Study Hall Digest 1/29/2019: Media Hell Week!!!!!!

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

I do not need to tell you that it has been the absolute worst kind of week for media. The only kind of people who seem to come out on top are named Bryan Goldberg and Jonah Peretti.

The bloodbath of layoffs and consolidation that happened last week across BuzzFeed, HuffingtonPost, and other publications has been a long time coming, thanks to a confluence of factors: Facebook and Google keep hoovering up the bulk of advertising revenue, and they’re impossible to compete with on their own turf. But digital media companies dependant on ad revenue don’t seem to have a choice. So they try to go really big, really fast using venture capital, scaling in an effort to outrun the duopoly.

What could possibly go wrong?

BuzzFeed is cutting 15% of its workforce, which will come out to around 250 jobs.

• The layoffs have gutted the national news, national security, health, lifestyle, and LGBT teams. A ton of longtime, loyal employees were laid off, and those left are either in arenas like tech or politics or are too well-known to get rid of.
• The Explanation: The company is looking to invest more in money-makers like e-commerce and content licensing in an effort to become profitable and give investors those fat returns
• Context: BuzzFeed has hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital, predominantly its from main investor NBC Universal.
• The Goal: CEO Jonah Peretti has made it no secret that he’s aiming to merge with other digital media companies in order to survive among tech giants. It looks like talks with Group Nine (Dodo, Thrillist, etc.) are farthest along. But Peretti just gutted the news operation. What’s actually left of BuzzFeed as a place for journalism?

Verizon, which owns Yahoo, AOL and the Huffington Post, is cutting 7% of the workforce in its media division, totaling around 800 jobs.

• The cuts included the entirety of Huffington Post’s opinion section as well as cuts to the site’s longform platform, Highline.
• The Explanation: Verizon CEO Guru Gowrappan has said the media division will focus on mobile and video products in an attempt to “stabilize” the company.
• Context: In 2015, Verizon had bought AOL, Huffington Post’s parent company, for $4.4 billion. The following year it bought Yahoo for $4.8 billion. The goal? To merge into a super company that could compete with Facebook and Google. (Sound familiar?) Verizon last year reported a $200 million downgrade in value due to the slapdash integration (and also the fact that AOL and Yahoo are terrible companies).

Massive newspaper chain Gannett, which owns USA Today, slashed dozens of staffers in newsrooms across the country.

• The layoffs included staffers at a host of local papers: the Arizona Republic (including a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist) the Knoxville News Sentinel, the Tennessean, the Indianapolis Star, The Citizen Times, the Westchester Journal News, and on and on (you can find the full depressing list here).
• The Explanation: The cuts come just weeks after a $1.3 billion hostile takeover bid from hedge fund MNG Enterprises, also known as Digital First Media, which owns around 200 publications, including the Denver Post.
• Context: The aggressive consolidation of the newspaper industry seems to be the last stop in a decades-long downward spiral of local papers, which is laid out in this insightful Twitter thread by journalism professor Jeremy Littau, which I highly recommend.

In brief: Newspapers are hemorrhaging ad revenues that, before the advent of the internet, were a given for the then-profitable industry — and back then, chains were gobbling up newspapers because they were a safe bet for turning a profit. Now, hedge funds are picking at the carcasses like vultures. “When hedge funds are in the game, you’re being stripped for parts to sell off,” writes Littau. “They have no interest in growing the paper or finding a sustainable model. That’s not what they exist for.”

What Does It All Mean?

Facebook and Google have cracked the digital advertising code and are making off like bandits — digital advertising is booming, having grown by 12% in 2017, and Facebook and Google were directly responsible for 90% of that growth. Here’s another fun fact: Advertisers pay, on average, 800% more to Facebook than they do other publishers.

So now digital publishers are scrambling to keep up by scaling as much as they can, especially in non-news fields that can grow faster. It’s not that BuzzFeed hasn’t done well (it made around $300 million in revenue last year), it’s just that it isn’t a massive tech company and so it hasn’t delivered massive tech company returns.

