Thoughts on Facebook’s “Silent Majority”
Thoughts on Facebook’s “Silent Majority”
Good morning.
This past week was both historic and difficult. I was inspired by all of the NBA players who stood up for justice, for what they believe in, and for galvanizing others who want to be on the right side of history. And that goes for the WNBA, MLS, MLB, and other athletes who spoke up. They aren’t the only heroes out there right now, but as a lifelong sports fan (especially the NBA), who understands how frivolous sports can seem to someone who isn’t as obsessed, last week’s actions were extremely meaningful.
OK, now on to this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with some big news in the battle between tech platforms and publishers. As I’ve covered recently, Google has been battling with the Australian government over a new regulation code that would require tech companies to pay news publishers in order to use their content on their platforms. On Monday, Facebook made their first big statement in this battle. Dylan Byers of NBC, reported that the company said users in Australia would be blocked from sharing news on the platform if the government persists in passing their proposed regulations. Facebook claims that the payments required by the regulations would make business untenable. As we know, news sharing is a major part of Facebook’s appeal (for better and for worse—lately for worse), so they don’t want to lose that aspect of user engagement with the platform. Each month, the tension in this standoff continues to build.
Dawn Davis, current vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster, was announced as the new editor in chief of Bon Appétit. Davis fills the role of editor in chief after Adam Rapoport resigned in June after a picture of him wearing brownface surfaced along with multiple accounts of his fostering a culture of racial discrimination at the publication. Davis has a history of publishing work from marginalized voices and per the CNN story covering her appointment to the role, wants “to cover food through the lens of commerce and community along with issues surrounding inequity and the environment.”
In a more ominous story, CNN reports that the White House is collecting a dossier on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Fahrenthold and others who they call “disgrace to journalism and the American people” and who are “blatantly interfering with the business relationships of the Trump Organization.” This kind of “dossier building” is something that is done by Putin’s autocratic regime in Russia. It also should be noted that reporting on the Trump Organization’s business relationships is something a free press should be doing, especially when Donald Trump has not formally divested himself from his business interests since becoming president and has by many accounts profited from his position as president.
In “vertical expansion” news, Wired announced plans to expand their video game coverage into a new sub-vertical this fall. Wired has seen substantial year-over-year increases in traffic and subscription sign-ups through their video game content and sees it as a further way to drive subscription revenue growth. The gaming sub-vertical will publish 20 articles a month upon launch and will also feature two new video series as well as a two weekly series on Twitch. Gaming coverage is seen as a growth area for many publications as video games have gone from a hobby to a lifestyle to an actual form of in-person entertainment and a means to make a lucrative income (before COVID-19, of course). When sports leagues were forced to close down due to the pandemic, they even turned to live streaming video game play between their players as a way to retain audience interest.
The Atlantic’s newsletter The Idea (seriously one of my favorite newsletters) used this week’s edition to focus on how mainstream news outlets are investing in covering race and marginalized communities. The Idea primarily took a look at CBS Village, which is a new multiplatform franchise under the company’s umbrella that is “dedicated to content about a diversity of communities, including Black, Asian, LGBQT, LatinX, women and millennials,” as Deadline reported.
Next up, we have a pair of BuzzFeed-related news items:
Mark Di Stefano, a reporter for The Information, reported last week that BuzzFeed sold its BuzzFeed Germany site to the German media company Ippen Digital after putting the property up for sale earlier this year. The change will be complete by the end of the year with all journalists set to keep their jobs.
Also last week, Deadline reported that BuzzFeed and Universal TV, which is owned by NBCUniversal, agreed on a “first-look” deal for scripted video content based on original reporting from BuzzFeed. Any financial implications of the deal have not been announced, but BuzzFeed (and particularly BuzzFeed News and their investigative reporting) has a robust catalog of IP that can be spun off or developed into other forms of storytelling.
