Study Hall Digest 11/4/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Deadspin is still technically alive, in a zombie state, churning out content apparently straight from G/O editorial director Paul Maidment (which is going about as well as you’d expect, with awkward and unconvincing mimicry of the Deadspin style and some dehumanizing language) but the sports (and everything else) website is dead in every meaningful sense thanks to the idiocy of Jim Spanfeller and company.

Deadspin’s decline unfolded with breathtaking speed over the past week, demonstrating just how fast a previously profitable publication could be destroyed. Bosses told the staff to stick to sports, the staff refused, interim editor-in-chief Barry Petchesky (a veteran of the site) was fired for refusing to obey the mandate, and every last staff member ultimately quit in protest. It has only been a few days since the masthead emptied out, but an astonishing amount of content has already been written, both about what led to the site’s death and the broader implications of the ordeal.

We should be used to attending funerals for beloved blogs — we’ve already mourned Gawker, The Awl, The Toast, The Hairpin, Splinter, and the list goes on — but jadedness hasn’t lessened the blow of Deadspin’s demise. I think that’s because the implosion was especially preventable and entirely the fault of private-equity ghouls who refused to listen to the journalists who knew better. The outcry seems even louder and more sustained than is typical. Deadspin’s death at the hands of G/O is an almost outlandishly awful tale that perfectly captures the bleakness of the current media landscape: If a site can be doing well, can be widely-read, can be profitable, and assholes with money can still come in and skewer it for no reason, what does anything mean?

In my view, there are two stories about the demise of Deadspin: its impact on the media industry in material terms, and its impact on the spirit of the industry.

Deadspin is one of many outlets to be picked apart by private-equity firms or hedge funds, which see media outlets as an opportunity to get rich by flipping the hollowed-out publication for a sale. Hedge fund Alden Global Capital gutted The Denver Post and a number of other local papers despite their being profitable; executives at Alden have profited handsomely from the destruction by loading its papers with debt and using that debt to finance other ventures.

This kind of exploitation is a spectre haunting local newspapers across the country. GateHouse Media, part of private equity firm Fortress Investment Group, is currently preparing to merge with the massive newspaper chain Gannett — a marriage expected to lead to staff cuts. Finance is killing the news, as Alex Shephard observed in The New Republic over a year ago, and the problem has only gotten worse since then. Worse still, the most feasible way out of this inevitability seems to be a benevolent billionaire owner, which doesn’t always go well either.

But more striking to me is the emotional fallout: Media workers bemoaning that the industry they loved is inhospitable and joyless, hardly even worth sticking around for. “There’s almost no space for writing anymore that’s joyful or an attempt to be creative,” tweeted Charlie Warzel, an opinion writer at the New York Times. “Hardly anyone is playing around with form or even just trying to entertain.”

I don’t think this is necessarily true, but it is telling that many of us feel this way. The death of Deadspin seems to mark a point of no return that I think will be instrumental in informing how media evolves over the next few years. Media workers have demonstrated more forcibly than ever that they will not let their wealthy overlords walk all over them, and that righteous anger combined with the general feeling of despair and loss will likely fuel what comes next. I have a feeling it won’t be “more benevolent billionaires” — but it could be worker co-ops, nonprofit publications, or solo enterprises.

How cancelled is cancelled? The New York Times Style section (or, as we like to call it, the Quarterly Journal of Cancel Culture Studies) published a much-maligned piece about people who have been “cancelled” and, would you believe it, they’re all doing just fine. For a piece that uses the words “cancelled” and “cancellation” with abandon, it does not attempt to rigorously contend with the term at all — as far as I can tell, it seems to mostly describe those who face some professional and personal consequences for promoting views that actively harm trans people.

There’s probably an interesting story to be written about how people who are “cancelled” really just become a part of a different social and professional network that conforms with their views, but this piece dances around that thesis and in the process flattens and makes palatable the harmful work of its subjects. You’d think reading this piece that Quillette, for example, is a nice little blog that loves free thought, not a site that defends phrenology and has endangered journalists by releasing a list of those they deem “Antifa affiliated.” It is possible to report on your subjects while still being critical of them and not further enabling them!

Longread of the Week: For Vulture, which has ramped up its book coverage this past year, Alexander Chee lays out the questions we need to ask ourselves if we are considering writing about communities not our own. “If you’re not in community with people like those you want to write about,” he says, “chances are you are on your way to intruding.”

Everything Else

— The writer-influencer’s influence at work: It was correctly observed that any writer who is not Taffy Brodesser-Akner would never have gotten away with vomiting their impressions onto a page and filing it as a book review for the New York Times. But when your entire brand is extreme relatability and everyone loves your quirky effusiveness, well, turns out that’s what people want from you!

— The Washington Post published a piece about a DA candidate in San Francisco whose father is in prison and felt it was necessary to tack on an editor’s note disclosing the author has a parent who was formerly incarcerated. Once again, it is telling what is seen as a bias and what is seen as neutral — as ProPublica’s Eric Umansky pointed out, the view that having an incarcerated parent taints a journalist’s “objectivity,” that not having an incarcerated loved one is the “neutral” view, benefits the privileged.

— It’s a testament to how long this week has been that the discourse around The Cut’s profile of the “mattress performance artist” Emma Sulkowicz feels like an artifact of the very distant past…it’s an interesting piece about someone who seems to have no belief system whatsoever. Also the answer to the question posed in the headline can be found in paragraph one, and the answer is no, she was not “red-pilled”.

— Some gossip around who may be next in line for the top job at the New York Times in a Washington Post profile of Bennet brothers Michael and James: It looks like James Bennet, currently editor of the (widely disliked by journalists) Times editorial page, may be the one to succeed Dean Baquet. Just imagining that editorial judgment throughout the entire newspaper….

— Illustrators, cartoonists and visual artists have banded together to share freelance rates on the website Litebox. This is very heartening to see! Sharing rates is essential to resisting exploitation and correcting power imbalances — that’s why it’s central to Study Hall’s operation!

— This might as well happen: Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer partnered with Stella McCartney to create a climate change-themed capsule collection. A thing you can now buy is a $1,595 jumpsuit stitched with Foer’s handwriting. This will definitely save us from the apocalypse.