A Haunting Look at a Social Media Diet
Good morning.
Yesterday, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. For the first time in four years, I feel a little bit lighter, a little more optimistic. I know it won’t last forever, but I’m going to try and enjoy it for now.
Now, on to this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with controversy at Politico. The Daily Beast has a thorough breakdown of one of the biggest media stories last week: Politico’s decision to let the controversial conservative pundit Ben Shapiro guest-write the Politico Playbook newsletter. Though not entirely similar, Politico’s decision, and the outrage surrounding it, further the themes raised on Paul Farhi’s Washington Post piece from last month that looked at how publishing op-eds by controversial figures became one of the major media stories of 2020—partly due to the fact that they are cost-effective means of driving traffic.
Last Thursday, Bloomberg published a story profiling Jedd Legum and his Substack newsletter/publication Popular Information. This profile is a good look into the audience and revenue funnel that can be built around a writer with an audience who serves readers in-depth investigative reporting. Per the Bloomberg article, Popular Information has 138,000 subscribers, with 5-10% of those paying $6 a month (or $50 per year), and Legum is able to promote his content further to a Twitter following of over 471,000. As Legum says, he’s built his content offering and audience on finding a topic to report on that is “something that’s so monotonous and boring that it’s unlikely to be duplicated.”
In other Substack news (there’s always, always Substack news), the Medium publication OneZero ran a story last week by Alex Kantrowitz on how platforms like Substack and Clubhouse may soon face the same scrutiny for moderating content that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms have come under and only taken true concerted action on in the past two weeks. The potential danger that Substack’s platform presents to giving space to dangerous voices has always been there and now that it has become one of the key players in the future of the media business at the start of this decade, how and when they decide to handle moderation is going to be a major story going forward.
On the newsletter beat more generally, on Tuesday, Axios’s Sara Fischer ran an exclusive news story about Forbes’s launch of a new paid newsletter service. As Fischer writes, the platform “will allow journalists to launch their own paid newsletters and split the revenue with the 103-year-old publisher.” As always, Fischer has plenty of good details in her piece, but a key point she notes is: “This is different from a platform like Substack, where content moderation policies are intentionally less strict because writers are paid directly and only by readers. Forbes' offering will inevitably mean there's more editorial oversight over the selection of newsletters and authors.”
Next up we have a pair of New York Times related items:
First, in his MediaLyte Substack, Mark Sternberg did a deep dive on the rise of the New York Times’s Cooking App. I, like I’m sure many of you are, have become very reliant on the Cooking App to plan meals every week. As Sternberg points out through a little bit of back-of-the-envelope math based on available figures, “It’s a safe extrapolation...to assume that the app has far more than 600,000 monthly users — many, many times more.” This is a great read on how a leading media organization has adapted and built a successful, standalone, revenue-driving product on the back of a part of its content library.
On the New York Times product front, last Wednesday the Press Gazette ran an interesting Q&A with senior director of digital ad technology at the Times, Pranay Prabhat. In the interview, Prabhat discusses some of the challenges he and his team are facing and some of the things they have learned as they’ve built an internal first-party ad program and tested the targeting results versus a traditional third-party ad model.
In hard media business news, last Thursday, Variety reported on Group Nine Media going public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The move to go public was first announced back in December. Now that Group Nine has gone public they will, according to the Variety story, target “the acquisition or merger with businesses in digital media or related areas like social media, e-commerce, events, and digital publishing and marketing.” Group Nine’s IPO comes after the news last week that Bustle Digital Group was also looking to go public via the SPAC route as well. I’ll most likely be going deeper into these stories next week.
Also last Thursday, USA Today reported that Gannett, one of the largest newspaper publishers in the world, is targeting 10 million paid digital subscribers in the next five years. Gannett just passed the 1 million subscriber mark in the third quarter, which is somewhat shocking given that they own more than 260 daily publications and says a lot about how far behind these major newspaper publishers are.
And in the last week, there were two stories of note related to Axios:
First, the Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Mullin reported last Thursday that Axios will be launching a subscription service called AxiosHQ for companies to tap a team of its editors for writing tips, including “a tool that recommends grammar and usage changes based on a database of edits from Axios staff.” As Mullin notes, Axios “was profitable last year, doesn’t have a paywall and currently generates most of its revenue through advertising.” And now they are launching a corporate software subscription business. I’m continually fascinated by their company.
And also at Axios, last week the company published a “Bill of Rights” for its readers. A lot of news organizations have pages similar to this, which transparently outline their ethics, standards, and policies. I had to create one for our publication at Artsy. However, I find it interesting that Axios felt the need to share this now as we move into the post-Trump era where disinformation and alternate versions of reality are presented as fact.
Finally, I enjoyed this interview with Karen Johnson, the head of product innovation and research at Bloomberg, at the Evolving Newsroom Substack newsletter from Nick Petrie. As Johnson says in one of her responses, her job “is to work with product, design and tech teams to make news experiences better for the people who use them. At the core of my work is the function of understanding how and why news and information fits into people’s lives and helping teams to translate these audience insights into decisions that will help make news products more useful, interesting and meaningful.” Johnson’s role is a great example of the kind of new jobs that are developing at smart, forward-thinking media organizations—positions that sit on the cross section of multiple departments and that are devoted to better understanding and serving audiences.
