Study Hall Digest 5/18/2020

Last week, Study Hall took off for a staff-wide mental health break. This week’s Digest was co-written by the editorial staff; next week, we’ll go back to our normal format.

More Layoffs Hit Condé Nast, Vice, and BuzzFeed

Even by pandemic-era standards, it has been a spectacularly bad week for the media industry. The bad news of layoffs and furloughs just kept coming, relentlessly, in waves. Here’s a rundown of all the cuts that took place in the past week alone:

• Condé Nast is laying off around 100 employees and furloughing about 100 more, per an email sent by CEO Roger Lynch to staff on Wednesday. The company will also reduce work hours for a handful of employees. This comes a month after a smaller round of layoffs plus pay cuts for higher-earning staff. (Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s artistic director and Vogue’s EIC, took a hilariously measly 20% cut.) Though Lynch had reduced Condé’s dependence on print and digital advertising and increased video revenue since he came on last year, the company was still hit hard by the pandemic drop in advertising revenue. Layoffs include Paris Martineau at Wired, Estelle Tang at Vogue, Mari Uyehara at GQ, and Matt Schnipper at Pitchfork. Ars Technica, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Wired are all unionized newsrooms, although Condé executives have not yet recognized the Wired union, which formed at the end of April. The union is now calling for recognition in order to negotiate proposed cuts.
• BuzzFeed, after instituting tiered salary reductions in an attempt to save jobs, told staff on May 6 that 68 employees would be furloughed. Those furloughs kicked in May 16. The company then announced in a Wednesday meeting that four more US employees would be furloughed and about 15 employees in the UK and Australia would be furloughed as well. As a result, the company will no longer run a dedicated UK and Australia news operation.
• Uzabase announced a roughly 40% staff reduction at Quartz, which amounts to 80 employees, mostly from the advertising department. The union representing journalists at Quartz said about half of the 43 editorial employees it represents will lose their jobs. Quartz will also close physical offices in London, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Washington, and will reduce executive salaries by 25 to 50% in an attempt to further cut costs. The company had suffered a drop in net sales of 54.1% in the first quarter of 2020.
• Vice has laid off 55 US employees and 100 internationally. CEO Nancy Dubuc said in a note to employees that the company’s digital organization was currently bringing in only 21% of its revenue while accounting for 50% of headcount costs, framing the layoffs as a painful but necessary move and part of a restructuring that will put more emphasis on “the value of our creative IP.” (IP tyranny!!) The Vice Union released a statement condemning the move and claiming that Dubuc had not exhausted all other options — including executive pay cuts — before resorting to layoffs. Layoffs include Leila Ettachfini, Susan Rinkunas, Marie Solis, Clio Chang, Michelle Garcia, Diana Tourjée, Alex Norcia, and Harron Walker.
• The Economist Group is laying off 90 employees, mainly in commercial roles, and its magazine will go digital-only later this year.

These cuts show the pitfalls of being overly dependent on advertising revenue and Big Tech — Dubuc in her statement blamed the company’s financial woes in part on social media platforms hoarding ad money to the detriment of a media company that scaled very quickly. Advertising was already a shitty life raft for ailing media companies, and the pandemic only made it worse. But there’s also a sense of inevitability to the layoffs, which come amid broader structural changes, like Condé’s pivot to more video content and Vice’s emphasis on IP creation. Digital and print media in themselves are not big sources of revenue unless you have massive numbers of subscribers; neither is advertising these days. Those roles are the first to go when shit hits the fan. — Allegra Hobbs

Ben Smith Tries to Take Down Ronan Farrow

When you start a new job, it’s natural to want to make a splash. Former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith has used his first batch of pieces as the New York Times’s new media columnist to do just that, delivering a compliment disguised as a critique to his employer and reiterating his distaste for media unions. His latest shot fired is an attempt at taking down the reporting tactics of Ronan Farrow, who has led #MeToo reporting as a New Yorker staff writer.

It could be a perfect hit: an unexpected target at a major competitor. Maybe Farrow isn’t so untouchable after all? The problem is that the column is pretty much sunk in the weeds of ethics-in-investigative-journalism quibbles: complaints of secondary sources that Smith can’t find and text messages that Smith can’t corroborate. And the results of Farrow’s reporting speak for themselves, even if there are rumors that he uses a team of a dozen or more researchers to get them. Smith is on firmer ground critiquing Farrow’s political stories, but the whole thing makes more sense as a one-sided dick-measuring contest than a journalistic duel.

