Study Hall Digest 4/27/2020: HOLLYWOOD EDITION

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Streaming in the Time of Coronavirus

The pandemic is changing the way we work, socialize, and entertain ourselves. So naturally we’re going to see some changes to our preferred method of time-wasting: binge-watching mountains of streaming content.

In a post on his website, analyst Matthew Ball broke down the impacts of the pandemic on viewing habits and streaming services, noting that a crisis like the coronavirus will strengthen pre-existing trends. Television was already seeing a gradual shift from pay-TV (cable) to streaming services — now, we’re going to see viewers cut out pay-TV as an unnecessary cost.

Plus, streaming services are attracting swathes of new viewers while we’re all stuck inside and bored out of our minds. TV viewership is up across the board, but it’s way up for streaming services: the seven largest streaming services (excluding Amazon Prime) saw an average 75% jump in daily sign-ups after states instituted shelter-in-place orders, and Disney+ saw an increase of more than 225%. Of course, the quarantine boom will probably not be sustained in the long term, but many of these new viewers will likely keep their subscriptions, Ball reasons, and cut out pay-TV.

What about the production pipeline? We’re all stuck inside and flying through Netflix’s vast library of mostly mediocre content, which is good for Netflix — but with production now all but impossible, won’t streaming services eventually run out of content?

Consultant Alex Goldberger of MediaLink tells Study Hall that Netflix is uniquely positioned to flourish during a production freeze for several reasons. “They have such a substantial library they’ve built over several years,” Goldberger said. The streaming service also tends to shoot its content pretty far in advance — the company’s chief content officer told analysts that all its 2020 content is ready to go and 2021 is largely taken care of as well. “They also have a global production infrastructure that will enable them to more easily scale up content production in less hard hit regions,” Goldberger added. “Iceland and South Korea are areas they’re looking at to shift more production to.”

Other services might not be so lucky. HBOMax, which is set to launch May 27, has had to put its much-anticipated Friends reunion on the backburner due to the pandemic. Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service specializing in bite-sized, ten-minute episodes, has enjoyed a successful launch, but may eventually hit a wall, Goldberger noted. “A lot of their shows that were slated to be delivered in 2023 and 2024 are now halted, and it’s anyone’s guess when that will resume,” he said. “They could potentially be in a position where they run out of fresh content to provide the consumers.”

Similarly, the Tokyo Olympics were supposed to be a boost to NBC’s Peacock streaming service. With the games canceled, NBC will have to draw in those subscribers some other way.

Are stories still being optioned for IP? Before the pandemic, studios were snatching up intellectual property from magazine stories at a stunning pace. Now it seems studios are still interested in buying up IP, since all the processes before production have continued apace. A source involved in some projects at Netflix told me that projects in the development stage are business-as-usual, which Goldberger confirmed

“Everyone is shifting their attention to development, because that is the only thing you can do at this point,” Goldberger said. “There’s a lot of meetings going on, a lot of people reading scripts and talking about ideas — that part of the value chain is still very much up and running.”

Problems could potentially arise down the line as studios have a long queue of greenlit projects waiting to enter production. “When you’re in a moment when there’s already a ton that’s been greenlit, you’ve already got that stuff that’s been pushed to 2021, to what extent are you going to be able to bring on new IP as readily as you might have previously?” he said. “There’s probably a bottleneck that begins to take place.”

Late-Night Hosts Kind of Suck at YouTube

Of all the quarantine work-from-home pivots, the bumbling attempts of late-night hosts to make YouTube content has a special place in my heart. Jimmy Fallon, who usually relies on playing slickly produced, inane games with celebrities to fill broadcast minutes, is producing brief dispatches from home in which he frequently loses battles of will with his two young daughters. Seth Meyers does not have a good microphone. John Krasinski is trying his hand at hosting on his newly created channel called “Some Good News,” which I feel bad for critiquing, but it is boring.

It’s funny to toggle between some of TV’s highest-paid entertainers struggling to make a video I can watch for more than 30 seconds and YouTube veterans like Nikkietutorials or Jenna Marbles, who have the formula down. Clips from late-night TV — Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show especially — regularly hit the YouTube trending page, giving the shows a certain amount of clout on the platform. But those hosts are struggling to recreate their success while filming at home, without the help of a production crew, something YouTubers have been doing forever. In the post-COVID world, I can only hope to see networks try to combine roles in the first late-night host-YouTuber hybrid. Just not Jake Paul, please. — Erin Schwartz

This Week in Discourse

Whatever effects the pandemic has on the media ecosystem, we’ll always have Twitter Discourse. This past week, it revolved around the trend of the quarantine essay, which was kickstarted by an April 21 thread arguing personal essays should be (mostly) abolished, from an anonymous lit-flaming account with the handle @ALiceFromQueens. There are several subgenres of quarantine essay. One, the “why I left New York during the pandemic” subgenre, has been widely panned as self-serving. Claire Fallon at the Huffington Post wrote a wonderfully scathing takedown of the genre, fueled largely by backlash to Meghan Daum’s essay in Medium’s GEN (published April 14), which presented her newly adopted puppy as an excuse for fleeing New York for “Apalachia.”

