More Profiles About Editor Management Styles!
Good morning.
I hope everyone who celebrated Thanksgiving had a great holiday weekend—and that you and your loved ones stayed safe. This is the 30th newsletter I’ve done since starting a Substack earlier this year! Time has flown by and I can’t believe we’re nearing the end of 2020. I’m not going to make any jokes about this year needing to be over since, like, everyone says that pretty much every year.
I’m going to run a regular newsletter this week and next week. But then, in the end of the year spirit, I’m going to try and pull something a little different together for the week before the holidays before taking a week or two off.
With those programming notes out of the way, let’s get into this week’s newsletter. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t yet.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with three stories from the “Publishers vs. Tech Platforms” beat that has been unfolding over this year:
First, last Friday, The Guardian ran a story about a new regulatory group in the United Kingdom that “will work to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other tech platforms.” The Competition and Markets Authority will be building out a Digital Markets Unit that will “enforce a new code of practice on technology companies which will set out the limits of acceptable behaviour.” According to the story, the code will “seek to mediate between platforms and news publishers, for instance, to try to ensure they are able to monetise their content; it may also require platforms to give consumers a choice over whether to receive personalised advertising, or force them to work harder to improve how they operate with rival platforms.”
On Sunday, The Monday Note (a publication run on Medium but not by Medium) ran a piece looking at the recent deal Google made with the French government that will see the tech giant pay €150m to French media organizations over the next three years.
And then on Tuesday, The Guardian had a story looking at how Facebook will be paying United Kingdom publishers to license their content under the new consolidated News tab on Facebook. Facebook hasn’t disclosed the amount of money they will be paying to the news organizations that have signed up into the licensing program.
Switching gears, the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York published an interactive resource and database compiling a “directory of nearly 300 community media outlets across the U.S. that primarily serve Black communities across the diaspora.” As the media industry reckons with its lack of diversity and history of racism alongside a lack of local news outlets and the rise of journalism based in and covering specific movements and communities, this is a welcome resource to have.
Over at CNN, Kerri Flynn wrote a wonderful profile of Dawn Davis, the new editor in chief of Bon Appétit. Davis was hired after Adam Rapoport resigned when a photo of him in brown face surfaced and soon made public a long history of racial discrimination and a toxic work environment under his leadership at Bon Appétit. Flynn lays out the stakes of the profile in this wonderful nut graf:
“Davis is joining Bon Appétit as somewhat of an outsider—not only because she is the magazine's first Black female editor in chief, but also because she came from the book publishing world, where she worked for 25 years. But Davis is no food neophyte. She has written and edited books about food, and as an avid home cook, she's known to be on the side of ‘living to eat’ rather than ‘eating to live.’ Will that be enough to renew confidence—from employees, advertisers and readers — in Bon Appétit?”
In other media profiles, Jewish Insider ran a great piece on Axios’s Jonathan Swann. Swann has become known for his White House scoops during the Trump administration and his interview with Trump that aired on HBO and spawned a meme. This is a great look at what it takes to be a high-level political reporter today.
Last Friday, Ryu Spaeth at The New Republic published a piece analyzing the work and overall approach to journalism of Ben Smith, the former BuzzFeed News editor in chief and current media columnist at the New York Times. Spaeth believes that Smith is the best media columnist the Times has ever had and sums up my feelings about Smith’s columns perfectly in one sentence: “I don’t recall lying in bed on a Sunday night thinking, with the anticipation of a tiger who is about to be fed, ‘It’s David Carr time.’ Ben Smith time, however, has become a weekly ritual—sad, pathetic creature of journalism that I am.” But Spaeth has much more interesting thoughts about the morality of Smith’s work and the morality of journalism in general. This kicker is pretty great—and damning:
“I have chosen Smith as my journalist par excellence because his conscience is so clear. We may be bad people, he seems to say, but … well, we’re just bad people. Journalists hope that the information they convey serves some higher purpose: the education of the public, the dispelling of secrets, the revelation of the truth. But this sometimes seems like a rather convenient framework to justify what is really going on: When we look in the mirror, the person staring back at us is a grinning Ben Smith.”
