Study Hall Digest 4/13/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Amid a Pandemic, Why Are Some Media Companies…Doing Fine?

Some media companies are thriving despite the pandemic. We’ve spent the past few weeks dwelling on the devastating impact the coronavirus is having on the media industry — alt-weeklies and local papers are folding, laying off staff, and cutting pay. Most recently, Bustle Digital Group laid off 24 employees, including the entire staff of The Outline. At the same time, freelancers are losing work as publications put a freeze on commissions or offer substantially lower rates. In short: It’s bad.

But there are a few media companies that have defied the trend. Hearst has reassured editors that there will be no layoffs, pay cuts or furloughs. Employees are receiving bonuses and Hearst is waiving budget targets that would have determined executive bonuses. Hearst owns big glossies like Esquire and Cosmopolitan, and they also own a couple dozen dailies, including the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle. Hearst is a private company, meaning it is not beholden to investors, and its diverse portfolio means big names can help offset the cost of running smaller dailies.

Patch, a network of sites specializing in hyperlocal news over a thousand cities and towns, just saw its strongest month ever in both revenue and traffic. Meanwhile, local publications like the San Francisco Examiner are seeing boosts in web traffic but are still furloughing staff due to plummeting ad revenue. Why does traffic convert to revenue for some publications but not for others? Patch has an ad-based revenue model, but with a few twists. According to Axios, advertisers sign on as “marquee sponsors” of its network of sites, so they have a certain amount of ad revenue locked in, making them less susceptible to the unpredictability of ad revenue pegged to web traffic. And according to a previous interview with CEO Warren St. John, Patch benefits from four major revenue streams spanning advertising, events, and commerce affiliate deals, so a downtick in ad sales isn’t the end of the world.

Plummeting ad revenue, particularly at local publications, may incentivize publishers to reconsider revenue models. Perhaps it will accelerate the pivot to subscription-based or non-profit models — or prompt a move towards ad-based revenue models that are more resilient.

One strategy is to trade rapid growth for security. Bustle Digital Group has hoovered up millions in venture capital and used that cash to acquire more and more sites that Bryan Goldberg doesn’t know how to run. That has gone, predictably, very poorly. On a much smaller scale, BuzzFeed, another venture-backed media company, has instituted pay cuts for staff but has avoided layoffs. Hearst is a private company that reaps the majority of its profits from its television division, leaving budgets for media properties relatively stable.

An unforeseen crisis like a pandemic will level media companies that aren’t built to weather the storm — which very few media companies are, it seems. BDG shuttered The Outline not because the crisis drained ad revenue, but because Bustle never figured out how to sell ads for the site in the first place and was keeping the website afloat by recklessly spending the venture capital Goldberg spent years stockpiling. Pardon the term, but “when all this is over,” I’ll be curious to see what lessons media companies take from those that have fared well through the pandemic. I’m predicting we’ll see more of a push towards diverse revenue streams, an overhaul of ad-based models that don’t leave platforms so vulnerable to fluctuations, and even more of an emphasis on subscriptions.

Condé Nast, in contrast with its longtime rival Hearst, announced this morning that pandemic-related financial pressures will force them to cut pay for higher earners and limit hours for lower-ranking staff. Layoffs are possible as a last resort, according to chief executive Roger Lynch. (Anna Wintour is only taking a 20 percent pay cut — her net worth is reportedly around $35 million and her salary is said to be $2 million.) Condé has historically been synonymous with luxury, but luxury doesn’t seem to be selling right now: consumers aren’t spending on extravagances and luxury advertising clients are cutting their marketing budgets. The glossy giant will be looking to make use of assistance programs in Britain and the EU for employees who have lost income.

The NYT Edits Out Joe Biden’s History of Sexual Misconduct

What a difference a year makes. Back in April 2019, when it seemed like the Democratic nominee might not be a white old man who loves Fig Newtons, the New York Times reported on Joe Biden’s “tendency to lavish his affections on women and girls” and how this was now “no longer a laughing matter in the era of #MeToo” if he was going to announce a presidential run, which yeah, no shit.

On Sunday, Biden’s tendencies towards improper touching and violating personal boundaries made the news again. This time, the NYT investigated claims from former Senate aide Tara Reade that Joe Biden had sexually assaulted her in 1993. When Reade joined other women in accusing Joe Biden of sexual misconduct last year, she didn’t disclose details of her alleged assault; her initial statements prompted death threats and accusations she was a Russian agent for tweets and posts that praised President Vladimir Putin. (She now calls the posts “misguided.”) It wasn’t until last month that Reade detailed her alleged sexual assault during a podcast interview with Rolling Stone reporter Katie Halper, a decision she made “as Mr. Biden was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination after winning a string of primaries against his chief rival, Senator Bernie Sanders,” according to the Times’ reporting. Their conclusion on Biden’s behavior? Well, it depends on which version you’re reading.

After interviewing Reade and several other women who accused Biden of sexual misconduct, their conclusion as of today reads: “No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.”

That sounds pretty conclusive as long as you ignore the revision. When it was first published, the last sentence read: “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses, and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable,” a sentence that caused widespread incredulity on social media. Along with the deletion of this very important subordinate clause on his pattern of misconduct came a tweet non-apology from the Times saying they had “deleted a tweet in this thread that had some imprecise language that has been changed in the story.” As BoboChimpan said on Twitter after the rewrite: “Aside from the well-documented pattern of misconduct, there was no pattern of misconduct” is a HELL of a take!”

The NYT has done its fair share of messy takes in the past, but as Popula’s Maria Bustillos noted, the addition (and subsequent deletion) of the clause felt like a “knock-down drag-out editorial fight in sentence form.” Some editors likely wanted to keep it in, while others wanted it gone. Only once the backlash began was it deleted, but it’s a bit too late for corrections now that the original version has gone viral.

I’m not sure what alternate universe the NYT lives in where their readers aren’t tracking and screenshotting changes made to articles, but it must be the same one where Easter Sunday is the perfect day to bury your previous reporting on unwanted touching in your new report on sexual assault allegations against the Democratic nominee for president. Rewriting someone’s history of sexual misconduct is journalistic malfeasance, no matter what reality you’re living in. — Chris Erik Thomas

Longread of the Week: In the London Review of Books, Clare Bucknell writes an extremely enjoyable and only slightly gnarly literary history of sedition in the UK. “The beauty of the legal situation, as libellers discovered, was that texts that were so exaggerated as not to be plausible actually had a better chance of avoiding conviction. The grosser and more outrageous the behavior attributed to kings or tyrants, the more wary prosecutors would be of claiming any relevance to [King] George.” The government is no longer prosecuting sedition the way they used to, but still: useful! — Erin Schwartz

In Other News

— Vox Media is currently in the midst of a drive for contributions. Editor-in-Chief Lauren Williams has said the drive is meant to supplement the decline in ad revenue.

— The Wrap seemed to have accidentally published a story about mass layoffs at The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard which…have not happened yet! What a way to find out your job is in jeopardy. It’s alarming that THR and Billboard’s parent company, Valence Media, knew about these layoffs far enough in advance to notify the press and not its own employees.

— Since Deadspin re-launched — after firing the acting editor-in-chief for not sticking to sports, which prompted the rest of the staff to walk out — its traffic has fallen to such startling lows that it seems they would’ve been better off not publishing at all.

– Magazine print sales are actually up! Too bad the same can’t be said for ad sales.