What I’m Engaged With
One of major issues this country will face moving forward is the fact that there are millions of Americans who are disillusioned, who believed in Donald Trump as their leader and as an arbiter of truth, and who firmly believe in conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact or reality.
This issue was put on full display in a New York Times piece by Kevin Roose this past weekend. Roose’s article is headlined “A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling” and profiled a woman named Valerie Gilbert who has become known for posting and spreading QAnon conspiracy theories on her Facebook page.
Gilbert is a 57-year-old woman, “a Harvard-educated writer and actress” who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Each day she takes to her computer to, as Roose describes it, “unspool [a] web of falsehoods on her Facebook page, where she posts dozens of times a day, often sharing links from right-wing sites like Breitbart and The Epoch Times or QAnon memes she has pulled off Twitter.” Gilbert believes “that the world is run by a Satanic group of pedophiles that includes top Democrats and Hollywood elites, and that President Trump has spent years leading a top-secret mission to bring these evildoers to justice.”
In his piece, Roose explains how Gilbert and other QAnon followers and believers have seen most of their theories disproven over the past few months. They believed that Donald Trump would win the 2020 Presidential Election in a landslide and “that a coming ‘storm’ would expose the global pedophile ring and bring its leaders to justice.” Neither of those things have happened. The piece details just how dangerous QAnon is because it serves as a belief system and a community for disaffected people to share and direct their anger at the people they believe have wronged them.
The most harrowing part of the piece is a bit of visual wizardry by the New York Times product and design (or maybe visuals?) teams. Midway through the story, there is an interactive graphic that shows how, from 2016 to 2021, Gilbert’s Facebook page evolved from sporadic posting to a deluge of daily misinformation and conspiracy theories. Specific post examples are brought into focus, accompanied by captions and analysis.
This graphic is haunting (and impressive) because it shows just how much social media (and really all kinds of media consumption) can actually change a person’s personality or sense of reality. As Roose writes, “For [Gilbert], QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative.”
And that is what people all over the country are doing and have been doing over the past four years. In a thread built of a link to Roose’s article, Lauren Camera, a senior writer at U.S. News News & World Report, explained how a childhood friend of hers went down an almost identical path. It is a terrifying and truly sad story and I recommend reading the entire thread.
And those are just two examples. This is what counts as real life is for a large number of Americans. What happened over the past four years isn’t going away just because Donald Trump is not President of the United States anymore.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: The Flight Attendant (2020)
For the last 5 years, watching television has been weird for me. I felt untethered in a way. Ever since Mad Men went off the air in the late spring of 2015 there hasn’t been a TV show that I’ve been dying to watch every week. For a long time, part of my identity was that I loved Mad Men—like, loved it to the point that I stayed up after every episode and wrote recaps at my old blog for no reason other than to just write about the way the show made me feel. I don’t know what that says about me.
During this period of time, I’ve become a TV watching agnostic, a nomad. I never get really attached. What I’ve gravitated towards are single seasons of shows: season one of The Terror (2018); The Watchmen (2019); I binge watched all of The Leftovers in one week in order to catch up to the conversation around series finale in 2017 (so maybe that counts as something); I watch The Mandalorian and enjoy it, but I don’t really care about good ol’ Mando and little baby Grogu; How To with John Wilson (2020) may be a new love affair, but we’ll see if that lasts through its second season.
I’ve enjoyed this period in its own way, though. A single, stellar season of a TV show can be a miracle in itself—everything self-contained and satisfying and leaving you wanting more. And if a successive season disappoints, then that’s all right, you were never that invested anyway.
The Flight Attendant, HBO’s dark comedy that recently finished its first season, is the latest addition to this list. The series, adapted from a novel by Chris Bohjalian, is a wholly satisfying blend of mystery, thriller, and comedy—and maybe even a rumination on female friendship. It centers around Cassie Bowden (the titular flight attendant, played by Kaley Cuoco), an alcoholic and flies around the world hiding from her past and any kind of true attachment. She soon becomes wrapped up in a mysterious murder in Bangkok and things escalate and become complicated, cringe-inducing, and tense from there.
I won’t spoil anything for you because this show deserves to be watched with little context. I didn’t know what to expect, and I loved it. Kaley Cuoco is best known for her role on The Big Bang Theory on CBS (which I don’t think anyone has ever watched and you can’t tell me otherwise, syndication deals and money be damned) and is phenomenal as the center of the show. She has a certain glamour in the role and on screen, but she still feels like an attractive woman you would see at a bar, getting drunk, and maybe being a little too loud. I don’t know if she is a true star, but her performance made me interested to see what she does next with her career.
The true revelation of the series is one of the supporting actors, Griffin Matthews. Matthews plays one of Cassie’s flight attendant co-workers. He adds a unique energy and charisma to every scene he’s in, making his character, out of all the characters on the show, feel the most real and alive. I hope he gets a lot of work after this role.
The Flight Attendant’s first season ends with its main plot and mystery resolved, but plenty of loose ends that leave the door open for season two to move in a lot of different directions. I’ll most likely watch season two when it comes out, and if it's just as good or even better than I will be thrilled. And if it's not, then I won’t be disappointed—because I’ll always have the experience of watching season one and that’s enough for me.