Study Hall Digest 12/17/2018

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Digital Media Unions Terrify Publishers

• Slate’s bargaining unit voted overwhelmingly last week to authorize a strike — with 98 percent of the unit in favor — should bargaining sessions with management fail to yield meaningful results.
• The bargaining unit is now eight months into negotiations, and the union says management has failed to respond meaningfully to its proposals.
  Slate’s management is allied with union-busting law firm Jones Day, known for making negotiations “ugly,” as Robert Struckman, president of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, told the Columbia Journalism Review. The firm is pushing for an open shop at Slate, which the union is resisting. (An open shop would mean employees aren’t required to join the union / pay dues but likely would still receive the benefits — these can be used by management to crush unions.)
• Union members last month took part in a mini-strike as a warning shot, in which staffers walked away from their desks for an hour and refused to answer Slack messages. That obviously didn’t compel management and its team of super lawyers to negotiate in a manner not, uh, “ugly,” so now they’re gearing up for the real thing.
• MEANWHILE, the staff at New York Magazine unionized last week and editor-in-chief Adam Moss has already said he hopes for voluntary recognition soon. Of course, the hope for voluntary recognition and actual voluntary recognition are not the same!

How Facebook Is Killing the News

“Facebook et al. became the primary sources of news and the primary destroyers of news. And they refused to deal with it because their business is predicated on the fallacy that technology is neutral — Silicon Valley’s version of ‘guns don’t kill people.’”

Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and CEO Monika Bauerlein earlier this month penned a lengthy exposition on the damage Facebook has done to their funding — damage that has been replicated across newsrooms. I think it’s worth revisiting, to keep in mind the enormity of Silicon Valley’s impact on the industry.

In short, Facebook positioned itself as a primary source of revenue for publishers, who reaped millions of pageviews — and with them, significant ad revenues — from Facebook. But fake news was persisting on the platform, and when Facebook finally got around to addressing it, it changed the algorithm to diminish all news, not just the fake kind. For Mother Jones, that has meant a $600,000 loss in advertising alone. The site is now asking for donations to help supplement some of that loss.

…And Scaling Up Does Not Necessarily Work

Verizon’s media company, Oath, tried this approach when it merged AOL and Yahoo (Oath also owns the assets of Huffington Post). The integration has been a failure. Oath stated in an SEC filing last week that due to “increased competitive and marketing pressures” in 2018 it will record a non-cash goodwill impairment charge of around $4.6 billion — that’s being chipped out of an initial goodwill balance of $4.8 billion, so that’s a $200 million downgrade in value for AOL/Yah/Post.

Could Non-Profits Help?

• The Chronicle of Philanthropy suggests philanthropists could remedy the toxic media landscape by funding “non-profit information services” that don’t focus on maximizing profits (think Wikipedia, but…in competition with Facebook). I asked a spokesperson for Craig Newmark Philanthropies if Craig, who shared the above link, is considering such an information service and was told Craig is declining to comment but wishes me all the best. Your best wishes aren’t going to save journalism, Craig! (Newmark has given $20 million to the City University of New York’s journalism school and $20 million to tech news site The Markup).
• Journalism has been perceived as a social justice issue since the 2016 election, and so has become sort of a pet project for people with lots of money. Maybe we’ll see the launching of an “ethical” nonprofit social media platform?
• On the donations-based front, Dutch “unbreaking news” service The Correspondent surpassed its fundraising goal to raise $2.6 million in 30 days, paving the way for the launch of its English-language publication. The company prides itself in being free from advertising revenue.

COMMENT: Media Mergers Mean More Homogeneity

When the founder and CEO of one of the biggest digital media publications gently suggests the idea of a mega-merger with some of his primary competitors, there has to be something more going on behind the scenes. Jonah Peretti’s prodding the idea of combining BuzzFeed with media companies like Vox, Vice, Group Nine, and Refinery29 in the New York Times prompted a flurry of discussion — could such a merger Save Digital Media?

Mergers might be inevitable; success, however, isn’t. For all of its combined billions of pageviews, digital media is still beholden to Facebook and Google for its traffic. Peretti sees a four-way marriage as the most effective way to break that duopoly. The merged entity could theoretically withhold its content from social networks, effectively striking for a better deal, or bargain directly with advertisers and sell ads on a larger scale, closer to the tech giants (but still a long ways off).

