The Local News Beat
Good morning!
I want to start with an apology. There was no newsletter last week, and that happened after two weeks where I was late in sending each edition. The past few weeks have been a little bit busy with travel, work, quarantining after returning from a hot spot, and visiting my family for the first time in seven months. It means a lot that you all subscribe to this newsletter and I’ll hit my deadlines moving forward.
Now, onto this week’s edition!
Your Weekly Roundup
First up are the layoffs at Vox Media. This was a big story earlier this month and is old news at this point since we skipped a newsletter, but I’d be remiss to not mention these layoffs here. Vox Media laid off 6% of its staff, or about 70 employees. The company paired this news with an announcement that they would be reinstating full salaries across the team, save for those at executive level. CEO Jim Bankoff said that “based on our current outlook...the difficult actions that we are taking today will be sufficient to weather this downturn and uncertainty, without need for significant additional measures”
BuzzFeed also announced layoffs of 5.7% of its staff, or 50 jobs. The majority of the employees who lost their jobs had been furloughed earlier this year
Amid these layoffs due to a harsh economic environment for media organizations, Poynter published a piece looking at the 2019 salaries for top newspaper publishing executives—many of which extend into the seven-figure range.
In major media executive news, the president of Hearst’s magazine division, Troy Young, resigned last Thursday after the New York Times published a damning account of his truly abhorrent and sexist behavior at the company. Katie Robertson and Ben Smith have covered Mr. Young and his resignation closely, including a follow-up piece from earlier this week about how Mr. Young and the company culture at Hearst led to spiking (a journalism term for “killing” or deciding not to run a story) a piece about the director Bryan Singer and accusations of sexual misconduct against him.
At the New York Times, on Monday, the company announced the promotion of Jyoti Thottam to deputy Op-Ed editor. The promotion comes after the well-documented controversy at the Times’s Op-Ed section over Tom Cotton’s piece calling for the United States government to use the military to “restore order” against Black Lives Matter protests. We are seeing the direct damage of Mr. Cotton’s inflammatory rhetoric. I don’t know Ms. Thottam’s work intimately so I don’t mean to connect her to the Op-Ed section controversy, but have to note the background narrative surrounding the section for full context.
In some lighter news, last week Study Hall published a profile of New York Times Styles section editor Choire Sicha. I’ve watched Choire’s career from afar (I can attest to his email style from the several pitch rejections I received from him when he was running The Awl) and found this look at his management style fascinating and heartening. As a media-nerd I’d welcome reading more profiles covering the management habits of section editors or vertical heads any day of the week.
Speaking of management styles, Talking Biz News published an internal memo sent by Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait regarding the length of his team’s stories. The memo is worth reading in full, but a key quote to me was: “A week or two spend on source-building, without any story published, is often a much more valuable use of our reporters’ time.” That is not something you often hear from a digital media leader. Editors and writers are pressed to produce day-in and day-out because more content means more advertising real estate. But the digital ad business is collapsing during COVID-19, so maybe perspectives like Mr. Micklethwait’s will become more prevalent? Probably wishful thinking on my part.
If you want to read more about the state of digital advertising, Pew Research published a report on key facts about digital-native news outlets. The report shows that overall advertising dollars spent has been increasing over the past five years, but that in 2018 and 2019 over 64% of that money was spent at tech companies, namely Google and Facebook.
Also, in good news, Marc Tracy at the New York Times wrote a story yesterday about the launch of Defector Media, a new media company founded and run by the Deadspin staff who walked out last fall after severe mismanagement by G/O Media. The way they are building Defector Media is fascinating and a model that I’m going to dive into in a future newsletter.
Back to bad news, Axios’s Sara Fischer broke down the instances of physical attacks against the press by law enforcement over the past few months. There are some scary trends developing.
Finally, there is internal turmoil at The Wall Street Journal. Last week, Journalists on the news side of the paper sent an open letter to the publisher Almar Latour asking for a clearer demarcation between news and opinion pieces. The letter cited the Opinion section’s “lack of fact-checking and transparency” as well as “its apparent disregard for evidence, [which] undermine our readers’ trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.” The Editorial Board which is responsible for the Opinion section responded through “A Note to Readers” stating that it would not succumb to “cancel-culture pressure.” The Editorial Board’s response seemed to conflate the actual demands of the open letter with current conversations around “cancel culture,” which has quickly become a commonly misused term.
What I’m Engaged With
In the last installment of this newsletter, I gave a shout out to Dan Barry’s profile of Evan Brandt in the New York Times. Brandt is one of the few remaining staff members at The Mercury, a local newspaper in Pennsylvania that has been and is still being squeezed for every last profit by its owner—the venture capital firm Alden Capital.
Barry’s profile was widely praised in media circles. In the piece, Brandt was symbolic of the slow death of local news but he wasn’t an idealized symbol; there was a real human being, one that was written about exquisitely and covered with empathy.
The piece was published just as McClatchy, the second-largest newspaper publisher in the United States, was sold in a bankruptcy auction to the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. That sale was supposed to be confirmed on July 24th by a bankruptcy judge, but that part of the process has been postponed to August 4th. However, it feels like a formality at this point: by next week Chatham will be officially approved to purchase McClatchy for $312 million dollars. McClatchy’s board announced that they will step down when the deal ultimately closes on September 30th.
Chatham has already said that they will keep the current staff at all of the McClatchy papers and maintain their current salaries and benefits. But the future remains uncertain. As Ken Doctor pointed out in NiemanLab, there are a variety of things Chatham Asset management could decide to do with the McClatchy papers, including looking for a merger, fielding offers to sell off parts of the chain, or operating the business and seeking maximum revenue. The New York Times published a piece looking at Chatham’s history of making severe cuts at a chain of Canadian newspapers.
