Study Hall Digest 12/23/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Quick Links

— How’s the ol’ Deadspin doing since media mastermind Jim Spanfeller fired a staffer for not sticking to sports and essentially forced everyone else to quit because he was ruining the site? Not good. New York Times sports reporter Kevin Draper’s calculations (via Comscore) show the number of unique visitors to the site plummeted from 19.9 million in October to just 2.2 million in November.

— Men are showing up at The Wing (the feminist coworking space has started letting them in after being hit with a discrimination lawsuit), and members are pissed, per the New York Post. Quote of the century from renowned party reporter and man-hater Kaitlin Phillips: “I think they’re just losers. Or cucked boyfriends.”

— Madeline Leung Coleman’s Topic story about how Chinatown restaurants buoyed the rise of West Coast punk is being turned into a movie from Topic Studios starring Awkwafina! (The original piece was published in the now-defunct Topic Magazine, but IP outlives publications.)

— Adam Driver doesn’t like to hear himself act. Terry Gross knows this, but still played a clip from Marriage Story during an interview. Driver was invited to remove his headphones, but instead chose to walk out. Pretty straightforward and low-stakes series of events (there’s been no indication Driver threw a tantrum, and it wasn’t live), yet it has spawned days of discourse within Media Twitter! Was Driver a giant baby or a self-care icon? Was Gross a monster willfully traumatizing Driver or simply a journalist doing her job? Seems most likely Driver is either an anxious person or an artist with a quirk and Gross was perhaps a little insensitive! Maybe we don’t need to extrapolate every tiny controversy into universally applicable life lessons——but then how would the hot take industry survive?

— J.K. Rowling, a purported billionaire whose previous greatest hits include suing an assistant over a few thousand dollars and creating wildly antisemitic characters, has outed herself as a TERF by publicly backing a woman who lost her job for obstinately misgendering trans people. Does this mean people will finally stop using Harry Potter as a metaphor to make sense of real-world human rights abuses and political turmoil? Probably…not.

Banned Words of the Year

Most publications have a list of forbidden words. Here are some of our favorites.

• At Vox, “late capitalism”
• At Chicago Magazine, “acclaimed”
• At The Outline, “horny”
• At Rolling Stone, “legendary”
• At Dazed, “radical”
• At The Cut, “badass”
• At Grubstreet, “gourmand” and “foodie”
• At NYT Styles, “based” used geographically (unless it refers to “a rocket ship”)
• At The New York Review of Books, “modernity”
• At the old Mic, “cop”

Year in Review

The Study Hall staff rounds up our favorite/least favorite things that happened in media in 2019.

In late July, NPR told the journalist Kim Kelly, who happens to be an anarchist, that she would no longer be writing music criticism for them because her “activist stance” had gotten her and NPR blasted by Tucker Carlson. Not surprising — NPR and other stodgy media outlets regularly cave to the far-right. More surprising: the move made NPR seem old, out-of-touch and irrelevant. A few years ago the idea of journalists being unbiased fact machines was sacrosanct. This year, we gave up the act.

In an era of white supremacist rule, imminent societal collapse from climate change, and a bunch of other bad shit, we’ve begun to look inward and have decided a career is no longer worth the price of silence. To be sure, that’s in part because there’s basically no such thing as a career in journalism anymore, so why not say what you really feel. And the privilege of having an opinion while maintaining a job falls along the predictable lines of race, class, and gender, as Kaila Philo wrote for Study Hall earlier this year.

But the dam is breaking. Good. The more we share our opinions — the less we give a shit— the better the media will be, the more people will trust us, the better we’ll feel. Let it all out. — P.E. Moskowitz

 

When I got a chance to actually hang out IRL and discuss Study Hall editorial with our staff writer Allegra Hobbs, one of the topics she mentioned was how writers were acting like influencers. Some people weren’t just journalists but tastemakers, documenting their lives on social media as well their articles or editorial work. Caroline Calloway was just the tip of the iceberg.

As the popularity of the resulting essay “The Writer as Influencer” showed (it even got syndicated by The Guardian), a lot of people were feeling that pressure to perform their identities online in 2019. The essay wasn’t a judgement but a description of the sense that we have to somehow embody more than our work, be more charming, attractive, polite, tasteful, whatever, especially in order to survive as freelancers. It kinda sucks, but at least Allegra started us off in understanding it. — Kyle Chayka

 

“He’s smart. He’s nice. And he just might be the devil,” reads the subhead of Dale Peck’s “My Mayor Pete Problem,” the *chef’s kiss* of political absurdity in a year packed with proof that we’re living in a simulation. Clocking in at nearly 3,400 words, Peck’s satirical takedown of neoliberal homosexual Pete Buttigieg was shady, explicit, and, within hours, gone: scrubbed from The New Republic’s website and replaced with an apology for the piece’s “inappropriate and invasive content.” Naturally, you can read “My Mayor Pete Problem” here in full because, well, the internet.

This controversial take on Pete Buttigieg’s sexuality and politics was the most important media story of the year. Not because news outlets and Twitter pundits frothed at the mouth to call it “homophobic” when it was really just a sassy read from a queeny old gay, but because it represented a seismic shift in American history. Over 16 years after Lawrence v. Texas declared gay sex a constitutional right and four years after same-sex marriage passed into law, here we were debating whether it was okay for a gay ACT UP activist to call America’s first gay presidential candidate a “top-by-default” when Buttigieg is clearly “bottom-and-please-turn-the-lights-out” kind of guy. — Chris Erik Thomas

 

One of my beliefs about writing is that you should always be trying to get better at it, usually by reading. This year, I read Andrea Long Chu. Her work is a revelation for the cohesiveness of its style and content: it is hard to write a good one-liner (for example, that Jill Soloway “mixes metaphors like a bartender in a recording studio”) and it’s hard to make a nuanced argument about female experience, and Chu manages both, making each integral to the other. Reading her essays is like turning over an intricate, polished puzzle box: you’re entertained, and you want to know how she did it. Check out her book, Females, and her virtuosically mean review of Brett Easton Ellis’s White. — Erin Schwartz

 

2019 was the year of media worker solidarity. It’s difficult not to be totally overwhelmed by the onslaught of layoffs — Business Insider counted 7,800 total — and to see them as the defining story of the past year in our fraught industry. To be sure, the impact and the human cost of those losses can’t be understated. But I am heartened by the wave of worker solidarity and organizing across the industry, in part a response to worsening precarity. A lot of newsrooms unionized — even those like BuzzFeed and NBC News that weathered aggressive (and at times bizarre) anti-union campaigns from bosses and peers. And our freelance colleagues worked hard to organize the Freelance Solidary Project under the National Writers Union to ensure our demands as workers are met as well. Meanwhile, communities like Study Hall provide a space for workers to gather, support one another and share vital information. Job prospects are abysmal, and big tech and private equity may be out to suck the blood out of the media — but solidarity among workers is better than ever. — Allegra Hobbs

2020 Media Trend Report

• Sprawling, high-profile print magazine interviews that never go online
• Reviews of books from like hundreds of years ago
• Extremely gossipy, light-the-match-and-walk-away celebrity writearounds
• An unquenchable demand for a new golden age of portrait photography
• Oral histories of stuff no one has ever heard of
• Mood lighting

— Rachel Seville Tashjian

See you next year!

Love,

Study Hall