Then there’s the to-be-expected documentation of the writer’s interiority during quarantine. Reviews on this subgenre are mixed. At The Cut, Evie Ebert wrote an essay on April 22 about resenting others’ quarantine situations. It was praised for its honesty and relatability, but prompted some discussion around whether such negative thoughts from relative privilege are worth documenting. As with most things, the real answer (and I think most would agree) is that it depends. There is currently an unease around essay-writing from quarantine because no one wants to be the oblivious navel-gazer moping about how they miss movie theaters while people are dying. At the same time, employing the fallacy of “other people have it worse” to stifle expressions of the more mundane loneliness, anger, resentment, and sadness we are experiencing seems like a mistake.

On April 22, somehow all of the above morphed — seemingly instantaneously — into a broader conversation about the merits of the personal essay writ large. Hilariously, the vast majority of tweets I saw on the subject were from people wondering why the hell we were debating the merits of the personal essay. Longreads editor Sari Botton responded to the original @AliceFrom Queens thread before tweeting about the issue more generally. Emily Gould, in her tweeted takedown of the personal-essay-takedowns, tweeted about an “anonymous alt.” The exhaustive critique of the genre is in high gear amid the flood of first-person quarantine content.

This Week in Layoffs and Departures

— Protocol, a subscription-driven tech site from Politico’s parent company that launched a few months ago, announced last week it is laying off 13 of (according to their site) 35 staffers, both on the editorial and business sides. While many media companies have been devastated by ad revenue losses, most have only instituted cost-cutting measures like furloughs and pay cuts. Those changes may very well end up being more permanent depending on how the coming months unfold, but by furloughing workers, companies like Vox — and local papers like the San Francisco Chronicle — are at least operating under the assumption that these setbacks are temporary. Protocol is not.

Why such severe cuts at Protocol? Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton pointed out that Protocol’s model is not heavily dependent on ad revenue, so this complicates the narrative that the industry is being sunk by advertisers cutting their budgets. But the memo to staff announcing the layoffs specifies that management doesn’t believe now is the time to launch new subscription services, and they’re probably right. It’s not the best time to ask cash-strapped readers to drop money on a new thing, especially when they’re trying to get corporate subscribers at $1,000+ annual rates.

— Kelsey Keith announced she will be stepping down as Editor in Chief of Curbed, which was hit especially hard amid Vox Media furloughs — half of Curbed’s staff was furloughed.

FROM DEEZ LINKS: Q&A with Ben Smith, NYT media columnist (full Q&A here)

[Hey! Study Hall has a new syndication partnership with the daily media newsletter Deez Links, by writer Delia Cai. Each week we’ll highlight one of Delia’s posts.]

Delia Cai: You’re two months into your new job at the NYT — how do the deadlines work for a Sunday column?

Ben Smith: I had this idea that I’d work Monday to Friday on a single piece, and file perfect copy Friday afternoon. In fact, I spend Monday and Tuesday wasting people’s time, at some point figure out what I want to write, and then just crash out as much reporting as I can toward the end of the week, and wind up ruining my editor’s weekend.

DC: What does a typical day look like for you in terms of where and how you’re getting your news?

BS: I had my brain rewired by Twitter around 2010 and that hasn’t changed much. I look at Twitter while I’m walking my dogs in the morning around 7, then again when I take one of them to play with my aunt’s pit bulls at 8:30, and then just kind of stay in the news cycle as long as I’m awake. I’m told this isn’t all that healthy.

Everything Else

— At the New York Times, Ben Smith published a look at the state of Condé Nast amidst the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, the media empire aesthetically associated with Anna Wintour is struggling to adapt to the moment of austerity. It is no longer “the Vogue company,” Smith notes. “Now its fortunes depend on whether the New Yorker — now the strongest business in the company — and Wired can keep pace with the red-hot Atlantic, and on Bon Appétit feeding and entertaining the homebound masses. Nobody is putting on a Givenchy cape anytime soon.”

— Substack announced 44 recipients of its $100,000 total grant program, hastening a newsletter boom among writers frozen out by freelance budget cuts at traditional outlets. Will 2020 be the year of newsletters and podcasts as well as the year of the quarantine essay?

— In New York Magazine, Justin Davidson penned a delightful profile of the West Side Rag, a hyperlocal news site for Upper West Side residents — a service appreciated now more than ever. “These days, there’s something comforting and essential about the daily mix of stories, some trivial, others tragic, that make a dense slice of Manhattan feel like a provincial town.”

— Bustle Digital Group has relaunched the beloved cool girl magazine Nylon, which it purchased last year. The release of the relaunched print edition has been delayed, however, due to pandemic-related woes. The print edition of the magazine’s previous iteration had been suspended since 2017.