Study Hall Digest 2/10/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Checking in With The City

It’s been almost a year since the launch of The City, a nonprofit local news outlet hosted on New York Media’s CMS and helmed by Daily News alum Jere Hester. The project’s announcement was surrounded by buzz and anticipation — it came at a time when New York was still reeling from the closure of outlets like DNAInfo and The Village Voice. The City not only offered to fill that void with news coverage, but offered a new model for a media organization at a time when ad revenue (and benevolent billionaires) were scarce.

The City has a three-tiered revenue model: major donors that allowed the outlet to get off the ground, corporate sponsorships, and memberships, which have grown alongside donations since the launch. I checked in with founding editor Jere Hester and publisher John Wotowicz, formerly a member of the NPR Board of Directors, to talk about The City’s membership campaigns, paywalls, and why we’re living in the “post-competition” era of local news.

The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Study Hall: Your first membership campaign was in November. How did it go, and are you planning a second one?

John Wotowicz: Before our first campaign, we were able to generate enthusiasm and about a thousand launch members that brought us about $100,000. Over the three weeks of the membership campaign, we were able to add another thousand members and generate nearly another $150,000 of revenue for The City. Obviously we are a small organization compared to somebody like WNYC, which has 200,000 members who generate millions of dollars of revenue each year, but we’re pretty excited about this given that it is our launch.

We will be continuing our membership outreach throughout the year — some shorter, some longer outreach efforts — but the most immediate of those will be around Valentine’s Day.

SH: How do you see your three sources of revenue shifting as the organization grows?

JW: If you go on our site, you will see a full listing of all donors that have contributed $2,500 or more since we launched. We have three extraordinarily generous lead donors — the Charles H. Revson Foundation, the Leon Levy foundation, and Craig Newmark philanthropies, each of which have provided us with two and a half million dollars to give us some runway, to hire a team and establish ourselves. We’ve had the great good fortune to be able to add approximately three and a half million dollars from a mix of individual and institutional donors, as well as our initial corporate sponsors, Tishman Speyer, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Citi.

SH: What have you learned about gaining and retaining membership?

JW: We’re early on in the retention game — the earliest member’s not yet at their annual anniversary, so we’re going to be learning a lot about retention over the next year or so. I’ve spent most of the last two decades in the national public radio ecosystem, on a series of member station boards and then on the NPR board down in Washington. Obviously membership is a pretty core element of the NPR model; I know that first and foremost we have to deliver great stories that are not only relevant to New Yorkers but provide a pathway to better lives for New Yorkers. If we don’t do that, it doesn’t matter what else we do.

Jere Hester: In the membership drive, we left a space for folks to tell us what they think about us or why they’re giving us money. We didn’t expect there would be much response there, but just about everybody who has become a member has filled that out. Where people tell us where we’re doing a great job, they’ll cite specific stories or specific topics. They’re also not shy about telling us what more we should be doing.

SH: You took a strong stance against paywalls when you launched. I’m curious how you feel about that now.

JW: I’ve spent a good part of my life looking at the trade-offs of all these models, both in the private sector and in the context of NPR. The terms of our grant agreements from our major donors restrict us from charging for our content. Beyond that, it continues to be very hard to make paywalls work such that they generate sufficient revenue to support a meaningful operation.

Our mission is really to have impact for all New Yorkers, and the minute you stand up a paywall, you are excluding a significant part of that total audience of New Yorkers. Even if all of the other reasons for not having a paywall were to go away, I think that we would keep a free-to-all model. It is our mission to do all that we can to lift the tide around local news in New York City, so mentions by other publications are also important.

JH: When other folks pick up our stories — hopefully with credit and links, sometimes without — or build on our reporting, we take that as a victory. Given the state of local journalism in New York and beyond these days, we’re in a post-competition age where there’s plenty of stories for all of us to do.

SH: Are you thinking about growth at this point?

JH: In terms of working with other news organizations, we’ve done quite a bit with Chalkbeat and we’ve worked on a great project with Documented. We’re looking for more opportunities along those lines, but internally, we’re not in the let’s-double-the-staff phase. A word that we like to use is impact, and we’re aiming for that with every story. With the great team that we’ve got, we’re doing more and better work. That will hopefully bring us some additions to our staff, but we’re really tackling this one story at a time.

Queer Media’s Next Melting Ice Sheet: Memes for Netflix

Goodbye Out, Them, and Into. Hello, Netflix’s “queer/trans social channel” Most, presented by Netflix, announced via tweet on Thursday. Following Brandon Taylor’s theory of queer media as “eight to ten homosexuals moving from digital vertical to digital vertical,” three of the four staff members for Most (Fran Tirado, Rose Dommu, and J.P. Brammer) come directly from fellow one-word-name LGBTQ publication Out — plus one bonus member of the Queer Media Mafia, Evan Ross Katz.

