Responding to Reader Feedback...With More Content
Good morning.
I’m going to keep the preamble short this week. But before I get to the newsletter, I just want to shout out two non-media industry pieces that are worth your time.
First, this piece did a great job explaining why AppleTV’s Ted Lasso is great. If you remember, I’m a fan.
And, this piece was a fun read—with lots of twists and turns—about, well, spending life on the internet.
OK, now onto this week’s newsletter. Oh, and if you haven’t subscribed yet please think about subscribing below! Also: If you want to get me a Christmas present, tell one person in your life about this newsletter over the next week or so!
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week off with two Substack-related stories. Why the hell not, right? It’s not like I can’t talk even more about Substack on a Substack than I already have...right?
On Tuesday, Nilay Patel (who I discussed last week), the editor in chief of The Verge, had a conversation on his Decoder podcast with Substack CEO Chris Best. It’s a long interview that you can obviously listen to as a podcast or read in Q&A form. Patel asks a lot of great questions.
And Monday, at NiemanLab, Michael Socolow wrote a piece looking at how Substack is actually like the “older versions of U.S. newspapers [that] were relatively expensive and generally read by elite subscribers.”
Related to Socolow’s story above, on Monday, Wired published a piece by Mark Hill covering the potential of subscription saturation. Hill collects a lot of interesting stats in the piece (most people only pay for one digital newspaper subscription, 76 percent of American newspapers used paywalls in 2019) and breaks down the simple economics between digital media subscriptions vs. streaming video subscriptions (the average American spend $29 per month on streaming subscriptions...which gets you maybe 2 or 3 subscriptions to digital media outlets). But the crux of the dilemma, as Hill sees it, is:
“Unless readers are willing to spend a lot of money—and substantially more than they spend on watching videos—it simply won’t be financially viable for them to consume a lot of internet content. Not coincidentally, a lot of internet content won’t be financially viable, either. The New York Times’ 587,000 new subscriptions outnumbered the combined efforts of 261 local papers across America.”
Speaking of Wired, the big news last Thursday was that the publication’s editor in chief, Nicholas Thompson, announced that he would be leaving his position to start as the new CEO of The Atlantic. Thompson has been the editor and chief of Wired since 2017 and during that time the publication’s digital offering has arguably become one of the most consistently interesting on the internet.
And in more Wired news, Digiday ran a story looking at how the publication used Black Friday to push $5 dollar subscription deals. As former Digiday president Brian Morrisey noted, promotional subscriptions can be used to make raw subscribers numbers look good, even if those aren’t high-quality users. The piece also has some good insight into how Wired has increased their affiliate content and revenue in recent years.
Last Friday, at Poynter, Gabe Schneider wrote a piece analyzing the lack of diversity in the ranks of media reporters. This was a great angle to take on covering the the media industry’s continued issues with diverse hiring. And Schneider sums up the problem perfectly: “The consequence of an insular niche group of journalists deciding what the story of American journalism is that, by and large, media journalists and critics are consistently missing the biggest problems in American journalism: exclusion, marginalization, and the journalism reckoning that defined 2020.”
Glamour ran an in-depth profile of White House reporter Yamiche Alcindor last Friday. Alcindor works for PBS NewsHour now after spending time at the New York Times. She has been subject to several outbursts from Donald Trump during his press conferences—you may remember this moment from back in March. And if you want some inspiring quotes, there are plenty to go around from Alcindor in this piece. A sample graf below:
“Alcindor has found that telling the truth to her viewers means owning her own truths too. ‘I bring my whole self to reporting—the fact that I’m a Black woman, that I’m Haitian-American, that I’m the child of people who came to America because they believed this country when it said that it treated men and women equally, despite their race and socioeconomic backgrounds. I believe that America should be delivering on that promise,’ she says. Her reporting is grounded in her intimate experience of struggle, of having immigrant parents, though she cautions that their stories are not a monolith. ‘I understand what it means to be stereotyped and criminalized just for how you look,’ she says. ‘I hope that my reporting illuminates some of the flaws that we have in this country, because it comes from a very personal place.’
Meanwhile, GQ published a piece looking at the fall of Man Repeller, the highly influential fashion and lifestyle site that started as a blog and turned into a full-fledged business. Except, it maybe never wanted to be an actual business. A revealing quote about the founder, Medine Cohen: “She was a trailblazer in the space of being a blogger. And then it seemed like she accidentally built a company—which I totally understand. That's really fucking hard when that's not what you set out to do.”
And we conclude with a pair of very shop-talky pieces about the New York Times:
This first one goes out to all the engineers out there. NiemanLab published a great conversation with Brian Hamman, the senior vice president of product engineering at the Times. Hamman discusses how the Times simulated the projected traffic during election week to make sure they could handle it!
And the Times moved national editor Marc Lacey over to lead a new team within the organization called Live, which is “the engaging and demanding platform for dynamic coverage of the biggest news stories.” According to the Times’s press release, Live will consist of “briefings, blogs and chats that were developed by newsroom and product teams.” Lacey will apparently “recruit a team of editors and reporters who can supplement work that crosses every desk.” I find the idea of Live and this organizational set up super interesting and I’m going to check back in on this story in a few months.
What I’m Engaged With
Guess what? It’s more shop talk based around something the New York Times did.
I always forget about the New York Times’s “Times Insider” content. The Times first launched Insider as an add-on to their digital subscription offering that would offer readers podcasts, events, emails, and stories that took their audience behind the scenes of how certain reporting was executed.
Some of that content is now available to all readers, which I was reminded of this past week when Times Insider ran a story looking at a recent feature the Times had published.
On November 25th, the Times ran a feature called “The Greatest Actors of the 20th Century (So Far).” Overall, the list was good, but obviously—like any kind of list capped at a specific number—it caused a lot of debate online. (My takes: Keanu should not be on it; Meryl should; Kidman shouldn’t be on it; and Denzel probably shouldn’t be number one.)
The Times recognized all of the engagement they saw with the piece and used Times Insider to run a story covering the list itself to engage in the conversation. The piece was called, aptly, “Meryl Streep Isn’t on Our List of Greatest Actors. Here’s Why.” In the piece, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis discuss why they left Streep off as well as other decisions that factored in their creation of the list.
I always love pieces like this, primarily for the shop talk. The little detail that stood out to me was the lead time for the creation of the piece. The article is 12,000 words long and Scott said that he and Dargis began brainstorming back in May, and Dargis explained how she and Scott would talk on the phone for hours discussing each individual actor under consideration. It’s all pretty standard stuff for creating a list of this nature, especially at the paper of record, but I just find it interesting to hear other people talk about how they create the articles that we can often kind of take for granted.
The Times Insider piece jives with something I read in Brian Morrisey’s most recent newsletter. Morrissey discussed the move from “advertiser-first” content to “audience-first” content that has emerged with the rise of the rush for subscription revenue. As Morrisey puts it:
“The shift to audience-first media models, in particular with subscriptions as a cornerstone, is an opportunity to return to the primacy of content as the main business driver. (Yes, revolutionary, I know.) An audience-first approach means that your content is a business driver. It is not simply a way to collect data for targeting and an audience to show tons of ads. Content is the product when your audience, not advertisers, are your customers. Without a great product, you’re not going to sell much.”
In running an article that responds to the audience reaction to a high-profile feature as well as giving that audience insight into how the feature was created, the Times is directly speaking to its audience as customers. They are basically saying, “We understand you may have some problems with this product we created, here’s why we believe that particular product is good.” This isn’t particularly revelatory, but I like taking a moment to identify this kind of content for what it is. And is it Journalism with a capital J? No, probably not. But it is an example of a major media organization recognizing, responding to, and speaking to its audience directly through a new and original piece of content.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Greil Marcus on The Beatles’s 1969 cover of Buddy Holly’s “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”
OK. I bet you saw the subject of this week’s “A Little Bit of Culture” segment and probably thought, “What the hell is this gonna be about?” Well, I’m not entirely sure either, but here it goes.
