Defector Media and Controlling Your Destiny
Defector Media and Controlling Your Destiny
Good morning!
I know the news about COVID-19 continues to remain grim even after all these months. I, for one, spent a large portion of my weekend just blankly staring and wondering how we got here as a country. But I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and remaining as resolute as is possible.
Before I get started this week, I just want to shout out to my former colleague and friend Julie Samuels for sharing last week’s edition and saying some nice things about this newsletter. Julie you are the absolute best and I miss working with you every day.
And to those of you who are new to the newsletter: Welcome! I hope you enjoy what you read.
Your Weekly Roundup
Perhaps the biggest story from the past week was last Friday’s news that James Murdoch, the son of the infamous media titan Rupert Murdoch, was resigning from his seat on the board of News Corp. News Corp. is part of the myriad Murdoch-family holdings and is the entity that publishes the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The decision was apparently “due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” according to Murdoch’s resignation letter. Murdoch’s politics have diverged from his father’s for a few years, and apparently the separation had been in the works. I haven’t looked into this concretely, but I imagine tons of Succession jokes were made on Twitter in the immediate wake of this news.
Meanwhile, the New York Post laid off 5% of its staff last week. According to Study Hall, this round of layoffs was due to the loss of ad revenue amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The 5% figure doesn’t make clear just exactly how many roles, and what types, were actually lost.
In some major news in the ongoing Big Tech vs. Publishers battle, last week The Guardian broke the news that Google, Facebook and other online platforms may need to pay fines in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars if they do not comply with a new Australian regulation code. The code has been in development for a few months now and I have covered it a bit here. The code will require Google and Facebook to negotiate payment with media organizations predominately publishing news in Australia and for an Australian audience. Google Australia has already pushed back on the code, calling it “heavy-handed.” How this code is enforced and what payments come out of Google and Facebook will be fascinating to watch in the coming months.
Digiday published a piece looking at some positive trends in programmatic ad revenue in June and July, primarily focused on success that Salon has seen. Salon saw a 25% increase in programmatic ad revenue year-over-year for the same period through most of July, but are still on track for losses for the entire year. The Digiday piece’s packaging is slightly misleading as most of the story focuses on the fact that these recent trends may provide some optimism for the second half of the year but can’t actually be trusted for a variety of reasons.
I wanted to take a pause here to plug an excellent piece at BuzzFeed News from Vanessa Wong looking at the toll that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on working parents. This is a wonderful personal essay with some heartbreaking moments as well some excellent researched facts. The entire story made me further admire anyone who is balancing a career and parenting during this time.
In some more inspiring news, this past weekend a new publication focused on gender and race inequality called The 19th launched this weekend. Their funding model is a mixture of “membership, philanthropy, and corporate underwriting.” The Atlantic newsletter The Ideacovered the launch more extensively this week, including an interview with the co-founder Emily Renshaw.
In his Sunday column this week, Ben Smith takes a deep dive into how media organizations are preparing to cover the 2020 election in a year when the results may not be finalized on election night. This is a terrific piece that gets into the mechanics of what goes into both guiding and shaping as well as operationalizing coverage for a pivotal moment in United States history.
On Sunday, Axios’s Sara Fischer reported on the limited impact the recent #StopHateForProfit boycott had on Facebook’s revenue. Facebook actually saw a 10% increase in ad revenue during the period of early July when the boycott began to pick up full steam, showing just how difficult it is to make a dent in Facebook’s overwhelming advertising business. Fischer notes that the boycott still presents a reputational problem, especially as Facebook is just coming off being part of major Congressional hearings. And, according to Fischer, the #StopHateForProfit boycott has plans to continue their efforts in the months to come.
Sara Fischer also broke the news on Tuesday that Bloomberg and The Athletic would be teaming up on a subscription bundle. Fischer has all of the details around the subscription in her piece, so you can dive deeper there. Bloomberg had already started a bundle with the tech-focused subscription site The Information earlier this year. This partnership should hopefully be beneficial for The Athletic, of which I am a fan and who underwent layoffs earlier this year, especially as the NBA’s return to action has drawn significant sports-fan interest.
