Study Hall Digest 10/30/2017

Hi

What’s going on at BuzzFeed? As other new media companies like Fusion/Splinter/Gizmodo, Gothamist/DNA, and Vice unionize, BuzzFeed has been mysteriously absent from the conversation. Two years ago, Jonah Peretti tried to convince his staff that a union wouldn’t work at BuzzFeed. And since then there hasn’t been much news from the company or its employees. It appears BuzzFeed wants to go public, which could make unionizing more important now than before. All in all, BuzzFeed is much better at keeping a tight lid on its scandals than most other media companies. One of its reporters wrote that controversial story about that private list of Shitty Media Men, and then BuzzFeed sent a memo to its staff addressing its problems with “workplace conduct,” but it has so far avoided the public scrutiny and high-profile firings that places like Vox have experienced recently. Meanwhile, the company is pivoting more and more to video and entertainment, though it’s not clear how that will affect its news operation. The rapid changes give its employees all the more reason to be scared of layoffs, restructurings and shifting and eroding labor conditions, which should give them all the more reason to form a union. (And maybe with a union its employees wouldn’t have to write a constant stream of groveling bullshit?) Anyone have any info??? Email me. 🙂 (It can be anonymous.)

Shitty Media Men aren’t only shitty, they often control the narrative around harassment, gender, power and everything else. As Melissa Gira Grant points out, this is just more proof that objective journalism can be a guise to prevent those in power from being held accountable.

Congrats to Jezebel and its new editor Koa Beck. The site seems to be going strong despite all the shakeups at Gawker Gizmodo. I can’t really think of any place that competes for the same audience or publishes the same kind of stuff.

Man, who would’ve thunk Terry Richardson was a fucking creep? Not like anyone warned you, Condé.

The LA Times is trying to unionize. Woo.

You can glean the same lesson about publishing from two very different publications—Jacobin and a tiny Michigan-based blog called the Saline Post: Don’t depend on ads, go directly to your community for support. (That’s how SH Digest works, too. ;))

Speaking of which, remember when big publishers all excitedly gave Facebook their content for free, and started relying heavily on Facebook for traffic? Well now Facebook has a message to publishers: Fuck you.

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Two pieces of advice for freelancers: Ask for support, and don’t publish everything you write.