As you can tell, I spend a lot of time reading articles online. I spend most of my day (like pretty much everyone now) staring at my screen, darting from Slack, to email, to Google docs, to Airtable, and then over Zoom for hours of meeting. Then once the workday is over I often decide to linger on the internet (for some reason) and read more articles on a screen.
I try to read books. Believe me, I do. I’ve tried to keep up with the new novels and non-fiction releases this year. But sometimes, I just want to read just a part of something I’ve read before. I do it because I want to scratch an itch; I do it because I want to feel a certain way or allow myself to sink into a certain mood—just as you would put on a song or the stretch of a certain album to do the same thing.
This past week, I wanted to read a specific part of legendary rock critic Greil Marcus’s 2014 book of essays The History of Rock n’ Roll in Ten Songs. The book is a must have if you are a music fan of any kind. The title is deceptive, as Marcus starts with one song in each essay and then proceeds to cover decades of time and multitudes of songs. It’s easily the music book with my favorite construction.
The essay I was craving was about “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” Buddy Holly’s posthumously released 1959 song. In the essay, Marcus gives a thorough, but concise overview of Holly’s career (including portions of an imagined history for Holly in the 1960s had he not died in a plane crash) as well as great details around the song’s recording, release, and its context within Holly’s overall catalog.
But, naturally, the part I gravitate to the most is when Marcus transitions from talking about Holly to talking about The Beatles. He specifically details how The Beatles failed, multiple times, to record a worthy cover of “Crying, Waiting, Hoping.” Within the essay is almost a mini-essay about the recording of “A Day in the Life” on the 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and how John Lennon’s vocal delivery on the line “a crowd of people turned away” in some way already brought into being the vocal delivery of the phrase “I was the dreamweaver” in his 1970 song “God” on the album Plastic Ono Band. (Trust me, if you read the essay it makes sense.)
Yet, the high point of the essay is when Marcus analyzes the Beatles’ attempt to perform a cover of “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” during the contentious “Get Back” sessions in 1969. Marcus gives a play-by-play of the (very rough) sub-three minute recording, but he touches on something truly poignant in the following passage:
“As George picks his way through the memory of the song—the memories the song sparks when they used to do it, when they tried to nail what attracted them to it in the first place, but also what the song itself remembers, the years it has traveled, the bodies it has inhabited, the voices that have tried and will try to speak its language—the whole history of the Beatles is present, as loss. And suddenly, that’s all you hear. Everything they ever had shines more brightly as, here, they feel its absence, feel what has slipped away, what can never be recaptured. Once they sent an idea of friendship out all over the world: the idea of a group that could bring out the uniqueness of the individual more completely than he or she could ever do alone. Now, they are putting that into the world one last time, but secretly, in a broken performance they have no reason to think anyone will ever hear.”
I get goosebumps when I read that passage—I feel such a sense of longing and sadness. It’s great! Now, if you read that passage and then listen to the actual recording, you will probably say, “What the hell? This is just a crappy cover for diehard fans.” And you’d be right to say that. The song is wobbly, the singing barely counts as murmuring at points, and the recording never truly takes off. And yet! And yet, there is a moment at 46 seconds when George’s guitar takes off for a moment and tries, really tries, to urge the group to cohere around the song that you can hear, and see what Marcus is talking about.
That is if you care about any of this at all. For some reason, I think about The Beatles entirely too much: as musicians, as friends, as a parable or fantasy, and as one of the great mysteries of chance and history. And when I read that passage, it makes me want to mourn—mourn for who I was at 15, at 20, and at 25; mourn the fact that who I once one was no longer exists, the fact that who all of my friends were no longer exist; mourn the fact, no matter how false, that once I was a better person, a better friend, a better son; mourn that fact that everything has to end and that, even if you know that’s the way of the universe, it is still painful.
Or maybe everything wants to make me mourn these days, but because I sit behind a screen all day it’s harder and harder to actually feel anything or remember that I’m alive, even though I’m aware of that fact as the death toll from COVID-19 continues to rise. So I turn to a passage from a book that I’ve already read, about a band I’ve spent too much thinking about, to find a specific emotion that I want to feel, and feel immediately.