Study Hall Digest 9/4/2018

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

BREAKING: Six Staffers at The Outline Have Been Fired

After raising millions off the idea that The Outline would change how readers engage with online advertising, the site has come up short and is feeling the pressure from investors to be profitable. That seems to be why Josh Topolsky’s site fired six people today, including the site’s two remaining staff writers and some engineering staff. According to a former staffer, each of the six workers was called into the office this morning and told the bad news by Topolsky personally.

“They said this was because of money stuff,” the staffer said. “They seemed really sad about it, which made me think it wasn’t something they wanted to do.”

While the former staffer didn’t want to blame anyone in particular for The Outline’s money woes, rumour has it that management essentially admitted to mishandling money, spending it in the wrong areas of development, leading to the firing of two staffers in June (which Topolsky first blamed on the performance of the staffers, and then later apologized).

The former staffer said that The Outline could have worked harder to retain people, but mostly blamed the media industry at large for the firings:

“I just feel numb. This industry has kind of conditioned me to continually feel dispensable and insecure, so this round of layoffs is just confirmation that I am right to feel that way,” they said. “At these media companies, there’s a lot of importance placed on flash and optics. And I think [these layoffs] have proven that without a real, on-the-ground mission that extends beyond the media world, any new media company is dispensable too.”

REPORT: The LAnd Rises From the Ashes of LA Weekly

Last year, the once-beloved LA Weekly was thrown into chaos when a mysterious new owner swooped in and fired the majority of the staff, prompting a boycott campaign led by former staffers. Jeff Weiss was one of those staffers, who mourned the loss of a publication where he’d been a contributor for roughly a decade. Now, Weiss has announced the launch of a new local publication called The LAnd to tell the stories important to Angelinos that LA Weekly can no longer tell.

“The one thing we agreed on was, it was never about the LA Weekly, it was never about, ‘Oh, I hate these Republicans that bought the paper,’” Weiss told Study Hall. “It was really about, how dare they do this to the city of Los Angeles, how dare they do this to something that had been such a civic institution.

“The idea was to be the exact opposite of what this corrupt and crooked LA Weekly and become.”

Joining Weiss at the helm are LA Weekly veterans Jennifer Swann and Sarah Bennett — there is no “editor in chief,” per se, or any hierarchical structure, explained Weiss. The editors are all on equal footing.

The group has solicited pitches from other Weekly defectors and local writers who are plugged in to stories the community craves, explained Weiss. The first issue is tentatively slated for a December release, though it is unclear how often it will be published — that will largely depend on funding, which is still being sought (though they have already raised a “decent amount of money” to get the project off the ground, said Weiss).

The publication will focus on parts of the city where “the news cameras might not come” unless there is a crime to report, said Weiss. The team wants to produce stories that matter to locals, but also have a universal relevance.

“None of us have any illusions; I don’t know how many issues we’ll publish,” said Weiss. “It’s not going to be weekly, not going to be a monthly at first, but we just want to do good work and cover the city we care about with the diligence and respect and focus that it really deserves.”

Vice is Launching a New Jersey Food Court??

Munchies, Vice’s food publication, has inked a deal with a developer to operate a food court in a ginormous, nearly-failed New Jersey shopping mall. It’s unclear at this point exactly what will be included, but chefs who have worked with Munchies will be invited and a cocktail party situation may be in the works. The brick-and-mortar enterprise isn’t necessarily a novelty in the world of food publishing — Buzzfeed’s Tasty recently set up stalls in Madison Square Garden, and Munchies itself has in the past partnered with Chef’d on meal kits and hosted events at the Vice headquarters. It’s the natural progression — print pivots to video which pivots to real life!

BuzzFeed Could Get a Partial Paywall

It’s an age-old dilemma — you want readers to have well-reported news on important issues at their fingertips so they can not be idiots, but you also want…money. Especially when you’re falling short of revenue targets using traditional streams like advertising. BuzzFeed is attempting to confront this troubling discrepancy by piloting a membership program with Google — it’s only being tested now, and there is no members-only content, but the hope is that softly teasing out donations of $5-$100 from readers will build a membership base with perks. A “partial paywall” could be a reasonable compromise, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told Digiday. This could be an initial salvo in Google’s attempt to create subscription tools for media (since they already ruined it with advertising).

