Digest 03/22/2023

THE MEDIA CLASSIFIED ADS

►The inaugural Artlab Editorial Fellowship is now open. Two selected writers will receive $10,000 to produce arts writing that brings new perspectives to a global network of readers and explore their communities with an eye toward forward-thinking solutions. Learn more here.

---

Inspiring! These Satire News Writers Stay Funny Even In The Midst of Media’s Existential Crisis 

Recently, I texted a friend a Reductress article titled, “I LIVED IT: The Person I Don’t Want to Date Doesn’t Want to Date Me.” I felt a twinge of nostalgia as I hit send. Between 2014 and 2017, this was something I did often, sometimes rushing to be the first to drop a story in the group chat, even though, in that era, my friends would probably have already seen it on Instagram.

In the past few years, satire outlets like ClickHole, Reductress, and The Onion have disappeared from my group chats and my timelines, even as their impacts remain. You’ve likely seen The Onion’s notorious headline “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” circulate on social media in the aftermath of a mass shooting, or negged a friend by calling him a “jazz boy.” But you probably don’t check these sites on a daily basis for a regular dose of snark.

It turns out, keeping the lights on and writing funny, relevant stories that people actually want to read has become just as difficult for fake magazines and newspapers as it is for real ones. 

At Reductress, content has transformed since the outlet was born in 2013. At the time, writers were still reacting to Cosmopolitan articles about how to please your man and leggings to help you lose weight. The era of the humiliation-porn confessional essay that inspires Reductress’ “I LIVED IT:” format, had barely begun. Jokes about these types of articles were once very funny. Today, they feel empty, taking shots at a bad guy who no longer exists.

“We’re a mirror, looking into a mirror,” Meredith Dietz, a Reductress contributor, told Study Hall. “We were born to satirize double standards and hypocrisy in women’s media, like ‘How to make him love you.’ That genre is going away. If you read Cosmo or Teen Vogue these days, it’s like ‘Here’s how to fight for Roe v. Wade.’” 

In 2014, clickbait and quizzes were at the height of their power, when ClickHole, The Onion’s internet offshoot, formed with a mandate to tackle the sites that published them, like BuzzFeed — not to be confused with BuzzFeed News — and Upworthy. But as these websites waned in influence, ClickHole and Reductress have also shifted away from their original assignments. 

“It’s hard to call [ClickHole] satire even,” said Jewel Galbraith, the site’s head writer. “It’s more just jokes now. It’s not really satirizing anything in particular.”

While early hits like “‘90s Kids Rejoice! The Spider Eggs They Used To Fill Beanie Babies Are Finally Hatching!” were direct spoofs, ClickHole quickly realized that invoking the illogic and absurdity of our culture was much funnier than saying something clever about it. As Vulture put it: “Stupid Times Call for Stupid Jokes.”  

Reductress is on a similar path.

“When we started out, we were parodying the concept of a women’s magazine directly,” said Sarah Pappalardo, Reductress’ founding editor. “Now, news is just a vehicle for satire about relatable experiences. It’s not the thing we’re satirizing.” 

Indeed, Reductress has broadened in scope to include Onion-style snark (“Biden Promises to Prioritize Climate Change as Soon as It Is Too Late”), ClickHole-y silliness (“Dumbest Fucking Idea Ever? This Woman Sells Seashells By the Seashore”), and their classic messy-woman observational comedy (“Obnoxious Friend Experiencing Linear Career Growth”). 

The Onion, which started as a weekly print paper in 1988, exists at a generational crossroads of media and comedy. It’s a Gen-X outlet, from the era of Dana Carvey and “The Simpsons,” mocking The New York Times and The Washington Post for a fast-paced Twitter audience that tends to favor irreverent memes over reporting. The Onion’s dry, anonymous voice is a signature, and has remained consistent, even as it’s faced upheavals (most recently, Elon Musk poached half the newsroom for his never-launched humor site, Thud) and shifted from broad evergreen “area man” jokes, to the snappy politics coverage they’re now known for. But when legacy media feels confused and out of touch, so does The Onion. “The Onion used to tell contributors to avoid internet humor, like ‘We satirize the news,’” said Dietz. “Now, I see them do clickbait style things that used to be ClickHole’s domain. That may be because CNN sounds more like ClickHole, but then so does The Onion.”

Satire writers now have to be quicker and more original to compete with every amateur and professional comedian and memer pumping out content on social media.

“Twitter definitely affects how we write jokes,” said one Onion staffer, who asked to remain anonymous. She said The Onion always deferred to one of their writers who had memorized every episode of “The Simpsons” to kill any joke the show had done. Now, the writers room searches most jokes on Twitter to make sure they aren’t redundant.

Despite this cutthroat environment, business isn’t so bad. The Onion shows some telltale of a G/O website in crisis. (The company was bought by Univision in 2016 and offloaded to Great Hill Partners, the equity firm that incorporated all Gizmodo blogs into G/O media in 2019.) The Onion Fellowship, once a path to a staff job, was canceled in 2020 and in January of this year, contributors received an email informing them that the rate for a headline was dropping from $100 to $50. While budgets are tight — especially in ways that impact contributors — and G/O’s output demands are tiresome, the site’s 13 employees have not seen layoffs since 2018 and the pay floor for staff writers is $60,000 due to the power of The Onion Union. 

Writers who spoke to Study Hall said Reductress and ClickHole are remarkably stable, thanks to a pair of unlikely new corporate owners. ClickHole was rescued from G/O in 2020 by the boardgame company Cards Against Humanity. When Galbraith started in 2017, ClickHole had 11 employees. Over the years, it fell to four, and she assumed the site would shutter under G/O. Cards bought ClickHole because they’re fans, and proved it by giving full ownership to its now five employees. The companies have found a mutually beneficial relationship, though not an egalitarian one. In exchange for quarterly cash infusions, ClickHole writers participate in a monthly card brainstorm and other revenue-generating projects that Cards thinks up for the outlet, like releasing its own game, Business Walrus. Galbraith said it’s a lucky position to be in, but admits “the question is how long Cards is willing to support us.” Like all jobs in a media industry that hasn’t figured out how to make websites viable businesses, theirs remain precarious and at the mercy of corporate generosity. 