In a duel, either party might get shot. This morning, New Yorker writers are tweeting in defense of their ironclad fact-checking department — and reminding us that Times newspaper articles like the column don’t go through that process. — Kyle Chayka

Writers Condemn Pulitzer Prize Decision

In an essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, four writers — Magdalena Edwards, Nádia Gotlib, Lisa Paddock, and Carl Rollyson — condemned the Pulitzer Prize Board’s decision to award biographer Benjamin Moser a prize for Sontag: Her Life and Work, his Susan Sontag biography. “How many documented examples of vexed scholarly conduct and plagiaristic tendencies are needed for [the Board] to take notice and pause?” they ask.

After reviewing criticism about Moser’s biography, the authors draw from their personal experiences with the author to suggest he lacks “scholarly scruples.” In June 2019, Paddock and Rollyson, authors of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, contacted Ecco, the biography’s publisher, asking for the removal of historically inaccurate passages that libeled them. A few months later in August 2019, Edwards published an essay detailing a revision dispute she had with Moser, then her editor, that ended with him receiving a co-translation credit on her 2018 translation of Clarice Lispector’s novel The Chandelier.

The four authors’ criticism is the most recent instance of writers coming forward with public allegations against Moser, who has been accused of distorting Lispector’s legacy and using his clout to attack female translators.

Contacted by Study Hall comment, LARB Executive Editor Boris Dralyuk said Edwards’ original essay was an “eloquent and well-substantiated account of a pattern of misconduct that affected the careers of women authors, living and dead.” — Evan Kleekamp

Facebook Settles Content Moderator PTSD Suit

Last week, Facebook agreed to pay $52 million to content moderators tasked with removing objectionable content from its platform, a preliminary settlement in a 2018 lawsuit brought by former moderator Selena Scola, who developed PTSD on the job. Each worker will get $1,000 — more if they’ve been diagnosed with a trauma-related disorder — and can receive up to $50,000 in damages.

Content moderation is one of the hardest jobs on the internet: workers regularly see graphic, disturbing images of death, assault, and sexual violence. Despite this, Facebook outsourced moderation to firms that lacked effective safeguards, one of which, Cognizant, paid moderators salaries as low as $28,800. Erin Elder, a plaintiff in the case, told the Washington Post that she asked her manager for counseling after reviewing a particularly disturbing post; days later, the manager told her the company she worked for, Pro Unlimited, could provide one counseling visit per quarter. “It was very clear that we needed more, much more support than what we were receiving,” she said.

Although $52 million is a rounding error for Facebook, which is currently valued at over $600 billion, the settlement does represent an important step for labor law: as we’ve all known for years, there’s no separation between what happens on the internet and real life. Sitting at your work computer wondering whether the next video to appear will be relatively benign or will haunt your dreams for weeks is a novel, particularly awful kind of trauma, and the wildly unsafe work environment it creates needs to be recognized by employers. Next, let’s handle journalists getting death threats on Twitter! — Erin Schwartz

Elizabeth Warren = Adult Lisa Simpson???

With Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, the 5049-year-long election cycle has moved on to gossip over who the next VP will be. On Friday, that question gave us the incredulously framed Atlantic op-ed “It Really Could Be Warren” by Edward-Isaac Dovere. In 3,500+ words, it says about the same thing as what polling and other op-eds have concluded: Elizabeth Warren is really overqualified to be VP.

What sets Dovere’s diatribe apart for me, however, wasn’t the acknowledgment of Warren’s qualifications: it was a weird aside in the tenth paragraph that dug itself into my brain like a worm, in which Dovere references an episode of The Simpsons from 2000 that literally predicted President Trump and also cast Lisa Simpson as female president post-Trump. In the 2020 election fan fiction we live in, Adult Lisa Simpson = Elizabeth Warren.

The comparison has been around since Warren started her campaign, and while both are female politicians with hair and ideas in the era of President Trump, it also feels off — especially after a historically diverse election cycle gave us yet another old white guy nominee. I’m all for using fiction as wrapping paper to make reality more bearable, but besides being the “first straight female president,” POTUS Lisa Simpson ends up being saved by her deadbeat brother, Bart. Having Lisa saved by Bart is about as inspiring as watching an overqualified woman lose the race to Joe Biden and then possibly settle for VP instead. — Chris Erik Thomas

Good Riddance

Every week that another large media company lays off a bunch of reporters and editors and media producers, the question reappears: what are we, collectively, doing here, as media workers? What, really, is the point?

