Study Hall Digest 12/2/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Amid Local News Crisis, Curbed is Shutting Down a Handful of Sites

Vox Media’s Curbed, a publication that reports on real estate development across a network of cities, is shuttering its sites covering Seattle, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. (The remaining local sites cover New York, San Francisco, Austin, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Detroit.) The move comes months after Vox acquired New York Media in an all-stock deal, but a spokesperson for the company told The Wrap that the decision to shut down the sites is unrelated to the merger. The spokesperson said that shutdowns are indicative of Curbed “sharpening its focus to deliver content where our audiences are most engaged,” noting that Vox will expand the Austin and Boston sites into full-time coverage (many of the sites were largely run by part-time staff and freelance contributors).

A source tells Study Hall that Vox was unsatisfied with the part-time model for the sites and had wanted to expand them all into full-time, but since, for unknown reasons, they were unable to do so, they opted to shutter them altogether and to focus their energies on a select few. At least, that’s the explanation given by management.

Curbed is far more than a real estate blog — the sites publish important work about life in the cities it covers, reporting on gentrification, rezonings, rent laws, evictions, and bad landlords. The closure of these sites comes at a time when local newspapers are laying off journalists en masse and industry minds are scrambling to try and save local reporting through nontraditional mechanisms like nonprofits and grants.

This morning, for example, Axios reported that the nonprofit Report for America will place 250 journalists in 164 local newsrooms in 2020 — roughly four times the number of local journalists the organization funded in 2019. Meanwhile, organizations like the Knight Foundation, rich people like Craig Newmark, and tech giants like Google are pledging records amounts of money. Altogether, about $1 billion will go towards solving the local news crisis in the coming years, both by subsidizing local journalism and funding research into how tech impacts the industry.

Still, I’m skeptical that billionaires or tech companies will prove a long-term solution. Just a few weeks ago, the Gannett-Gatehouse merger went through, a move that will likely lead to consolidation and the loss of more local news jobs, though not all editorial. Time is running out to invent a sustainable model that will keep paying journalists to cover local news. In the meantime, lets hope our new patron-overlords don’t have a shift in priorities.

Longread of the Week: Taylor Lorenz at The New York Times profiled a 15-year-old businessman (business…teen?) who amassed a huge following on an Instagram meme account only to have his enterprise upended when the social media platform abruptly deactivated his account. The businessteen, Rowan Winch, is trying to pivot to YouTube, but he says that losing his Instagram has been like losing a big job and thus his identity. “With @Zuccccccccccc, it felt like I had a purpose and was doing something that benefited a lot of people,” he tells Lorenz. “And now I kind of just feel — I feel lost.”

Bonus Longread: Again at the Times, Ellen Barry’s years-long, intercontinental investigation of a mysterious Indian prince (or is he?) living in an abandoned royal hunting lodge is pure, uncut Feature Journalism. It also got released as a podcast, because everything has to also be a podcast. It will doubtless be a movie in ~3-5 years.

One Good Thing: In his take on the “Is there a doctor on this flight?” meme, Remezcla music editor Eduardo Cepeda imagines the uselessness of being a reggaetón writer (or any media worker) in the middle of a medical emergency.

Everything Else

— Max Read at New York Magazine spoke to BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti in a sort of retrospective on the company’s role in the media landscape over the past decade. You better believe he had some shit to say about unions fostering a hostile workplace and being hard on founders! “When I look at a lot of founders who had unions forming their companies, they’ve tended to end up no longer that engaged with a company,” he said. “You know, [Nick] Denton, and Arianna [Huffington], and Shane [Smith].” Ah yes, the problem with Shane Smith’s reign at Vice was definitely that the workers decided to unionize.

— TheSkimm, a popular newsletter aimed at millennial women that counts Oprah as a fan, is looking for a buyer. The company is profitable, but has seen a drop in subscriber growth; the goal is to find a buyer that can help expand app offerings and grow subscribers.

— The Ringer used the new Mr. Rogers movie — in which Matthew Rhys plays a fictionalized version of Esquire reporter Tom Junod — as a news peg to publish an “exhaustive” ranking of movie journalists. But how exhaustive can it be if it doesn’t include Michael Keaton in local news masterpiece The Paper?

— In more bad local news news, OC Weekly, a local newspaper covering Orange County and Long Beach, was abruptly shuttered by the Duncan McIntosh Company the day before Thanksgiving, immediately laying off all 19 staffers.

— Scientific American pulled a critical piece on Twitter’s favorite gynecologist, Dr. Jennifer Gunter, after Gunter complained that it was a “hit piece.” Writer Jennifer Block, meanwhile, has defended her article and continued to call Gunter out for what she believes is a condescending and “patronizing” tone and a dismissal of factors such as diet in vaginal health. In any case, it’s a disconcerting example of baby behavior that a beloved Twitter figure can get a piece taken down by stomping her feet.

— I learned there is such a thing as WholeFoods Magazine — a trade magazine about whole foods and not a vanity publication for Whole Foods Market — at the same time I learned Mitch McConnell was named WholeFoods Magazine’s 2019 person of the year for his push to legalize hemp as an agricultural commodity. I have not known peace ever since.