Study Hall Digest 2/26/2018

Some tentatively good news and lots of definitely bad news this week!

Sure, unions can create backlash from management, but in the case of the LA Times, it seems the union might have actually saved the paper from being ripped apart by Tronc by making it impossible for the ridiculously-named company to create a shadow, non-unionized newsroom. So woo!

Gothamist, LAist and DCist are coming back?? They’ll be under the umbrellas of public radio stations in their respective cities. That’s where the good news ends, because it seems Jen Chung and Jake Dobkin, the original owners who were notoriously difficult to work under, and who decided to sell the sites to billionaire ghoul Joe Ricketts in the first place, will be in charge again. The deal was largely funded by two anonymous donors, and I have absolutely no proof of this, but maybe Chung and Dobkin felt bad for being made millionaires by destroying the -ist sites, so they donated to get them back??? The union that represented DNAist didn’t even hear about the deal before it was announced to the public, and WNYC is currently a mess, so color me slightly excited but mostly skeptical about this whole thing!!!!!

Speaking of poorly-run media companies, Newsweek is more of a shitshow than ever, but at least its reporters and editors got to publish this story on the mag’s ties to a Christian semi-cult before they were fired. The editors note up top reads, in part, “As we were reporting this story, Newsweek Media Group fired Newsweek Editor Bob Roe, Executive Editor Ken Li and Senior Politics Reporter Celeste Katz for doing their jobs.”

Vox fired 50 people, and gutted a lot of Racked, which, IMHO, is its best site. Maybe the cuts were necessary, but the lesson is that management at most companies doesn’t know what the heck it’s doing: a few months ago Vox was all-in on social video, and most of the people it’s now firing worked in…social video.

I’m sure everyone has seen the Brendan Fraser profile, which I thought was really good. To me, the story was proof that celebrity profiles don’t have to be vapid and overly flattering, but can instead get to serious issues and deep truths and still draw in views (it’s one of GQ’s most-viewed-ever stories).

On Facebook-implosion-watch: several media companies are experimenting with ways to basically leave the platform, and finding it semi-successful, so maybe we’ll all get away from the beast soon!

It’s kinda terrifying that one celebrity can make or break an entire media company these days.

If you’ve always wanted to read a truly insane 1,000,000 word piece about Bari Weiss, written by a cult that uses fake names to get money to run weird cult exercises in the woods, now’s your chance!