Study Hall Digest 3/12/2018

Let’s start with some good news about media companies maybe making money again! The Athletic, a sports site that caters to local markets raised $20 million and plans on hiring hundreds of more employees. The Athletic is unique because it’s subscription-based—you can barely access any of its content without signing up ($3.75 a month, billed annually). That means no ads, and it means it’s not beholden to Facebook algorithms to make its money. If the model works in sports journalism, it’ll probably be tested out in other areas too (I’d pay $2/month for The Outline, e.g.).

And similarly, The New Yorker has been proving that people are willing to pay a lot of money for good content: the price of a digital and print subscription is now $120 a year, and subscriptions make up 65 percent of their revenue. Condé thinks the magazine will be able to double its subscriptions, to 2.4 million people, in the next five years. I think this is all great. Internet-ad-supported content is usually bad! Subscriptions encourage uniqueness and depth. Woo.

But for all those publications still thinking tech companies will save you, I’m sure relying on Pinterest will do you much better than relying on Facebook, lol.

Newsweek: Even more of a shitshow than we thought! The site was found to be buying traffic to boost their ad sales, and their spokesperson is absolutely insane!

This is a good piece on how the media totally and utterly failed to cover the West Virginia teachers’ strike, one of the most significant labor actions of the last several decades.

Congrats to the David Carr Fellows for graduating into being staffers at the New York Times. I think more fellowships like these would be a good idea—they allow for experimentation within trepidatious news organizations. Neither Hess nor Herman would’ve been hired and able to write the kind of stuff they wrote if they’d started out as normal staffers.

I cannot write anything else about the New York Times op-ed page without risking an aneurysm, so if you want to see just how many terrible columns have been produced there recently, go here.

Everyone on the Study Hall listserv is required to buy this top.

True!