Texting with the Audience
Good morning!
No preamble again from me. Let’s just get straight to this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
The New York Times published a piece by Noam Scheiber that is a pretty damning look at the sports media icon Bill Simmons, his hiring practices, and his seeming failure to promote or support staff members of color. I’ve followed Simmons’s career for nearly twenty years now—I’ve been an unapologetic fan of Grantland and The Ringer and have dreamed of working at both publications. But that was obviously all from a distance. The accounts in this story, and elsewhere, are disheartening. I’m going to dwell on this one and see how and if Bill Simmons responds over the next week before diving in any further.
Last Friday, CNN reported that Vice Media Group was launching an internal investigation after multiple allegations of discrimination at Refinery29. The editor-in-chief of Refinery29, Christene Barberich resigned from her position earlier this month in the wake of the allegations. Vice Media acquired Refinery29 last October.
Digiday reports that tech reviews and news website Digital Trends is also facing allegations of a discriminatory workplace. The company’s CEO, Ian Bell, stated that 70% of the company’s staff “can be categorized as white or male,” per Digiday. (Full disclosure: I used to write for a Digital Trends-owned property called The Manual from 2012-2015.) Digiday has managed to find success and profitability through an SEO-first strategy, but based on the in-depth reporting of the Digiday story, they have a lot of work on their company culture ahead of them.
The Daily Beast published a piece last week covering a walkout by the staff of Pitchfork over “anti-union initiatives taken by the publication and its parent company, magazine publisher Condé Nast,” as Maxi Tani reported. Last month, when Condé Nast announced layoffs, the only proposed cut at Pitchfork was to Stacey Anderson the publications union unit chair. As Study Hall reported on Monday, the walkout was also tied to Condé Nast’s problem with diversity in their hiring practices.
In New York Times internal memo news, over the past week, two internal communications have been shared by high profile media reporters. The first memo, shared by Ben Smith, outlines the company’s plan to increase diversity in the newsroom; the second memo, shared by Margaret Sullivan, lays out the company’s return to office plan—with staffers not planned to return to the office in full until 2021. And yesterday afternoon, Marc Tracy tweeted about another internal memo announcing 68 layoffs within the company, none of which were in the newsroom or editorial sections.
Last Friday, the Associated Press announced that it would update its style to capitalize Black “when referring to [the word] in racial, ethnic, or cultural way,” as Poynter reported. Many have called for this style guide change for years.
Also last week, the CEO of Medium, Ev Williams, announced in a Medium post (of course!) on Thursday that NFL quarterback and activist Colin Kaepernick will join the company’s board of directors. Williams went on to say that Medium will partner with Kaepernick’s publishing company to “create and feature stories focused on race and civil rights in America, and to elevate emerging voices from communities of color.”
Finally, following up on the theme of last week’s newsletter, Axios’s Sara Fischer gave a succinct look at Spotify’s podcast expansion and programming in her weekly Media Trends newsletter.
What I’m Engaged With
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a trend piece on publishers using text messages to engage with their audiences.
The story mainly focused around a recent experiment/initiative undertaken by BuzzFeed in March of this year. As the COVID-19 story became arguably the story of the century so far, BuzzFeed used text messages as a way to directly connect with readers and provide them with relevant stats and figures as a means of updating them about the story.
This initiative was done through a platform called Subtext, which is the product of a company called Alpha Group. Alpha Group is “the in-house tech and media incubator for Advance Local” and Advance Local is a unit of Advance Publications (the media conglomerate the owns Condé Nast) that focus on local news markets.
I first learned about the Alpha Group and Subtext through The Atlantic’s newsletter The Idea. In an interview earlier this year, CEO of Alpha Group, Mike Donoghue, said the reason they created Subtext was because algorithm shifts have made it harder to forge a true connection on social media. “Subtext is a platform that cuts through the clutter of social media and the din of newsletters to create meaningful connections and valuable opportunities for engagement and monetization,” Donoghue said. “It allows subscribers to text with the personalities they care most about, on the ideas, news and information that are a crucial part of their lives.”
As the Wall Street Journal piece from last week points out, experimenting with text messages in order to reach an audience is not new: the New York Times tried it with mixed results in 2016 around their coverage of the Summer Olympics. The way Donoghue describes the product is certainly inspiring—but I’m not sure that text messages can do everything he says. At a certain point, don’t those just become noise too?
Most of the people I know have never mentioned engaging with a publisher via text message. But as I get older, I seem to know less and less people! So, maybe there are actually savvy media consumers out there using text messages to stay up to date on a story or on issues they care about. Stranger things have happened!
The Wall Street Journal piece ends citing examples of how local newspapers have used text messages to connect with their readers. To me, that could be the best use case for this kind of product. During March and April, for instance, getting texts from The City (a local New York City publisher I trust) telling me that new COVID-19 data visualizations with updates were ready may have kept me better informed and directly tied to a reliable source.
At the very least, it would have saved me a lot of anxious scrolling through Twitter. And that’s what a product like Subtext is apparently for.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods
Look, I’ll be honest with you: I am not the biggest Spike Lee expert. I have not seen all of his movies. Da 5 Bloods, his latest film, was released on Netflix on June 12. It may not be Spike Lee’s best film, but it is one of the most affecting movies I’ve seen in some time. Da 5 Bloods is ostensibly a Vietnam War movie, but it's much more than that. Spike’s latest movie references and alludes to classic Vietnam War films like Apocalypse Now and Dead Presidents as well (or so I’m told) as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And it features two major characters from The Wire in lead roles—so already I was predisposed to liking it.
But when Delroy Lindo delivers two stunning soliloquies at the end of the film, that’s when I knew this movie went to another level for me. I’d forgotten about Delroy Lindo. Delroy Lindo who seemed to be an indelible presence in so many 1990s movies, an actor who was whoever he was in a movie—and whoever he was, you were glad it was Delroy Lindo who was playing the character. He always added something to a movie, never took from it.
In Da 5 Bloods he steals the movie entirely. I won’t give away any spoilers. What I will say is the two soliloquies Delroy Lindo delivers are some of the finest lines written for a character that I have heard in some time. The phrase “Shakespearean” gets tossed around to describe moments and scenes like these and it doesn’t always fit the bill—but in this case there is no other way to describe the language and the way Lindo delivers it. There is a musicality, a poetry that feels lofty but also extremely lived in and real. I left the movie saying to myself that if I can even write something as good as those soliloquies, then I will die happy.
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.
Donated to Black Voters Matter.
Donated to the Highlander Research and Education Center.
Donated to the Fund for Black Newspapers.
Donated to Equity and Transformation.