Study Hall Digest 4/6/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

On Friday, Bustle Digital Group laid off 24 staffers across its family of sites, including the entire staff of The Outline. G/O Media laid off 14 staffers. The layoffs are the latest casualty of the industry-wide loss of advertising revenue due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has already wreaked havoc on alt-weeklies and local newspapers. According to Digiday, BDG has also instituted pay cuts for many remaining employees. Executives are taking a 30% cut and CEO Bryan Goldberg is taking an 85% salary reduction.

A laid-off Bustle staffer, who asked to remain anonymous, told Study Hall they were “really shocked” by the abruptness of the layoffs. Everything had seemed fine for the last few months; even during the pandemic, the atmosphere at Bustle hadn’t shifted. They distrust the explanation that layoffs were necessary. “If Bustle was really hurting that badly, you’d think they could do something that wasn’t laying the staff off,” said the former staffer. “They’d only acquired Inverse and those newer sites [Nylon, The Outline, et al] really recently. I don’t really buy that it’s gotten that bad this quickly and laying off these people at the bottom who totally rely on their positions to stay afloat — [I] don’t think this is the only way they could’ve done it.”

The staffer had been with Bustle Digital Group for about six years, and was given two weeks of severance.

Leah Finnegan, former executive editor of The Outline, told Digiday that the drop in ad revenue came at a time when BDG was “beginning to build the infrastructure that would cater to selling The Outline and the properties it was grouped with” to advertisers — BDG hadn’t previously been able to figure out how to market the publication, and as ad sales dropped, The Outline was cut.

A former The Outline staffer told Study Hall they wish there had been more of an attempt by BDG to figure out a revenue stream that worked for the publication. “The product of what The Outline makes is completely different than the product of what Bustle is,” they said. “If both these websites have audiences, we just have to figure out what each of their products is rather than, ‘Well, you know we can’t sell ads, so whatever, time to close up shop.’”

It does seem that Goldberg’s previous strategy of buying up new sites at an alarming rate — sites he doesn’t seem to know how to maintain or sell ads for — wasn’t smart, and it’s certainly not adapted to a crisis situation. He bought Gawker for $1.35 million and ran an attempted relaunch of the brand into the ground. He has also, mostly within the last year, bought Mic, Elite Daily, The Zoe Report, Inverse and Nylon. Media is already a precarious business, and this approach is already inherently risky; the pandemic makes that all the more apparent.

The ongoing question is, was the pandemic drop in advertising just an excuse for Goldberg to make cuts that BDG was already planning anyway? It’s unclear how much the company is actually invested in the success of its acquired titles.

In San Francisco, as with everywhere else, local publications have been hit hard by the loss of ad revenue — and as a result, coverage is suffering. The San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly are experiencing readership at “record levels,” Editor-in-Chief Deborah Peterson wrote in an op-ed, yet the company has had to reduce hours and pay of staffers in order to weather ad losses.

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a reporter and columnist with the Examiner, told Study Hall that the traffic was 6,000 times higher than usual on the day the paper broke the story of the city’s shelter-in-place order. Roughly two weeks later, Rodriguez and his colleagues are partially furloughed, their hours cut approximately in half. “We have four reporters, but now essentially we have the equivalent of two reporters even though we’re all still working,” he said.

These conditions are especially trying during a pandemic, when readers are desperate for information. The Examiner is unique in its hyperlocal approach to covering the city, Rodriguez explained, and now there will be less coverage. “[We’re] going to be reporting three days a week when we’re in the middle of a pandemic and people are thirsty for information,” he said.

Local news was already suffering before the pandemic, in part due declining ad rates, and it’s worrying that the current crisis has further exacerbated the problem. Advertising as a product or business model just isn’t adapted to a situation in which consumers aren’t going anywhere or buying much. Non-profit, subscription-driven models appear more durable and may be the future of local media.

Rodriguez said he hopes the crisis prompts a re-examining of revenue models moving forward. “I think it’s been very clear for a long time that advertising supporting local news has been dwindling, and most news outlets in the country that are successful are subscriber-based or are non-profits, and that’s really the only two routes news agencies are going now,” he said.

The Democratic Primary That Time Forgot

Want to feel old? Yesterday was the one-month anniversary of Elizabeth Warren dropping out of the Democratic primary. The concept of an “election” has been pulverized with the sledgehammer that is the coronavirus pandemic. Campaign offices are closed, rallies are a distant memory, and everything IRL is URL now with very mixed results (see Joe Biden’s “absolute technical nightmare” of a virtual town hall). Candidates have overcome early technical hurdles, but tuning into Biden’s new podcast Here’s the Deal or watching Sanders explain to Whoopi Goldberg why he won’t drop out of the race just feels weird now.

Even the concept of voting feels alien, which is why 15 states have postponed their primaries. The sole holdout is Wisconsin, where the Republican-held state legislature has ignored pleas to cancel the in-person primary and switch to an all-mail ballot. Digging in your heels to stage in-person voting feels especially reckless because at the point, it’s a one-sided race. Sanders trails Biden by double digits in the state, and in the last month, his biggest victory wasn’t winning a state election, it was fighting for freelancers and the self-employed to receive unemployment benefits in the CARES Act.

Yes, reality may have endorsed Sanders’ Medicare For All plan, but Sanders’ narrow path to victory was practically nonexistent before coronavirus took a wrecking ball to the primary. Sanders staying in the zombie election when his campaign wasn’t even winning state primaries pre-corona feels reckless enough that Sanders’ allies — including his own campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, and professional Bernie Sanders impersonator Larry David — are calling for him to suspend his campaign and continue the fight from the Senate floor. — Chris Erik Thomas

In Other News

— The Onion and G/O Media unions put out a statement on the layoffs at the company, calling them “callous” and accusing management of a lack of transparency.

— On a far lighter note, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz refuses to learn how to make coffee, even during a pandemic, because he’s not a “big artisanal coffee baby”?? Indeed, going to a gas station and ordering 18 coffees to-go is far more low-maintenance than what I do every morning, which is…pour hot water over some coffee grounds.

— Wall Street Journal reporter Katie Honan documented the decline (or ascent?) of the New York Times cooking newsletter, which has pronounced that “anything for dinner is ok.”

— The Wing has laid off nearly all hourly employees and half of its corporate staff, claiming it lost 95 percent of its revenue overnight due to the pandemic. Here’s a quote from an anonymous former employee, per Motherboard: “As someone who is fully aware of where The Wing gets their funding ie billionaires and millionaires like Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures, I know that these hard cuts are meant to keep Audrey and Lauren’s business afloat.”

— The Atlantic dropped its paywall for coronavirus content and has gained 36,000 subscribers in March. Further driving home the point that lack of readership is not what’s ailing the media industry!