Study Hall Digest 7/16/2018

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Popula Wants Your Weird Local Stories: “Alt-global” publication Popula is now up and running on Civil — a platform I do not fully understand YET, but give me a goddamn second! — and is teeming with features, personal musings, comics, and more. What is alt-global, you ask? Editor Willy Blackmore puts it this way: Imagine a local alt-weekly sensibility on a global scale. Popula wants writers, particularly those not situated in major media hubs like New York, to write about local figures, institutions and happenings — things they’re passionate about that don’t make it into the national publications. The weird, the unique, the niche.

“We do want something that you feel you can kind of tell from a unique perspective, and is not necessarily the first thing that you would think about on a subject or about a place or on a person — something that’s a little different,” said Blackmore.

Like dearly departed weird content hub The Awl, Popula aims to be a destination for the stories you feel passionately about but may not otherwise find a home for — so shoot your weirdest shot to [email protected].

In the meantime, read this incredible, sprawling Anthony Bourdain interview from Maria Bustillos, part of Popula’s first-ever Tempo magazine, which runs on Sundays. The rest of their content thus far is distinctive in that I can’t imagine it being published elsewhere (as Blackmore suggested) either because it is quite niche or because it feels experimental. Check it out.

Bustle’s Bryan Goldberg Bought Gawker: Here’s an interesting plot twist. Bryan Goldberg is the dude who raised roughly $6 million to launch Bustle, a women’s site to which Gawker attributed the “industrialization of confession” by prying intensely personal details from underpaid female writers to keep that conveyor belt of confessionals moving. But that’s not even close to the most damning thing Gawker wrote about Goldberg! It literally published a piece titled “The Relentless and Well-Deserved Mockery of Bryan Goldberg.” And now that very same Bryan Goldberg has purchased that very same Gawker.com — weird, no? That Bryan Goldberg whose greatest hits include:

— Claiming men do not read books (maybe not men who use women’s legs as makeshift desks, you doofus!)

— Defending paying writers as little as $100 a day for four to six posts

— Touting the creation of a women’s site with diverse content as though this were an ingenious concept and as though The Awl, The Hairpin, The Toast, etc., etc. did not exist

Anyway, Goldberg wrote to staff that he has no immediate plans to revive Gawker but is “very excited” about the future of the site. Well, we’re all on pins and needles!

Saying Farewell to a Queer Pioneer: The magazine Hello Mr.’s tenth issue will be its last, and as a send-off, editor Fran Tirado reminisces in them on the ways in which the groundbreaking publication helped lend the depth and complexity to the visible queer narrative he felt had been missing from available in gay media back in 2013, consisting largely of drag queens and Neil Patrick Harris. “Much of what Hello Mr. has strived for since day one is that complexity,” writes Tirado. “In the first issue, our call to ‘progress’ was a need for deeper and more meaningful stories. And now, as the Executive Editor of this magazine and official ‘gatekeeper,’ we have scouted and published deeper stories right there in our pages.”

Working for Viceland Seems Like a Nightmare: The podcast and talk show hosts Desus and Mero did not choose to leave Vice when they did, they say — but the release sounds merciful given the apparent hellishness of the experience. In short, the network was overly demanding while skimping on resources. “The channel wanted us to die for this fucking network,” said Desus. “We’re also the highest rated show on the network, put some respect on our name, have someone come massage my feet.” Seems reasonable!

Buzzfeed Happens So Much: Will it never be sated?? After launching a morning show on Twitter and announcing series on Oxygen, Netflix and Hulu, BuzzFeed has now announced the launch of a new interview show on Facebook Watch called Profile, in which Audie Cornish of NPR’s All Things Considered will interview guests before a live studio audience. Vanity Fair calls it “a millennial answer to the in-depth interview style pioneered by Dick Cavett, Larry King, and Charlie Rose.” Facebook is apparently shelling out up to $10 million to outlets like Buzzfeed using its platform so I’m guessing we’ll see more of this format from online publications.

Own Your Shitty Takes, for Posterity: A writer penned a bad take for Business Insider about Scarlett Johansson’s almost playing a trans man (Johansson has since backed out of the project). I don’t feel the need to repeat anything she wrote. It was willfully obtuse and boring and predictable. I’m bringing it up because Business Insider deleted the post after the backlash, which in my mind is a huge no-no for reputable media organizations. Issue an apology! Tack on an editor’s note! But you made the decision to publish the piece of shit, so you should have to keep it on your website.

