Study Hall Digest 6/19/2017

Hi

Well I guess last week I was a little early in proclaiming that media industry volatility is over: HuffPo laid off dozens of reporters this week and Vocativ laid off its entire writing staff in a video pivot. This certainly sucks for the reporters laid off, but unlike the layoffs of years past, I’m gonna bet these are more isolated incidents due to specific circumstances (HuffPo being absorbed by Verizon/AOL, Vocativ never being able to find footing with a consistent audience), than it is a sign of a larger shift in the industry. Because overall, I’m seeing more hiring and stability.

And one positive sign buried in the bad news: unions work. Laid off workers at HuffPo get a severance package that their union bargained for, which includes continued health benefits, two months’ salary, plus a week of pay for each year worked there.

The Guardian takes an interesting look at the trade publication Inside Housing, which for years warned of fire safety problems at housing developments like Grenfell Tower, which caught fire last week, killing dozens. It reminded me of a story from a couple of years ago (that I now can’t find) about how the majority of growth in the media industry is at small, specialized, and often paywalled publications. Journalism in the public interest, unavailable to the public. Woo.

And BuzzFeed has a great story about a small blog that got as much traction online as the UK’s biggest newspapers leading up to the recent election, which helped push Corbyn to Labour’s historic gains. Blogs! Still a thing!

Final Thoughts

When is it not okay to get paid for your work? Writer Alana Massey created an $150 online course on making money through writing. She was lambasted by a few Men of Twitter® for “scamming” young writers. Alana wrote a long blog post in response, showing how her course was in fact the real deal, and also delving into a sensitive issue: when do we deserve to get paid for our labor, even if we’re getting paid from people in the same boat as us? I deal with this a lot: nonprofits asking me for advice based on my book (I’ve started to ask for money for this), young journalists asking to take me out to coffee (I would never charge for this obviously). I don’t know if there’s a clear answer, but I think if we were all teaching each other for low fees, we’d probably learn more and do it more cheaply than at journalism school.