So now you scale again. Not with VC funding, but with sweeping, aggressive mergers. It’s what Verizon did when it unwisely integrated AOL and Yahoo, and it’s what BuzzFeed is currently scheming to do with Group Nine. The layoffs were certainly an attempt to groom the company for such a deal.

Who suffers? The workers, the quality of content, and readers — everything that matters to actual journalism.

So here’s a thought: What if we went small instead of big? What if media companies focused on slow growth and sustainability instead of ballooning profits for investors and scaling at breakneck speeds? There are shops giving it a shot with reader-based models, like The Correspondent, as well as philanthropy-funded sites like The City. Even Axios thinks the future of media is niche.

As readers we can support these titles and invest in their success without the expectation of massive profits. And as journalists, we can organize and try to consolidate power for workers. I want a future for media in which workers hold the concentration of power. Let’s get to work!

On the Cruelty of the “Learn to Code” Campaign

By Zoë Beery

Unless you follow a lot of people who cover the alt-right, you may not have heard that, within hours of the mass layoffs last week, 4chan organized a harassment campaign of journalists on Twitter, interspersing noose and beheading memes with mocking suggestions that laid-off reporters “learn to code.” There was, of course, some racism and anti-Semitism sprinkled in, too. On Sunday Twitter announced it would crack down on anyone using the phrase as part of a targeted harassment campaign. Unsurprisingly, the right-wing media pounced, crying foul on Twitter for supposed censorship of an innocuous phrase. Reason, Breitbart, Twitchy and Donald Trump, Jr. have all weighed in.

But despite the salience of the story – not to mention that it’s a shiny new angle on the layoffs – neither left nor non-partisan media has really gone in on it, other than a report from NBC’s Ben Collins. “Covering this kind of harassment is a significant part of my job, but this was probably the worst I’ve ever seen,” Collins tells Study Hall. He points out that the genius of the campaign is that “learn to code” provides cover for its real purpose, which is spreading violent threats. “The idea is to make journalists look soft and play into a larger narrative about conservative suppression on social media. It’s a perfect storm for animus and cruelty.”

I asked Collins how journalists should cover stories like these without giving trolls the attention they thrive on, especially considering how fast bad actors can morph their messaging. “Work quickly to show the truth and what’s behind it, and in large numbers” is his response. But with so few reporters covering the story, potentially because they rightfully fear vicious backlash, a critical mass of reporting has yet to materialize. “Right now [the campaign] is continuing super successfully and relatively unabated as an infowar tactic,” Collins says. Unfortunately: “this one is working.”

IN OTHER NEWS:

• Old media stalwarts love to wring their hands over new media, zeroing in on BuzzFeed’s LOL’s and OMG’s and listicles — I know we’re all searching for answers while the industry we love tanks around us, but this ain’t it!
• BuzzFeed, which is — very unfortunately — not a unionized shop, banded together to demand Jonah Peretti, who is worth $200 million, pay his workers accrued PTO in states where it was not mandated by law (so everywhere not California). He gave in after an open letter signed by hundreds of workers and a meeting, but not before defending himself on Twitter. Did we mention Jonah Peretti, who just fired a bunch of journalists, is worth $200 million? Jonah Peretti is worth $200 million.
• In wild media news that has been almost entirely overshadowed by subsequent mass layoffs: The new Gawker hired a bigot whose capacity for spewing reliably offensive shit in the office was…really breathtaking. Gawker then refused to fire Carson Griffith or otherwise deal with her bigotry, so the site’s only two reporters walked out, refusing severance because it was attached to a non-disparagement clause (badass). Bryan Goldberg has been predictably dismissive and refused to substantially address any of this.
• Attention-seeking troll Kyle Smith misses the old days, when white male reporters ran around the city, being “ink-stained rascals,” doing the real work of talking to bartenders and trash collectors. Attention-seeking troll Kyle Smith knows nothing about local news reporting and should stick to misogynistic clickbait garbage about the mobster movies women don’t understand.
• Ashley Feinberg talks to Popula editor Maria Bustillos about Twitter. “All these terrible opinions and people make me want to die, but then I also love it,” she says. Relatable.
• The New York Times examines “hustle culture,” or “performative workaholism.” I agree with writer Katy Kelleher’s suggestion that we revive slacker culture instead!!