What is "Movement Journalism"?
Good morning.
I hope everyone had a safe Labor Day weekend.
With the little bit of summer left, I’m taking a week of vacation next week so there won’t be a newsletter. The week I’m back, I’m hoping to go longer on something in the “A Little Bit of Culture” section. I’ve been finishing up the draft of a new novel manuscript (third time’s [maybe] a charm!) so I haven’t been doing much essay writing or any other writing aside from that and this newsletter, but I think I’ll have something worth sharing when I’m back from the break.
Those are the updates from me. Now let’s get to this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start with Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan. On Sunday, Sullivan wrote a piece looking at how the media should prepare audiences for how the results for this year’s presidential election will be announced. Because there will be such a large volume of mail-in ballots this year, the actual vote totals won’t be completely counted on election night—something that is at odds with how we’ve come to expect election winners to be declared. We want election results, as well as all of our news, immediately. But this year’s election won’t be that way. So, Sullivan outlines how news outlets should start preparing their audiences for that reality now. She also discusses how they should avoid the instinct to find a clear narrative and winner and live with and report on the uncertainty for the weeks and even months following the election.
Staying on the election coverage beat, last Thursday, Reuters announced a partnership with Facebook that will see Reuters serve as the authoritative source for election night data and reporting on Facebook. Reuters has a long reputation as a reliable newswire and this partnership is a convenient way for Facebook to address the well-documented issues the platform has had with users sharing false reports and content from unreliable sources. However, this kind of real-time updating and reporting through Facebook’s platform has a chance to, as Sullivan pointed out in her piece, feed into some of the bad instincts news organizations already have when covering elections.
Next up, I want to take a look at two interesting stories Digiday ran about publisher revenue from digital advertising:
Last Thursday, Digiday ran a follow-up story to a piece in late July that looked at some promising signs for publishers in programmatic revenue. Digiday’s piece uses data from Staq, a revenue data management service, that shows CPM rates (cost per 1,000 ad impressions, the unit of measurement used to measure the cost efficiency of running a digital ad against content) continued to increase across August, reaching their highest level of 2020, and much closer to 2019 (aka pre-COVID-19) rates. This trend has some publishers feeling encouraged and confident in their Q3 advertising revenue numbers. However, the piece points out that brands are still wary to advertise against straight news at the moment due to the sensitivities around the global pandemic, social and racial inequality, and political controversy. In fact, the uptick in CPM rates for other publishers could be attributed to a vacuum of ad space inventory from straight news publishers.
But earlier in the week, Digiday also ran a piece looking at the difficulty publishers are having securing deals with new advertising clients. As the Digiday piece says, “many advertisers seem content to work more closely with publishers they already have relationships with, typically on smaller, cheaper campaigns that can be executed quickly.” This has led to shorter planning cycles that allow for fewer larger-figure, high-concept sponsored content partnerships and more transactional deals that allow advertisers to make sure any campaign they commit to still remains resonant as so much about the social and culture climate changes seemingly from month to month. So, as always, when it comes to digital advertising it's a mixed bag.
Staying on the revenue beat (what a beat!), Condé Nast announced that Vogue Business was launching a new membership program as a means of creating a new revenue stream. Vogue Business was launched in 2019 as Condé Nast’s first B2B title serving professionals in the beauty, fashion, and luxury industries. I didn’t know there was a Vogue Business until I learned about this story, but the structure and the offering (including the Vogue Business Index, an analysis of the world’s 50 top luxury brands) seems smart. Vogue Business is going after a small (340,000 readers over the last 18 months, so small for Condé Nast standards) and highly valuable audience and leveraging the value that their content provides for professionals into subscriptions that could serve a variety of uses, and be included in departmental subscription budgets year after year (shouts to Digiday for really developing that niche).
Last week, CNN ran an interesting feature on ESPN and their embrace of politics in coverage as athletes have become increasingly vocal about social and political issues. This change in approach comes after the 2017 controversy over Jemele Hill’s tweets that stated Donald Trump was a white supremacist, which prompted then ESPN president John Skipper to say that ESPN was not a political organization. James Pitaro, who succeeded Skipper, has doubled down on that approach and has done his best to keep ESPN and its on-air talent as apolitical and non-controversial as possible. The CNN story outlines how staying apolitical has been almost impossible this year for any journalist covering sports.
Also over at CNN, media reporter Kerry Flynn has a great piece on the video game industry and how publishers are starting to invest in covering it as a more robust beat. Last week, if you recall, I noted how Wired was building out a gaming vertical. There’s more on that, and lots of other great reporting in Flynn’s piece.
And speaking of Kerry Flynn, she was all over BuzzFeed’s announcement that they will be ending their salary reductions across their staff. BuzzFeed cut staff salaries ranging from 5%-25% based on pay level back in April.
NiemanLab published a great piece looking at major outlets and their service journalism (a technical term for pieces that give readers practical advice, that lately often means consumer-oriented buying guides) offerings in the wake of COVID-19. This piece provides a great overview of service journalism as well as how different outlets are altering their strategies in real time to stay as relevant to readers as possible.
On the local news front, last week High Country News, a nonprofit news organization covering the American West, announced plans to invest $10 million dollars in “expanding its editorial staff and freelancers, endowing its intern and fellowship program, overhauling its website, and developing its internal marketing staff.” This is another heartening story for a local news outlet, and it is very encouraging because the $10 million is coming from external fundraising efforts.
Finally, we conclude with a piece NiemanLab ran last Monday about the freelance community and publication Study Hall. As you know, I cite Study Hall a lot in this newsletter—they provide an invaluable service for writers and media professionals—and am a paying subscriber. For anyone looking to find out more about Study Hall, the piece is a must read. But the quote that stuck out the most to me was from managing editor Erin Schwartz: “We’re more irreverent, and more bloggy. As an editor, it’s a lot simpler to make content primarily for 4,000 people who talk to us all the time, versus attempting to hit crazy growth targets. We’re trying to make things that reflect and refine the sensibility that is already there in the community. Sometimes that means a report on racism in the travel industry, and sometimes it means a really dumb joke.” This kind of quote speaks to the theme that has been emerging in 2020 of media professionals taking their destiny into their own hands. They are using whatever platform and audience they already have and building sustainable communities and revenue streams, creating content specifically for a dedicated audience without the undue pressure to scale that investors or corporate executives bring.
What I’m Engaged With
This week, I want to take a moment to look back on a piece published by NiemanLab at the end of August. The story was written by Tina Vasquez as a mixture of reporting and personal essay where she dove into a new form of journalism called “movement journalism.”
I’d never heard of the term “movement journalism” before. Vasquez defines it as “journalism that meets the needs of communities directly affected by injustice.” And her piece explores how she’s come to define herself as a “movement journalist” while at the same time learning about what exactly that entails, and what the “movement journalism”....ah, movement...actually means.
In the piece, she cites a report by Anna Simonton of Press On, a southern media collective that is supporting “movement journalism,” for Project South, an organization fostering those tackling social, economic, and political issues in the South. According to Simonton’s report, as Vasquez writes, the goals of movement journalism are, “prioritizing stories that amplify the power of people, producing news that is based on the experiences and identities of oppressed people, and developing shared political analysis between journalists and communities.” This is contrasted with traditional journalism’s tendency to uphold harmful and oppressive existing narratives.
Vasquez’s feature is extensive and among the other themes she touches on is how “movement journalism” is rooted in community and in local news and involves shifting the perspective and fundamental approach of newsrooms. She ties a lot of that to the movement being based out of the South. I can certainly understand that, but there are also local news organizations like The City in New York for example that are doing something very similar to what “movement journalism” is described as in the piece.
She also discusses the New York Times’s “1619 Project” and how newsrooms often have issues with a reporter injecting their personal perspectives into the work they are doing. That’s something I have always found strange, especially considering that legendary 20th century reporters like Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hammill were often celebrated for injecting a sense of their personal viewpoint in their work.
And she also touches on how journalists of color are often seen as not being able to report “objectively” on stories or communities that they are a part of. This was raised in a Media Diversity Institute story earlier this summer about journalists of color being unsure about speaking out at Black Lives Matter protests for fear of seeming impartial.
This is a fascinating piece that’s well worth your time. Using the framework of “movement journalism” it brings up a lot of themes that have been occurring over the last few years across the media industry, and especially this year. What does it mean to be objective as a journalist any more? The importance of local and community-driven news. The need to add diverse and different perspectives into newsrooms to change existing norms and rules. I haven’t wrapped my mind exactly around what makes “movement journalism” a true movement or what sets it apart from those other themes. But it takes me awhile to learn things.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: “So Far” the Crosby Stills Nash & Young podcast
There was a week this summer when my girlfriend was out of town and I was left alone in our apartment. And during that time I did what I normally do when she goes away: binge movies and other TV shows we don’t normally watch together. This time around, I also added something else into the mix: binged six episodes of a podcast, each one over two hours long, about all of the releases from the members of the legendary super group Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. That podcast is called “So Far.”
“So Far” is a product of Tom Scharpling and some of his usual collaborators. Scharpling is best known for his long-running radio show and now podcast The Best Show. I won’t get into why you should know The Best Show. I have plenty of friends who love it to death and I’d be happy to connect you with them if you want to find out more. I’ve never been as much of a diehard fan, even though I do enjoy it and have gone through periods where I listened every week. The Best Show is available for free, but after the first two episodes, “So Far” is behind a Patreon paywall.
The concept for “So Far” is pretty simple. Each episode, Tom and three members of his Best Show extended family cover two years of releases from CSNY as well as each of the group’s members. At the end of each show, they decide who had the best set of years. This is an exhaustive podcast in the best way. I can’t say that I love CSNY or any of its members all that much. (Though this feature from Cameron Crowe covering CSN in 1976 is probably one of my favorite pieces of music journalism ever.) I mean I love Neil Young and think he’s amazing, but I am one of the biggest Neil Young fans? Probably not. Do I think Stephen Stills is underrated? Yes, yes I do, even as I’ve learned about some of his truly awful solo albums via this podcast. (And this is from someone who actually rides for Stephen Stills II.) But even so, it’s still extremely fascinating to go year by year and look at the missteps, masterpieces, and just run of the mill music each of these guys created alone, as a full group, or in various configurations.
Scharpling paused “So Far” after six episodes back in June for personal reasons. The limited series may be resuming in the fall. The last episode he and the group released covered 1977 and 1978. There are still over forty years and lots and lots of terrible albums to go. I can’t wait.
The Action I’ve Taken
I haven’t taken action in the past week. I hold myself accountable and will do better this week.