Digest 3/8/2021

Journalism after a year of COVID, David Brooks, New Yorker union, and more.

JOURNALISM, ONE YEAR LATER

This week marks the one-year anniversary of New York implementing lockdown measures early in the COVID-19 pandemic, that moment when the crisis became terrifyingly real in the US. It was when everything started to change — restaurants closed, even brief outings were limited, and people (New Yorkers at first, with others to follow) began working from home. This included journalists: we suddenly found ourselves tasked with getting information to the public while the usual avenues of doing so were severely restricted. Newsrooms shuttered, reporters went from on-the-street interviews to making phone calls from their apartments, and for the most part, it has remained that way for a year now. 

A little over a month ago, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism published a report looking at how the pandemic year has changed journalism. Some key takeaways:

• The standard of in-person reporting has been replaced by Zoom interviews; journalists turned their apartments into makeshift studios, inviting news consumers into their homes. 
• User-generated content became more common, as journalists’ ability to capture footage in-person was limited. The New York Times even ran a quarantine diary feature in which they published footage that was filmed by the subjects themselves.
• When journalists did go out into the world, the methods have changed. Safety protocols have been put in place to protect journalists and their subjects — distanced interviews by journalists equipped with masks have become the norm.
•  The public is more desperate for information than ever, creating a higher demand for service journalism; at the same time, false information has spread rapidly on social media, creating a greater demand for journalists setting the record straight.

I was curious about how a reporter who has been covering the pandemic experienced these shifts, so I talked to Rachel Holliday Smith, Manhattan reporter for The City. She noted the difficulty of moving from in-person to remote reporting — community meetings are a significant source of story ideas for local newsrooms, and it’s difficult to replace that with phone correspondence. “I’m just calling everyone I know to keep up with them in a more real way,” she said. “There’s no coffee meetings, there’s no gossiping in the back of community board meetings anymore…it’s hard to get that chatty [dynamic] that spark[ed] ideas for stories all the time in the previous world.” 

Still, Smith says that the transition has a silver lining. Before, reporters couldn’t possibly be physically present at every meeting; now they’re just a click away on Zoom. “I can throw on a headset and Zoom into a billion meetings a week,” she said.

I was most struck by Smith’s observations on how the past year has changed her newsroom’s relationship to its audience. The Newmark report noted an increased demand for service journalism, and the trend has persisted as newsrooms provide readers with information they need to navigate an ongoing crisis. At The City, this has included explainers telling people how to donate blood or homemade masks, or how best to stay safe during the early days of the pandemic.

“I’ve always been a fan of service journalism, and in the past year it’s become super clear that it’s extremely valuable [and] necessary,” Smith said. “It feels like almost every story we’re doing is service journalism, even if it’s not packaged that way.”

The City’s newsroom has incorporated more direct engagement with readers, who tell reporters what news they need most urgently through a combination of direct messages, tip lines, and Google forms. The crisis has accelerated an already growing trend in media: a focus on reader engagement and a view of that relationship as reciprocal.

A publishing model that centers reader interaction was gaining traction before the pandemic, but it had not been “implemented fully,” she noted. Now, it has been. “This is a direct example of why [reader engagement] is quite important and not just an exercise,” Smith told me. “We need to be talking to the people who read us…because they genuinely know more than we do, and they will tell us what they need. What else is a newspaper but delivering the news that people need?”

BROOKS LEAVES WEAVE

I have previously reported that the New York Times’ draconian policies for its travel section dictate that even freelancers are forbidden from taking paid trips for other publications if they wish to write for the Times. This would lead one to assume the Times takes potential conflicts of interest very, very seriously — unless, apparently, they are David Brooks. BuzzFeed recently reported that Brooks, one of the paper’s star op-ed columnists, has been collecting a salary from an Aspen Institute program called Weave, which Brooks founded himself and has referenced in past columns. Facebook donated $250,000 to the Aspen Institute to help fund the project in December 2018, while Brooks has written about Facebook in his column and even blogged for Facebook’s corporate site two weeks ago. Brooks has resigned from his paid position at Weave (he’ll remain a volunteer) and the Times is adding disclosures to past columns that mention the program. Still, it seems like a slap on the wrist compared to the consequences for violating similar policies elsewhere at the paper.

Weave is classic David Brooks: a “social fabric project” that deploys something called the “relationalist manifesto” to cure society’s wide-ranging ills by replacing an overly individualist sensibility with one of connectivity. Practically, this means building community and reaching out to neighbors, but beyond these vague imperatives, it is made clear that “Weaving is a way of life and a state of mind, not a set of actions,” and that certain people are “Weavers” in their communities and others are not. In short, it correctly identifies we are a deeply individualist culture, but rather than seeking institutional changes, it evangelizes an amorphous feel-good ethos. One thing is for sure: David Brooks’ unnamed poor friend who is afraid of Italian cured meats is not a Weaver.  

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— WIRED’s new editor-in-chief is Gideon Lichfield who takes over from Nicholas Thompson (who left earlier this year to join the Atlantic). 

— Paris Review editor Emily Nemens resigned from the magazine to work on her second novel, just weeks after web editor Nadja Spiegelman left to launch a new quarterly at Astra House Publishing. 

— Former managing editor at The New Yorker and then editor at Businessweek Silvia Killingsworth is heading to Bloomberg to head up its Americas Editing Hub. 

— Matt Fuller jumps from HuffPost to the Daily Beast.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Freelancer Taylor Moore made this Media Twitter bingo board that made me wonder, once again, why I’m on this cursed website.

— As the New Yorker union continues to battle Condé Nast management for fair wages, it posted some dispiriting testimonials from union members, like this one from an anonymous staffer who learned their counterparts at other Conde titles were out-earning them by $30,000 to $40,000.

— The Globe and Mail deleted and apologized for an essay titled “I’m channeling Anne Frank’s spirit in lockdown,” for obvious reasons. 

— Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri is facing a rare criminal trial after she was arrested while covering the summer protests for racial justice, with the police claiming she failed to disperse when ordered and didn’t identify as press until she was in custody. This is both exceedingly stupid and alarming with regards to press freedoms.

— CBS paid a licensing fee between $7 million and $9 million to Oprah Winfrey’s production company, Harpo Productions, to air that Meghan and Harry interview, and the network was seeking $325,000 for 30 seconds of commercial time during the interview. I’d be willing to bet CBS streaming service Paramount Plus saw a sharp uptick in subscriptions yesterday, the majority of which will be canceled if people remember.

— I was expecting Twitter to explode when Ben Smith dropped his Sunday column on downtown print zine The Drunken Canal and the New York edgelord/COVID-flaunting media scene, but the Harry and Meghan interview dropped shortly after publication, perhaps sparing Media Twitter another round of discourse.