Study Hall Digest 2/3/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

What Can a Journalist Tweet? Hell If Marty Baron Knows!

Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez was reinstated not long after her suspension last week for tweeting a Daily Beast story about the rape allegation against Kobe Bryant shortly after Bryant’s death, but questions around her suspension and social media policies at news organizations still linger.

To recap: Sonmez tweeted the link; executive editor Marty Baron sent her an email saying that the tweet showed “a real lack of judgment” and that she was “hurting the institution”; Sonmez was suspended, though whether that suspension was due to tweeting the story or to a follow-up tweet showing the name of a man who sent her a harassing email was unclear; her colleagues rallied around her; Sonmez was reinstated and released a statement requesting clarity from Baron and the Post; and finally, Baron sent a long email to staff over the suspension, rehashing the Post’s social media policy and noting it’s “not always easy to know where to draw the line,” and sort of implying that Sonmez did indeed cross a line but that, you know, it’s tough to make these calls! The email contained no apology or admission of error, so I can only assume Baron stands by the action taken by the Post.

Columbia Journalism Review noted that the furor around Sonmez’s tweet spiked when Donald Trump Jr. quote-tweeted her, leading to a pile-on from Breitbart and The Daily Caller. It seems that the Post did the classic establishment publication thing of only enforcing its social media policy when they fear being targeted by far-right trolls. Social media policies tend to be vaguely worded and arbitrarily enforced, making it difficult for staffers (and freelancers!) to navigate amid incentives to maintain an online presence. But a story about a public figure who has died should be a pretty noncontroversial thing for a reporter to tweet.

More importantly, institutions need to have reporters’ backs in the face of far-right harassment. Throwing up your hands and saying “Ah, well, social media — tricky, right?” is a pretty weak move from Baron, who owes Sonmez an apology. But that’s probably the best we’re going to get. The Daily Beast reported this morning that last year, the Post threatened to fire Wesley Lowery for tweets criticizing the Times for leaving mentions of racism out of a story on the Tea Party. Again, presumably the problem was revealing bias, but the real issue here is starting to look like women and writers of color recognizing the realities of misogyny and racism.

American Dirt Criticism Reaches Critical Free Speech Levels, Cancels Tour

The discourse around white-woman-who-loves-barbed-wire-as-an-aesthetic Jeanine Cummins’s racist border novel American Dirt has reached Peak Discourse. Amid a wave of harsh reviews and criticism from Latinx authors — which call out the book for its error-riddled and stereotype-filled portrayal of a Mexican mother attempting to cross the border with her son — Flatiron Books has cancelled Cummins’ book tour, citing safety concerns. Though Flatiron president Bob Miller did apologize for some issues critics had raised, including neglecting to mention that Cummins’ touted “undocumented immigrant” husband is IRISH, he attributed the cancelled tour to “specific threats” of “physical violence.” (It is worth noting that writer Myriam Gurba, who penned a fierce critique of the book, has said she also received death threats.)

Deadspin Back From the Dead While GMG Union Battles Bosses

For one brief and shining moment, Deadspin was back — sort of. Former writers of the beloved website gathered yesterday at Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog to blog about the Super Bowl and whatever else happened to strike their fancy. Kelsey McKinney wrote a guide to attending a game party; Lauren Thiesen wrote about attending a life-altering Phish concert at Madison Square Garden; Samer Kalaf wrote about the worst tweets of 2019. Much of it was sports-related, some of it was not, as it should be. The project was sponsored by password manager Dashlane, whose head of communications, Joel Johnson, is the former editorial director of Gawker Media. The blog was a temporary project that lasted through the game weekend and is now, sadly, over.

Meanwhile, G/O Media remains a dumpster fire onto which CEO Jim Spanfeller is heaping gasoline*. It’s been about three weeks since 97% of the GMG Union bargaining unit cast a vote of no confidence in the CEO, and over a week since Spanfeller and co. announced that the new Deadspin editor would be Chicago-based, placing him outside of the union contract. After Deadspin’s move to Chicago was announced, the union set up a meeting for contract negotiations to discuss the plan, but the editor’s hire was announced before that meeting could take place, said a GMG Union member. “I think Jim Spanfeller considers any opportunity to take a position out of the union as a win,” they said. “I think they have a very misguided misconception that our colleagues in Chicago will be less bothered by the whole situation than we are here.”

The union member described Spanfeller’s decision-making process as “erratic” and “off-the-cuff,” and noted that, in addition to the upwards of 20 Deadspin staffers who walked out over management’s “stick to sports” mandate and the subsequent firing of staff who disobeyed it, G/O is having a rough time keeping people. “People are quitting every week; sometimes it seems like every day,” said the union member. “This company is very obviously bleeding out talent. I think at least 30 editorial staffers have left since the Great Hill acquisition, but I think that number is conservative.”

