Study Hall Digest 11/19/2018

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Social Media Platform: Bad? (Yes)

We all knew Facebook sucked. I hope we all knew Sheryl Sandberg and her phony brand of corporate feminism was bad. Also, the claim that Pod would Save America always seemed wildly optimistic.

So the bombshell New York Times report on Facebook’s internal scrambling to cover up the degree to which it facilitated Russian interference in the 2016 election was just further confirmation of something we already knew: the social network we’ve come to depend on for communication and organizing is an ethical shitshow with a possibly net-negative impact on the world. (On the other hand, it has allowed people I knew in middle school, who I have no desire to speak to ever again, to find me in adulthood.)

Still, the platform is unavoidable. I thought about deleting my Facebook for the thousandth time the other day, but it is often the best way for me to get in touch with sources who would otherwise be difficult to pin down. And for publishers, it presents a lucrative source of traffic and thus ad revenue — Facebook, knowing this, this year has attempted to ally itself with news publishers.

Should we dismantle Facebook? Probably. But we’d need something else to fill the vacuum.

Is There Another Way to Fund Media?

New media models have been popping up as potential solutions to the ad-based model. Last week, we published an original report on the newsletter platform Substack and the writers using it to essentially build self-sustaining, self-run publications that are funded via reader subscriptions.

Co-founder Hamish McKenzie noted this model freed writers (who are also, in this case, publishers) from Facebook and Google. Instead of being beholden to social media giants, he argued, you could be beholden to your readers alone.

A Dutch Subscription News Outlet Launches Here

Substack is just one of several companies attempting to combat the depressing dependence on bad actors like Facebook. Dutch news publication The Correspondent is now in the process of launching an English-language version of the site, which prides itself in being utterly ad-free and powered exclusively by readers.

“We try to be as independent as possible from platforms like Facebook or Twitter,” founding editor Rob Wijnberg told Study Hall. “The more you are dependent on Facebook and Google and Twitter and all these platforms to spread your journalism, the more you have to adapt to their logic. And their logic is ad-based.”

A look at The Correspondent’s “founding principles” also reveals acknowledgements of other troubling aspects of more mainstream media operations, namely the idea that journalist should feign a lack of bias.

“The whole job of the journalist is interpreting the world, not just neutrally registering something,” said Wijnberg. “So if that’s the case, then posing as a neutral observer or is just misleading your audience.

“The alternative is being open and transparent about the view you have, and being open and transparent about underlying assumptions that go with it, and pretty much trying to not only tell the the facts straight in your stories, but also how you came to these facts.”

The Correspondent just launched its fundraising campaign with the goal of raising $2.5 million by December 14. So far, with 25 days to go, it has raised over $707,000.

The Thing About Token Republicans…

Back to Facebook for a moment: Facebook had hired a conservative-led public relations firm that took advantage of anti-Semitic fear-mongering on the far right to encourage reporting on potential connections between George Soros (often the central figure of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories) and anti-Facebook activists. Pod Save America’s token Republican, Tim Miller, was part of the firm behind this defense.

The other Pod bros at Crooked Media have claimed they’re disturbed by the revelation and said Miller would not be working for them while they “get to the bottom” of his involvement.

But what did they expect? Ashley Feinberg at the Huffington Post posed this question, pointing to some unfortunate views promoted by Miller while he was still being touted as a Good Republican by Crooked Media. Among other offenses, he helped stoke fears over Hillary Clinton that were proooobably not helpful in 2016.

Freelancing Ethics: Rules About Paid Trips

The New York Times’s new travel editor, Amy Virshup, is “re-imagining” the travel section, and a brief questioning on Twitter revealed part of her vision is aggressively enforcing the Times’s ban on accepting free press trips, because it would render the journalist unable to document their trip objectively.

Virshup’s position is in keeping with an old-school media ideal — journalists don’t take payment or gifts from sources, period. But travel writing, unlike local reporting, is hugely expensive, and by Virshup’s own admission the Times doesn’t fully cover the cost of its writers’ trips. So uh…how do they get paid for again?

The result, some writers pointed out on Twitter, is an exclusionary environment that only lets wealthier or more established writers take a stab at writing for the Times travel section. For some, comped trips are a way to break in to or experiment with travel writing. Virshup has vehemently defended the policy and pointed to a handful of pieces in the section written by writers who are not white men, but the entire media industry has also decayed in ways that make such a blanket policy more suspect. Reminder: The Times now runs its own ad agency, lol. Anyway, the solution seems obvious: if you don’t want people taking paid trips, pay them more money!

The coverage of the deadly California wildfires has prompted a few discussions about disaster coverage:

— Firstly, how does one cover a city that hardly exists anymore? David Little, editor of the Chico-Enterprise Record, talked to CJR about the grueling process: the paper was dropped off at evacuation centers because it couldn’t be delivered.

— Some critics have griped the fires aren’t getting the sort of coverage a hurricane on the East Coast would — simply because it is not on the East Coast. West Coast reporters remind us the coverage is there. But it perhaps isn’t getting the 24/7 treatment it deserves from major networks.

— News stories about the fires have referenced climate change, but climate change should be front and center of these stories, argues Jon Allsop at CJR.

Art Media Company Gets Acquired!?

Jay Penske’s media company PMC — the relatively recent acquirer of Rolling Stone and the owner of Variety, WWD, and Deadline — just bought two storied art magazines, ARTnews and Art in America, probably for $20-25 million. More than I thought they were worth! Both magazines are 100+ years old; they’ve struggled to adapt to the internet and went from being competitors to sibling publications when they were first consolidated by Brant in 2016.

Art media is usually a prestige play, but surely there’s some money to be made if auction houses are selling a billion dollars of art in a week?? The problem is there’s no critical consensus as to which art magazines are actually important or good right now. In 2016 London’s Frieze art magazine / art fair got an investment from WME-IMG and it’s also moving more toward Vice territory than, say, Artforum.

The backstory is that Penske sold a $200 million stake in his company to the Saudi sovereign wealth fund early this year. No doubt that cash is fueling the buying run. It looks increasingly like an attempt to build a more niche, industry-focused (and thus more profitable?) Conde Nast. Brant is also in a weird spot: his zombie Interview Magazine, which sold out of bankruptcy to his own daughter, is in the midst of rebooting. — Kyle Chayka

Study Hall Special Comic Edition by Aude White:

SHORT LINKS:

— Gavin McInnes is sad his repellant views have attracted negative attention from his Westchester County neighbors. He blames it all on — who else? — George Soros.

— Netflix and Vox’s docuseries “Explained” has been renewed for a second season. Read Daisy Alioto’s critique of the series, and explainer culture as a whole, on Study Hall.

— Game of Thrones is back in April and it’s the final season!!! I don’t watch Game of Thrones, but I’m truly happy for literally everyone else.

— Eddie Scarry criticised Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has spoken of financial difficulties, for wearing…a jacket and coat. Because conservatives hate it when non-wealthy people own things. This has, however, launched a very satisfying meme.

— Another old-school media thing that doesn’t seem to be working anymore: shitty entry-level jobs we’re supposed to be grateful for because someone has benevolently agreed to give us a tiny bit of money for our skill and labor. Deadspin pointed out the exploitative nature of this sort of job which inevitably led to older journos acting superior because they could afford to take the poorly -paid gigs with no benefits. Very cool, good for you!! It’s definitely good these jobs exist because some people can use them as stepping stones! Don’t think about it too hard!!!