Reductress had one of its best years ever in 2022 in terms of revenue by focusing on its non-media products: 60 percent of it came from merch and workshops, said Pappalardo. But the natural endpoint of the outlet’s success was being acquired in August 2022 by Phenomenal Media, a media company and venture capital fund run by Vice President Kamala Harris’ niece Meena Harris that “centers women and historically excluded communities,” according to the company’s website. The staff said little has changed, except that, as a pleasant surprise, headline rates rose from $15 to a whopping $30. “Mommy kept us safe,” said Dietz, publisher of the classic, “Too Tired To Pee, Too Full of Piss to Sleep.”

Even if satire can stay afloat, the format might be the problem. The absurdist-comedy-du-jour these days can be found in parody social media accounts. Posters critique culture and offer takes on the news through satirical versions of whatever type of posts we’re consuming at a given time. Brad Troemel mocked craven virtue-signaling following Ye’s racist tirade with an infographic about Adolf Hitler’s “toxic history and what you can do to help.” The account @powerofselfcare critiques the excesses of wellness culture through pseudo-inspirational posts like, “Always prioritize comfort over growth. Read that again.” 

“Had we started Reductress today, I don’t think it would survive. We’d probably be a TikTok or an Instagram account,” Pappalardo said.

As the internet fragments into teeny-tiny echo chambers, the next generation of parody outlets have analogously become more specific. In 2019, several new satire sites sprung up that are delightfully niche: Awf Magazine, dedicated to parodying pandering LGBTQ+ content and Flexx Mag, a parody “urban” outlet that pokes fun at Complex, Bossip, and Worldstarhiphop. 

Among the writers who spoke to Study Hall, there’s no consensus about what satire media’s future looks like. That being said, almost all were adamant that it’s a timeless medium that must survive against the odds. 

“Because this format was created and established so long before meme culture, it grants it a certain degree of staying power,” an Onion contributor said. 

“Every time I think we’re completely fading into irrelevance, we’ll have a piece that absolutely hits,” said a  veteran Onion staffer, who asked to remain anonymous. Most recently, The Onion’s takedown of New York Times’ coverage of trans people, “It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives of As Many Trans People As Possible”, went viral and got a glowing write-up in Them, which noted, “the humor magazine’s coverage is outstripping most major magazines.”   

“When we have a super viral article that people really connect with, I feel like it hits harder than a single meme could,” the staffer said.

Satire media may no longer be cool. But that may not be a bad thing. Media workers, and anyone who reads journalism, should value our court jesters. Personally, I’m excited. Satire writers are liberated to do whatever they want right now, and if they pay attention to all the new ways the media can be hypocritical and uninspired, they’ll never run out of jokes.

 

Maybe they’ll even get us to click on an article one day.

 

---

LONGREAD OF THE WEEK

“The college wrestlers who took on a grizzly bear”

In this ESPN longread, writer Ryan Hockensmith details a grizzly fight between a college wrestling team and, well, a grizzly bear in the Wyoming wilderness near Yellowstone. The story starts with a gripping lede: “A good friend never lets his buddy step in bear crap.” But that’s exactly what got the young men into trouble, as Brady Lowry alerted his friend Kendell Cummings of the bear crap when a grizzly came out of the brush. The scene that unfolds from there is a vicious fight between two young men and a mama bear, and the writing is so effective, it will have your heart racing. From there, the story is about the young men’s friendship, how they began to heal from the traumatic attack together and overcome their fear of the wilderness, and even make their way to nationals just four months later. The story’s inspirational and triumphant arc will make for a great sports movie one day. I, for one, can imagine Austin Butler, still using his Elvis voice, encouraging his friend to step back on the wrestling mat. “Move forward.” —Erin Corbett

---

COMINGS & GOINGS:

—A.O. Scott is leaving his perch as film critic at The New York Times to serve as editor-at-large of their Book Review. Scott, who started at the Grey Lady in 2000, conducted his own exit interview that was published last week. “The audience necessary to sustain original and ambitious work is narcotized by algorithms or distracted by doomscrolling,” the critic mused to himself. “The state of the movies is very bad.” At another point in the Q&A, he reflected on his positive review of 2001’s cult classic “Freddy Got Fingered.”

—Elizabeth Lothian is The Brooklyn Rail’s new Books editor. 

—Brendan Klinkenberg is now Gimlet Media’s executive editor. 

---

EVERYTHING ELSE:

—It’s never too late to get married for the fifth time. Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old CEO of News Corporation, celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by dressing up like a slutty leprechaun and popping the question to Ann Lesley Smith, a 66-year-old former police chaplain, at a crowded, rowdy Manhattan pub packed with go-go dancers donning sparkly green hats. Okay, most of that is *true.* “I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love — but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,” he told his very own New York Post,  which is essentially like your dad incoherently mumbling a few words of encouragement to you at a sloshed Outback Steakhouse dinner.  

—G/O Media, which owns Jezebel, The Onion, and Gizmodo, sold Lifehacker to digital media company Ziff Davis. As of now, it seems that there haven’t been any major staffing changes. 

—-According to Forbes, the FBI and DOJ are investigating ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, for using the app’s data to track down the location of US journalists. Does the US government suddenly care about journalists’ safety, privacy, and overall well-being? Or, is this investigation merely a convenient chess piece in a cold war between rival powers? We will let you decide!