Study Hall Digest 2/18/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Journalism and Tech: A Match Made in HELL?

Apple is preparing to launch a subscription news service billed as the “Netflix of news,” which could potentially be a promising way forward for publications looking to attract more readers and earn revenue outside of advertising — EXCEPT Apple is planning to keep about half of the subscription revenue made through the service, according to the Wall Street Journal. The rest of the revenue would be divided up among the participating publishers according to how much time readers spend on each site, so at the end of the day each publisher could walk away with significantly less than half of that revenue. But does that mean publishers would be wise to spurn Apple on the deal? The short answer is: It depends. Study Hall spoke to Aram Zucker-Scharff, director of ad tech for the Washington Post (whose Twitter thread on the topic can be read here). Here are the main takeaways:

• Whether the app is harmful or beneficial may depend largely on the type of publication: A large national publication that is raking in subscriptions could risk cannibalizing those high-paying subscriptions for a smaller slice of the pie from Apple. According to the WSJ report, some of those publications (the Times, the Post, the Journal) are wary of the deal for this very reason.
• But that cannibalization may not occur at all, because people don’t subscribe to national publications for the same reasons they subscribe to Netflix, argued Zucker-Scharff. “A lot of subscribers don’t subscribe to the New York Times or New Yorker necessarily because they’re putting a value to the content they’re getting — they’re putting a value to the institution,” he said. If that’s true, they wouldn’t necessarily toss their subscription for a cheaper option.
• Small, local publications are a different story, said Zucker-Scharff, because they’re not thriving on subscriptions in the first place. “There a lot of small local publications that don’t necessarily have the power to show up in searches all the time, they might be covering a city that shares a suburb with a major metro area and therefore are overshadowed in social or search by a larger publications,” he explained. “[They’re] looking for ways to capture the audiences that thus far have been uncapturable.” A subscription service like the one pitched by Apple could be the solution.
• It’s important to note that there are a lot of unknowns around this app: It’s unknown whether publishers would be able to make ad revenue off page views within the app, for instance. If not, that could put publishers in a position of determining whether the potential lost ad revenue would be worth the potential added subscription revenue.
• Apple also may refuse to release subscribers’ personal information to publishers, cutting off the relationship between the publication and its readership. According to the WSJ report, that is also troubling for the national publications wary of the deal.
• The larger issue, said Zucker-Scharff, is the media industry and its readership are in a position of being beholden to gatekeepers, whether Google, Facebook or Apple News. Facebook and Google currently have publishers reliant on ad revenue in a stranglehold, and are making off with the lion’s share of that revenue. Apple’s pitch may give a publisher a way to untangle themselves from the duopoly of Facebook and Google, but they would then owe potentially more than half the revenue from that partnership to Apple. “You’re still at the mercy of a provider, and you have to hope the provider is willing to be a benevolent capitalist,” said Zucker-Scharff. Let’s hope Apple decides to be a tad more benevolent than 50 percent.

NYTimes: Before you Criticize Esquire, Consider…Empathy

Esquire this past week published a sprawling (and boring) feature about a white teenage boy growing up in Wisconsin in an attempt to “look at our divided country through the eyes of one kid,” according to Editor in Chief Jay Fielden. The piece failed to say anything profound about national division, instead showcasing a confused kid with half-formed opinions in service of Fielden’s war against the “Kafkaesque thought-police nightmare of paranoia and nausea, in which you might accidentally say what you really believe and get burned at the stake.” I wrote a critique of the piece for Study Hall showing how the piece seemed to be a cover for Fielden’s own casual ambivalence on issues that matter.

The New York Times opinion section on Saturday published a piece written by Robyn Kanner and edited by Bari Weiss (lol) arguing the teenage boy featured should be extended empathy and room to grow. Well, fine. But as I argued on Twitter, the whole op-ed is propped up by a gross mischaracterization of the criticism around the Esquire piece, which was about Jay Fielden’s editorial mission and the decision to profile this kid while ignoring larger questions of whiteness and masculinity. The critics were not grabbing their pitchforks for Ryan Morgan, who barely has any fully-formed opinions, though I’m sure Bari Weiss would like to believe that’s the case. It’s a shame the op-ed didn’t bother confronting the real, substantive criticism of the piece and the way in which it was done — as New York Magazine’s E. Alex Jung pointed out, “you could only do that if you ignore black thought.”

