Study Hall Digest 12/11/2017
Hi
We might be at a turning point in how the media gets funded. After another week of layoff horror stories (the new owners of LA Weekly are so incompetent they can’t even run an ultimate frisbee game or the paper’s social media accounts; Cracked is pivoting back to written content and firing a bunch of people after an unsuccessful pivot to video), it seems like the idea that advertising is not a sustainable revenue model is picking up steam. Mainstream outlets like the Economist and The Atlantic are pushing for more online media companies like Vice and BuzzFeed to go directly to their readers for money. I think I’ve said here before that no one would pay for BuzzFeed’s content, but their bounce rate is lower than the New York Times’—only 34 percent of readers leave the site after reading one article, compared with 54 percent of Times readers—so maybe I was wrong.
There are sites like The Information, which has 10,000 subscribers who pay $399 a year, and Politico, and a bunch of other niche sites, but whether normal people will pay for normal news remains a big question. A new media platform called Civil is supposed to launch in a few months. It already has a publication in the works called Populi with some high-profile names attached (including Sasha Frere-Jones, which like….why would you hire him?). Civil says it’ll allow people to pay for crowdfunded journalism with digital currency, and pay writers with the same currency. It all sounds very futuristic and well-intentioned but I’m not sure anyone wants to pay for crowdfunded journalism with Ethereum coins anymore than they want to pay for it with dollars, and that hasn’t worked out too well. So, good luck, I guess, to Civil.
MSNBC is stupid and panders to right-wing trolls, but what else is new? All the TV networks are terrible!!!!
Snapchat is trying to market itself as somehow more ethical than Facebook and Twitter because it doesn’t mix its news and branding and personal feeds together??? IDK.
Lol:
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