Apple News Stole My Attention During the Election

Nov 12, 2020

Good morning.

I’m back after an unintentional month-long hiatus. Long story short: I’ve had a lot going on at my day job, I needed to take a step back from checking Twitter and keeping up with the media in the lead up to the election, and I wanted to finish the draft for my third novel. Now the revisions start.

It’s obviously been a long month and a long, momentous week. Saturday was a day of celebration, but I know that the next two months and certainly the next few years are going to be just as long (but potentially not as chaotic or demoralizing), and that there is still a lot of work to do. And a recent edition of Nicole Cardoza’s Anti-Racism Daily newsletter has a good list of ways to continue the work that needs to be done—including not taking our eyes off the Georgia Senate Runoff Elections.

One final programming note: I’ll be moving these emails to a Thursday send moving forward. It just works better for my schedule.

Now, onto this week’s newsletter.

Your Weekly Roundup

This week, we lead off with (why not?!) a pair of New York Times related pieces.

First up, is Ben Smith’s profile of perhaps the defining journalist of the Donald Trump era: New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Smith profiles Haberman through the lens of the coming end of Trump’s presidency. It’s a good profile, and one that reminds me that reporters like Maggie Haberman are a completely different species. (I could never do what she does. And I could certainly never do what she does and also be a parent.) However, after talking the piece over with my girlfriend (who is much smarter than me) it left a funny taste in my mouth. Ben Smith is the New York Times’s media reporter, and he has commented on how that position puts him in a funny place as the Times becomes an all-encompassing media entity. And Smith has done plenty of good reporting in his new position, but in the range of his work this one fell closer to “corporate newsletter employee spotlight” rather than “industry reporting.” I’m not sure if there is anything necessarily wrong with that, based on the positioning of his role, but I just find it interesting to wrap my head around.

And over at New York, Reeves Wiedeman published a very long read on the New York Times’s “reckoning with itself.” I’m still making my way through the story entirely, but it focuses on the recent turmoil and divides within the Times and its seeming identity crises as it continues to become an all-encompassing media organization that wants to please and reach everyone.

Coming off last week’s election, there was plenty of coverage of how the election was covered. For that analysis, as always, I recommend listening to The Press Box. However, what caught my eye was a Twitter thread from the writer Matthew Sheffield who identifies as a “former conservative activist and journalist.” In the thread, Sheffield walks through the core misunderstanding of the purpose of journalism that modern conservatives and conservative media seem to have.

Staying with politics, on Tuesday, Axios’s Sarah Fischer reported that according to Facebook’s analysis of their data, only 6% of their users see political content. As Fischer states, this number is “meant to provide context for reports that have focused on the viral popularity of conservative political content on Facebook,” which I covered in a previous newsletter. There’s a lot of analysis in Fischer’s piece that makes this claim from Facebook feel somewhat dubious, but an interesting bit is that Facebook is planning to “publicly provide more data about which posts are getting the most reach and engagement,” something that journalists have been seeking.

Next up we have a pair of media acquisition stories:

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Japanese financial data service provider and media company Uzabase was selling Quartz—to its editor-in-chief. Uzabase initially purchased Quartz in 2018 from Atlantic Media, which founded the media organization in 2012. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Uzabase CEO Yusuke Umeda is making a personal loan to Quartz to support the deal. This is an interesting development that in some ways falls into the employee-owned media model that has emerged in different forms this year, most notably with Defector Media and Brick House Cooperative.
And this one happened back in October, but it’s worth noting. Sara Fischer reported that Insider Inc. purchased a majority stake in the media startup Morning Brew in a deal valued at about $75 million. I’ve been following Morning Brew and their suite of newsletters for about a year now. First, I dismissed them as something of an Axios knock-off, but then I realized that the companies have both been around for the same amount of time and I began to appreciate the subtle difference in Morning Brew’s delivery to their audience, which certainly skews younger than Axios’s. And that acquiring that audience was part of the motivation for the purchase by Insider Inc.

In more hard media business news, CNN’s Kerry Flynn shared an internal memo from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti that stated the company will be profitable in 2020. Peretti also announced that staff members who had their salaries reduced at the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic would now see their full compensation restored. As Peretti states in the memo, this is a stunning turnaround for BuzzFeed which seemed like it would have a disastrous year. (Update: It appears now that Buzzfeed is looking to buttress its revenue streams with a…licensed sex toy line?)