What will these four be doing, exactly? The announcement tweet states that Most will be a social media platform for “the talent and stars from our communities [to] have a home when we talk about their shows and movies.” Tirado, who will lead the team, clarified to Study Hall that Most is less “queer media” and more “just [wanting] to make gay memes and spark joy and uplift queer/trans talent and get as many queer folks paid in the process.”

“I’m tired! media is broken,” he continued. “all I wanna do is make queer people happy and throw them parties and help them find their favorite shows.” In queer media, you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the party promoter. — Chris Erik Thomas

What Even Is Iowa?

How did the first week of voting in the 2020 election end up feeling like the car crash scene in Final Destination 2? Iowa’s caucus system imploded in a chain of events that included a broken app created by a shady tech company, clogged phone lines, and not knowing how to count things.

It’s fitting that in the wreckage of our democracy, the media narrative that emerged was pure chaos. Pete Buttigieg declared himself victorious on Monday night despite literally zero percent of results being announced, a move that made him, in the eyes of the internet, a villainous gay rat (with apologies to the other gay rat, Arthur’s Mr. Ratburne). On Thursday, we got a victory speech from Bernie Sanders as results showed him with thousands more votes in the caucuses’ first and final rounds of voting.

As unethical as #MayorCheat Buttigieg’s premature victory speech was, it paid off. His strength in Iowa was the biggest story of the week and polling shows a modest rise in New Hampshire, the next state to hold its primary. The full results show Buttigieg claiming two more delegates than Sanders, winning 14 to Sanders’ 12, but these results aren’t official since Bernie has requested a recanvass to correct the many inconsistencies in the data. Iowa’s 41 delegates are a small number when you need 1,991 to win the race. After a week that felt like a decade, Iowa’s massively overblown importance in the race has taught us that narrative matters far more than winning via the state’s byzantine election rules—and if you’re not getting the narrative you want, just make it up! — Chris Erik Thomas

Longread of the Week: The New York Times Magazine profiled author Jenny Offill, whose new novel Weather tackles life amid the human reality of climate collapse. “Offill doesn’t write about the climate crisis but from deep within it. She does not paint pictures of apocalyptic scenarios; she charts internal cartographies. We observe her characters’ lurching shame, despair, boredom and fatigue — solastalgia experienced in ordinary life, vying with the demands of aging parents, small children, the churn of the mind. What she is doing, her friend the novelist Adam Ross told me, is coming as close as anyone ever has to writing the very nature of being itself.”

Everything Else

— This New York Post story, titled “Craft beer hater pulls gun on people outside Brooklyn’s Other Half Brewing Company,” has everything: Losers camping out with lawn chairs in line for elaborate new craft beer flavors; a drunk visitor so furious at the sight of them he pulls a gun; a hurled White Claw can; a blasé witness who describes the gunman as a “regular white guy with a beard.” It’s the platonic ideal of a New York City news story. (It helps that there were no serious injuries.)

— Apple’s news bundling app had an underwhelming first year, reports Bloomberg, and now the head of business for the service is departing. Apple has had a tough time drawing paying subscribers to the app and was unable to lock down deals with the New York Times and the Washington Post due to concerns that a partnership would undercut the papers’ own revenue models.

— I screamed while reading this Guardian op-ed from Emily Bell that identifies the New York Times as “the midtown Manhattan local news organization which is transforming itself into a global digital news brand.” Where is the lie?!?! Bell argues the success of the Times stands in sharp contrast to the floundering of digital startups — most recently, journalists from those startups like Ben Smith from BuzzFeed and Taylor Lorenz from The Atlantic have left their posts to work for the Times. “Connectivity has sorted society into the 1% and the rest. Winners taking it all are a feature, not a bug, of the current technocracy,” Bell writes. If Smith, a far-sighted editor deeply invested in his staff and newsroom at BuzzFeed, could not see a sufficiently attractive path forward, then there probably isn’t one.”

— Speaking of the Times, the paper of record is hiking the price of a digital-only subscription by 13%. As Felix Salmon points out, the paper’s not even pretending to be a product for the masses.

— Jessica Simpson’s memoir is out, so time to revisit the shameful way she was treated by the media in the past two decades. This Vanity Fair profile by Rich Cohen, who should clearly be barred from profiling women, is a bizarre relic of a bygone era when, apparently, it was perfectly acceptable for magazine writers to fat-shame their subjects (and to also be openly horny in their writing).

— IndieWire suggests that Disney coughing up $75 million for the musical Hamilton indicates a plan to turn it into a franchise including films but also maybe amusement park ride and they’re probably right but hahahaha help.