Study Hall Digest 5/21/2018

Study Hall Digest: 5/21/2018

Condé Nast is on the precipice of something big, bad and ugly: shortly after releasing what they called their “best comedy issue ever,” (which has a really funny cover imho) GQ laid off one of the main people responsible for producing it—their culture editor Anna Peele, along with fashion editor Garrett Munce and lifestyle editor Ross McCammon. Staffers are pretty convinced that this is just the beginning of a massive round of layoffs, especially since Condé recently announced they’d be relinquishing over one-third of their office space at One World Trade. Must be weird and terrible to work in that office and know that a third of it is about to get booted, but not know who.

We all know journalists don’t make enough money. But there’s a big exception: #resistance reporters who track Russia and Trump from inside the beltway. CNN and MSNBC have inked contracts with dozens of New York Times and Washington Post journalists who now appear exclusively on those networks after their big stories break. The contracts, according to BuzzFeed, start at $30,000 a year and go all the way up to $250,000. Guess it’s a good way to boost middling newspaper salaries, and cheaper for CNN and MSNBC than hiring actual reporters of their own. #resistance reporters are also making bank as speakers, charging up to $25,000 per speech. But the really big money is from book deals, which can reach into the high six figures and beyond, plus sales figures in the hundreds of thousands for the likes of Wolff and Comey. I guess Michelle Wolf had a point when she told the WHCD that they’d created this monster and were now profiting off of it. No wonder they got so angry at her.

The internet, according to Dan Nosowitz, is no longer fun. I feel like it hasn’t been fun since like… IDK, ever?

The best thing to do after your employees publish a tell-all story about how your company is really shitty is definitely to hire DJ Khaled to talk it up at a flashy conference. Univision’s PR people also deleted a photo of one of their executives wearing a designer outfit because it was deemed inappropriate in the wake of all the news about their financial struggles. Glad they seem to be spending money in all the right places!!

If you want a depressing look at what it’s like to be a local reporter in Philadelphia, here you go: moldy offices, leaks in the ceiling, earning less than $30,000 a year, and getting your job cut with no notice. All this despite the fact that the papers’ parent company is actually profitable. Media! Bad!

And Kyle Chayka writes in a review of the new season of StartUp from Gimlet Media.

StartUp was Gimlet media’s first podcast—a kind of audio diary of Alex Blumberg’s quest to found his own podcast company. It was radically honest and transparent, full of awkward calls with investors and real, consequential business problems. Once Gimlet became too big to self-disclose and Alex got awkward putting numbers on the podcast, StartUp turned into another immersive, psychological entrepreneurship diary but of a startup called Dating Ring. Then the show lost its way, decaying into a mix of one-off episodes and hagiographic tech-industry anecdotes that only addressed Gimlet’s business once in a while (a 2015 diversity episode was a standout). I’m happy to report that StartUp’s new season, an immersion with Arlan Hamilton, a gay, African-American venture-capital investor, is a return to form. Hamilton launched herself into the insular, white, male world of VC, going from a self-education in tech to raising money to invest in startups founded by people of color. What gives the podcast tension is the risk of failure: Can her gambles pay off? The new season is the kind of journalism that the tech industry needs more of: telling stories from perspectives that don’t usually get airtime and turning the tables on startup founders.