Study Hall Digest 8/12/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

It seems that no publication is immune to abrupt shutdowns. It was announced last week that Pacific Standard, an online magazine known for its deep reporting on social justice and public policy, will be shutting down August 16 in a move that has left staffers reeling. There were no warning signs — editor in chief Nicholas Jackson told the Daily Beast that the board of the non-profit Social Justice Foundation, which has backed the magazine since its 2008 launch, had recently approved a ten-year expansion plan that included hiring more journalists. In fact, the magazine had recently hired eight new staffers, who have now lost their jobs.

Pacific Standard wasn’t owned by a capricious millionaire, but it may as well have been — its fate was ultimately in the hands of philanthropist Sara Miller McCune, who had funded the publication through the Social Justice Foundation with donations from her publishing giant SAGE Publishing. SAGE brings in between $300 and $400 million a year in revenue, and around $3 million of that had gone to the Pacific Standard. But McCune has changed her tune, abruptly redirecting her funding, which a representative of the soon-to-be-shuttered Social Justice Foundation said would go to academic and professional publishing. (Jackson, for his part, told Daily Beast that he wasn’t sure whether the move was legal and was encouraging his staffers to explore all legal options.)

The shuttering exposes a flaw in the non-profit funding model, which I suppose we always knew was there but is devastating to see in action: when a publication is supported by a sole rich person, it’s subject to one person’s whims. Rewire News recently laid off all its reporters due to the “changing priorities” of a “core funder,” a financial blow it has struggled to recover from through smaller donations.

Governing, a magazine covering state and local government, announced its impending shutdown the same day Pacific Standard’s fate was announced — its publisher said in a post that the magazine’s (ad-based) business model had become “unsustainable.”

“I honestly don’t know what it takes, beyond a billionaire, to keep a niche media company afloat,” Reyhan Harmanci, a member of Pacific Standard’s editorial advisory board, told the LA Times. But a billionaire is hardly a dependable revenue stream. The Intercept and parent company First Look Media are in the same boat, a reminder of which is the recent, similarly sudden shutdown of FLM’s Topic newsletter. It seems like concentrations of money and power are generally bad for journalism — and that maybe the best strategy is a reader-driven model.

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Go ahead and cancel your subscription to the New York Times. Or don’t — honestly, does it matter that much? As Alex Pareene wrote in the New Republic — amid the controversy and calls for cancelled subscriptions after a bad Times headline — the Times really does not need your money. It has a combined print and digital subscriber base of 4.7 million and reported an operating profit of $37.9 million the second quarter of this year.

The Times has enjoyed the benefits of a post-2016 “Trump bump” as readers have come to see it as an arm of the resistance, in part due to an anti-Trump marketing campaign that touts the importance of “truth” in an era of lies. But of course, as executive editor Dean Baquet told CJR, the Times doesn’t see itself as the “opposition party” nor has it every operated that way. In fact, the Times, as a strict observer of old-school impartiality standards, tends to cover the Trump administration pretty credulously and with a concerted effort to appear fair and balanced. Critics have noted its deference to power (remember that controversial Hope Hicks article?) and for the paper, The Bad Headline is hardly the first strike.

The Times has also successfully billed itself to people outside New York and DC as a necessity, the national paper of record, as Pareene notes, even though it has a pretty limited and elite target audience. As a result, it is far outpacing more regional outlets that could actually use that subscription money. Nieman Lab just last week published a pretty striking chart of digital subscriptions that show how “national” outlets are brutally trouncing local ones. In short, the Times has survived the media industry meltdown; your local newspaper may not, so maybe subscribe.

Longread of the Week: Here’s an absolutely horrifying piece from NPR about a deluded white Christian missionary who felt God was calling her to help care for malnourished Ugandan children – a task she was in no way qualified to actually carry out without causing terrible harm. A Ugandan civil rights attorney is suing her, claiming she should be held accountable for the deaths of over 100 children in her care.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— The Wing became embroiled in two mini-controversies within a week. First, it invited Marianne Williamson to speak, which led to a backlash from some members (Audrey Gelman has said The Wing is inviting every candidate to speak and that detractors are welcome to come ask questions). Gelman then drew some criticism for calling into question an Instagram post from New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, noting a “double standard” that applies to female politicians exposing their personal lives (she later apologized for using Johnson’s post to make her point).

– The New York Times is hosting an intervention for its deputy Washington editor, Jonathan Weisman, who just can’t stop posting bad, racist tweets and sending very bad emails. His madcap posting spree culminated in some really bizarre emails requesting “a word” with Roxane Gay, which also went to her agent and to Harper Collins. That went about as well for him as you would expect!

— Has your timeline gone from total Taffy Brodesser-Ackner saturation to total Jia Tolentino saturation? You’re not alone. (And it has not gone unnoticed by Tolentino herself!)

— Tucker Carlson has conveniently departed on a mysterious vacation after claiming white nationalism is a “hoax” — a false and dangerous claim that led some advertisers to cut ties. Is this just going to be a regular thing now? Carlson and Laura Ingraham both have withstood advertiser boycotts in the past, which lost Fox millions of dollars, but didn’t yield any meaningful results in Fox’s programming.

— Amid an outpouring of tributes to Toni Morrison, Jezebel published some musings from the late author on writers as workers that feel incredibly vital today. She encouraged writers to not fall trap to the romanticizing of “individualism” and to remember their work is labor. “Romanticized and misapplied, individualism keeps us self-indulgent,” she said. “It keeps us ignorant of contracts, of money, of benefits, of rights, of how the partnership between author and publisher ought to work, of the areas that threaten both publisher and writer.”

— A prankster very easily conned Quillette into publishing an obviously fabricated account about how “the DSA is doomed” from a “construction worker” named Archie Carter, slipping in some red flags (a love of Alinsky) that would have been caught by anyone fluent in leftism just for fun. Founder Claire Lehmann has refused to explain how the piece got published, instead focusing her energy on trying to “cancel” Marx for being into phrenology.