The State of Social Media Managers
Good morning.
Thanksgiving is approaching and COVID-19 cases are dramatically spiking all over the country. Republicans are trying to meddle in an election that has already been decided. These are trying times and the next few months will be long ones. To everyone reading, just know that I wish you safety and sanity.
Now, onto this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We lead off this week, unfortunately, with the “Will Donald Trump start a media business once he leaves office?” beat. On Sunday, there were a flurry of pieces centered on the Newsmax media organization and whether or not they are the target of a future acquisition by Donald Trump’s allies and backers to become “Trump TV.” First, the Wall Street Journal ran a story looking at a surge in Newsmax’s ratings for Trump supporters who are frustrated with Fox News’s recent coverage and how Trump and his backers and allies could form a media organization around him. Then Variety ran a story where Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy went on the record to say that, “Newsmax would never become ‘Trump TV’” and that there are no active plans to sell the company. The “Trump TV” story is not going to go away—it's another way for him and his allies to stay relevant and retain leverage (and attention) in the “What is Trump going to do next?” game that we’re sure to hear a lot of over the next year. Even though I hope most media organizations will try to stay away from that beat as much as possible.
The migration of established journalists to Substack continued last week when Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox and senior correspondent, announced he was leaving the company to start his independent newsletter called “Slow Boring.” Connor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic spoke to Yglesias last week to get some of the rationale behind his decision. A few notable quotes from Friedersdorf’s piece are:
“There was an inherent tension between my status as a co-founder of the site and my desire to be a fiercely independent and at times contentious voice,” he wrote in his first post on Substack, adding on Twitter, “I’m looking forward to really telling everyone what’s on my mind to an even greater extent than I do now.”
Many outlets, he argued, are missing something important. “The people making the media are young college graduates in big cities, and that kind of politics makes a lot of sense to them,” he said. “And we keep seeing that older people, and working-class people of all races and ethnicities, just don’t share that entire worldview. It’s important to me to be in a position to step outside that dynamic … That was challenging as someone who was a founder of a media outlet but not a manager of it.”
I’m not familiar enough with Yglesias’s work to comment on how any of the above points fit into the point of view he’s expressed throughout his career. There are a few broad generalizations in the second paragraph that don’t touch on some of the other issues with mainstream media—mainly that the powers that be at major media companies are much more closely aligned with the Democratic establishment and would prefer to retain a “liberal” status quo that can look in many ways similar to the conservative status quo. Either way, the jokes about the Substack migration are starting to pick up.
Despite the jokes, there is even more Substack-related coverage to consume. The Columbia Journalism Review ran, in my opinion, the most comprehensive piece on Substack’s rise, its pros and cons, and the challenges the company faces as it continues to gain prominence. If you are trying to get a bird’s eye view on one of the major media trends of the year, this is the piece to read.
Moving back to political coverage, there were a few pieces of note last week:
First, Esquire ran an oral history of CNN’s election week coverage. I’ll be honest—I haven’t made my way through this one entirely. And the fact that an oral history of CNN’s coverage of election week was published two weeks after election week feels almost like a satire of oral histories themselves.
The New York Times ran a profile of CNN’s Abby Phillip, one of the network’s political correspondents and a rising star.
And the New York Times also ran a Q&A with Matthew Sheffield who I covered last week after he started a thought-provoking Twitter thread about how conservatives view the role of journalism.
In subscription revenue news, Digiday ran a piece last week that took a closer look at how news publishers, specifically local news organizations, are starting to improve their subscription conversion rates. According to the piece, news publishers are experimenting with shorter-term, cheaper subscription offers to get people in the door. Gannett, which is the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S., has been working on standardizing how subscriptions are offered across all of its titles and has crossed the 1 million subscriber threshold. And the Dallas Morning News which is one of the more prestigious local newspapers in the country reported a 39% growth in subscribers year over year in the third quarter of 2020.
On Tuesday, Axios’s Sara Fischer reported that Instagram is considering a plan to start paying publishers to use their content on its platform. There’s not a ton to this story yet, but I wouldn’t have predicted this plan to be coming from Instagram specifically.
Last Friday, Digiday published a piece covering how BuzzFeed is continuing to build out its Black culture brand Cocoa Butter. Cocoa Butter was formed in 2015 as a collection of social accounts as part of BuzzFeed’s “distributed” properties “in which separate social accounts are set up to share content otherwise posted to BuzzFeed, but that may appeal to specific audiences,” as the Digiday piece notes. Cocoa Butter began developing more original content including videos that ran on BuzzFeed’s main YouTube channel. Those were successful enough that Cocoa Butter pivoted their strategy to produce more of those videos earlier this year. Now BuzzFeed will be giving Cocoa Butter its own YouTube channel, a newsletter offering, a dedicated section on BuzzFeed’s main site, and potential commerce content opportunities.
