Study Hall Digest 4/30/2018

Let’s get this Michelle Wolf thing out of the way: she was good! Very good, even! I expected Republicans to be mad about her take-down of essentially everyone at the White House Correspondents Dinner, but the back-bending journalists are doing to accommodate Republicans’ hurt feelings is disgusting. Maybe it’s because Wolf called the Washington press corps out for being the sycophantic losers they are! I mean, the WHCD should be canceled anyway. It’s gross and does literally nothing except further people’s perception that journalists are untrustworthy careerists who rather get a fancy dinner next to politicians than actually report on them. Anyway, how does Kathy Griffin have the best take on this?

Meredith, the midwestern magazine conglomerate that bought Time Inc, is now looking to sell Time and Fortune Magazines. The good news is that Meredith promised not to sell it to Trump-supporting American Media. The bad news is, who would want to buy Time Magazine at this point? “If you own Time magazine, do you still get invited to the White House today? You probably don’t. It just doesn’t have the same cachet it used to,” one analyst said. “Even if you are a wealthy individual, you have to ask yourself if you want to spend this much money on something that may not have a lot of value in the long term.”

Netflix is apparently financed with billions of dollars of junk bonds! Who knew. Can Study Hall get some junk bonds???

Just FYI if an editor rejects your pitch, it means you’ve been disenfranchised / silenced / had your right to free speech violated, and should sue, or at least write a whiny article about it.

Megan McArdle is a terrible person but she makes some really good points about paying for journalism: namely that the new media companies that thrived in a free internet are actually doing worse than the traditional ones who have asked their readers to pay for their stuff. Writers need to make money!

Big questions still remain on whether the return of Gothamist is actually good for the people who once worked there, or just good for the branding of WNYC.

And speaking of WNYC, an investigation into harassment and bullying there found that the problem was “not systemic.” The report also absolved the station’s president Laura Walker of any wrongdoing. Seems like the report got it wrong, since everyone I know who has worked at WNYC was absolutely miserable.

Today in content I do not understand why anyone would consume: A Netflix show about BuzzFeed journalists’ lives.

And in some good news: Milo Yiannopoulos’s media company is in dire financial straits, and nearly everyone at his company was fired, including troll-journalist Chadwick Moore, who Milo didn’t even have the guts to tell. Good riddance to them all!