The merger plan means Peretti is thinking bigger, not better. It’s not about fundamentally changing the ad-based, online distribution media model but accelerating it. By banding together, the united publications become kind of like a social network themselves — too big for advertisers or readers to avoid. (Copying the enemy isn’t necessarily good for journalism, however. Peretti himself said recently that the Facebook-Google duopoly “favors publishers of cheap media.”)

It was only a matter of time before mergers became digital media’s go-to coping mechanism. The trend is already manifesting; Condé Nast recently announced it will merge with the London-based Condé Nast International, which will lead to a consolidation of all its titles across the world. The hope is that consolidation will lead to business efficiencies — Condé was already in the process of creating shared social and creative teams across multiple U.S. magazines like Vogue and GQ.

Film, television and streaming have also set a precedent. Disney is sweeping up 21st Century Fox — a deal expected to go through in January and spawn “brutal” layoffs at Fox. AT&T bought Time Warner. Comcast bought the British broadcaster Sky. These consolidations were prompted by Silicon Valley’s outsized influence on how we consume media today. Netflix was crowding out traditional movie and television companies, paying exorbitant prices for productions in order to create something of a content monopoly, so traditional media companies decided to scale up in an attempt to compete, like Voltron battling Godzilla.

The Drum published a long read exploring the pros and cons of the theoretical media mega-merger. It could be a financial boon, but not because of negotiating better deals. Rather, it would lead to cost-saving layoffs because of the efficiencies of consolidation. That’s right, more layoffs — beyond the shuttering publications and general trimming going on. The conglomerate wouldn’t need as many engineers, ad-sales staff, or business-side managers, and it won’t need as many writers or editors either.

One result could be a digital-first Condé Nast or Meredith: an umbrella company (hopefully net profitable) that publishes many titles, all different but with a vaguely similar aesthetic and business model. But a merger will also incite a struggle for dominance as the separate companies each try to put their stamp on the new corporate structure. Vice has the highest valuation by about $4 billion, so its leadership could take the reins. The whole thing seems to be Peretti’s brainchild, but BuzzFeed might have the smallest actual news division after many losses over the past two years. Vox Media has the clearest blueprint for managing multiple strong, individualized brands.

A source within BuzzFeed has since told The Drum that the merger discussions are happening. It makes sense: like a round of hot potato or crypto investing, you don’t want to still be in the game when the bottom truly falls out. If the companies do merge, then investors, owners, and employees alike will still see their stakes or stock options devalued. But that’s better than Mic’s miniscule $5 million price tag in the Bustle sale, or a valuation of nothing.

Everyone loses: instead of competing voices, we get one monolith. We gain some stability, perhaps, but more homogeneity and fewer staff jobs make up the wave of the merger future.

SHORT LINKS:

— The Weekly Standard, a conservative publication known for not fawning over Trump, will cease publication. The Intercept compiled a list of the 10 worst articles ever published there.

— Penthouse put together a list of “new puritans” that includes Laura Loomer, Alex Jones, Nicole Cliffe, Asia Argento, and Rose McGowan. So yeah, it basically just put together a list of wildly disparate people it doesn’t like and tacked on an inexplicable moniker. The magazine has also recently profiled Jordan Peterson and Mike Cernovich — so, are porn mags the official news source for the alt-right/intellectual dark web?

— Google Fusion Tables, a tool used by data journalists, is going away, highlighting further that tech companies aren’t especially plugged in to the needs of the journalists using their resources.

— Tin House Magazine’s 20th anniversary issue will be its last — the cost of running a print literary magazine was becoming too burdensome, the publisher wrote in a goodbye letter, and the resources will be shifted to Tin House Books and Tin House Workshop. (The McCormack family also owns and publishes The New Republic, which recently lost its editor-in-chief.)

— Harper’s thinks it’s important you know that this one French novelist really likes Trump. Cool, thanks so much!! Good stuff!

— Am I correct in understanding the “Mitski backlash” is literally one dumb tweet? I mean, it was a bad tweet…from a nobody with 136 followers, who got roughly 2,400 likes? And Mitski (maybe) acknowledged it??? Twitter’s democratizing effect is such that truly anyone can ascend to virality at any second, but the twist of one dumb opinion being received as criticism worthy of acknowledgement is just too much.