The Washington Post could help bolster support for local papers instead of spending close to $10 million on a Superbowl ad. National outlets clearly have the reach and brand enthusiasm local papers lack. (Or are we looking at a future in which, once again, WaPo and NYT acquire smaller papers?)

How The Guardian Turned Profitable

The Guardian, which for years struggled with profitability, is making money now. Nieman Lab looked at the success story as a blueprint for the digital future of newspapers, and a big takeaway seems to be to make your money from readers, not ads. The Guardian has had success with a membership model, forging a relationship with readers rather than just asking for money in exchange for a product. I recently wrote about the trend of pivoting to a reader-centric approach for the Study Hall Digest.

NYC local news site The City, which launched recently, makes use of this approach, but it also benefits from some big donations from the Leon Levy Foundation and Craig Newmark, as well as a kickstart partnership with New York Magazine.

Should I Throw my Laptop Out the Window?

Hot take: There are too many streaming platforms and too many shows. Most of them are mediocre. Some of them are very good — I watch all of those, plus some of the mediocre ones. It was recently reported that Walmart is preparing to launch a slate of original shows on its streaming service Vudu, including a remake of the 1983 movie Mr. Mom. It’s all too much.

Relatedly, the New York Times published a nice opinion piece on the joys of binge-reading. The writer, Ben Dolnick, found himself gulping down a book when a power outage cut him off from Netflix, and it turns out reading a bunch in a single sitting is great! It deepens the experience, infuses it with a pleasure that is elusive when you’re reading in 10-minute bursts on the train or before bed, and allows you to glean more from the plot and better draw connections.

I’d have to agree, having sped through a good chunk of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation over the weekend. It was…really nice! I also rewatched a bunch of Mad Men even though I’ve seen it a thousand times so, you know, balance.

Longread of the Week: A fantastic piece from Emily Nonko on Wall City, a magazine run exclusively by incarcerated journalists of San Quentin State Prison.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Verizon is looking to sell Tumblr, which a few months ago banned porn and saw its traffic nosedive as a result, and PornHub has already expressed interest in snatching it up. Pornhub’s VP says he can’t wait to restore the platform “to its former glory with NSFW content.” If the deal goes through, it will very much be the feel-good media story of the year.

— For The New Republic, Jacob Silverman wrote what I think is an excellent and deeply relatable look at the toll of scraping by as a freelancer in the gig economy. It made me think about the volume of talent we stand to lose when journalists inevitably drop out due to the unbearable financial and mental stressors (Silverman, by his own admission, benefits from privileges not afforded to others — it is the less-privileged who will likely opt for different career paths).

— Days after a couple of ambassadors for The Correspondent said they felt misled by the start-up’s crowdfunding campaign, which had initially touted a U.S. office and a U.S.-centric approach to news, the site posted an unsigned statement that said, unequivocally, “We screwed up.” This is after deflecting, calling the backlash an overblown Twitter controversy, and blaming it on readers’ misunderstandings.

— Vanity Fair’s Beto coverage, a shiny profile about the very relatable punk bassist, is rivaled only by Vanity Fair’s Buttigieg coverage, which calls the candidate “a policy wonk with sex appeal” who “shows blandness can sizzle.” Can’t wait to see what treatment they give Biden (oh god, I just ruined my own morning imagining it).

— Instagram and Facebook have banned far-right extremists like Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulos, leading to a meltdown from Trump and Trump Jr., who called the ban a “calculated silencing of conservatives” (telling). The truth is, of course, these platforms don’t do enough to deplatform far-right extremists — especially Twitter, whose CEO rushes to shield “conservatives” from perceived persecution.

— I think every writer has, at some point, been burned by a bad headline or otherwise had an editor put words in their mouth. A particularly egregious example of this happened to Michelle Yang, whose Huffington Post piece on receiving treatment for her bipolar disorder was stuck with a racist subhed on Facebook. Let writers approach headlines and subheds! (But also just don’t wildly misconstrue a piece and affix a writer with a sentiment they did not express…also don’t be racist).

Correction: As Lux Alptraum noted on the SH Listserv, Mindgeek, the owner of PornHub, is also quite exploitative and destructive for media and the adult entertainment industry!