Study Hall Digest 9/30/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

ICYMI: Read our Q&A with The Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull, who talked about posting your way to a career in media (Twitter can be good!), why that airport story captured our interest and dominated online discussion for days, and how she writes unique and incisive stories about widely-covered cultural trends. Above all else, she says, approach people (but not brands) with empathy and a healthy dose of curiosity: “The answer to ‘Why are people doing this thing?’ is never ‘Because these people are really stupid.’”

Vox Acquired New York Magazine…So Now What?

The acquisition was announced in the New York Times (Vows section jokes abounded) to a mixture of responses. The deal itself was received almost exclusively with optimism, but the manner in which the two companies went about announcing it was heavily criticized by the blindsided New York Magazine union and its members. What executives clearly hoped would be unanimously praised as a sensible business maneuver was ultimately soured by a failure to consider the human element. I’ll take each piece one at a time below.

First, the deal itself:

• It was an all-stock deal that values New York Media at around $105 million and Vox at $750 million, with New York retaining 12% ownership of the company, per the Wall Street Journal.
• The two companies are merging, making New York Media chief executive Pamela Wasserstein president of the combined Vox Media. Both Wasserstein and Vox CEO Jim Bankoff are going to great pains to emphasize that the deal is a PARTNERSHIP dammit (hence the choice to go with stock, with Wasserstein telling Digiday she eschewed cash because “we believe in this vision”).
• The deal is being pretty universally heralded as a smart move — there doesn’t seem to be any danger of a culture clash (except maybe when it comes to consolidating the Slack channels!), and there is a surprising lack of overlap among the verticals (which will remain separate, Wasserstein says). The two companies complement each other in a number of ways — most notably, Vox has its own creative studio and a successful history of producing content for streaming services, while New York excels at e-commerce and has a knack for producing longform stories that get optioned.
• In a world where media companies are fighting for advertising revenue, scale is the name of the game — remember that Jonah Peretti of BuzzFeed had envisioned a super-merger to better court tech platforms. It’s a strategy that could work, according to one analyst. “You put a combination like this together on the digital side and you have that much bigger a sale to an advertiser who’d like all of them, and that much bigger a menu for an advertiser to pick as a place for ads,” Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for Poynter, told Study Hall.

But what about the workers?

• New York Magazine staff were caught completely off guard by the Times announcement, and many took to Twitter to make clear they do not appreciate being left in the dark. The New York Magazine union released a statement condemning the announcement of the sale: “While we’re encouraged that management is excited by the merger and wants to preserve the quality and integrity of New York Magazine, we’re deeply unsettled by the disrespectful manner in which they informed our staff — after the New York Times story was published and after the press release was issued.”
• Most were “reassured” after an all-hands meeting the day after the announcement, one staffer told Vanity Fair, though others said there was a feeling of unease around the sale because media is a dumpster fire and we’re conditioned to assume the worst. Wasserstein, for her part, has pledged nothing will change on the editorial side and no layoffs are anticipated.
• Since a large part of the attraction for consolidation seems to stem from the power of IP: What does this mean for writers whose work for the super-company is optioned? Ian Frisch pointed out that while New York Magazine has writer-friendly contracts that allow freelancers to keep option rights, Vox does not. Staffers may fare worse, though. The box office success of Hustlers, based on a New York Magazine story by Jessica Pressler, has been cited as an incentive in coverage of the deal. Pressler said she got a 50% cut in 2016 and that the policy has since changed, not in favor of the writer.

The deal is slated to close this fall, so all will be clearer in time. For now, there is at least reason to be optimistic — Edmonds argued the deal seems to have been made for the right reasons, not out of necessity and not out of a lust for massive profits. “I don’t think it’s a distressed sale,” he said. “You’re looking at a very wealthy ownership and they probably are not in it for big, big profits.”

***

The New York Times is in hot water again, this time over its choice to publish information about the government whistle-blower who alerted authorities to Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. The Times chose to reveal that the whistle-blower is a CIA agent, which many argued could make them easy to identify, including representatives for the whistle-blower himself. Here’s an eye-catching line in the Times story: “Lawyers for the whistle-blower refused to confirm that he worked for the C.I.A. and said that publishing information about him was dangerous.”

Dean Baquet defended the choice, claiming it was important to establish the whistle-blower’s credibility since Trump was trying to smear him. More importantly, the White House had been aware a CIA agent filed a whistle-blower complaint before the Times made that information public.

The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal published the same information, but only the Times got the blowback — this is not surprising, nor is it unfair. This was, in readers’ eyes, one of a series of recent strikes against the Times that warrant cancelling subscriptions, which have included a bad headline and several of its writers harassing colleagues. Anyway, here’s a reminder that the New York Times doesn’t need your subscription money and maybe you should consider giving it to a local outlet instead!

EXITS AND ENTRIES

— Anna Merlan has officially departed Jezebel, and was sent off this past week with a farewell blog. She is moving to Los Angeles and will be joining a new features desk at Vice in October.

— After a year in the position, Sarah Jeong has left the New York Times editorial board (she departed in August), though she will remain a contracted contributor to op-ed. The Times’ choice to hire Jeong was made by bad-faith attacks over some funny and savage tweets about white people.

Longread of the Week: Lorelei Lee documents the war on sex work and her own experiences in the profession for n+1 in a striking mixture of analysis and personal history. She at one point recalls making the trek to testify against a California bill that would mandate the use of condoms and state-recorded testing of adult film performers, and watching the state assemblyman sponsoring the bill: “I remember Hall testifying to the committee that he had written this bill because someone needed to be “a voice for the voiceless,” and that person would be him. I sat beside him at a podium microphone. My coworkers stood in a long line at a microphone behind him, waiting for him to stop so we could speak.”

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Caroline Calloway, oft-maligned influencer and Instagram blogger known for selling Matisse knock-offs and poorly planned creativity workshops, appeared onstage at the Bell House for a live taping of the Red Scare podcast. It was ostensibly to tell her side of that widely read The Cut essay from her former best friend and collaborator, Natalie Beach, but it was mostly just a mess. Calloway’s earnestness didn’t mix well with the Red Scare crowd, and she has a penchant for stream-of-consciousness monologues that don’t mix well with the podcast format. There was one interesting bit of information to come out of the mess, though: Calloway claims Beach sold the film rights to Ryan Murphy for $1 million, but that she won’t see a penny of it herself (though she is, according to her Instagram, in LA for film-related meetings all day today and is meeting Beach at night). The saga continues! I kind of hope they’re both in on it together.

— G/O Media has a new slogan, and it’s…well, so unfortunate as to be noticeably reminiscent of a parody of a bad media company slogan in Succession!

— “Hell yeah, it’s better than going to Harvard or Stanford” is by far the greatest line from an “entrepreneur” fighting tooth and nail to get on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list, which a new report in The Information reveals is (surprise!) dumb and meaningless and says nothing about the honorees (much like a degree from an ivy league university).

— How much money do podcasters make? Well, most of them — like 99% — make zilch, it turns out (and consider how many podcasters there are). But the really big ones, like the Times’ The Daily, rake in millions of dollars a month in ad revenue. Chapo Trap House’s Patreon is still six figures a month. No wonder everyone’s pivoting to podcasts.

— Are you already fatigued by impeachment content? The problem is that no one knows how we should refer to the scandal and its wall-to-wall coverage. The New York Times submits: Impeach-gate, Ukrainegate, and Whistlegate, and questions whether we’ve exhausted the suffix “-gate” altogether at this point. Answer: Yes we have. (For more on that see our politics newsletter, The Circuit.)