Study Hall Digest 11/12/2018

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

The White House Briefings: Pointless

Happy Monday, fellow workers. I’ve been thinking — if a large part of my job, ostensibly as a truth-teller, operated as an obnoxious formality that basically just yielded a barrage of lies and abuse, would I keep doing it? Eh…probs not.

The White House revoked CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass on the made-up grounds that he “put his hands on” the intern who tried to take his microphone. The Trump administration put out a doctored video — which Kellyanne Conway admits was “sped up” — seemingly originating from InfoWars to bolster the lie. Trump also insulted three black female reporters in the course of three days because they asked valid questions in the pursuit of doing their damn jobs. The President has indicated he might revoke more press passes.

But the press corps continues to go through the motions. CNN chief Jeff Zucker told producers to ease up on coverage of the Acosta fiasco, and there seems to be no movement towards organizing against the briefings. Political operatives tell the New York Times that reporters are stuck in a catch-22. Masha Gessen at the New Yorker argues that a boycott of the briefings would result in the loss of valuable information and accountability.

But do these briefings yield anything elucidating? Gessen says the White House is “a lousy source of information about itself” but remains “the best available source.” Is that really the case? The most meaningful coverage of the administration has come from rigorous examinations of how the federal government operates on a practical level and how those machinations impact people. Reporters can FOIL documents and cultivate sources that aren’t serial liars.

These press briefings are not neutral territory, and to be in that space is to ingratiate yourself to the office, to a certain extent — the White House sets the stage and creates the arbitrary rules, and essentially cultivates a forum for themselves to spout lies and then double down on those lies. If these press briefings are run by liars who are always going to spout lies, and the president is a belligerent windbag who just shouts insults over reporters’ questions, what the fuck is the point besides the shallow spectacle? More reporting gets done at your desk.

The State of Culture Coverage: Bad

A round of layoffs at The Fader last week serves as a reminder that your job performance is not insurance against the whims of your employer. Myles Tanzer, who was senior editor at The Fader until Thursday, noted he had written the most-read cover story in the magazine’s history and that web traffic had ballooned by 300 percent under his leadership. He still got shitcanned.

The broader significance, as culture writer Kelsey McKinney pointed out, is that fewer resources are being dedicated to culture in a sort of “pivot to politics” phenomenon. Fusion aka Splinter, where McKinney had previously worked, axed its culture section shortly after Trump was elected.

Since then, the Village Voice has shuttered, LA Weekly has deteriorated, Complex and GQ have undergone staff cuts, just to name a few. Where does this leave culture coverage? Well, almost squarely on the backs of freelancers, but there are fewer and fewer outlets taking their pitches.

Media Jobs: Not Especially Secure

The Wall Street Journal reports Vice plans to shrink its staff by 15 percent through a hiring freeze and attrition, and plans to axe several of its verticals. Vice Union tweeted out the article with the caption “Time to keep fighting.” The fight seems more urgent than ever.

The editorial members’ first contract expires Dec. 31, yet the next bargaining session is not until Dec. 4 and management has ignored staffers’ requests to pick up the pace. The production bargaining committee, meanwhile, is still awaiting management’s responses to its economic proposals. Staffers sent a letter last Monday to management but have not yet received a response. Given the impending doom in the WSJ piece, the way management seems to be waiting out the clock is…not promising. It seems unlikely they feel incentivized to offer further protections to staffers they may imminently want to cut.

Letter of Recommendation: Starting Your Own Media Company?

So what if you wanted to opt out of all the above bullshit? Katherine Spiers, former food editor at LA Weekly, provides at least one potential answer. She had been running her food history podcast Smart Mouth for over a year when she was laid off from the alt-weekly, and decided to bring other projects into the fold and launch TableCakes Productions.

“When I got laid off I realized I’d been working as a journalist for 14 years, seven as a freelancer, and even as a freelancer you’re working your tail off to do good journalism for different owners who get mad when they’re not making hedge fund returns on their investments,” Spiers told Study Hall.

It occurred to Spiers after being axed from LA Weekly that despite her long career in media spent working for other people, she had no savings to speak of. So why not work for herself?

“If you can’t buy a house after 14 years of doing this, I was just like ‘Well, this as stupid, I think I’d be happier being broke on my own,” she said.

So far, five other podcasts have joined Smart Mouth at TableCakes, all rather niche: one on how sitcoms have historically dealt with LGBT issues, one on video game music, one on 1970s movies, one on most-recommended movies, and one on cannabis. Spiers says she qualifies this as a soft launch and hopes to grow to 10 podcasts within six months. She would like the site to function as an audio newspaper, with a different podcasts representing each section.

Spiers doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges of independence — it’s pretty much constant exhaustion and very little money. TableCakes currently contracts two freelance editors and has roped in someone at a discounted rate to advise on ad sales. But there’s a lot of room for experimentation and the work is rewarding.

“As with anything, it’s harder to do if you’re not married to a wealthy person or have wealthy parents,” she said. True! Which brings me to my final point: we should all abandon our aspirations in favor of seeking out marriage with a billionaire.

SHORT LINKS:

— White nationalists cannot be trusted, fucking duh, and we cannot let them control the narratives. Tucker Carlson controlled the narrative about the benign protest that occurred outside of his house because journalists and celebrities like Stephen Colbert allowed him to, despite the existence of a police report contradicting his account. Get it together.

— Catching up with Tronc: Tribune Publishing, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Virginian-Pilot among other local publications, will be offering buyouts to staff due to financial difficulties. And the company, in a recent conference call, cited financial costs stemming from the massacre at The Capital Gazette. So, don’t worry, it’s not your job performance, it’s just that your colleagues were murdered and that was super inconvenient.

— In a truly wild Huffington Post dispatch, Ashley Feinberg reports on how Axios employees are grappling internally with the backlash to their boy Jonathan Swan’s ass-kissing performance on their new HBO show. There is some recognition that they fucked up, but the prevailing sentiment seems to be, in the words of one employee within the company Slack channel, “They hate ya cause they ain’t ya.” Editor-in-chief Nicholas Johnston, in audio obtained by HuffPo, slammed the critical Splinter piece that called Swan a bootlicker: “Our profile is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we’re going to have more cool successes. And you know what? We’re on HBO, Splinter.com, and you’re not. You’re fucking laid off by Gizmodo. I’m sorry. So they’re going to come after us on this kind of stuff.” Healthy attitude!!!

— A Financial Times columnist argues her younger colleagues have a shitty work ethic. In particular, it really grinds her gears that they seem to have “all the time in the world for minute parsings of feelings and fairness.” It is indeed much better to vomit opinions onto the internet, as exhibited by this column, than to consider things deeply, and that’s the problem with young people these days.

— The New Gawker is…not Gawker. At least, the beta version of the site, that went briefly online filled with Bustle articles last week is a depressing spectacle. Gaze upon it, if your soul can endure: