Study Hall Digest 7/10/2017

Hi

The Stranger published this long piece about trans people deciding to detransition. While it’s an interesting topic I guess, it struck me as really inappropriate for a variety of reasons: 1) the media barely covers trans issues in the first place, so why start your focus here?? 2) there was ALREADY a piece on detransitioning in The Outline (which I have problems with for the same reasons) 3) a trans writer who was assigned the piece decided against publishing it because of the narratives it would fit into, so The Stranger found someone else who is not trans!! To me this gets to a question of whether journalism is always good—i.e. do some things NOT need a light shined on them? In my view, yes—there’s no reason to give light to things that feed into narratives that perpetuate oppression. Like who is detransitioning a pressing issue for, besides trans people? Why do we need the World Wide Web reading about this right now? Curious how others decide if a story is worthy, or whether it’s overly gawky, or exploitative.

Fusion’s website is rebranding as Splinter, and their new address will be SplinterNews.com, which is currently not working, and which sounds like something out of a bad thriller where journalists are sexy and have loft apartments in expensive cities and exciting lifestyles that don’t involve sitting in front of a laptop for 60 hrs a week. Fusion needs to like….pick a track and stick with it!!! TBH Univision should shut down the TV station and funnel those resources into the web. Too bad that’ll never happen. :[

Journalism, by robots, thanks to Google. ;[

Happy news: ProPublica seems to be doing really well. They just hired Peter Elkind, and have hired a bunch of other reporters over the last few months. Anyone have any inside info on how they’re staying afloat?

Final Thoughts

The freelance model: Freelancer Vincent Bevins made a good point that there are very few industries where freelancing is the modus operandi: Real estate, Hollywood, and increasingly journalism. But the model works for a lot of people in Hollywood because you work on something for a long time and then get paid a large sum for it, whereas journalism is much shorter form and has much lower pay. It seems like writing is kind of bifurcating into the Hollywood model and the arts model: really ambitious, well paid stuff, and stuff with social value that makes you no money (just like most art).