I Hope This Newsletter Won't Put You to Sleep
Good morning.
If the subject line this week was confusing, let me explain. I’m going to talk a little bit about special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) this week. It might get a little boring and I might butcher a few things, but I want to try my hand out at breaking down a trend that is emerging in the media business this year.
Other than that, I’ve been thinking a lot about something I read in Brian Stelter’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter last Friday. Stelter included a quote from an interview he did on his podcast with Ron Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, in which Brownstein said the following, “The fundamental dividing line in American politics...is between those who welcome and those who fear the way America is changing." That may not seem groundbreaking, but it is simply put, and it’s all I see when I follow the news each day.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with controversy at the New York Times. (It feels like this happens every month now.) The latest issue the Times is facing is the backlash over their decision to end the contract of editor Lauren Wolfe who tweeted about getting “chills” seeing Joe Biden’s plane land at Andrews Air Base on Inauguration Day. Except, on Sunday night, the Times refuted that they had not parted ways with Wolfe over that specific tweet. On Monday, Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair had more details from Times sources indicating that Wolfe’s contract was severed due also in part to previous behavior on social media. This incident happens almost exactly a year after the Washington Post’s misguided firing of reporter Felcia Sonmez over a tweet she posted about Kobe Bryant in the wake of his tragic death. Smarter people than I, have broken down the danger of media organizations disciplining reporters based on broad social media policies. And Today in Tabs from earlier this week probably has a better summary.
Yesterday, Jennifer Barnett, the former managing editor of The Atlantic, published a piece on Medium detailing her time working for an abusive boss while she was at The Atlantic. That man is never named in the piece, but it is James Bennet, the former editor of the New York Times’s Opinion section who resigned last year amid controversy for publishing a piece by Senator Tom Cotton that called for the military to quell the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. The sexism and mistreatment Barnett faced at The Atlantic is truly awful. I’d say unimaginable, but we’ve heard stories like this before. The ending of her piece is especially depressing, since Bennet is now indeed getting another chance over at The Economist.
Marty Baron, the legendary editor of the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Miami Herald, announced his retirement on Tuesday. I heard he’s starting a Substack (just kidding!).
In actual Substack/newsletter beat news, we have a pair of interesting stories from Tuesday:
First, Twitter announced that they had acquired the email newsletter service Revue. This comes right on the heels of their acquisition of Breaker, a podcast broadcasting and discovery app. The New York Times reported that Twitter considered acquiring Substack, but a deal never materialized. One of the many big questions that comes out of this latest acquisition is: What exactly is Twitter trying to be now?
And Axios reported that the Everything Bundle, a collective of individual newsletters offered for a subscription as a kind of approximation of a publication, has left Substack. Per the Axios story, the group is leaving Substack and forging ahead with “$600,000 in seed funding, its own content and newsletter software built in-house, and a refreshed brand as Every.”
In more controversial news from New York media institutions, we have a pair of stories about the New Yorker:
The magazine was under heavy fire last Thursday when the New Yorker Union’s more than 100 members staged a daylong walkout. The walkout was over failed negotiations with management centering around raising the pay floor at the magazine to $65,000 and “a system of graduated annual [salary] increases, which would help compensation keep pace with the cost of living and prevent wage stagnation.”
On Friday, it was reported that the New Yorker had voluntarily returned a National Magazine Award for a 2018 article covering a company in Japan that provided a rental service where actors would pretend to be family members for paying customers. The New Yorker decided to return the award after due diligence revealed that key subjects in the story had lied to the writer of the piece and the fact checkers of the article.
In other media controversy news, last Saturday, The Guardian reported that Rolling Stone, which is owned by Penske Media, has offered to pay “thought leaders” $2,000 to publish content on the site in order to “shape the future of culture.” Per The Guardian’s story, Penske Media has said, “that Rolling Stone does not allow paid content to run as editorial in any context, and that all such content was clearly labelled.” I’ve observed a few different “pay to play” revenue models during my time in publishing, but this one feels especially schemey.
It’s been a while since I’ve covered the Google vs. Publishers beat, but there were two stories of note in the past week on fairly opposite ends of the spectrum:
First, last Thursday TechCrunch ran an extremely thorough breakdown of a new agreement Google had reached with L’Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale, which represents about 300 press titles in France, to pay approved publishers licensing fees for using their content in snippets and other placements. A lot of the agreement is still sketchy, as is how this agreement works alongside Google’s News Showcase, the new licensing program the company announced at the end of last year.
However, last Friday, The Guardian reported the news that Google was threatening to shut down its web search services in Australia if it is forced to pay publishers to license their content per a new government code that is currently being considered in the Australian parliament. According to the story, Google wants “to make changes to the code to make it ‘workable.’” What these simultaneous stories show is that Google does want to make deals with publishers for using their content in ways it sees fit, but only on their terms—terms which remain mostly obscure.
Last Thursday, Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair wrote a very good story about how news organizations have, and will continue to, devote resources to covering extremism and domestic terrorist groups in the United States. I am interested to see how this kind of coverage is handled over the next year especially: Will we see tone deaf profiles or pieces that present extremist groups and domestic terrorists for what they are, without trying to maintain some kind of “objectivity”?
In local news...uh...news, on Monday, Axios’s Russel Contreras had a story about a new newsletter venture focused on bringing “local news on Black and brown communities to national audience.” The organization, called URL (Uplift, Respect, and Love) is led by former CNN executive S. Mitra Kalita and Philadelphia radio executive Sara Lomax-Reese.
Finally, I enjoyed this piece, published on Monday over at Poynter, from Samantha Tomaszewski that looked at the importance of “audience” or audience development roles at media organizations. Since audience work has been the focus of my various roles for the past five years and has helped me grow as a professional, I’m a little biased. But any news or media organization that doesn’t value roles focused that are on measuring and monitoring what audiences are engaging with and how that data can benefit the business, that help package content to readers, that test and iterate on new content types and formats, doesn’t know what they are doing. As the article says, most of the time we are “jacks of all trades” so it can be hard to define what we do, but we can and do cover a lot of ground.
What I’m Engaged With
Are you ready for some SPAC talk?! In recent weeks, SPACs have come up in a few media business stories. Specifically, because Group Nine Media used a SPAC to go public last week and Bustle Digital Group has discussed plans to go public via the same route.
But first, what the hell are SPACs? Well, I will first link you to an explainer at The Verge and the Investopedia entry for the term that will each be much more helpful than anything I paraphrase. But basically, as I understand it, SPACs are companies with no real commercial business that raise money to take a company public with the sole purpose of acquiring another company in the same business sector.
So what does this mean for the media industry besides the two examples I linked to above. Well, a piece from CNBC that was published on Monday outlines how this could be the beginning of a lot of consolidation. Namely, that Group Nine Media is targeting an acquisition of BuzzFeed among about 20 other properties. If you recall, near the end of last year, BuzzFeed acquired HuffPo. If Group Nine added both of those organizations and their properties to put alongside the portfolio of brands they have already, it would create an extremely formidable and vast media empire.
But, as the CNBC story reports, BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and Vice Media have all discussed going public via SPAC as well. So you could see permutations of any of these companies acquiring and rolling up any of the others. As Bryan Goldberg, the CEO of Bustle Digital Media, says in the CNBC piece, “These companies do merge well. They capture a lot of synergy on cost and revenue when they merge.” I don’t know about you, but I always like my companies to merge well.
All of these major media organizations were able to rebound at the end of 2020 after a very bleak start to the year during the COVID-19 outbreak. And so after you rebound, where do you go? You look to rapidly expand, of course! At the size and reach all of those companies are currently at, you can only get bigger in order to compete with the true giants of media right now: the New York Times, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon/The Washington Post, and, yes, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Will any of these acquisitions happen this year? Will the media industry consolidate faster than we think? As I’ve said before: Nobody knows anything, and I certainly don’t know anything at all. But it certainly seems like Group Nine has started the year with a specific purpose.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Promising Young Woman (2020)
It’s been awhile since I’ve watched a movie and knew immediately that it would stick for me for years to come. The last one was probably First Cow (2020), which I watched last summer. But Promising Young Woman is a movie that I’m still processing and probably will be for a long time.
I’m going to give you very few details about this movie, because I don’t want to rob you of experiencing it fresh. But Promising Young Woman is the feature debut for Emerald Fennell, who was the head writer for season two of Killing Eve. The fact that it is Fennell’s debut is astounding, because Promising Young Woman manages to be so thematically tight while also balancing a variety of of tones and genre beats.
The film is about a woman in her early thirties named Cassie (played by Carey Mulligan) who goes out to bars and clubs, pretends to be drunk and then attracts the attention of “good” guys who act like they want to help her, but who actually want to take advantage of her. However, once Cassie goes back to their apartments or homes, she soon reveals that she is not someone to be taken advantage of.
Fennell knows when and how to lean into the tension Cassie brings to each of these encounters—we know that Cassie has something planned each time, but we don’t know exactly what it is—and yet she still manages to find the comedy in every encounter. There is also a period of the film that glides by on rom-com pacing before the movie enters into its descent in the last act where, suddenly, you realize that the film’s ending was always inevitable. And yet the ending still manages to surprise because of the rom-com beats Fennell has established. Mulligan was phenomenal in a truly difficult role—a character who is smart and funny, wounded and fragile, but incredibly strong all at the same time; Bo Burnham was perfectly cast as Cassie’s love interest; and Alfred Molina kind of steals the movie in a small role as a haunted attorney who wants to atone for his sins.
I know this all sounds vague, but trust me—this is a movie you need to see. It will be hard for another film released this year to leave me as affected as I did after I watched Promising Young Woman.