Digest 8/10/2020

On subscriptions, streaming, Sarah Schulman, and Bon Appétit

ICYMI: Last week, we published Off the Record, an interactive narrative on the reality of working as a journalist of color written by Farah Mohammed and designed by Mary Truong.

ADS ARE OUT, AUDIENCE IS IN 

The New York Times rolled out a digital subscription plan in 2011, and it seems to have paid off — the company just recorded its biggest ever quarter for subscription growth, having raked in 669,000 new digital subscribers during the second quarter of 2020. With that boost, revenue from digital subscriptions and ads amounted to $185.5 million, with print revenue lagging at $175.4 million, marking the first time in the company’s history that digital revenue has exceeded print. 

Ad revenue plummeted as a result of the pandemic — digital ad revenue fell 32% and print fell 55% — but the pandemic is also largely responsible for the boost in new readers. The company has surmised that an interest in staying abreast of the current crisis, plus the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement protesting police brutality and racism, has driven subscriptions. It brings to mind the “Trump bump” the Times saw when hundreds of thousands of new subscribers flooded the paper after the 2016 election.

It has long been the Times’ strategy to drum up audience engagement, accumulating not just clicks but an invested readership. Times chief executive Mark Thompson counted this recent boost in subscriptions as a victory to that end. “We’ve proven that it’s possible to create a virtuous circle in which wholehearted investment in high-quality journalism drives deep audience engagement, which in turn drives revenue growth and further investment capacity,” he told Times media reporter Marc Tracy in a statement. Of course, the flip side of that is that when subscribers are displeased with the content they’re paying for, they unsubscribe — the controversial Tom Cotton op-ed published this June led to a record number of subscription cancellations in the span of an hour.

Fortunately, this isn’t a trend limited to the Times (which arguably doesn’t need your money), but it does heavily favor it and other big national outlets. On the whole, more people are paying for news — 20% of consumers in the US now pay for news, according to a recent study from the Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, up from 16% last year. That study found that “around half of those that subscribe to any online or combined package in the United States use The New York Times or The Washington Post.” Still, there are some promising figures from the Pew Research Center that indicate Americans are tuning in to local outlets as well; 61% of those polled in April said they were following the pandemic on national and local outlets in equal measure, while about a quarter said they were paying more attention on a local level. Some local outlets have seen subscriptions grow amidst the crisis as readers search for pandemic news, even when that news is unpaywalled.

But are these subscription boosts enough to save local outlets, stacked against the devastating dips in ad revenue that have led to sweeping layoffs and furloughs? The Times, no surprise, is coming out on top, but it seems unlikely that smaller outlets will benefit in the same way.

At the same time, we are asked to grapple with the ethics of charging people for information. Nathan J. Robinson wrote in Current Affairs about how fear-mongering content from unscrupulous sources tends to be free, while more nuanced, factual content on the same subjects is kept behind paywalls. Charging readers for content is not unreasonable, but it does have costs, like potentially turning non-paying readers away from beneficial and accurate information; under capitalism, however, it is also necessary, because writers must be paid. There are promising alternative models: The Guardian (which is owned by a trust) is forgoing a paywall, instead sticking to donations, last year made a small operating profit after previously losing money. Still, the publication suffered 180 job losses due to the pandemic.

STREAMING SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE ALSO SKYROCKETING 

Disney+, the streaming service just launched by Disney in November, has within eight months reached the subscriber goal it had told investors it would reach by 2024. There are now 60.5 million global subscribers to the service (in case you’re curious, the New York Times has 6.5 million total), which offers coveted content not found elsewhere, like a film compilation of the hit musical Hamilton and Beyoncé’s Black Is King movie. The live action version of Mulan will premiere on the platform in September. Disney+ still has less than one third of the paying customer base of Netflix, which is still the undisputed leader of the streaming wars.

Other streaming services are flourishing, too. Hulu now has 35.5 million subscribers, while ESPN+ is now at 8.5 million, more than triple the number of subscribers it had a year ago. The reason for this sudden spike is no mystery — people are trapped inside, so they’re watching more content, and streaming services are capitalizing on it. Theatrical releases are suspended for the foreseeable future, but streaming platforms will offer those releases for double the price of a movie ticket; Mulan will be available on Disney+, but it will cost $29.99. 

Stir-crazy viewers seem to be willing to shell out the money for expensive streaming services and content. Judd Appatow’s King of Staten Island, for example, drew a large VOD viewership after its theatrical release was pulled. Will this permanently change what consumers are willing to pay for new video content? Movie theater chain AMC may not even survive the pandemic. I think this year will reshape our media consumption habits in the long term, as viewers grow used to watching at home and studios realize they don’t need theatrical releases to make money. It also remains to be seen how it will impact the journalists whose IP is being optioned for film and television; earlier in the pandemic, at least, optioning was still going strong as studios anticipated resumed production. 

 

LONGREAD OF THE WEEK It has been rare for me to feel thrilled while reading (or, frankly, consuming anything) throughout the pandemic, but this profile of author and activist Sarah Schulman in The Cut by Molly Fischer made me feel something akin to thrilled. At one point, Schulman recounts learning about the boycott of Israel over Israeli treatment of Palestinians when called to speak at Tel Aviv University and reckoning with her lateness arriving at the issue; she reflects more generally on coming late to important realizations regarding power dynamics and abuse. “At some point, if you want to have a real life, you have to say, ‘I did that then, this is why I did it, but I don’t have to do it.’ It’s possible to do that. You don’t have to be a martyr or a saint to do that.”

 

EVERYTHING ELSE

— There’s a lot of hand-wringing over Facebook’s supposed bias against conservatives, but there’s a lot of evidence of the exact opposite. In fact, Facebook is so jumpy when it comes to accusations of anti-conservative actions that they continue to bend over backwards to make right-wing outlets feel welcome on the platform, most recently relaxing misinformation rules so conservative pages wouldn’t be penalized.

— Media critic Ken Doctor is launching his own local news company, Lookout Local, beginning with flagship site Lookout Santa Cruz, which covers his home county. It’s a for-profit company funded by some big names — the Knight Foundation, the Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism — and it has a deal with the Los Angeles Times to use its CMS. Its model will provide an interesting contrast to local news nonprofits like The City.

— The Harry Potter movies, now on HBO Max, will leave the service on August 25 and reappear on NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock in October. Warner Bros. signed the TV rights to the series over to NBCUniversal in 2016, in a deal reportedly worth around $250 million, but a last-minute deal allowed HBO to stream the franchise for three months. 

— Staff walkouts at Bon Appétit are ramping up as Condé Nast apparently refuses to pay its POC talent equitably. On August 7, BA Test Kitchen stars Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly and Rick Martinez announced that they have all rejected a CNE contract they say did not offer fair compensation that they will no longer appear on the YouTube channel. Test kitchen manager Gaby Melian and Bon Appétit senior food editor Molly Baz have also both said they will no longer appear in videos for Condé Nast Entertainment. Ryan Walker-Hartshorn and Jesse Sparks, the only two Black editorial staffers at Bon Appétit, have quit the magazine. 

— After pivoting to video (lol), G/O Media laid off 15 staffers, including most of its video team. A G/O spokesperson said that “some resources currently dedicated to video would be better used across other areas of the company, including editorial.” Hmmmmmmm.