But of course, Bari Weiss was never going to do her due diligence as an editor — she sympathizes with Fielden’s stated mission, and even apparently reached out to console him about the backlash. Anyway, sorry to be a “digital Jacobin” about it.

Email Etiquette: Can I Tell an Editor to Fuck Off?

Here’s something freelancers are buzzing about this week: In a since-deleted tweet, Esquire editor Tyler Coates shared an email from a disgruntled freelancer fed up with Coates’ lack of response despite following up. After withdrawing his pitch, the freelancer writes: “At this point it’s too exhausting and frustrating to keep pitching ideas, knowing they’re going to be rejected, ignored, or buried under 50 other emails.” He goes on to say he’s written for Esquire for the past several years but now considers it a waste of time for both parties. “Especially mine,” he concludes. Well! Bridge burned!

The general consensus among freelancers in our Listserv seems to be: No one comes across well in this exchange! The email seems like some unnecessary dick-swinging when a brusque “Just letting you know I’m taking this elsewhere” could have worked just as well without potentially damaging the writer’s word-of-mouth reputation among other editors. BUT the editor comes across worse. Admitting you don’t respond to a repeated contributor within several weeks is a bad look. Tweeting out a freelancer’s emotional email — one likely fueled by financial anxiety — is a worse look. Freelancers’ livelihoods depend on editors responding to pitch emails. At a certain point (short of several weeks), “I was busy” doesn’t really cut it.

Anyway, this is all part of a larger conversation about email etiquette and what you owe others via email when it’s the dominant mode of communication. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant argued in a perfectly-timed Times piece that, yes, you do owe a response in a professional situation like this one. A response could mean “I’m sorry I haven’t gotten around to this but I will soon.” SOMETHING.

EVERYTHING ELSE:

— Popula is allowing readers to tip writers…in cryptocurrency? It’s a cool concept, but why not set up a tip jar to accept USD as well? What do we think?

— Instead of an “edit” button (please no), Jack is considering a “clarifications” feature for Twitter that would allow users to “clarify” tweets without changing the original content. Like a retweet, except in this case, another user would be unable to share the original tweet devoid of its added clarifications. I don’t hate this idea in theory, but it seems like it would be messy in execution. Idk ya’ll, maybe Twitter is just a bad forum for communicating.

— Private-equity firm Great Hill Partners is in EXCLUSIVE talks to buy Gizmodo Media Group. The firm has previously dabbled in publishing, but it seems this would be the first digital media acquisition. I guess this means Bryan Goldberg has been edged out of the bidding for Gizmodo, which is not a bad thing.

— LexisNexis, which has become indispensable among investigative journalists, has banned journalists from using its database tool that allows users to pull up addresses and phone numbers by searching someone’s name. The company cited “public concern,” and said customers in media would be barred unless they provided evidence the tool isn’t being used for investigative journalism. Fraud investigators and debt collectors, however, are still permitted to use the service. I guess there hasn’t been sufficient “public concern” in that area?

— BuzzFeed News has announced that it plans to unionize with the NewsGuild of New York. Those talks apparently began in 2015, but the recent layoffs lit a fire under the efforts and now around 90 percent of BuzzFeed staff support the union. It remains to be seen if the rest of BuzzFeed follows.

— This Wired article argues journalism is returning to its roots by bucking traditional notions of objectivity. Here’s a sample: “[If] you explained Twitter, the blogosphere, and newsy partisan outlets like Daily Kos or National Review to the Founding Fathers, they’d recognize them instantly.” It goes on to say Ben Franklin would probably host a podcast like Chapo Trap House or have a deeply partisan blog a la Ben Shapiro. What IS dying is objectivity, which according to Ben Franklin, is great.

— The author of a viral Meghan Trainor press release, called “deranged” and “astonishingly horny” by Paper Magazine, has revealed herself! Caroline Goldfarb, a writer on the Late Late Show, said she ghost wrote the “experimental” release, which contains the phrase “smash bae’s junk to smithereens.” Breathtaking.