We’ve learned over the past few years that traditional organizing is not enough. Vice is unionized; many of the local papers and alt weeklies that have been gutted are unionized. Unionization undoubtedly helps, but unions do not solve the central conundrum of a dying media industry: we have no viable business model.

Advertising dollars are being gobbled up by Facebook and Google, a duopoly with its hands deep into the pockets of politicians. The little ad revenue left is unpredictable — a few months of COVID was enough to seriously damage some of the largest publishers. The few remaining will either continue their race to the bottom, squeezing more and more content out of workers, or become monopolies in their own right, like the New York Times.

At some point, the media machine, creaky and outdated, more painful and less productive than ever, must become unworthy of saving.

The point at which to start building the new machine is now, largely because there is almost no old machine left. But also, the old machine fucking sucked: its raw materials were our eyeballs and sweat and time, and it produced bizarre byproducts like never-ending listicles and 600 near-identical articles about Chrissy Teigen. The real purpose of the machine was not the content, it was the revenue reaped by the very select few, who made off with $23 million mansions and golden parachutes.

A friend who works in healthcare and is a communist told me that there is no normal to return to after COVID. He was speaking generally about the world, but I think this especially applies to us as media workers.The old normal was really bad! Why return to it? Time to build a new machine, starting from scratch, producing together a better normal for ourselves: self-sufficient and ready to rumble. — P.E. Moskowitz

Inside the New York Times Parenting Section

Each week we highlight one post from Delia Cai’s daily media newsletter Deez Links. Here’s a Q&A with Jessica Grose, the lead editor for NYT Parenting.

DC: Has the pandemic changed your vision for the role NYT Parenting should play in your audience’s lives?

JG: I wouldn’t say it has changed the vision, but it has sharpened it and made it newsier. We always wanted to bring evidence-driven information to our readership, but for the first year, it was pretty evergreen. There’s always a new crop of parents trying to potty train their kids, for example.

In this moment, we had the opportunity to provide more news-driven, daily information to our readers about a health scare that was affecting their kids and their lives in a very specific and once-in-a-lifetime way, and I only hope that we have been helpful and even comforting.

Read the full Q&A here.

Everything Else

— A whole 1,350 people who had bought tickets to a now-cancelled Caribbean cruise hosted by disgraced former Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor are now wondering if they’ll get their money back. Keillor wrote an ambiguous email to would-be cruise companions in limerick, so that’s comforting.

— Wrangling records from officials and government agencies is always a headache, but this is especially rough: Montana’s Public Service Commission is now suing media organizations, including the Billings Gazette, that asked for public records related to a recent email spying scandal.

— Los Angeles Magazine took a look at some troubling changes at The Hollywood Reporter since two movie producers were given ownership of the publication, allegedly interfering in editorial operations and trying to axe stories that they felt strained business partnerships.

— Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder of doomed streaming app Quibi, blames sparse downloads of its star-studded 5- to 10-minute shorts on the pandemic. That’s surely part of it, since the app was essentially built to entertain commuters, but also the content is pretty mediocre, and perhaps building a streaming service that only works on mobile is not the most resilient business plan.

— Digital editorial staff at People are unionizing, with 98% of eligible staff submitting union cards. Parent company Meredith has not yet recognized the union.

— Last Friday, Facebook bought free gif repository Giphy for a sum Axios reported was $400 million. As Bloomberg web art director Steph Davidson asks on Twitter: “What are the artists getting?” (“The difference between giphy and napster is that metallica have lawyers,” she added.)

— Elsewhere in pandemic-induced layoffs: New Museum union founding member Dana Kopel writes at SSENSE about layoffs and furloughs hitting museum workers, many of whom were part-time and lacking health benefits. It also asks a larger question, given the art industry’s tendency to funnel large sums of money to executives and endowments while outwardly claiming to be progressive: “How can we build a different kind of art world, one in which our lives and livelihoods are not dependent on millionaire directors and billionaire donors? For many of us, times were uncertain long before this moment.” Same!