Study Hall Digest 4/23/2018

This week we’re getting an inside look at the shitstorm at L.A. weekly, thanks to a former marketing coordinator at the paper, Thomas Gallegos. Gallegos was asked by the new right-wing owners to not only serve as a marketing coordinator but also write for the site. They’ve apparently destroyed the firewall between editorial and business. Gallegos also revealed that one of the paper’s new editor’s is a fanboy of right-wing maniac Dinesh D’Souza and other-right-wing-maniac Ayn Rand. And he confirmed that the paper did indeed buy fake Twitter followers in order to boost their numbers once #BoycottLAWeekly started convincing people to unfollow the paper.

Speaking of millionaires doing bad things to publications, Kyle Chayka writes in about Harper’s:

Harper’s fired its editor-in-chief James Marcus on April 13. Marcus was the magazine’s third EIC in two years —— Chris Cox was fired in February 2016 (he’s now at GQ) and his interim replacement, staff editor Ellen Rosenbush, moved out for Marcus that March. Rosenbush is now back in as editorial director. Cox clashed with the magazine’s owner Rick MacArthur over too radical a cover change; Marcus’s fate was sealed when he pushed back against Katie Roiphe’s reviled take on #metoo.

The revolving door shows how much MacArthur exerts control over what the magazine looks like. Any EIC seems to be ultimately secondary to his positions. “He’s looking for a doormat at this point,” Marcus told the NYT.

Apparently there’s a huge generational gap in newsrooms: Old people are good employees who understand their bosses and young people just like tweeting. Older people are good at writing, but young people just care about PC bullshit (can anyone figure out who this quote might be from: “I actually feel like I’m walking on eggshells trying not to offend millennial editors,” says a writer who’s worked at newspapers and online. “I’m constantly told by younger editors that my jokes are politically incorrect; by the time my stories are published, my writing has been sanitized.”). What this article doesn’t really cover, and what seems glaringly obvious to me, is that the generational gap in newsrooms has much more to do with pay and work standards than culture: if you’re expected to be producing 50 posts a week for half the money your older counterparts make, you’re probably less willing to tow the company line on things like sharing your opinions on Twitter.

BuzzFeed now has a newsletter about fake news. I feel like the media really overestimates how many people give a shit about fake news???

Apple, which bought digital subscription magazine service Texture a few months ago, 23 of their own for news and magazines. Seems like it could be a good source of revenue for organizations if it’s done the right way!