Study Hall Digest 5/14/2018

The big news of the week is just how much of a shitshow Univision is. It’s probably not shocking that a multinational corporation with little experience running digital operations would flounder in 2018, but it’s a little surprising just how much they’ve fucked up. The company’s financial woes all stem from a private equity deal made in 2007 that left the company with $10 billion in debt. Now high-paid consultants are saying the only way out is to trim essentially the entire company, including Gizmodo Media Group, by 35 percent. But the company has also been internally mismanaged—top execs hired their friends instead of actually qualified people and spent millions developing TV shows about things like sharks that no one watched.

The story also mentions that Gizmodo Media Group is probably the only profitable part of the company, but that it will nonetheless likely get hit with cuts. The real problem here is that TV news execs are some of the stupidest people. They ruined Al Jazeera (I used to work there); they ruined Fusion; they ruin everything they touch. The TV industry is accustomed to easy money from cable distribution deals and when that doesn’t happen (because it’s 2018 and people use the internet), they just throw up their hands and say, “welp I guess we better just fire everyone.”

The situation at Condé Nast is getting bleaker. Some unnamed but apparently big-name writers at Vogue, GQ and other Condé properties are complaining about their retainers being cut by as much as 40 percent. One writer even had to move to Philadelphia to deal with the impact (who?? I live here too! HMU!). Sucks all around, though it’s also worth mentioning that there’s a lot of money going to some of those writers who produce very little. That money could probably be better spent elsewhere, though it’s unlikely Condé will spend it on hiring younger, better writers, which they should.

BUT! Kyle Chayka writes in from the Good-Condé-News front: The New Yorker is increasingly prioritizing the web. A staff update shows the magazine building out its digital coverage, naming a new online news director and adding a full-time staffer to its new short-form news blog (!), The Current. The general editorial division seems to be between breaking news (aka politics) and culture (aka books). The updates are important for freelancers to know who to pitch, but they also demonstrate that the mag’s expansion into an online multimedia force is going well. It’s been more successful than just about any other legacy title at doing so!

Medium! What! Is! It! Doing!!!!!!! Ev Williams apparently gets bored every six months and completely changes the direction of his company. This time he decided to dismantle the membership program of small publications like Electric Literature with barely a warning, because, in the words of a Medium spokesperson, the publishers were “confusing” the platform’s own revenue model. That’s the surest way to endear yourself to writers, Medium! You’re doing great!!!! We’ll have a more in-depth story on this soon.

Tronc paid $15 million to its outgoing chairman/terrible person/sexual harasser/caricature-of-a-bad-media-boss Michael Ferro in addition to the $208 million he got in stock. In unrelated news: here’s how to build a guillotine.

Facebook’s algorithm that’s supposed to filter out fake and biased news has so far pushed down the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC and pushed up the rankings of Fox and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. Lol :l.

The saddest thing to me about Bari Weiss’s trash piece about a few conservatives that feel marginalized even though they have millions of followers and millions of dollars is that several editors looked at it and said, “yep, this is good to go, let’s give it this headline, let’s assign our best photographer to it.” It’d be one thing if Bari existed in a vacuum, but the Times throwing its institutional weight behind such a shit piece makes me :{

This was a depressing media week, so here’s a pup munchin on a flower. Ok bye!!!