I regret to inform you that this newsletter is back
Hey All,
Once again I abandoned this newsletter and once again I stand before you saying “eh...I’ll try to do better” In all seriousness, I'm recommitting to delivering something to your inbox once a week. Sorry. You get what you pay for and this substack is free. Anyway, here are some stories I thought were important this week.
https://digiday.com/media/being-black-you-have-to-work-twice-as-hard-inside-bleacher-reports-staff-revolt-that-toppled-a-ceo/
Like the rest of the country, the media business has been engaged in a conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion over the last few weeks. I don’t pretend to be an expert on these issues nor do I think it’s my place to weigh in and adjudicate any of the debates that have been raging across your Twitter timeline. However, I want to plug this great Digiday story by the equally great Tim Peterson about the changes taking place at Turner’s digital sports property Bleacher Report. There’s a lot to unpack about the company’s culture challenges and the staff revolt that ultimately lead CEO Howard Mittman to resign but there’s a line in the piece that really stood out to me.
“most members of the leadership team as well as its predominantly white sales, revenue and marketing teams sit on the third floor. Below on the second floor sits the company’s content teams, which is where the majority of its Black employees can be found."
So much of the debate about diversity in recent weeks has been focused on the highly visible roles in editorial and content teams. That makes sense. Media companies have a unique ability to provide these employees with a platform to reach the public, and giving people of color access to jobs as writers, producers, and on-camera talent is absolutely critical. But it’s not everything. While content jobs might carry glamour, the real power (and the real money) is usually found on the other side of the house.
The revenue side of a business may not set the content strategy directly, but it still exercises tremendous influence. Your sales team determines the type of advertisers that walk through the door and what type of audience they expect to reach, that expectation determines what type of content needs to be created, implicitly if not explicitly, for every to keep receiving a paycheck. Consider that Radhika Jones might edit Vanity Fair, but she still has Susan Plagemann looking her shoulder, asking her to make the magazine more affluent and more white.
Money is also concentrated on the business side of most media companies. Starting salaries are higher than in content roles, and they usually come with commissions and annual bonuses, all of which is important if you’re coming to the business without a trust fund and a web of family connections or a singular talent to be the preeminent voice of your beat/publication/generation etc.
There’s nothing uncommon about Bleacher Report’s executive suite, or it’s sales and marketing teams. In my experience, all of these groups are predominantly white and male. Unlike the work that has been done (much of it in the glare of the public eye) to make newsrooms more diverse, these teams seldom face the same pressure to reflect the world at large. If media, as a business, is going to meet this moment, it’s imperative that the push for diversity not be confined to the areas of the company that the audience can see.
Several Small Things:
https://medium.com/journalismandliberty/stop-opportunistic-news-consolidation-during-covid-19-protect-local-news-651279dceb1c
Nikki Usher, a media scholar, great Twitter follow, and current fellow at the Open Markets Institute, has written a smart op-ed urging policymakers to temporarily halt M&A in the news media sector during the pandemic. The coronavirus has hit every industry hard, but media companies, especially local news outlets, were already on shaky ground. The pandemic has left local news, including venerable newspaper owners like Tribune, open to low-ball bids from predatory hedge funds like Alden Global Capital (commonly nicknamed “the destroyer of newspapers”) Usher proposes freezing these type of opportunistic mega-deals in favor of creating space for local ownership groups to buy back their local outlets which, without the burden of massive accumulated debt, could be run profitably in perpetuity (I wrote about a version of this local ownership model in a previous newsletter) It’s a great idea that would require a minimal intervention on the part of lawmakers given that the tools to do it already exist in established antitrust law. It won’t happen, but it’s a nice thought.
https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020_News_Deserts_and_Ghost_Newspapers.pdf
On the subject of local news, there are 198 counties in the United States without a local newspaper. Of those, the vast majority (108) are in the South. There is no Southern state that doesn’t have at least one county without a local news outlet. I know this because someone counted and then Axios published the results. With all due respect to Penelope Muse Abernathy at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC Chapel Hill, I feel like this is one of hundreds of studies I’ve seen about where these news deserts are and how they come to be. I also know that there are dozens of organizations, private investors, grant programs, and nonprofits all of which hope to address this problem. What I haven’t seen is any data tools, public or private, that could help them do that.
It seems to me, that an enterprising researcher could take these 198 counties, evaluate them based on factors like cost of living, population, demographics, and regional need, to create ballpark estimates of what it would take to launch a functioning digital news outlet that meets the communities basic information needs. Local business statistics and census data could be used to ballpark the likely number of potential subscribers and advertising sponsors giving nonprofit orgs a sense of what costs would need to be defrayed by grants and donors. Public policy researchers do considerably more complex projections every day.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/27/parler-ceo-wants-liberal-to-join-the-pro-trump-crowd-on-the-app.html
A bunch of right-wing media figures are running what amounts to an influencer marketing campaign for Parler, the latest Twitter clone offering “unlimited free speech” in response to Twitter’s incredibly mild fact-checking of the President and a handful of bans on extremists advocating violence or race wars or whatever gets Republicans horny these days. More mainstream terrible people like Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, and Mike Cernovich have all promoted the site (app? Who knows!) on their own Twitter feeds but have sadly not stopped tweeting and moved decamped for Parler.
Media twitter is fascinated by Parler just as it was once fascinated by Gab, the slightly less glossy and much more openly pro-Nazi Twitter competitor that came before it. But like all Twitter clones Parler will ultimately amount to nothing. The power of Twitter isn’t found in reaching a large audience of like-minded followers, but in making big ripples in the relatively small pool of several thousand journalists who shape most national news coverage. A handful of those journalists will certainly join Parler so they can screenshot and cross-post whatever weirdness goes on over there, but neither they nor the conservative influencers currently touting it will make it their permanent home. Likewise, the Trump fans who love Twitter don’t love it because they get to hear from their favorite right-wing provocateurs but because it allows them to hurl racist invective and conspiracy theories at reporters and liberals so they too will eventually flock back. Sooner or later, everyone returns to the bird app.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1972/06/03/cookie-oscar-grover-herry-ernie-and-company
Sometimes you find something so perfect on Twitter that you need to share it even though it has no relationship to anything else. In that spirit, please enjoy the great Renata Adler describing the new show “Sesame Street” in The New Yorker in 1972. The whole thing is perfect but I’ve selected a few of the best passages below.
“The human characters of “Sesame Street” live in a brownstone on an integrated urban slum block, where, in the company of cloth figures called Muppets—most of which are brightly colored and furry—they teach, among other things, the alphabet, induction, friendliness, geometric forms, and counting. Oscar, the green-furred grouch who inhabits a trash can, where he collects fish heads, mud, an old sneaker, a petrified brownie, and who makes occasional trips, for the sake of his collection, to the dump, is not just a creature of whimsey, with a tendency to rant; he is something of an expert on ecology. His neighbor is the inexhaustibly obliging blue-furred Muppet Grover, who will run great distances, interminably, to illustrate the concepts “near” and “far,” who will patiently deliver to a restaurant customer the letters missing from his alphabet soup, who will dance, sing, and demonstrate in waltz time, “Around, around, around, around, over, under, and through,” and who will be frightened out of his hiccups and into unconsciousness by a not altogether successful creature called the Snuffleupagus, whom all the human members of the cast, black and white, Puerto Rican and Anglo, still take to be a figment of the seven-foot bird’s imagination.”
“On “Sesame Street,” there has been an amiable, senile Muppet pedant, Herbert Birdsfoot, who is in the habit of addressing Kermit, the Muppet frog, as “young man,” and who, being profoundly devoted to physical education, found himself stuck one day in the middle of a deep knee bend. “Young man,” he said, looking pensively at the floor, to Kermit, “do you realize that you have webbed feet?” Kermit himself has given many lecture-demonstrations, among them one that embroiled him with the letter “W,” that program’s sponsor. Every program is “sponsored” by a few letters and numbers, which are given elaborate commercials in graphics and song. “Zap. Zap. Zap. Zap” may not be everybody’s description of the four lines of the letter “W,” but it was Kermit’s, and the shaggy blue-furred Cookie Monster ate the lecture’s subject anyway, transforming it, with successive bites, into an askew “N,” a “V,” a tilted “l,” and nothing. A substitute “W” began to wiggle, walk, and wobble—in a kind of visual, extraprose equivalent of onomatopoeia (the word “path” on “The Electric Company” walks down one)—and ultimately wrestle (a phonemic mistake, unusual on the program) with Kermit until he weakened. Kermit has had other misfortunes with lessons. When he was counting four eggs, for example, they hatched, and the chickens began to walk away, leaving three, and then two, and then one. “All right,” Kermit said, “there’s only one chicken left, so let’s count it.” The program is extremely patient with error and frustration.”
Henceforth, the official mascot of this newsletter will be Herbert Birdsfoot amiable, senile Muppet pedant. Long may he reign.
Ok. That’s it. Newsletter over. How was that for you?