Digest 05/24/2021

AP's unjust firing, the flaws of cryptocurrency coverage, hype-y restaurants, and more media commentary.

This week’s Study Hall Digest feature has been handed over to Rachel Hawley, a journalist for The New Republic and The Baffler among many other publications. Rachel writes on how journalists should cover cryptocurrency, and why the beat requires a new attitude. 

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THE AP FIRING AND THE END OF “OBJECTIVE” JOURNALISTS

Less than two weeks ago, Israel’s army bombed the building housing the AP’s offices in Gaza. Days later, the AP fired a young reporter over her supposed support for Palestinian liberation. Emily Wilder, 22, had only worked for the AP for a few months when conservatives began pressuring her employer to can her over her social media posts, which could be read as pro-Palestine. Though Wilder’s dismissal is obviously troubling on its own, it’s also a sign of a much larger problem at mainstream news organizations, which have again and again proved themselves more concerned with appeasing their conservative detractors than actually maintaining a sense of objectivity. Journalists have been punished over their support for Black Lives Matter and myriad other causes that conservatives take objection to. But we may be reaching a tipping point. After Wilder’s firing, she did not apologize but instead called out the AP for its double standards. And tens of thousands of people, including many journalists, voiced support for her. Perhaps the industry is finally realizing that ‘objectivity’ is a constantly shifting target that works more to keep the far-right happy than it does to further any journalistic standards. — P.E. Moskowitz

CRYPTOCURRENCY NEEDS A NEW KIND OF COVERAGE

I am not a business or finance journalist by any stretch of the imagination and until fairly recently, I had little interest in that corner of the media landscape. In the past six months, however, financial news and commentary has become a large part of my media diet, in part because 2021 has delivered a deluge of extremely weird, Extremely Online stories about money: the r/WallStreetBets-fueled GameStop short squeeze, the NFT craze, the Pokémon card bubble, and most recently, the cryptocurrency market crash. In a relatively short period of time, the world of cryptocurrency has gone from a relatively niche subject to a perennial hot topic in the national media, and everyone, from big legacy publications to clickbait farms, is setting their sights on the beat.

But, as is often the case with emergent technology, there have been some growing pains as a wide variety of publications have begun covering some aspect of the crypto-verse. This was especially apparent in February, when the rocketing NFT market left every publication simultaneously tasked with explaining the concept of non-fungible tokens to audiences who knew next to nothing about blockchain technology. The result was a flood of “explainers” with folksy headlines like “What’s this craze for NFTs all about, anyway?” and “Everything You Need to Know to Make It Through a Conversation About NFTs,” whose near-universal infantilizing tone — gee whiz, this is all just so confusing, isn’t it! — did little to elucidate the subject. 

Neither did the countless slack-jawed articles about the NFT artist Beeple, now a celebrity, or the oh-so-clever Times article that was itself (!) sold as an NFT. Even as more skeptical coverage and analysis began to proliferate — mostly focused on NFTs’ massive environmental impact and concern over an impending bubble collapse — comparatively little focus was given to the crypto miners and traders who had been buying up NFTs for years, partly to drive up the price of cryptocurrencies — and whose self-enrichment was, in a sense, the real heart of the NFT boom story.

Similarly, general audience coverage of fungible cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can sometimes overemphasize the industry’s weirdest aspects. n its coverage of the Dogecoin surge earlier this month, the Times leaned into the bizarro framing, taking a moment within the first three sentences of literally every article to guffaw at the fact that the currency began “as a joke,” while one CNN headline read “What is Dogecoin? How a joke became hotter than Bitcoin.” 

What is often omitted, or contained to a few sentences at the end, are arguably the most important questions: who’s wielding the power within the crypto market, what are their material interests, and how does everyone else stand to be affected? This sort of inquiry also requires an understanding of the crypto scene’s internal culture. There is no Bitcoin board of directors or centralized comms department, just an ungainly hierarchy of weird rich guys on the internet, whose proclaimed belief in the utopian promise cryptocurrency is inseparable from the fact that producing more true believers further enriches them. Few journalists thread this needle as well as The New Republic staff writer Jacob Silverman, whose work on the subject ranges from blistering refute of the crypto-sphere’s self-mythology to consideration of the technology’s long-term security and surveillance implications. 

Beyond the nail-biting prices and percentage changes that make up many headlines, journalists need to be more mindful of the embedded ideology of the cryptocurrency economy, the same way politics journalists need to consider their subjects’ motivations or business journalists the corporations’ bottom line — why source X might be giving quote Y. For the crypto-news consumer, this goes double: while legacy publications do often approach cryptocurrency topics with a healthy skepticism, many tech news sites whose core audience overlaps with the crypto scene frame issues of sustainability and ecological impact in particularly rosy terms. (Inverse, whose crypto coverage includes a fair amount of uncritically reported hype, posted a job opening last month for an “Elon Musk Reporter and Researcher”.) 

As cryptocurrency’s novelty in the mainstream consciousness wears out and we all become more acclimated to the concept of decentralized blockchain technology, I think we will be better able to find the signal amid the cryptoverse’s ample noise. Crypto is bizarre not because it is an outlier in an otherwise reasonable system, but because the system is itself mostly bizarre. After all, is becoming a millionaire by investing in Dogecoin unfathomably weirder than doing so by investing in Uber, a company that has a market value of $92 billion despite having literally never been profitable? Maybe, but not by much. — Rachel Hawley

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK  

Covering luxury culture as a journalist is difficult because it’s the opposite of breaking news, the opposite of vital importance, the opposite of the public interest (though the public is very interested). The writer on high-end, expensive art, products, and experiences must always be wary to temper their enthusiasm for the subject and cast a skeptical eye — the eye of the reader, not the eye of the luxury creator or participant. My favorite pieces of this genre are less about the subject than how the subject works, the economic and societal machinations behind your favorite chef, artist, musician, celebrity.

Helen Rosner, currently a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a pro. Her most recent piece is “How to Get a Table at Carbone,” an interrogation of high-end restaurants and the post-pandemic re-emergence of flashy luxury culture. The putative subject is the Major Food Group restaurant group and the thirstiness of patrons to dine there. But really it’s about the perception of fanciness itself, which persisted throughout quarantine. In lines like this, Rosner always nails the details of which cultural aspiration is made up, the signifiers of wealth and taste: “The city’s moneyed gastronauts stood at their enamelled-lava kitchen islands and tore into delivery bags of chicken soup with truffles and foie gras from Brooklyn Fare, caviar service from L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, or an eight-hundred-dollar D.I.Y. sushi box from Masa.” — Kyle Chayka

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Writer Kerry Howley and editors Ryu Spaeth and Justin Miller were just hired full-time by New York Magazine. Howley is a veteran freelancer for the magazine, author of big features like a profile of Reality Winner.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— The Daily Beast did a post-mortem on Choire Sicha’s time running the New York Times’s Styles section, finding that Sicha may have clashed with higher-ups based on his idiosyncratic management style, though no one disputes that he made the section a must-read. The article takes a weird turn into corporate drama around journalist Taylor Lorenz, who worked mainly under Sicha and has been unjustly targeted (both internally and externally) for her public profile on social media.

— For more background on Sicha, read Study Hall’s deep profile of the pioneering digital media editor, written by Jessica Wakeman in 2020.

— The German media conglomerate Axel Springer is in talks to buy Axios for $400 million+, according to The Information. Axel Springer previously bought Business Insider, which is on a tear lately with its subscription model.

— The New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project and the U.S. legacy of slavery, was blocked from a tenured position at UNC Chapel Hill by the school’s board because of “politics” aka “telling the truth.”