Speaking of revenue and profitability, Digiday recently published a very anonymous source-heavy piece covering the optimism media executives have for their advertising revenue for the rest of the year. There’s not a ton to take away from the piece since all of the sources are anonymous, which makes it a somewhat dubious barometer for how advertising revenues are actually faring.

In media layoff news, last week ESPN announced that it would be letting go of 300 employees and not backfilling 200 of those positions. Richard Deitsch at The Athletic published an interview (paywall alert!) with Jim Miller (who wrote the oral history of ESPN, which is a must-read) looking at what led to the layoffs and what ESPN might do moving forward.

Finally, we have more from the incomparable Sara Fischer! On Tuesday, Fischer reported that Reuters will be launching a new business “line” (I think that means publication/media entity?) called “Reuters Professional” that is aimed at an audience of B2B and B2C professionals—a market which the company estimates is worth $36 billion. As always, Fischer has all the good details but this continues a trend of media organizations focusing offerings on the industry professional audience (aka what you’d have once called trade publications). Everyone wants those sweet “business need” subscriptions.

What I’m Engaged With

Last week, I was, like I imagine most of you were, consumed with following the U.S. election. From the Tuesday election night results I swore I wouldn’t care about because I knew the actual result wouldn’t be announced until a few days, to wanting to know who won on Wednesday morning, to painfully waiting on Thursday and Friday, I was constantly seeking new election information.

Because I’ve been taking a break from Twitter, I’ve been using Apple News a lot more. It’s been a strange experience. I find myself stumbling into digital content from major news networks like ABC, NBC, and CBS, which I never would have read ordinarily; being pulled in by voicey Vanity Fair political headlines; and reading more AP and Reuters reports than ever before. I don’t know if I like it more than Twitter, but I find it a more sustainable and sane way to keep up with the news each day.

The best thing that Apple News did during the election, though, was incorporate 538’s live blog feed into its app. 538’s live blog is nothing revelatory—plenty of publications have created a tool like it before and have used them for years. However, its placement in the Apple News app made me appreciate the simplicity of the design and content delivery as well as the approachable, informative, and, dare I say it, essential analysis.

I don’t really know anything about the 538 writers aside from Nate Silver, but during election week, I found myself inherently trusting them. It was like a streamlined Twitter feed of sober voices at a time when on actual Twitter my feed was full of threads crammed with theories, retweets that led me to circular threads, and lots of cable news clips that distracted me or gave me anxiety.

Normally, I’d be afraid to just be getting information from the voices at one publication. What makes Twitter great (when it is not totally destructive to production, morale, and self-esteem) is that you can get information from all the voices you want during the moments you want to hear them the most. But during election week, I was simply happy with 538’s staff giving me a live blog that approximated a Twitter feed.

And, to Apple’s benefit, it kept me glued to their app for hours at a time, when I would normally have just checked it once or twice a day for maybe 30 minutes. In the end, Apple News got my attention and my time last week.

A Little Bit of Culture

This Week: “The Blob” by The Five Blobs

Since I missed running a “Halloween” edition of the newsletter, I figured I’d belatedly make it up to you all.

During October, I was spending time in Austin with my girlfriend and her family, which included participating in my first ever “Trunk or Treat” (socially distanced and fully masked) as well as carving pumpkins. As part of these festivities, we listened to an old Halloween mix my girlfriend’s family had made years ago. And on that mix, I was introduced for the first time to the song “The Blob” by The Five Blobs.

Maybe you’ve all heard of this song before, but it was a revelation to me. It’s not a Halloween song—it’s the theme to the classic 1958 horror film The Blob. Clearly, I’ve actually never seen that movie either, but obviously I get the gist: It’s a blob!

Why this song fascinates me, though, is because it was written by Burt Bacharach, who was unknown at the time. In fact, many attribute the song to kickstarting Bacharach’s legendary career. Once I found that out, I couldn’t stop listening to the song. In it, you hear the building blocks of Bacharach’s legendary body of work. The strumming guitar part that starts the song and pops up periodically directly points to “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”; the almost bossa nova rhythm calls to mind “The Look of Love”; the euphoric saxophone feels like a prototype of the horn parts of “Always Something There to Remind Me”; and the overall musicality of the melody, the feeling you get when you listen to it that makes you say, stupidly, “Yes! There are so many kinds of music here and in the world and I want to listen to them all, I can’t believe there are touches of them all in this one song,” is just so powerful.

And, sure, it's a novelty song from a dated 1958 horror movie, but damn it makes me feel alive.

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