One of my newsletters wouldn’t be complete without the latest reporting from Axios’s Sarah Fischer. This week we have a pair of stories:
First, Fischer had a story on how the local news media organization Patch (Remember them? They’re still around and doing well!) has developed a platform called Patch Labs that allows local journalists create their own newsletters and websites. As Fischer reports, “[t]he software allows reporters to sell ads and subscriptions directly via the platform, and keep most of the revenue.” And Fischer connects the dots between what the Patch is doing and what platforms like Substack and other outlets (like Axios) are doing in both the newsletter and local news space.
Then, Fischer broke the news that star Politico reporters Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer and John Bresnahan are launching their own daily newsletter (and media company) to compete with Politico’s Playbook newsletter, which they helped establish. As Fischer states in her takeaway, Sherman, Palmer, and Bresnahan are “the latest big media stars to leave their outlets in pursuit of independent projects.”
Finally, on the Substack beat, over at the, err, Substack newsletter/publication Margins by Ranjay Roy and Can Duruk, Can Duruk wrote about...well….Substack. (There are levels here, man.) Duruk relays his experience creating a popular Substack and weighs in on a variety of topics: whether or not Substack can be compared to an online marketplace, why Substack has been a potentially good shock to the system for the media industry, and Substack’s plans (or lack thereof, maybe) for improving the reader experience on the platform. I highly recommend reading this.
What I’m Engaged With
A few weeks ago I praised AppleTV’s Ted Lasso for its depiction of management. This week, I want to take a moment to look at a piece that spotlighted what (at least on the surface) look like the real life habits of a good manager or leader in the media space.
Last Wednesday, the New York Times ran a “day in the life” kind of profile piece on the editor in chief of The Verge, Nilay Patel. I’m usually a sucker for this genre of profile. You know the one I’m talking about: the one where you follow a notable someone on an “average” day or week in their life. No matter who it is, I usually get a vicarious thrill in reading along to the structure and rhythms of their day and imagining some better, profile-worthy future for myself.
But in reading this piece on Patel, I actually kind of felt like it was an average week in his life. Maybe I’m naive, but that’s what I felt in reading the piece. Sentiments like “Today’s Slack fire drill is a fun one...We’re reviewing Apple’s newest Macs, and there’s a scramble as we realize that some of our test results may have been affected by a software glitch in Premiere. For a minute, it seems like we’ll have to make major edits to our reviews and even potentially miss our deadline, but it turns out we can work around the bug. Crisis averted” seem like the standard emergencies any media job is made up of these days.
Time management solutions like, “I find it impossibly hard to context-switch between ‘management and meetings’ mode and ‘individual creative mode,’ so I’ve set aside Tuesdays as a day for marathon meetings in an effort to free up creative time elsewhere” and vacillations between, “The best work advice I’ve ever gotten was from Microsoft’s C.E.O., Satya Nadella. I asked him how he found the time to do everything on his schedule. ‘It’s your time,’ he said. ‘Be selfish about it’” at 10:00 AM on a Wednesday and “Hit by a wave of Slack messages. I am not great at being selfish about my time” at 10:01 AM on that same day ring all too true.
But what struck me about Patel’s week—whether average or not—were some of the management and leadership behaviors he discussed/exhibited.
One of those behaviors was his routine of having office hours every Wednesday afternoon where he just “hang(s) out with reporters and talk about whatever stories they’re working on,” which he calls his “favorite hour of the week.” Now, in this particular week Patel says he has to skip the office hours because he has to record episodes of his podcast to bank for over the holidays so maybe that’s all lip service, but I liked hearing an EIC’s approach to holding office hours with reporters every week.
Another was his mention of a leadership meeting where the focus was on “making sure people actually take vacations.” Again, this could all be lip service in order to look good in print, but I don’t think I’m that pessimistic. I say that because encouraging people to take vacations has been a real thing at my job this year too and we’re making sure people take vacation time at the end of the year as well—just like we did in the summer.
