Study Hall Digest 4/17/2017

The media rn

TBH this week was a pretty depressing one in media. Amber Jamieson, one of the most well-liked reporters at The Guardian US announced she was taking a buyout, which comes on the heels of a bunch of other bad news for the company, from layoffs to Trump-related office woes. Seems like the company can’t really figure out a niche in the new media era—it doesn’t feel as vital as the Times, but it’s not willing to stoop to the levels of other media orgs in the search for clicks (well, sometimes it does).

Tribune Media’s new website is dead. It was supposed to be some kind of prestigious flagship, staffed up with big names from Vice, The Intercept and other well-known places. But it seemed a disaster from the start (I tried writing for them once and they tried to pay me $300 for a 1,500 word story they expected New Yorker-level writing and editing on). Tribune is one part of a company that split off and formed Tronc, which is also not going well. Media executives certainly seem aimless these days.

Thoughts

I regret to inform you the media is back on its bullshit: Remember when Trump was elected and a bunch of people subscribed to legacy papers as a reward for their new supposed criticality, and the Washington Post even changed its g-damn slogan to “Democracy Dies in Darkness”? Welp that all went out the window these past few weeks as the media cheered war-waging and called Trump “presidential” 12 billion times for killing people in far-off countries. Instead of digging in its heels, media is doing what it so often: recentering itself so that it becomes the voice of the establishment, whatever the establishment happens to be at the time (in this case clown-run proto-fascist military republic). That explains why the New York Times hired a new opinion editor this week who thinks global warming is a hoax and Arab people have diseased brains.