Study Hall Digest 3/5/2018

We’re getting a clearer look at exactly why the New York Times op-ed page is terrible. Long story short, it seems like its editor James Bennet has a very confused and conflicted notion of what opinions are worthy of publishing. In a leaked transcription of a meeting provided to the Huffington Post, Bennet claims that the op-ed page will always be pro-capitalist, but that beyond that there aren’t many rules about who should be published. An Israeli settler who believes Palestinians should not have their own state is a good voice to represent, as is Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, but that’s okay because, according to Bennet, they’re balanced out by having published Bernie Sanders’ op-eds too. It seems to me the overarching problem here is that Bennet, like most people at the Times, live under the impression that there’s a way to balance any selection of voices toward some universal neutral. No one at the Times wants to admit that journalists and editors are always making curatorial decisions that are inevitably influenced by their politics. We’d be better off if Bennet could just say outright that he is a conservative contrarian who does not want to give space to leftist or progressive thought, as opposed to couching his beliefs in nonsensical platitudes about “setting the parameters of conversation,” or whatever.

And on the topic of terrible leadership at legacy publications: Slate has a really deep look at how Newsweek became the clickiest of clickbait farms . Reporters on every beat were goaded into producing 500,000 to a million pageviews a month and often fired if they complained. The company offered bonuses in the low hundreds for getting hundreds of thousands of clicks, which reporters felt like they needed to hit because their pay started in the low $40ks. Can’t really imagine where the company goes from here except further into the dumps.

If you told me that a website that promises to make a chart about every inane thing and gives you probabilities for things you never wanted the probabilities of, would be a money-loser, I’d say “no fucking shit.” But it seems Nate Silver will land on his feet anyway.

LA Weekly left the spotlight quickly after it was purchased and gutted by a team of shady millionaires who promised not to turn it into a right-wing propaganda machine. But now that’s exactly what they’re doing, albeit pretty subtly.

DeMocrAcy DiEs In DArknEsS.

Okay onto the good news: TNR has hired Rachel Rosenfelt, the founder of The New Inquiry, as its publisher. Rosenfelt is a bold choice, mostly because she’s an unapologetic leftist, but also because the things she’s run in the past—TNI, VersoBooks.com—are experimental and not huge profit-makers. Best of luck!

Tom Scocca, formerly of Gawker and The Awl, is launching an opinion site called Hmmm Daily, which seems like it could publish cool and good opinions. But it’s being run on the new blockchain-backed Civil platform, which I still feel pretty Hmmm about, so we’ll see.

I would listen to this podcast!

True ;/