A Brief(ish) Engagement
Good morning. This has been a tough week. No preamble today—I’m going to keep things short and to the point. I hope everyone is staying safe and cherishing the ones they love.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with a piece by Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post looking at the harassment female journalists are facing. In the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder and the murders in Atlanta yesterday morning, this situation is incredibly troubling.
And there was major news on the Substack beat this week. First, on Monday, Substack published a blog post explaining their Substack Pro program, in which the company pays “a writer an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform” and in return “a Pro writer agrees to let Substack keep 85% of the subscription revenue in that first year” after which time “the deal flips, so that the writer no longer gets a minimum guarantee but from then on keeps 90% of the subscription revenue.” This post was met with a wave of backlash and skepticism. In response, on Wednesday, Substack published a followup blog post giving more details into the kinds of writers who are part of their Pro program as well as their own views on what gets published using their platform. I need more time to sit with these posts and the commentary around them before I can write anything useful.
In other big platform news, on Tuesday, Sara Fischer had an exclusive scoop covering Facebook’s plans for their own publishing platform. Per Fischer, the plan “includes tools for journalists to build actual websites, in addition to newsletters” and will also “allow writers, journalists, and other types of professional experts to publish content outside of text, like live videos and ‘Stories’ status updates” that creators can eventually monetize. Platforms are now battling over who has the most attractive tools for creators. Is this the real story of the next five years?
Meanwhile, on the vulture capital beat, this past Sunday, Marc Tracy of the New York Times reports that Alden Global Capital’s deal to acquire the entirety of Tribune Publishing may be in jeopardy. Part of that deal was to have Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the Maryland-born entrepreneur and businessman, take control of the Baltimore Sun and two other Maryland papers via a nonprofit organization. However, there have been complications to that part of the deal and it appears that Bainum may be seeking to make a bid to buy the entirety of Tribune Publishing with the help of other partners. Who knows what will happen, but Bainum’s move could keep the country’s second-largest newspaper conglomerate out of the hands of a venture capital firm that has gutted papers across the country to find any possible profit it can.
Over at the New Yorker, on Monday the publication announced the launch of The New Yorker Live, a new monthly online events series that will feature conversations and a question and answer session with the audience. The offering is “free” for all subscribers to the New Yorker. This sounds like a subscription retention move with a future play for subscription-tiering to me!
Speaking of the New Yorker, Sarah Sicre at NiemanLab ran a nice Q&A with Liz Maynes-Aminzade who is the head of the publications puzzles and games department. The conversation covers the engagement and revenue upside the publication is seeing from its crossword.
Last Friday, Digiday’s Sara Guaglione wrote a piece looking at TikTok’s Instructive Accelerator Program, were the platform pays publishers to create “instructive and informative” videos for users. This is the second iteration of the program—last year TikTok featured content from media companies like Group Nine, Insider, and Discovery.
And finally, Quartz turned one of its articles into an NFT!
What I’m Engaged With
This week I’ve been mainly engaged with sticking to my nightly schedule of revisions to my novel manuscript. Because of that, I don’t have anything cohesive to share here. But here are a few takes, ideas, and even a book that have held my attention.
Mark Sternberg’s deep dive from March 10th on subscriber churn at media companies has had me thinking a lot.
Brian Morrissey’s always efficient newsletter has put some thoughts into my head about ad revenue and event revenue.
The Markup’s amazing interactive feature from last Thursday that literally looks at the split-screen differences between the Facebook feeds of Biden voters and Trump voters kind of blew my mind.
This (very long) thread from Shaan Puri on the future of Clubhouse is a take I kind of agree with.
And Bill Buford’s memoir/cooking travelogue, Dirt, has been a joy and a comfort to read every evening over the last two weeks.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)
It’s Oscars season! Did it sneak up on you too? Did you miss the announcements on Monday? Well, I almost did because...who the hell can remember that the Oscars usually happen around now or that movies even came out at all after the year we’ve just had?
So in honor of almost forgetting about the Oscars, I wanted to use the space here this week to talk about an Oscar contender I recently watched: Judas and the Black Messiah.
Judas and the Black Messiah has 5 Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (x2), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. The film is based on the life, or part of the life, and assassination of Fred Hampton—the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. It is no spoiler to say that the movie covers his betrayal at the hands of William O’Neal, who drugs Hampton on the evening he is later killed. Hampton was killed at the age of 21. The entire story is harrowing and the ending reminds you that truly nothing has changed in this country.
As a movie itself, though, Judas and the Black Messiah didn’t work for me. The film spends too much time trying to tell a more omniscient story—it attempts to equally cover the narratives of Hampton, O’Neal, and the machinations at the FBI. And I understand why they took that approach. However, the story would have been more powerful, in my opinion, if the movie stayed rooted as more of a true shifting point of view narrative between O’Neal and Hampton. There is a stretch of the movie where Hampton isn’t in the movie at all; to be fair, he is in jail at that time but maybe that’s the stretch to really lean into O’Neal’s story.
Not having Hampton in the movie is a problem for one major reason: Daniel Kaluuya is absolutely amazing in this movie as Fred Hampton. You’ll read about Kaluuya training himself to talk and give speeches like Fred Hampton, but once you see the comparison it is truly astounding. There is one moment in particular when Kaluuya is giving a speech to the Black Panthers when he steps back for a moment and pauses; the camera holds tight on Kaluuya’s face from an angle and all you see his one side of his face—the flick in his mouth, the small movements of his eyes, and perspiration on his forehead. In that moment, Kaluuya as a performer is so alive and so present as this character that you almost forget you exist as a viewer—you are in the moment. Whenever Kaluuya is on the screen, you don’t want him to leave, so when he does, that is a problem.
LaKeith Stanfield plays William O’Neal and certainly has the harder part to play. He is the betrayer, he spends most of the movie in a state of ambivalence, but yet is also gutted by what he has to do in the end. Stanfield is not as magnetic as Kaluuya, but he too has a moment that jumps off the screen. It happens near the end of the movie, when the FBI agent (played by Jesse Plemons) indicates to O’Neal what he wants him to do as part of the FBI’s plan to kill Hampton. Stanfield sits in a chair, at a table in the restaurant; his face is steady but with the slightest look of shock; and then his body, starting with the shoulders, rocks forward just a bit and then back just slightly, as if a wave has passed through him. It’s a stunning moment.
Stanfield and Kaluuya are both up for Best Supporting Actor. Because of the nature of their roles and the way the movie uses the space of its narrative, this makes sense. And I would be shocked if Kaluuya did not win.
Judas and the Black Messiah is worth watching for the performances and the history alone. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if the way the movie is told actually works.