Digest 1/19/2021

Political reporting after the Capitol Hill riot, outrage cycles on Substack, and more.

CAPITOL HILL REPORTING AFTER THE RIOT

Kadia Goba, a reporter at Axios who covers Congress, now brings a gas mask and goggles with her to work each day along with her laptop. She has also been offered therapy through her employer — an offer she plans to take advantage of — in the wake of the January 6 siege of the Capitol building by Trump supporters, an event she experienced firsthand. 

Goba was inside the House chamber when the Capitol was breached and hid behind a chair, feeding information to her editor over the phone, as the mob rammed against the door. At one point, gas masks were distributed to those sheltering in the chamber so police could fire off tear gas. She feared for her life. Still, she wasn’t aware of the sheer size of the mob inside the Capitol until afterwards — she had been evacuated by a route that avoided the crowds, and never had a direct encounter with a rioter. 

“I don’t know if I can honestly say I’ve processed all of this,” she told me. “But I can say…I didn’t realize there were that many rioters inside the Capitol at that point.” 

Goba says that it has become clear to political reporters, who would otherwise be covering relatively dry legislative action, that the potential for violence has become part of the job. “It is becoming status quo that politics reporters have to be prepared to cover riotous events,” she said. “Just yesterday [my colleagues and I] were discussing the need for riot gear.”

After evacuating the Capitol on January 6, Goba went back to the building that night, when Pelosi reconvened the legislature (she talked about the experience with the New York Times). When she returned to the Capitol a few days later, she was prepared for more chaos. “I brought a [gas] mask. Now I just carry a gas mask and goggles all the time.”

“I do not go into work anticipating [violence],” she added. “I just think, at least I don’t have to suffocate because I wasn’t prepared.” 

I asked Goba if she ever felt this isn’t the job she signed up for — Capitol Hill reporting isn’t a beat that typically involves anticipating violence. She said she doesn’t really feel that way. “It’s part of the job — I don’t feel any regret,” she said. Still, the perimeters of her work have changed: it is quite bizarre for Congressional reporters to be lugging protective gear to work. 

Whether these changes are permanent remains to be seen. In the meantime, said Goba, Axios’s offer of free therapy has been helpful. “They’ve been very good at chaperoning me through this,” she said.

SUBSTACK WANTS MEDIA REBELS

Last week, a tweet from writer Jay Owens noting the appearance of Substack CEO Chris Best on the Megyn Kelly Show alongside Parler CEO John Matze got a lot of attention from media Twitter, and for good reason. Substack has been garnering a reputation as the platform for free speech crusaders: media people who voluntarily quit their highly-paid staff jobs because they feel their speech is being stifled by their employers, editors, or colleagues. Most recently, Bari Weiss (who left her job as an opinion columnist at the New York Times in July) launched a Substack with an inaugural post fretting over the implications of the Trump Twitter ban.

In reality, Best’s segment on Kelly’s podcast was entirely separate from Matze’s and wasn’t all that exciting. Best expressed concern about the precedent set by Amazon Web Services deplatforming Parler and defended Twitter’s decision to ban Trump. But something he said about the kinds of people flocking to Substack caught my interest. I transcribed the entire quote here, but in short, he described the mass media defections as “a massive tailwind” for Substack and spoke highly of the sorts of people who would quit a job over matters of “integrity.” 

“All of the people who at some point placed their integrity above whatever pressures were on them to deviate from either telling the truth as they saw it or doing the work they thought was most important…the people who were willing to stand up to the groupthink…those tend to be the best people,” he said.

On its own, it’s an inoffensive set of platitudes. In the context of recent events in the media industry, Best appears to be endorsing the likes of Greenwald and Sullivan, whose exits from The Intercept and New York Magazine respectively appeared to have less to do with censorship than entitlement. Substack has positioned itself as an antidote to outrage culture and a media propped up by outrage-driven clicks, which makes sense in theory. People subscribe to a writer’s Substack only if they want that person’s thoughts delivered to their inbox; it sounds like the opposite of a model that converts outrage into revenue. 

But this sentiment from Best made me wonder whether that’s actually the case. Substack is embracing its reputation as a haven and a platform for a particular figure in media — one who is constantly outraged themselves, peddling a narrative of perceived victimhood that doesn’t necessarily line up with reality, expressing a sense of fear and doom while misidentifying its source. And it seems that the outrage cycle works to galvanize fans of these writers— and thus can grow subscriptions.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— My former DNAinfo Boss Joe Ricketts, who repeatedly tried (in vain) to sway the slant of our coverage and ultimately fired us all for unionizing, is launching a site for “news without a political slant” called Straight Arrow News, which is so idiotic I can only assume he named it himself. 

— Snapchat users are making millions through the new Spotlight (lol journalism) feature, through which the app pays its top performers in a bid to compete with the likes of TikTok in the endless scrolling video feed business. “They’re the highest paying platform right now,” influencer Joey Rogoff told the Times. “Hopefully other platforms see that and will follow their lead because ultimately that’s what’s going to make creators the happiest.”

— I can’t believe this happened last week, but Politico had Ben Shapiro write its Playbook, which triggered a fair amount of backlash (both internal and external) and which top editor Matt Kaminski defended by noting that “mischief-making has always been a part of Politico’s secret sauce.” Professional trolling is genuinely a media strategy among top publications! 

— OZY is profitable for the first time since its founding seven years ago. Last year, it raked in $50 million in revenue. It seems to have a pretty split revenue model — half comes from TV and podcasts, the other half from branded content and advertising on the digital side.

— Garage is NOT shuttering, but it is leaving Vice. Ownership of the magazine will return to founder Dasha Zhukova, who operated the magazine as a biannual fashion and art print publication for five years before the Vice sale.