MTV News Wants a Do-Over: After axing its staff in June 2017 to “pivot to video,” MTV News has now put out a call for contributing writers to fill the same gaps it created. MTV’s Former Senior National Correspondent Jamil Smith spoke for everyone, I think, when he responded simply: “Sorry, we’re all busy now.”

And Now, a Mini-Lecture — Some Tips for Journos Debating Whether to Document Strangers in Public: The dizzying “plane bae” saga has seemingly come to an end, with compulsive tweeter Rosey Blair issuing an apology for dragging her unwilling plane seatmate into the limelight and the recipient of that unwanted attention strongly rebuking Blair’s actions. Through a lawyer, the woman said, “I did not ask for and do not seek attention,” adding the whole ordeal “is not a romance — it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.”

Blair is absolutely not a journalist — though she claimed to be “some strange variety” of one in a since-deleted Instagram post — but her actions do raise ethical questions for those of us who professionally document what we see. This week, I spoke to a few journalism professors who teach ethics about the ethical issues inherent in documenting private citizens in public. Samuel Freedman, a professor who teaches media ethics at Columbia Journalism School, said journalists should interrogate the newsworthiness of what is happening before them — if the actions of a private citizen have no “news value,” then sharing their actions is an invasion of their privacy, he argued.

“People who have captured [footage] of flight attendants dragging people bodily off planes for minor infractions — that’s a public good,” he said. “I think putting an event like that out there is totally legitimate. If you’re talking hypothetically about a couple that are having a marital spat just between themselves and some nosy person nearby decides to film it and put it out there, I think that’s really egregious.”

Ruth Hochberger, a lawyer and former editor-in-chief of the New York Law Journal, who currently teaches media ethics at at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and at Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, send me an email with three questions we can ask ourselves when debating whether what is unfolding before us has news value:

(1) “Is the subject newsworthy? Example: if Kim Kardashian is falling down drunk in a restaurant, snap away. If you or I are, who cares? Unless we’re about to get into a car and drive away with a six-month-old in a car seat.”

(2) “Is the activity being documented newsworthy? If a police officer is beating an unarmed, defenseless teenager on the ground, it may be a public service to document the action.”

(3) “Is the activity causing public disruption? As an example, an editor at the New York Times jumped off the roof and committed suicide. While he was not well known, and his action was not particularly newsworthy, the streets in Times Square were closed off to traffic. This, in itself, made the action worthy of documentation. The inconvenienced public has a right to know — and see — what the cause of that was.”

These are ethical considerations, of course, and not legal ones. While it is incumbent upon us as professional journalists to interrogate the ethics of our documentation, a non-journalist with an iPhone is, unfortunately, probably not asking themselves these questions. Though maybe if any good comes from the “plane bae” debacle, it is that more laymen fancying themselves “citizen journalists” will be more likely to think twice.

Longread of the Week: I know I’m late to the party, but this New Yorker profile of Ottessa Moshfegh made me lose my goddamn mind. I tend to roll my eyes at those I deem overly precious about writing but fuck that. I could not get enough of the sublime weirdness, the terrifying intensity, the unapologetic self-seriousness. I love it so much, I want to live in this profile. I want to read everything there is to read by and about Moshfegh but I almost certainly do not want to meet her because I would melt into the ground under her gaze.

Tweet of the Week: “to give you an idea of how it’s been going with univision, had a meeting with a top exec who asked, and i quote, ‘gizmodo is the tech one right?’” — Jill Shulz, VP of Media Operations at Fusion.

SHORT LINKS:

— Kylie Jenner is not a self-made billionaire: Though Forbes disagrees. Read its breathless profile if you want to sink into a deep depression, and read this piece about how everyone mad at Kylie is actually just sexist if you want to fall even deeper into one.

— The toll of being laid off from your dream job: Sarah Hagi at Hazlitt on the hollowness of the “it’s not personal, it’s business” line.

— In pure and endearing corrections news: The Washington Post mistakes ClickHole for a legitimate news site.

— Gizmodo is doing very well, actually: Audiences of its sites continue to grow. So what’s Univision’s fucking deal?

— Pod Save America is Coming to HBO: The podcast will be producing a series of hour-long specials on the midterm elections. Exciting?

— New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova is now a professional poker player: For those of us who need side hustles to make this writing thing work, I give you our new queen.