In Facebook-related news, the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan published a very sober piece about America’s susceptibility to believing and spreading misinformation that they engage with on social media platforms. Sullivan’s piece was centered around the bizarre and dangerous Dr. Stella Immanuel story that rose that subsided over the past two weeks.
Speaking of disturbing news, the Washington Post was on top of a troubling story about the Department of Homeland Security compiling intelligence reports on American journalists covering the protests in Portland, Oregon. Intelligence reports are primarily used for documenting the activity terrorists or other dangerous actors and sharing that information with other law enforcement agencies—not tracking journalists exercising their First Amendment rights. Upon learning about this practice, acting secretary of the DHS, Chad Wold, ordered it to stop as well as asked for an investigation into the matter. This past weekend, Brian Murphy, the top intelligence official responsible for overseeing these reports was reassigned. It remains to be seen what if any other action will be taken in this case.
This past weekend, Axios’s Mike Allen ran a nice summary of the rise of text- and infographic-based posts and stories on Instagram over the past few months. Refinery29 in particular nearly doubled their amount of text-based posts in July, and ProPublica (who had already been publishing text-centered posts on Instagram) has seen a 70% increase in follower growth since March.
If you want a true deep-dive into a specific topic, I recommend reading Ben Thompson’s analysis of the “TikTok War” at Stratechery. He doesn’t get into the ongoing developments of TikTok’s future in America, because the piece was published before the recent drama, but it gives an excellent political, economic, and audience psychology breakdown of what makes TikTok and its future fascinating.
Somewhat related, I found this little thread on Twitter by product professional Josh Elman around what differentiates digital “media networks” from “social media networks” really concise and useful.
I also want to plug the latest installment of Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter. Petersen is a senior culture writer at BuzzFeed and in her most recent newsletter she goes a bit deeper into the state of local news, which I did here last week. Her piece focuses on the area- or town-specific coverage that makes local news unique.
Finally, I’m somewhat obligated to acknowledge the Media Thirst Guy post. Read on and engage in the discourse at your own risk.
What I’m Engaged With
Last week, I touched on Marc Tracy’s story in the New York Times covering the upcoming launch of Defector Media, the new media organization started by the Deadspin staff who walked out in protest of G/O Media’s management last fall. I want to come back to Defector Media this week, as well as some other new models of “self-publishing” that have been discussed recently.
In the middle of July, I stumbled upon a tweet from Benedict Evans, an independent analyst who runs a successful newsletter and has been studying or working in media, technology, equity research, strategy, consulting, and venture capital for the past 20 years. Evans’s tweet said, “Substack is disrupting Medium so fast it’s painful” and linked out to Andrew Sullivan’s final piece in New York magazine.
Sullivan is a prominent and controversial conservative journalist, pundit, and blogger. I’m not familiar with his work, so I won’t analyze that. Why his final New York piece is notable to me is that he announced the re-launch of his old blog, The Daily Dish, would be happening via Substack.
And that’s what Evans’s tweet was referring to. For the last five or six years, Medium was seen as perhaps the primary self-publishing tool for journalists, creative writers, artists, public figures, or celebrities to self-publish work that didn’t fit neatly under another umbrella or as a chance to test out material with an audience. Perhaps Medium’s most notable recent piece of this kind was Barack Obama’s essay about the death of George Floyd.
More recently, Medium has been known (at least to me) for its suite of publications creating original content. However, there are writers who still use Medium to self-publish and to get paid. As I understand it, Medium pays based on the number of Medium members who read an article. If your article becomes popular, there are ways for Medium to prominently feature the article to help in these efforts.
Substack, on the other hand, is entirely in the control of the creator. You can set up your own paywall settings and membership tiers and earn income directly from passionate readers. And that’s why notable writers like Andrew Sullivan, among many others are moving to Substack. Hence “Substack is disrupting Medium so fast it's painful.”
At the end of July, Business Insider published a piece on Substack’s rise that covered the fact that BuzzFeed technology reporter Alex Kantrowitz left the company in June to start his own monetized Substack. And so have many other journalists who have lost their jobs or who are out of work. COVID-19 has brought a brutal onslaught of layoffs in the media. The number of jobs available are dwindling and there aren’t enough that are likely to open up to meet demand.
This self-publishing development via Substack is promising but, as Study Hall notes, it isn’t a viable solution for all writers. It’s hard to develop an audience, let alone one that will pay for your content among all the other available options. Plus, there is also the concern that so many writers publishing without an editor or oversight to loyal fans could contribute to the spread of dangerous information online, depending on what the writer is covering.
But mainly, you need an audience.
That’s why Defector Media is so interesting. The former Deadspin staffers are building a media organization based on podcast property as well as a digital publication. The Ringer has shown this to be lucrative in a similar space, but they ultimately have Bill Simmons’s expansive reach. However, the Deadspin staff brings their own “brand affinity” with them to this new venture. They walked out on management rather than sacrifice their beliefs. They gave up their jobs and the publication they helped build and bring to a large audience instead of listen to outrageous corporate demands. Their work and their voices (and their own individual social media followings) combined with the action they took last fall, brings a reader loyalty that is worth a lot.
Defector is also interesting because they have no outside investors. The staff have all invested about a 5% stake in the company themselves. Their monthly subscription will cost $8 and each team member will be paid as the revenue is actualized. Each staff member also has ownership over the intellectual property of their articles, something that can be complicated at a traditional publisher if Hollywood wants to option the rights to an article—in most cases the company owns the work, not the staff member.
Another interesting aspect of the company is that the staff can vote out the editor-in-chief with a two-thirds majority. That’s obviously vastly different from the way things work at a traditional media company. It’s similar to the way the Civil publications were set up, but much simpler in my opinion. I never quite understood how Civil’s bitcoin token process worked and how it could be used to vote out the head of a publication.
I don’t know if Defector Media will work. I hope it does and I wish I had the courage or the platform to do something similar. (I’m just out here trying to hit my deadlines and hopefully building a small Substack audience of my own—and maybe try to publish some fiction in my free time). But what Defector Media foundation and Substack’s rise show is that with contracting jobs, an uncertain economic feature in the media industry, and the long history of abuse and mistreatment by those in leadership positions as traditional publishers, smart and enterprising writers and editors with a platform are taking their futures into their own hands.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Liv.e’s album Couldn’t Wait to Tell You
Occasionally these days, I’ll go on a spur-of-the-moment sprint of discovering new music. This happens very randomly. On a slow Saturday or Sunday evening—or maybe late one week night when I should be getting ready for bed—I suddenly panic and realize I don’t know enough about music that has been released over the past few months. So I first consult the AllMusic.com Editor’s Picks and then poke around Pitchfork.
Couldn’t Wait to Tell You by Liv.e is an album I discovered in this way. The record was released in June, but I only came to it in the past week. Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is Liv.e’s debut LP, but she released an EP back in 2018. Pitchfork has plenty of her biographic details covered in their record review, so I’m just going to explain why I like it here.
This record sounds like a lot of things: a carnival, muffled music heard from outside a venue, nitrous oxide, jumping into a body of freshwater, spoken word poetry, a washing machine, and the scenes in Annie Hall where Diane Keaton sings at the lounge club. There are artist comparisons I could make, but I won’t. Not because the music isn’t comparable to other artists, but just because I don’t want to do that. If I were to give the album a genre, it would be psychedelic R&B or soul. I like this album because it has 20 songs, but is only just over 48 minutes long. Each track truly flows into the next and feels like a continuous listening experience; not a continuous song, but a continuous music experience. It is suite-like in places, but not over composed. When I listen to the album, it gives me the same buzz, the same languid, coming-up feeling that good psychedelia does—except it isn’t psychedelia, it’s different than that. Maybe, before the summer is over, I’ll have a chance to listen to it on speakers somewhere outdoors, somewhere safe.
The song that made my August playlist is “LazyEaterBetsonHerLikeness.” Listen to the album and see what song makes yours.
The Action I’ve Taken
For the next few weeks, and maybe months, I’ll conclude each newsletter with a brief list of actions I’ve taken each week to help end police violence and to support an America that is free of racism. This isn’t meant to virtue signal or pat myself on the back—it’s merely meant to show my commitment to change. I won’t share any donation figures here but can provide them upon request.
Contacted multiple New York City council members and continued to ask them to divest themselves of any money taken from police unions.