*bad business decisions

Media Launches: Knewz and Scroll

Have you ever asked yourself: What if news, but hip? Rupert Murdoch has, which is why his News Corp is launching Knewz, a Drudge Report-like aggregation site that collects headlines from across more than 400 publishers “free of filter bubbles and narrow-minded nonsense” (which, yes, News Corp is famously free of those things). Everyone is losing their minds over the chaotic design, which kind of looks like an obsessive detective’s corkboard if that detective was also a yellow highlighter, but I personally prefer to fixate on this quote from News Corp CEO Robert Thomson: “We live in a world of vexatious verticals, of crass clickbait, of polarized perspectives and fallacious, fact-free feeds – Knewz is knowing and needed. Knewz nous is in the house.” I could not have said it better myself.

Now a more sincere question. Have you ever asked yourself: What if ad blockers weren’t harmful to publishers? That’s the idea behind Scroll, a subscription service that blocks ads while paying publishers so they don’t lose the revenue. 300 sites, including Vox, are trying it out on a trial basis (when it officially launches later this year, the service will cost $5/month). Peter Kafka at Recode noted: “If Scroll works, it doesn’t mean internet advertising is going away. It would, however, be another move toward creating a tiered internet, where people who don’t want to see ads — and can afford to pay not to see them — won’t see ads.”

Of course, those who can’t afford not to see ads will continue to see them. Streaming services like Hulu have been on a tiered model like this for some time, and it’s not that hard to imagine the whole internet following suit. If I’m allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic (which I rarely do, so why not) I can envision a world in which a service like this allows publications to attract more subscribers while retaining most of their much-needed ad revenue.

Longread of the Week: Becca Rothfeld in The Point went long (Ed. note: football) on the exceptional normal characters who populated Sally Rooney’s novels, and the illusion of normalcy Rooney herself projects in interviews. Of a Rooney protagonist who is effortlessly gifted and insistently normal: “So is she normal, or isn’t she? The truth is, the book fulfills a ubiquitous romantic fantasy precisely because it can’t decide. Who wouldn’t like to succeed in romance without really trying? Who hasn’t sometimes wished that their normalcy were exceptional? And who among the overeducated leftist set has not dreamed of surpassing their opponents without compromising their egalitarian virtue?”

Study Hallers Recommend: Coverage of the Iowa caucuses is unmatched as a mass act of parachute journalism, and results in endless cliches about nice midwesterners and the heartland that aren’t reflective of the state. (NB: I was born and raised in Iowa.) This campaign cycle, however, a bright spot has been the Cedar Rapids Gazette, a paper with a circulation of about 35,000 which last year hired Twitter-famous leftist journalist Lyz Lenz as a columnist.

A recent column on the challenges of caucusing with a baby was shared widely online; Lenz also talked about the issue on NPR. Instead of the coastal reporters covering flyover states, flyover stays should cover themselves for a local and national audience. While not every local paper will be able to hire a local writer with a readership like Lenz’s, it’s proving to be a great means for changing the boundaries of local news. — Willy Blackmore

Comings and Goings

— BuzzFeed Ben is now New York Times Ben: Ben Smith is leaving his longtime post as editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News to join the Times as a media columnist. (Will he divest his equity???)

— Colin Lecher, senior reporter at The Verge, is joining The Markup as an enterprise reporter.

— Marc Snetiker is leaving Entertainment Weekly for Netflix to produce digital and editorial work. I predict journalists leaving traditional media for streaming services will become a trend.

Everything Else

— Businessman Aron Ping D’Souza, who helped Peter Thiel destroy Gawker, is launching an elite social network called Column that would ostensibly host such public figures as Elon Musk, Ann Coulter, and Peter Thiel and a bizarre grab-bag of celebrities including Chance the Rapper, Diane Von Furstenberg, and Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine. Sounds like my personal hell, but ok! Each of these investors is expected to cough up $100,000 for a stake in the company to get it off the ground. It’s like Facebook, but for super rich people, and instead of a “like” button there’s a “truth” button, so, again, this is my personal hell.

— The BBC is cutting 450 jobs in a desperate cost-cutting measure, reducing the number of stories covered and consolidating journalists into “centralized teams.”

— The Guardian is banning advertisements from oil and gas companies, which is a first for major media companies.

— The Des Moines Register’s poll of Iowa Democrats was abruptly pulled Saturday night when Pete Buttigieg’s campaign raised concerns — the thing is, CNN had planned an hour long special around the poll’s release, which they then suddenly had to fill. Maybe don’t plan an hour of TV around the release of a poll!

— The New York Times’s loathed election needle is back, baby….times four. Here it is, the vaguely threatening headline that launched more than a few preemptive panic attacks:

My election needle for election needles is pointing toward “please no more election needles, ever again.”