Study Hall Digest 6/11/2018

This digest is written by a candidate for Study Hall’s Staff Writer position.

“We’ve been told for years that because you get prestige, you don’t get money,” said one print staffer at the New Yorker in a particularly brutal quote from New York Magazine’s excellent piece on the magazine’s newly formed union with the Newsguild of New York. It’s the kind of thing most young professionals in media have been told time and time again — take a pay cut because the job is at a celebrated media organization, or it’s a stepping stone to a better future, then work long hours, don’t complain, and keep your head down. It’s exactly this unspoken code the New Yorker’s union wants to eliminate, pushing against pay discrepancies, complicated overtime rules, and subcontracting. t’s also the same kind of logic that’s prevented the New Yorker from unionizing at least once before: a 2015 piece in n+1 detailed a previous effort by highlighting then-editor William’s Shawns anti-union campaign. His argument? Unions are anti-freedom.

While the union itself covers all of the New Yorker’s support staff — copy-editors, fact checkers, web producers, the social media team — it doesn’t actually include any of it’s staff writers, who despite the name, are all independent contractors and do not receive benefits including health insurance. Check out the full statement here.

“I thought that my biggest concern during this maternity leave would be the amount of diapers to change,” tweeted BuzzFeed France’s editor in chief Cecile Dehesdin in response to the news that her entire operation would be shut down. The move eliminates at least 12 jobs and is likely due to the fact that BuzzFeed missed their $350 million target for 2017 by more than $70 million. Look for more cuts to BuzzFeed’s news arm.

“There’s always a tension between a media company and a technology company around how we approach our work together,” said Campbell Brown, head of global news partnerships at Facebook, about the new series of original news programs Facebook is set to launch this upcoming summer. Let’s hope his words aren’t as foreboding as they seem, since Facebook hasn’t had the best luck when it comes to original programming.

Their previous attempts to woo media companies have been complicated: Facebook shells out large sums of money for orgs to make content, and once the money drops off, the news orgs stop making the content. In 2017 only 2 percent of the most engaged Facebook videos were posted by traditional publishers, and a 2018 report shows that all of us are primarily watching videos about babies and puppies. Also the new programming just sounds, well, um, bad: the list of shows includes On Location, “a daily news show that will show journalists around the globe as they report on-the-ground”; Anderson Cooper’s “vertically shot interactive program that will stream weekday evenings from New York City”; and, most confusingly, a weekly show from online media org ATTN, that “will feature social influencers breaking down the biggest issues.” Who wouldn’t want to get news updates from Instagram models???

Facebook is also shutting down its embattled Trending News module, but is launching two other new initiatives in its ongoing quest to Make Social News Happen: a breaking news label that will flash during developing stories and a “Today In” section focusing on local news and community goings-on.

The New York Times is experimenting with a customized weekly newsletter: Your Weekly Edition. The experiment’s been around for three weeks; it watches what you’re reading and rounds up links you might like using a mix of automated and editorial curation.

Columbia Journalism School has scooped up Raju Nasiretti as a professor of professional practice and director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship program. Nasiretti was most recently the CEO of Gizmodo Media Group, and his tenure there was complicated. In May, GMG’s special reports desk wrote a compulsively readable take-down of their parent company, Univision.

Media subtweet of the week: “Is the advice work for us as a temp for 2 years and then maybe we’ll consider you for a position here?” said Rebekah Entralgo Fernandez about NPR, responding to a CJR round-up of editors who explained what they look for during hiring decisions. The radio giant has a reputation for keeping contractors around for years with only the fleeting hope of a staff job.

What not to do after a celebrity death: Flood the zone with trash clickbait, like Newsweek appeared to do after news of Anthony Bourdain’s death broke. (Reminder: that company still sucks.) For an actual remembrance, see Helen Rosner in the New Yorker.

And some late-breaking news: The Outline appears to have closed its “Power” vertical and let go of several staffers. The Outline was supposed to illuminate the powerful forces that control our world, so this seems to make the publication much less unique. What gives????