And finally, in commerce content news, Digiday had a story this week covering Group Nine media’s new marketplace Swipe.shop. Group Nine is rolling out 80 different shops over the holiday season in a “mobile-optimized browser,” some of which will have branded sponsors and others that will be curated work products from Group Nine affiliates. There will not be editorial content involved so it's not a traditional “commerce content” offering, but it's another example of a media company incorporating ecommerce or marketplace functionality into their content umbrella as way to drive revenue.
What I’m Engaged With
This week, I want to focus on a story titled “The Social Media Managers Are Not Okay” that the Medium publication OneZero ran back on November 9th.
I missed this piece when it first ran, but it’s been on my mind all week. The story, by Marta Martinez, looks at the state of the social media manager position—specifically through the lens of this tumultuous and extraordinarily eventful year.
In 2020, specifically, Martinez says that social media managers are, in their own way, “first responders.” As one of the subjects quoted in the piece recognizes, social media managers aren’t in the same category of the first responders that we’ve celebrated for their heroism throughout this year, but they do serve as the first line of “defense” or the first voice speaking on behalf of a publication, brand, or company in the middle of breaking news, emergencies, and social upheavals.
That kind of responsibility has taken a toll. Social media managers, as their job title states, are in the thick of social media. As we know all too well, social media has been proven to be detrimental to our mental and overall health as well as a place filled with toxic, dangerous, and damaging language and voices. And if your job is to monitor, filter, or engage with those voices all day, you are acutely feeling those effects. Martinez covers social media managers who have been forced to quit their jobs under the strain and who have gained weight or found their eyesight worsening from staring at feeds on screens all day.
As Martinez points out, social media manager jobs are in high demand but very often because of that fact (much like in journalism roles, which are similarly in demand) the people that fill those roles are underpaid and overworked. And very often social media managers are the underappreciated, the importance work, as Martinez says, “often invisible and undermined.”
I’ve worked with several social media managers in my career so far and I’ve always tried to treat them with respect. Like in any creative job, there are periods of frustration or misalignment. But generally, I appreciate social media managers. Mainly because I could never do their job. Understanding social media metrics, platform changes, and audience trends across platforms has been a major part of my job for years. Yet even from that step of removal from actually managing an account or presence it was hard for me to truly feel comfortable spending so much time with Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Basically what this piece did was make me take a moment to appreciate the people behind the social media accounts. I spend a lot of time covering media stories and the often combative relationship between media organizations and social media companies. But at the center of all of that are the people managing the voices and content that are created and distributed across social media platforms and that can be a heavy burden to bear—especially in a year like this.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Ted Lasso
I’m long overdue to share an appreciation of Apple TV’s comedy series Ted Lasso, so I’m doing it this week.
For those that don’t know, Ted Lasso was a character created by Jason Sudeikis as part of a set of commercials for NBC Sports to promote the fact that they were airing Premier League matches in the early 2010s. The idea being that Lasso was an American football coach who was now coaching football (aka soccer).
That thin premise has now been adapted and expanded into a 10 episode series on Apple TV and I’m here to tell you that it is a success. Ted Lasso is a “feel good” series in the truest sense. Lasso brings a sense of positivity to everything he does that could come off as cloying, but in Sudeikis’s hands is extraordinarily winning and inspiring. The show gives Lasso just enough of a darker edge as he navigates a divorce while also trying to bring a football team together and win over fans and a conniving owner (shouts to the writers for using the Major League set up and then doing their own thing). And there are enough throwaway jokes that seem like they are purely there to be weird that makes the show interesting and worth parsing again. Plus, the show pulls off a character like Dani Rojas who could have just been an offensive stereotype but instead becomes one of the most endearing characters I can recently remember in a comedy series.
Ted Lasso does all of this because the show’s viewpoint seems to genuinely combine two beliefs: that being kind and sincere matters and that having and/or being a good manager can change a person’s life. Both of the show’s beliefs resonate with me—but at this stage of my career, the latter does. As part of my role, I am a people manager. Managing people can be tough, just as navigating a workplace in any role can be tough and, at times, a grind. But when I’ve felt the most lost or uninspired at work, it’s the people management part that has always grounded me. If I can be, or try to be a good manager and set my reports up for success, then I know at least something I’m doing is contributing in some way to my team. And Ted Lasso presents coaching as a form of management that really makes a difference when you are doing it right. Ted Lasso is a good coach. He makes mistakes, but he corrects them. It’s obviously a comedy, so things generally work out, but the way the show depicts coaching/managing, as something you have to consistently bring positive energy to, while also knowing when to push and pull back from the people you manage, is one of the best depictions I have ever seen. Each episode left me inspired to try, whether I actually succeeded or not is another story, to be a better manager the next day at work.
It’s rare to find a show like that—let alone one based on an NBC Sports commercial character from the early 2010s.