Study Hall Digest 8/26/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

I’m sick of newsroom dramas — just give me self-aware and scathing dramas about the ruling-class vampires hoovering up and destroying digital media companies!! That’s what we’ve been given in Succession, the darkly funny HBO series about a billionaire media mogul and his terrible adult offspring, and apparently we fucking love it! Season 2 has launched an outpouring of Sunday night tweeting that, at least on my timeline of mostly media professionals, has elevated it to the Big Little Lies tier of collective viewing.

This is especially true of last Sunday’s episode, which revolved around patriarch Logan Roy’s decision to shutter edgy digital media site Vaulter, a pet acquisition of his son’s that was failing to meet traffic goals — oh, and the staff was moving to unionize. Randall Colburn at the AV Club called the episode “fucking gutting.” Media workers tweeted half-jokingly about it being “triggering” — and honestly, having worked at a news site where our billionaire owner very abruptly shut us down a week after we voted to unionize, it was surprisingly painful to watch.

But I also found relief, even perverse pleasure, watching the all-too-real tanking of a site that might be Vice, or Gawker, or BuzzFeed — the jury’s still out. I think that’s because the dramatization underscored the pettiness, ambivalence and general incompetence of the few one-percenters making these decisions that impact hundreds. It felt like a welcome peak behind the curtain. Vaulter was always a plaything to the Roys. The knee-jerk decision to put so many workers out of a job brought to mind the fresh shuttering of Pacific Standard, which had to fold when a single bored philanthropist abruptly pulled funding. The episode also provided the centerpiece of what was likely the most-read the most-shared media story of the week, departing Deadspin editor Megan Greenwell’s goodbye post, which used the example of Vaulter to expertly dissect both the G/O (formerly Gizmodo) tailspin induced by her own private-equity overlords and the disintegrating digital media climate.

So the most accurate fictional portrayal of media in recent memory barely features journalists, but that seems right — we’ve felt like an afterthought for some time, especially amidst this year’s thousands of job cuts. It’s reality. Aidy Bryant’s protagonist in Shrill having a staff job as a blogger felt cartoonishly wrong. I don’t think I could stomach another romantic comedy about a woman with a glamorous job at a glossy magazine.

***

A publication called Reason, you say? I’m sure it champions reasonable, reason-centric stories by and about reasonable people. If there were a publication called Facts and Logic would you not assume the prevailing ethos of the place is that of FACTS and LOGIC? Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn Reason magazine published a very long, glowing rehabilitative profile of a journalist who lost his job following sexual misconduct allegations and that the “deep dive” was propped up almost exclusively by the accused’s account. Journalist Emily Yoffe seems to have happily taken former Los Angeles Times correspondent Jonathan Kaiman at his every word, treating his woeful tale of a man battered by false accusations from mercurial feminists with such credulity that she didn’t even bother to talk to other sources — just slap those words underneath a melancholy black-and-white portrait and call it a day, right? Reason!

Washington Post national political reporter Felicia Sonmez, one of Kaiman’s accusers, last night posted SIX PAGES of corrections she has sent to Reason editor in chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. The factual inaccuracies in the piece are so glaring and so easily contradicted — some by documents Yoffe herself had access to — they can only be interpreted either as reporting so sloppy, it would’ve gotten me fired as a rookie reporter at a local paper, or as a willful mischaracterization driven by an admitted desire to cast the accusers as women seeking the “thrill” in coming forward with allegations.

***

I hope we’ll keep seeing the media grapple with its role in enabling Epstein. NPR published an instructive look at three publications — Vanity Fair, ABC News and the New York Times — that had a chance to take on the self-trafficking billionaire and failed, either backing out due to apparent intimidation (Graydon Carter disputes this, but it looks like a bullet and a severed cat’s head left at his home may have scared him out of taking on Epstein in Vanity Fair?), or just chickenshittery, or, as with the Times, a reporter having a disturbingly chummy relationship with the guy.

Meanwhile, The New Republic took a look at powerful literary agent John Brockman, who sang Epstein’s praises — Epstein, in turn, championed Brockman’s Edge Foundation, which facilitates largely online conversations among intellectuals in science and technology (but also, apparently, hosted opulent and exclusive meetups). Brockman has stayed silent on the matter. Author Evgeny Morozov has said he’ll drop him as his agent until answers are provided. Will others do the same?

Longread of the Week: Serena this, Serena that. I mean, Serena is amazing — but did her sister Venus ever get her due? Elizabeth Weil for the New York Times Magazine delved into her history as a trailblazer in women’s tennis, including a delightful anecdote in which Venus fearlessly interrogates then-President Bill Clinton about why he ducked out the U.S. Open during the match.

NEW THING ALERT: Protean, a “nonprofit literary collective for the political revolution,” is well on its way to meeting its fundraising goal for its second issue. The small leftist publication has already made a name for itself with incisive political commentary, attracting top tier talent like cartoonist Eli Valley. It’s also known for paying its writers on time.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Our own Kyle Chayka reviewed Graydon Carton’s Air Mail newsletter for The Nation, finding it to be an elitist project that fails to capture or adequately comment on the current times, with its “plummy, presumptuous editorial voice” and nostalgia for a more glamorous age of glossies.

— Cléo, a beloved magazine on film and feminism, will shutter — the editor explains the grant that made up a large portion of its budget has been suspended, slashing their funding.

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders is going to Fox News as a contributor offering political analysis because OF COURSE SHE IS. Here’s a look from Media Matters at the revolving door between the Trump administration and Fox.

— Tumblr was sold to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, earlier this month. The new chief executive talked to the Times, and seems to want to keep the site a friendly gathering place for those with niche interests, but also wants to introduce changes to help bolster traffic (Tumblr lost a huge chunk of users when it banned porn — a ban the new owner will uphold).

— Media Twitter recently erupted in a spirited debunking of the “starving artist” trope after some dumbass posted that real writers will write no matter what, regardless of their circumstances (the original tweet seems to have been deleted). Idk man, I used to work in service and after upwards of eight hours on my feet at a job that was physically, mentally and emotionally grueling I pretty much had no energy to do anything but pass out before waking up to do it again.