Study Hall Digest 1/22/2018

Hi

Eyyy let’s start the week with some good news: The Los Angeles Times unionized! It’s the first time the paper has had a union in its 136 year history. The vote is particularly significant because the paper has been historically extremely anti-union, yet the union won by a huge margin (248 to 44).

“It’s a huge symbolic shift,” Ruth Milkman, a CUNY professor who has studied the LA Times and unions told the NYT. “The [LA] Times was literally the celebrated centerpiece of anti-unionism for such a long time. Turning that around is a big achievement.”

It’s also significant that the LA Times and Vox unionized with such large vote margins on the heels of DNAist being shut down specifically because they formed a union. I guess people are getting less scared of organizing, or more desperate to secure equitable working conditions, or both.

Okay on to the bad news: RIP to The Awl. 🙁 It sucks it and The Hairpin are going away, but the sites also came from a very specific era of the internet that seems very, very over at this point. There are still places producing Awl-ish content, but for young writers it’s harder that ever to break into the biz by writing long and getting good edits. The problem of course is the business model: there’s no way to make money with banner ads anymore (even clickbait farms can’t do it, much less places with stories that take 20 minutes to read and only attract a few thousand readers each). Maybe….if there were….some kind of….subscription service….filled with people who appreciate longform content….;).

Speaking of The Awl: Its series Content Wars essentially predicted the stupid place we’re in now where ad-supported business will be over, social media will be making us more depressed and stupid, and no one will know where to go from here.

And speaking of that: We have even more evidence Facebook is not changing its news feed because it cares about publishers or users, but because it cares about money—specifically money from pushing its own video content. The company will also now let users rank the credibility of news, which is a great way to elide all responsibility for what goes on their platform (“the users said it was trustworthy!”). It’s also a great way to collect data on all of their users’ news preferences for advertising. Some places will be fine in this Facebook shift (those who did not sell their souls to Zuck), but I can’t imagine places like NowThisNews will get much traffic to their homepage without FB referrals. So here’s a preemptive RIP to those places.

I guess I should have predicted this but I’m kinda shocked by how bad and fucking stupid the backlash to #metoo is. From the Atlantic to the New York Times, publications are really going for it on their opinion pages to essentially say women should shut up. Imagine being the NYTimes reporters who uncovered Weinstein only to have your paper’s op-ed pages say, “women don’t actually care about sexual harassment.” But I guess you’re probably used to thinking that the op-ed page is filled with bullshit if you work at the Times.

Saveur has been gutted by layoffs. Not clear where it goes from here, but probably nowhere good.

I mean I know I’m not the target demographic but I’d never even heard of this Bloomberg publication.

BuzzFeed’s business model is built on stealing the labor of people who actually are funny and smart and repackaging it into listicles with large fonts, but we already knew that I guess.

Who knows what’s happening at Newsweek??? All I know is its owners are mad shady, and the publication has gone downhill extremely rapidly, so maybe it kinda deserved it???

Final Thoughts

I know people love Elena Ferrante but this is the shortest column I’ve ever seen, and she was probably paid like $5,000 for it.