The New Yorker Festival Backtracks on Giving Bannon a Platform

When Steven Bannon was announced as a headliner at this year’s New Yorker Festival, to be interviewed by David Remnick, the magazine quickly learned a whole lot of famous people object to sharing a stage with an infamous white nationalist. John Mulaney was among the first to drop out, calling it “PT Barnum level horseshit,” and was quickly followed by Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff and Jim Carrey. Roxane Gay pulled an essay she had in the works for the magazine’s website. David Remnick soon issued a statement announcing he had had disinvited Bannon from the event, noting his own staff had internally opposed Bannon’s inclusion. He explained the objective had been to publically challenge Bannon through a “rigorous interview,” not let him broadcast his views unfiltered. That may have been his intention, but the fact remains that compensating someone to appear on stage as a festival headliner strikes a decidedly different tone than interviewing someone (unpaid) for journalistic purposes, which Remnick ultimately recognized. But the larger issue is that liberal intellectuals often see reprehensible people, who would deny the humanity of some of a festival’s audience members, as worthy debate partners whose ideas are worthy of engagement. Racism and xenophobia are not thought experiments and the world is not a philosophy class.

Anyway, I have no doubt many will agree with Bannon that the turnaround signals Remnick’s caving to a mob, plus free speech, blah blah blah. I’m tired already. The First Amendment doesn’t codify anyone’s right to a festival stage, nor does it mandate anyone share a stage with someone they find morally repugnant.

Interview is Back, Baby! And You Better Believe Those Freelancers Are Never Getting Paid!

Remember when Interview Magazine tanked after filing for bankruptcy and the magazine itself was bizarrely quiet about the whole thing? I thought that was weird at the time. As it turns out, it was never really gone for good — owner Peter Brant literally bought the magazine back…from himself. And in doing so wipes out the $3.3 million debt he owed to hundreds of unpaid staffers, freelancers, and agencies. Brant’s daughter Kelly, the magazine’s president, saw the bright side in a memo that noted the outpouring of grief over the magazine’s closure gained a new, young audience. Ok! Good luck getting new, young writers — or any writers — to contribute to your publication!

The Unbearable Authenticity of Being Salena Zito

What is there to say about self-styled populist expert Salena Zito? She would like you to know she has a shit ton of miles on her Jeep from driving through back roads – she doesn’t take highways!! — and that she wears cowboy boots. These are telltale signs she is engaging in aggressively authentic journalism, really digging into the heart of Trump country and getting to know the locals (they’re all on back roads). So imagine her surprise when she was accused of making shit up — the OPPOSITE of authentic! — in her book “The Great Revolt.” An anonymous Twitter thread sprung up last week noting six “lifelong Democrats” and “former Obama voters” named in her book are in fact elected Republicans. Pretty damning stuff. Zito fired back with a series of threads and called the accusatory thread a “malicious lie.” Ashley Feinberg at the Huffington Post reached out to Zito and broke down the whole controversy at length here — in conclusion, says Feinberg, you should take Zito neither seriously nor literally.

On the Future of Tronc and the Future of Tech in Journalism

Investment firm Donerail Group is reportedly looking to buy Tronc’s 10 daily newspapers and sell them off to individual owners, which could have a handful of unforeseen consequences for the industry, according to Nieman Lab. For example, Rupert Murdoch may have an interest in buying the New York Daily News (a Murdoch rep flatly denied this was the case). Most interesting, perhaps, are the ramifications the move could have on the tech frontier. New LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who holds a 25 percent stake in Tronc, would reportedly continue his role in exchange for spreading the newspaper technology he’s honing for the Times, which could include AI-driven analytics.

Longread of the Week: A harrowing deep dive by BuzzFeed’s Christine Kenneally into abuse at St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage.

SHORT LINKS:

— BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith is sorry for helping spawn insider political journalism.

— BuzzFeed is trying its hand at product reviews. (A lot of BuzzFeed in the newsletter this week! Idk!)

— Do you have no friends or social life to speak of? Seeking a soul-crushingly demanding job that encourages your slow spiritual death? PBS wants your slavish devotion!

— The editor and publisher of Jacobin has acquired the UK leftist magazine Tribune to cover the Labour movement, per BuzzFeed. Good branding is key to good socialism.

— Rewire staffers hope to join the wave of media unionization. Good luck to them on their negotiations.

— Damn, CNN warned us all the way back in 1995 that we were gonna be living in “multimedia hell.” Why didn’t we listen???