Study Hall Digest 8/7/2017

Hi

Another day, another veiled threat to jail journalists from the Trump Administration. Woo.

Being trans and covering the trans ban is exhausting, writes Katelyn Burns. I think you can extrapolate that to say being from any marginalized group and being asked to cover news in an unbiased way is exhausting and can be personally harmful. (If you haven’t yet, read Lewis Wallace on objectivity).

Wired published another issue with all its features written by men, and then wrote a kind of tone-deaf apology to which everyone replied “uh just get more women to write for you instead of writing bullshit explanations.” Anyway, what’s the last time I read Wired you ask? What’s the last time I was in an airport with a very limited magazine selection and forgot my iPad?

NYT buyouts continue, and it looks like the paper is losing a lot of its veteran reporters who write a lot of their Pulitzer-worthy content. Hope they’re getting $$$$$ in their buyout package!

The Awl is ditching Medium and going back to WordPress. Medium’s slide into thing no one really understands that is used almost solely by amateur Trump/Russia conspiracy theorists who can’t get paid to blog elsewhere continues!

Imagine having millions of dollars and deciding the thing you wanted to do with your money is make memes…wait maybe that is what I’d do with a million dollars tbh.

Facebook and Google will kill us all, part 1,000,000 in an ongoing series.

Final Thoughts

Freelancing sucks, but at least it’s better than a full-time job, right? Or is it? People think it means making your own schedule, but it usually means dropping everything to work whenever, and chasing down the payment afterward, and following up with editors who never get back to you even after they tell you to pitch. Maybe the solution is to ditch J-school. Maybe the solution is to get a job and just freelance on the side, or just become a Lyft driver and create an extremely popular and well-funded podcast. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