Medium and The City Are Creating Helpful COVID-19 Service Journalism
Welcome to this week’s edition of Are You Engaged? I hope you all made it through the last week and weekend safely. And, I hope you’re all looking forward to the upcoming 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls as much as I am.
Before we get into this week’s edition, there are a few media news items of note to get to. First, the New York Times published a comprehensive and frightening breakdown of the roughly 28,000 news and publishing jobs that have been lost since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And breaking early this week, it appears that layoffs are imminent at Condé Nast, and at some of Vox’s properties furloughs (everyone’s favorite!) are reported to be coming this week too. Again, I’m thankful that I have a job right now—but I fear for the industry I’ve spent about 10 years of my life working in, as well as for the thousands of people more talented than I am who are out of work right now.
One of those people out of work right now is Grant Wahl. Wahl was perhaps Sports Illustrated’s most notable soccer writer, but was laid off last week by The Maven, the company that now owns and operates Sports Illustrated. The whole story is very ugly and casts further doubt on what kind of future even the most successful journalists have as we face a potential prolonged economic recession.
For this week’s newsletter, I’ll be going a bit longer (OK, a lot longer) in the “A Little Bit of Culture” section below, so I’m going to keep things brief here in the main section. What I want to focus on this week are two resources and examples of good, digestible service-journalism during COVID-19.
Most major publications have created hubs or dedicated sections for their COVID-19 coverage. At Artsy, we’ve even done our own, light-touch version. These kinds of pages or collections of articles are table stakes for any publication at this point: COVID-19 is the major story of this moment and covering it from as many angles as your resources (both from a staff and product perspective) allow is the practical business decision.
However, there are two resources that I have found especially helpful: Medium’s Coronavirus Blog and The City’s COVID-19 coverage center.
Medium is primarily known as a personal blogging platform, but in recent years it has undergone some changes. Currently, they are leaning on a subscription model and leveraging quality reporting and personal essay writing at a variety of their own, recently-created publications.
But on the main Medium site, they have created a helpful blog that collects pieces written on Medium by professional contributors, articles from their suite of publications, as well as surfaces relevant coverage by themes within the COVID-19 story from other major outlets. They are also packaging updates in the form of a daily newsletter. I find this approach to be a smart mix of aggregation, UGC, and also original content.
The City is a local New York news outlet that I’ve subscribed to for the last year. It’s a nonprofit news organization, and buying a subscription has been my small way of supporting local New York news as well as a forward-thinking digital outlet. (Plus, when you buy a subscription you get a great coffee mug. Truly one of the best coffee mugs ever created.)
The City has been tracking New York-related COVID-19 stats in real time and breaking those numbers down with an array of helpful (and well-designed) data visualizations. In addition, their coverage tackles the COVID-19 story from a variety of local angles, giving you insight into perspectives and sides of the story that you maybe wouldn’t ordinarily think of from your vantage point in New York. And within that, they are serving up a steady dose of helpful and actionable service pieces.
These are just two examples of outlets doing COVID-19 coverage in an interesting and….engaging way. You may like the way other publishers are treating, handling, and organizing the story, but the ways that The City and Medium have presented their coverage have stood out to me.
A Little Bit of Culture:
Each week I end the newsletter with a brief ode/rant/riff on a bit of culture I’m passionate about. It might be music, it might be movies or TV, it might be a book, and sometimes it might be related to sports. Once a month, I’ll go a little longer on something.
This is one of those times.
This week: A deep dive on the first season of AMC’s The Terror
For a little over the past two years, I have spent part of my time living in the North Pole.
I haven’t actually physically set foot at any longitude considered part of the Arctic Circle. I am too much of a coward, too weak physically and mentally, and also have a pretty busy day job, all of which have kept me from venturing to the North Pole as a physical place.
Instead, my mind has lived there. In waking moments, I have imagined myself moving slowly and solemnly over barren and unending stretches of ice and rock. When winter wind has blown down New York avenues, I’ve braced for the cold in my face, accepted it, and then continued walking, pondering what kind of paralyzing cold might grip me if I ventured out of shelter along the coast of Nunavut or Melville Island. Other times, I think about the frozen bays and straits and other bodies of water. The freeze of winter sets in quickly in the Arctic Circle (or so I’ve read) and the waterways can turn to ice and become treacherous in almost an instant. What once was a beautiful shade of blue, is now stacks of jagged and towering glaciers.
But I also think of the thaw. I think of Prince William Island, stretching vertically like a severed thumb from the rest of North America. When the ice melts—and yes, sometimes it does melt—the land becomes a sinking mud pit dotted with stone. I think of how the Arctic Circle is like another planet, and that NASA uses Devon Island as a stand-in for what exploring Mars would be like.
Why do I think of all of this? Because of a television show.
The Terror came out on AMC in the spring of 2018. The 10-episode drama was based on the 2007 novel of the same name by the author Dan Simmons. The novel and the show are fictionalized accounts of what happened to the ill-fated crew aboard two British naval ships searching for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s: The Erebus and The Terror.
I’ll give you a very brief history here. The expedition of The Erebus and The Terror was led by Sir John Franklin. Franklin was a decorated officer of the Royal British Navy and Arctic explorer who was eventually made governor of Tasmania where his reputation was somewhat tarnished due to political machinations. In an effort to redeem himself, he led an expedition to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. He was joined in command by Captain James Fitzjames and Captain Francis Crozier. However, the ships were caught in ice in the fall of 1846 and, though notes from 1847 and 1848 were found in nearby cairns updating on the crew’s condition, none of the men survived. Eventually search parties were sent in the ensuing years, but neither ship was found until The Erebus was located and excavated from Queen Maud Gulf in 2014; The Terror was found “in pristine condition” in Terror Bay off King William Island in 2016.
If you want to know the entire story of The Erebus and The Terror there is plenty of literature out there for you to read. After watching The Terror, I read a book called Ice Ghosts by Paul Weston that details the entire story of the ships, their doomed expedition, and their eventual discovery.
This story fascinates me for a variety of reasons. First, the fact that 129 men on two different ships perished and disappeared with very little trace is eerie and unsettling. Second, imagining what the conditions of the Arctic Circle must have felt and looked like with the technological and equipment of the 1840s is terrifying in a way that my brain can barely comprehend. Third, just thinking about the actual history, that at the time finding the Northwest Passage through maybe the most inhospitable place on Earth seemed like a good and noble idea in the service of discovery and commerce, that these men were encroaching on waters and hunks of land that very few humans had touched, that there were native people living there, surviving, and calling those lands home, living their own history and experience of the vast world, that it was not even 200 years ago, makes me feel weak at the unapproachable force of time and the universe.
The Terror manages to bring all of these vague feelings and sensations to life. Even though the show was shot mostly on a soundstage and on an island off the coast of Hungary, every scene feels as if you are isolated in the Arctic with the expedition. The pancake ice feels real; the shales, packs, and mountains of ice feel real; the barren, craggy, islands the men eventually make it to both feel reassuring away from the void of ice, but also daunting in their desolation. One aerial shot at the end of the first episode, once the ships are trapped in the pack, makes you glad you were never there.
On the show, the men have to survive the elements, tuberculosis, zinc deficiency, lead poisoning, each other, and also the presence of a supernatural beast: the Tuunbaq. The Tuunbaq did not exist. But when you watch the show, and are immersed in the extraordinary setting, the sense of dread that permeates nearly every scene, it seems plausible that nearly anything could be possible for the demise of these men. Why couldn’t the Tuunbaq be real?
The show presents Tuunbaq as a fact of life in the Arctic Circle. It’s a part of the religious beliefs of the Inuit (In reality, Tuunbaq isn’t part of actual Inuit beliefs but a creation of Dan Simmons.) And when Mr. Blanky—one of the crew members of the ship and one of the best characters on the show—faces off with the creature at the end of episode 5, you’ll start believing in Tuunbaq too. It is one of my favorite sequences in television history. From the swirling snow, to the way the action is shot, to the haunting score, it is a scene I will never forget and always return to.
Though Tunnbaq is a source of much of the horror (and violence, so much violence) on The Terror, the show is ultimately more concerned with the limitless depravity of men, especially when faced with extreme circumstances and the breakdown of leadership, order, and law. What comes across over the 10 episodes is that men can and will be convinced of anything under the right circumstances, and that maintaining a sense of right and wrong is seemingly the ultimate challenge when one has to decide whether to continue living or to give in and die.
The Terror concludes with a haunting image. The lone survivor of the expedition (again, in the book and in the show; in real life there were no survivors) is seen sitting on a frozen body of water, hunched above a sealing hole, waiting with his spear for one to swim by. The synthesizer score begins to build and swirl. And soon the camera pulls back slowly. The vast whiteness of the terrain, with the sunlight glinting through the open and endless sky, starts to take on hues of gold and faint shades of purple. The effect feels almost hallucinogenic. And then it’s over and you’re left empty, haunted, and moved.
AMC aired a second season of The Terror last year. The setting and story were different and the series will now potentially be used as an ongoing anthology. I haven’t watched the second season. And I still haven’t read Simmons’s book.
That’s because the first season of The Terror remains holy to me. It stands alone in a pure and contained way. It is a story and season of television I will go back to time and time again (I’ve already watched it three times all the way through). Though it came out to critical acclaim two years ago, it still feels like people didn’t and don’t talk about it nearly enough.
The Terror’s first season is one of television’s masterpieces. It’s depiction of one of the great mysteries of sea exploration has forever gripped my imagination. So, in some way, I will always be living in the North Pole—both attracted to and in perpetual fear and awe of a part of this planet that I will never know. And one that seemingly may vanish, taking all of its mystery, and all traces of the limitless depravity of men with it.
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