Study Hall Digest 7/31/2017

Hi

What makes an alt-weekly viable in 2017? The Baltimore City Paper is shutting down this year, leaving the city with the staid and flailing Baltimore Sun and really nothing else good news-wise. BCP’s former editor Baynard Woods has a good post-mortem of the institution. What killed it? The usual things: corporate greed (in the form of being bought out by their adversary, The Sun), a changing industry, dwindling ad sales. Their corporate owners announced that they’d be shutting down the paper the same day they announced they’d recognize its union. There are signs of hope (kind of) in the alt-weekly sector though. Seattle’s Stranger, and New York’s Village Voice are still trudging along, publishing hard-hitting news and big features. A lot of the best reporting I’ve seen this year have come from alt-weeklies in smaller markets that don’t usually get national recognition. But none have figured out a sustainable business model. And that fucks up the media ecosystem in general. Alt-weeklies used to be feeders into larger organizations for young journalists looking to prove their chops. Where do young reporters’ ambitious, reported features go nowadays?

Choire Sicha is headed to the New York Times to oversee its Styles section. Seems like a good fit and a good sign the Times is keeping with…the times. Sure there are edgier people, but there are also way less edgy people, such as most people who work at the Times, so way to stretch your wings, Grey Lady!

Snopes, the site that tells people whether things are true, raised $500k in one day. TBH I’m a big fan of Snopes because it proves that journalism doesn’t have to be so journalism-y on the web. There was one point, maybe when Vox launched in 2014 (it was gonna have all those “cards” with information, remember???), that it seemed sites were experimenting with form more. What happened?

Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, which is a hip name for an investment group, is acquiring a majority stake in The Atlantic. Also, The Atlantic is profitable, despite (because of?) all of their terrible takes and the fact that a war-mongerer is their editor-in-chief.

I’m sure everyone has seen The New Yorker’s Scaramucci interview. Fun stuff. But has anyone noticed that TNY and the Times have published essentially unedited interviews with the Trump admin recently? Seems kind of odd, not bad, but odd. I think it shows what an adversarial press looks like—i.e. willing to make politicians look as stupid as they are. I can’t imagine The New York Times would publish an embarrassing interview with an Obama official word-for-word (then again, Obama and his officials were a lot less stupid). Let’s see if the press stays adversarial and willing to make fools of politicians after Trump leaves (or after he declares martial law and stays president forever or whatever).

This newsletter is surely better than a Game of Thrones newsletter run by the Times, yet we don’t have 60,000 subscribers. What gives????

Final Thoughts

I’m drinking a rosé spritzer on a porch on the Jersey Shore while writing this. I highly recommend it. —Enav