But the most important thing I took from the piece was this:
“I have my weekly check-in with my boss, Helen Havlak, the vice president of The Verge. She’s a genius — I hired her years ago to be our engagement editor and then editorial director. After a while, I realized I was going to business-side meetings, coming back and asking her what to do, and then just repeating what she said in the next meeting. So, we promoted her to be my boss; she’s in charge of our business while I focus on editorial, and it’s been terrific.”
This quote is why I tend to believe all of Patel’s sentiments in the piece. It takes a real leader to promote someone who once was below you on the masthead or reporting structure to be your boss because you identify that it simply works better that way. Helen Havlak was kind enough to let me and two of my reports pick her brain about audience development ideas back in 2017 when she was on her way to becoming Patel’s boss—so I understand why he made the decision.
Reading this piece reminded me of a profile Study Hall ran earlier this year on Choire Sicha, the section editor of the New York Times’s Styles section. That piece displayed some of Sicha’s more idiosyncratic forms of leadership but also what makes him a good and well-liked manager as well as a steward of original editorial ideas and new voices.
There are plenty of stories about toxic or terrible leaders and managers in the media industry. So, even if it is naive of me and I may be proven wrong one day, I like to appreciate the profiles that shine a light on people who are trying to manage and lead in a productive way.
And, like I said back in July, I’m just a media nerd at heart so I’ll read profiles about the management styles of section desk editors or head editors all day long anyway.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: How To with John Wilson (2020)
For the past month, the TV show that everyone has been talking about is The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. But the show they really should have been talking about is How To With John Wilson on HBO, which just concluded its first, six-episode season last Friday.
Now, don’t get me wrong: The Queen’s Gambit was great. And there have been plenty of pieces extolling the show’s virtues—specifically the strength of its protagonist and the charisma of its lead actor. I thoroughly enjoyed the show (save maybe the last 15-20 minutes but that take is out there already), but it wasn’t as satisfying as How To With John Wilson.
Maybe that’s because How To With John Wilson is so refreshing. To take a step back, the show’s episodes are structured as 20 to 30 minute “how to” videos that you’d find on YouTube. Wilson has been making them for years in a shorter format. But the topics covered from episode to episode range from “How to Split the Check” to “How to Put Up Scaffolding” to “How to Make the Perfect Risotto.” Wilson narrates over street-shot footage and in between conversations with interview subjects (most of the time strangers, sometimes his friends, and in the season finale, his landlord) in a documentarian’s voice that is at varying times stumbling, ponderous, baffled, poignant, and intentionally corny. I’d never seen any of Wilson’s work before the HBO show and his overall delivery felt incredibly new to me.
A lot of people have gravitated to the show because it is a reminder of life in New York before the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilson roams both strange and familiar corners of Manhattan, crannies of Queens, and nondescript main arteries in Brooklyn. And it all makes you long for a time, about 12 months ago or so, when you could obliviously bumble through the streets of New York, probably worrying about something stupid on your phone, while meandering through so much life.
I’ve had people tell me that watching How To With John Wilson is difficult because it requires so much empathy. And that’s part of the reason why I love it. In the season’s second episode, “How to Put Up Scaffolding,” there is a moment where Wilson talks to a man with blindness and asks him how he feels about scaffolding. The man points out that the scaffolding that comes to shoulder height on adults is the most dangerous because he can’t easily sense its presence with his cane and so he often bumps into scaffolding bars. Watching that man explain his experience—one I have no grasp of—wearing a red fleece sweater and holding his cane, center of his body, made me feel a sense of sadness, awe, and despair; it made me feel raw and vulnerable and alive. This man is the type of person I’ve probably rushed past in a hurry to weave my way around scaffolding alongside buildings on Canal Street or somewhere else in New York. When I do that, I’m never properly thinking about what the experience of a stranger is, I’m never truly seeing the strangers or the people around me. And I’m certainly not wondering how difficult it might be for them to navigate around scaffolding.
In a short segment of an episode just a shade under 30 minutes, John Wilson put this man in full frame and made me think about his experience. That moment stuck with me for the rest of the evening after I watched “How To Put Up Scaffolding”; that moment sticks with me now.
Oh, and it’s really funny too.