Study Hall Digest 2/5/2018

Hi

It’s been a really, really, really, really, really bad week for local news. Most depressing to me is the bankruptcy of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia because it had a lot going for it: a strong investigative team, local ownership, a Pulitzer. None of it was enough. But not to fear, Facebook is here just in the nick of time, or like 10 years too late, to push more local news into your feed.

Even if the new algorithm gives a leg up to what little local news remains, there’s a much deeper problem: internet ads will never be sufficiently profitable for publishers. The only places they truly benefit are tech behemoths like Facebook and Amazon. So while news companies keep jumping from platform to platform, hoping to get new readers, praying for a favorable algorithm to come their way, they’re ignoring that no matter how many readers they get, they’ll still be screwed if they’re relying just on ads (if the New York Times and BuzzFeed have struggled under the ad-supported model, what do you think that means for tiny papers across the country?).

We’re at a breaking point though: internet users are extremely sick of ads, and new research suggests they’re rotting our brains, and rotting the internet, transforming it from a space of information sharing into a casino-esque nightmare of machines trying to grab your attention and monetize it by the nanosecond. That’s largely because the United States has left internet ads virtually unregulated (that’s not true in much of Europe and elsewhere). So for now, at least until we get someone else in the White House, we’re stuck with this horrible situation.

Cartoon villain Peter Thiel has invested in HQ Trivia. So I guess now I have another reason to never download HQ Trivia.

And I have another reason to hate the New York Times, but this time not for the content they produce (though there’s always room for that too), but for the managers who hire and fire the people to produce it. Welcome back to Glenn Thrush, who has been punished for sexual harassment in the stupidest way possible.

The L.A. Times’ new editor Jim Kirk remains a mystery, even to his own staff, though it appears he’s pretty anti-union. But the shady scab shop that Tronc appeared to be setting up in the last few weeks—hiring star reporters and editors under a different, non-union contract—has lost at least one of its most prominent members, so that’s good.

If you want to read a rebuttal to that silly Atlantic piece about why white collar unions are problematic, here’s a good one with a depressing conclusion: “White-collar workers aren’t organizing because they feel secure, but because they have more in common with precarious blue-collar workers than ever.”

We now know how much Felix Salmon made at Fusion. We also know that several other editors there are making over $300k. So how is Univision planning on making money with Fusion Media Group, given these high salaries and their low page view numbers? Sure cutting $400,000 from their budget helps, but I’d imagine there’s gonna be more cutting down the line :/.

In light of Texas Monthly making some weird, unethical advertorial deal with Bumble, here’s a look at the good work the mag has done.

And instead of looking at that Katie Roiphe piece, I recommend you look at this.

An evergreen reminder: