Study Hall Digest 4/2/2018

It’s our one-year anniversary! And we obviously couldn’t have done it without you! We have 550 members now, and that number keeps growing. We’ve gone from being a rinky-dink listserv to having two weekly newsletters (Digest and Opportunities), an ever-expanding Basecamp operation, a lil’ media operation (pitch us!), and more coming soon. So first and foremost, THANK YOU!!! If there’s anything you’d like to see more of, please tell us. <3 Enav, Kyle and Erin.

…onto the news…

On the good news front: The Onion (which includes AV Club, ClickHole and more) has unionized. The move is significant for a few reasons:The Onion, unlike most of the other recent media operations that have unionized, is mostly an entertainment site. This could mean that we see unionization spread to less newsy sites. Also, 90 percent of their staffers voted ‘yes’, so that’s a good sign that support for unions in rising. Writers Guild will represent the staffers. Essentially every new media org has gone with WGA over NewsGuild, except for Mic.com.

Vanity Fair has beefed up its culture department with a bunch of new hires who’ll be reporting on TV and film. Cultural criticism isn’t usually a huge money maker on a click-supported model so we’ll see if VF is trying something new here, revenue-wise (or just trying to bolster its physical mag subscription revenue).

Here’s a good story about how tiny food magazines have found a niche somewhere between traditional magazines and books, supporting staffs of a couple people with circulations in the hundreds or thousands. Maybe small, indie, reader-supported media operations are the future. 😉

And speaking of small, subscription-supported things, the Fort Collins Coloradoan has managed to rack up 22,000 subscriptions in a city with 170,000 people, so like 13 percent of the entire city is subscribed, wow!

Okay now let’s go 60 miles south to Denver for the bad news, where a hedge fund has cut the Denver Post’s staff in half (click through for a very depressing photo of the situation).

Something similar is happening at the Dallas Morning News, and, of course, their corporate owners have given themselves hefty raises. What else is new?

If you haven’t seen the viral video of reporters at Sinclair-owned TV stations parroting a Trump-friendly, media-bashing script at the behest of their bosses, check it out. It’s definitely scary, especially considering that Sinclair acted as a propaganda arm for Trump during the 2016 campaign. But tbh have you watched local news recently? It’s all about crime and how police are great and such, so…that’s already a form of conservative propaganda, IMHO.

And now, because it’s our one-year anniversary, some pictures of baby sea mammals.