Somehow (probably because I’m doing this newsletter) I’ve found myself fascinated with the machinations of this sale. And in doing so, I’ve been trying to keep up with the recent conversations and developments around local news.
The Washington Post media columnist and esteemed longtime journalist, Margaret Sullivan, recently published a book about the grim state of local news, Ghosting the News. I haven’t read the book yet, but Vogue published an interview with Sullivan earlier this month. In it, Sullivan points out the current contradiction occurring within local news: during COVID-19 people want to know what is going on directly in their communities more than ever, yet there are fewer local newspapers to provide essential reporting.
And yet, there are some signs of hope. In the past year, the Salt Lake Tribune has become the first U.S. daily newspaper to shift completely from a for-profit organization to a nonprofit (extra long link because you should read this). They’ve been able to secure over 3,000 individual gift donations from subscribers so far this year, putting them on pace to reach their stated goals for funding. They’ve also been able to roll out benefits and special access to subscribers who donate at a higher level. Due to COVID-19, their traffic is up, but they are wary of how long the current pace of philanthropy can continue in the face of the economic ramifications of the pandemic.
On July 16th, Congress introduced the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, which is a bipartisan bill that could offer tax credits to both local news organizations and their subscribers. This is a two sided approach that incentivizes community members to support their local news outlets and allows those news organizations to support their staffs.
And, as I’ve covered before, Google has also set up the Compass Experiment as part of their Google News Initiative in an effort to provide local news sources for communities that don’t currently have them. But Google’s partner in the Compass Experiment is McClatchy and McClatchy was just purchased by Chatham Asset Management and we don’t know what Chatham Asset Management is going to do with McClatchy. Man, I’m exhausted and confused.
Will local news survive? I honestly don’t know. I subscribe to The City, which is a nonprofit local news organization in New York. But I don’t subscribe to the Miami Herald or the Sacramento Bee or any of the other many prestigious local newspapers that are in danger. I grew up on Long Island and I don’t subscribe to Newsday. I remind myself to subscribe, then forget, then vow to not forget, then forget again. I scroll Twitter and click on links, I subscribe to my suite of prestige publications and a few niche ones. I read Evan Brandt’s blog, admire his diligent tweets documenting Pottstown school board meetings, and I always say I’ll get around to supporting local news outlets across the country but never do.
I’m as much a part of the problem as anyone else.
Correction: Within this section I incorrectly listed the name of New York Times reporter Dan Barry as Dan Berry. This text has now been updated.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: “Promises I’ve Made” by Emitt Rhodes
Unfortunately, this space has increasingly become a place for me to pay tribute to someone who has recently passed away. This week, it’s the singer and songwriter Emitt Rhodes.
Emitt Rhodes is not a household name. His best-known song is probably “Lullabye,” which was featured in The Royal Tenenbaums. After a prolific start to his career in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rhodes became a music industry recluse due to a combination of contractual disputes with his label, burnout, and potentially drug use, though there is no clear documentation that the latter played a big part in his decision to step back from the business. In 2009, the last he was the subject of a documentary, The One Man Beatles, and released what is now his final album Rainbow Ends.
Calling Rhodes a “One Man Beatles” is apt. It was an accolade he also shared with Harry Nilsson who also had the same gift for pop songwriting and melody that John, Paul, George, and Ringo had (Ringo’s melodic drum parts count!). Rhodes played and recorded his debut album himself around the time that Paul McCartney was doing the same on his self-titled debut and on Ram. (Todd Rundgren was also doing something pretty damn similar on his early solo records.) And if you haven’t heard Emitt Rhodes before, well, he sounds a lot like late-Beatles and pre-Wings at the Speed of Sound solo Paul McCartney.
My favorite all-time Emitt Rhodes song is “Promises I’ve Made.” From the bouncing opening piano chords to the fluid bass playing, the track sounds like a Beatles song. And once Emitt starts singing, the vocal phrasing, the exact tone of his voice is uncannily like Paul at his sweetest and poppiest. What makes the song my personal favorite are the remorseful almost-country lyrics (somehow I associate it with “How Much I’ve Lied” by Gram Parsons) and the synthesizer coda. The synthesizer first appears underneath the song at 1:17 and lays in the background until about 2:25 where it steadily builds and carries the song to its haunting conclusion. The last minute of the song is defined by a tone and sound that were secondary throughout the majority of the track—something the Beatles often did.
I always find myself writing about the Beatles, and here I am doing it again. And I imagine for a gifted songwriter and musician like Emitt Rhodes who was making his name around the time the Beatles were breaking up, in a style that was influenced by and indebted to them, it must have felt impossible to escape those comparisons. The 1970s were littered with power pop acts who wrote songs as catchy as the Beatles and who sounded like the Beatles, but didn’t catch on because, well, they weren’t the Beatles. And that’s who everyone wanted. The forces of history and the consumer are equally unkind.
But “Promises I’ve Made” is canon to me. It is a song I’ve lived with for more than ten years now and will be a song I live with for the rest of my life. I owe Emitt Rhodes a debt of thanks.
The Action I’m Taking
I’ve been feeling a little disorganized lately. In June, I started recurring donations to a variety of organizations dedicated to making the United States a safer and more equitable place. But since then, I’ve lost focus. I’ll be refocusing myself, but I’d love to hear from anyone receiving this email about ways to donate both my time and my money to support change in this country. What are organizations you are passionate about? How are you giving your time? Any suggestions are welcome.