Study Hall Digest 7/3/2017

NOTE: This Newsletter has been temporarily renamed Media Hell Week to reflect the shitty shit that happened in the last seven days.

Hi

Oh boy. So lots of firings this week. First let’s talk about the New York Times and its copy editors. As discussed on the listserv, there seems to be consensus that management did this in a needlessly crass way by making the copy editors all reapply for their jobs. There’s less consensus about what the firings mean for the Times and the industry in general. The Times is experimenting, snapping up smaller properties, trying to expand into video (after failing at that about five years ago — anyone else remember their daily videos where reporters would just talk to each other?). The company obviously needs to experiment and figure out what’s working. But to me the problem is that they seem less and less vital. I read WaPo more than the Times now. I actually barely click on the Times anymore out of fear that the news I seek will be surrounded by 1 million terrible, anger-inducing, transphobic, anti-climate-science, pro-gentrification op-eds, along with articles about which $300 biodynamic wine pairs well with your new underground apocalypse bunker in Hudson, NY (The New Brooklyn!) or whatever. But as a media professor once pointed out to me, back when the NYT was still mainly a print property, if you stripped away all the other sections from the actual news, the Times has ALWAYS been a little about news and A LOT about lifestyle. Anyway, from a labor perspective, why not just retrain the copy editors instead of firing them?

Then there’s MTV “pivoting” to video, which is a nice way of saying they’re firing all those expensive writers they hired a few years ago when social justice writing was thought to be profitable. Fusion, Mic, et al are based on the same concept, but through a combination of Facebook algorithm rejiggering and the audience exhaustion that comes with a constant deluge of articles that are like “WHY. THIS. ONE. PERSON’S. STORY. SHOWS. EVERYTHING. WRONG. WITH. AMERICA,” that business model is faltering. So MTV is “pivoting,” Mic has learned to get creative with its advertising model by opting for verticles sponsored by companies (kinda like The Outline), and Fusion is…still figuring it out. But I think it’s worth pointing out right now: LONG-FORM WRITING ABOUT ANYTHING, ESPECIALLY SOCIAL JUSTICE, WILL NEVER BE PROFITABLE ON A CLICK/AD MODEL. Fun fact: the legacy TV networks used to lose tons of money on their news shows back in the good ol’ Walter Cronkite days, but the shows added prestige to their brand so they felt it was a good business decision to keep them on. Maybe good news just isn’t a money maker??

All of this would feel more tolerable if it was just a sign of a media industry dealing with technology changes, but the media actually seems to have a lot of money these days. They’re just spending it on hiring the worst people. Bret Stephens is now getting an additional paycheck at MSNBC, and Chris Cillizza is getting a whole fucking brand built around his inane opinions at CNN. The media’s obsession with centrism means that when the country moves towards the fascist right, the media redefines what centrism is. Expect to see a “Why Democracy Actually Is Bad” opinion piece soon….oh wait.

Maybe all the bad opinions will be countered by BuzzFeed’s new opinion section, lol. BTW, buy a BuzzFeed fidget spinner!!

Feel-good-liberalism-in-3-minute-sound-bites purveyor StoryCorps is using Walmart-style tactics to stop a unionization effort.

In some genuinely good news, Mother Jones hired a few great reporters, thanks to the record donations it has received since Trump’s election. That’s it for good news! This isn’t Media Coddling You Week, it’s Media Hell Week!!!!!

Final Thoughts

What do we do y’all? As a freelancer I often feel kind of helpless, watching these big media company decisions and not really being able to influence them. It would be cool if there was a writers’ union or freelance union that was a powerful voice in these matters. I’m heartened to see more and more media companies unionizing, but I think we’re a while away from writers, video people and workers in general having an actual voice in the media business.

May next week be Media Heaven Week.