Study Hall Digest 4/9/2018

What’s the best way to win over supporters after your paper is bought by shady right-wing millionaires and billionaires and fires all of its beloved writers and reporters? Create an astroturf campaign accusing anyone who badmouths you of cyber-bullying! The new L.A. Weekly’s owners seem legitimately scared of the boycott organized against the paper by its former staffers, and so they’re asking people to tweet nice things about the paper. They also apparently bought a bunch of Twitter bots to boost their message. Considering every single one of the paper’s tweets is ratioed into oblivion, the anti-cyberbullying campaign appears to not be going well. The boycott organized by former staffers on the other hand is having an impact: by organizing a call-in to different restaurants, the boycott leaders got a big annual restaurant event called Essentials canceled late last month. Many advertisers have pulled out of the paper and its associated events as well. Viva la boycott!

They say journalism is dying, but a brand new media company called HoggWatch.com, which obsessively tracks the moves of Parkland survivor David Hogg, is thriving!! So there’s hope for us after all. That’s hoggwatch…hoggwatch.com.

I’m too exhausted to follow the latest drama with everyone’s favorite grown-ass-baby-media-man and tentacle porn afficionado Kurt Eichenwald (something about him arguing with a Parkland shooting survivor and then emailing Ben Shapiro an insanely long thing about it??) but RIP to his career.

Gothamist is relaunching, but so far that seems to be better news for WNYC and Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung than anyone else who worked at the old company.

The ad-supported business model is failing, so the answer, it seems, is to turn your employees into advertisements themselves by subtly encouraging them to post brand-sponsored hashtags across social media. Why would Refinery29 staffers agree to do this if they’re not getting anything more than a few free products though??? If you’re gonna be bought off, at least raise your price a lil.

The Department of Homeland Security wants to make a list of every single journalist in the word, so…see you guys in the labor camps!

The Denver Post is doing some baller stuff to call attention to the incompetence and cruelty of their hedge fund owners, including dedicating the entire op-ed page to lambasting them for how they’ve run the paper.

Kyle Chayka writes in from the media startup front:

A church built on Bitcoin popped up in Brooklyn recently but turned out to be a gag by the tech blog Futurism (which is actually funded by the sales of Gravity Blankets). The site is launching a cryptocurrency vertical under the Gawkeresque name of Blocknik, and they’re hiring reporters and freelancers (email [email protected]). The problem the site confronts is that most crypto coverage is insane bullshit that’s compromised from the get-go: the writers hold (or are even paid in) cryptocurrency and the news cycle is driven by secret Telegram chat groups that manipulate currency values. While Blocknik is still TK, Coindesk is a well-known crypto news site, and Coin Talk is a podcast from Longform vet Aaron Lammer.

And from Study Hall friend Zach Howe, who helped organize Mic’s union, and who is at the Labor Notes conference in Chicago right now:

Perhaps for the first time in the conference’s history, organizers talked about how to include freelancers in their organizing, and protect them in their contracts. The media organizing movement is transforming from a bunch of individual union drives into a cohesive, coordinated national and international movement. It will only succeed to the extent it can embrace and support freelancers and other vulnerable workers!