Last weekend, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter and founder and current CEO of Medium, posted a piece on Medium looking at product improvements, subscriber growth, and future plans for the company. In the piece, he charts Medium’s traffic growth, discloses that they have hundreds of thousands of subscribers that they think can still scale, and that they pay writers on their platform a total of $2 million dollars per month. Perhaps most interestingly, given Substack’s rise and increasing competitive edge against Medium, Williams talks about Medium’s newsletter product and recent improvements.
Following up on the “What I’m Engaged With” section of the newsletter last week on Wall Street Journal’s “Money Challenge” email series, Digiday ran a reported piece last week (after my newsletter ran) on publisher’s using email “lessons” or “courses.” It’s nice to know that I have some idea of what I’m talking about! The Digiday piece is a good read and they point out a lot of examples of email courses that I wasn’t aware of, like CNN’s “Sleep But Better” and Wirecutter experimenting with series on credit cards, sleep, and working from home.
Last week, I also covered the launch of Brick House, a new independent media organization spearheaded by Maria Bustillos. After the newsletter ran, Bustillos published a piece in Columbia Journalism Review explaining her reason for launching Brick House.
Finally, NPR ran a story that is both inspiring and frightening about how college student newspapers are diligently covering the botched reopenings of their institutions amid COVID-19. College and university reopenings have immediately resulted in breakouts of COVID-19 cases and in some instances faculty are being instructed to cover up or hide details about the figures of confirmed cases from students. The work these students are doing is important and their dedication to reporting and their craft is inspiring, but it's extremely frightening that they are being put in a position to look out for themselves as a global pandemic that has killed over 180,000 people has become entangled with politics and profit.
What I’m Engaged With
Coming off both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, I’ve been trying to reconcile, as I'm sure many people have, how there are two different versions of reality playing out in America at any given time. And I’ve been trying to think through what that means for publishers.
Last week, New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose published an extremely insightful look at how posts from conservative voices consistently rank as the most highly engaged pieces of content on Facebook. Roose routinely shares the most engaged posts on Facebook via his Twitter feeds and analyzes NewsWhip’s (a social “watching” tool that lets you monitor how content from other publishers is performing on social media; we used to use it at Artsy) monthly “Top Publishers on Facebook” report. But his piece laid out clearly, just how powerful conservative voices are on Facebook and how they shape reality for those who consume primarily through that social media platform.
Roose properly points out in the piece, quoting a Facebook spokesperson, that engagement doesn’t directly correspond to how many users see a post, and it doesn’t include views from ads on Facebook where Biden’s campaign is spending a lot of money. However, he also points out that Facebook doesn’t make any of that data available either.
The piece presents a variety of eye-opening data points to show just how much content from conservative voices and outlets out-engages major news organizations and moderate or liberal sources. Roose even took to Twitter to share the data in visual form. This specific chart is extremely illustrative of just what is happening on Facebook.
When we used NewsWhip at Artsy, we’d look at their monthly or quarterly reports where they discussed what worked on Facebook. They’d use terms like “emotional content” or content that elicited “outrage” to describe what was driving engagement on social. As an art publication, that was hard for us to find truly useful. But for conservative pundits, influencers, passionate individual Facebook users, and even news organizations it can be an effective and extremely dangerous “strategy.”
I didn’t watch the RNC, but I followed along to those who were watching it and commenting about it on Twitter and I read pieces covering it in major news sources. And there I saw and learned about the alternate version of reality being presented by the Republican party: an America with cities burning, where taking safety precautions for COVID-19—a pandemic that has killed over 180,000 people in America alone—is just an example of the left wanting to take away the rights of individuals, and where Joe Biden is an agent of the “extreme left.” And that is the type of narrative that is being shared on Facebook each and every day.
Since I started this newsletter, I’ve covered the recent philosophical debates over objectivity in journalism and whether or not it still has a place. When so much of what is being presented as “reality” or “truth” by political figures and influential conservative voices originates in lies or conspiracy theories, then covering those figures and what they say “objectively” becomes pretty much impossible. We only have to look to the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people with an AR-15-style rifle, is now being lionized by many of these voices as a hero as an example of what kind of dangerous territory we are now in.
And as we get closer and closer to the election in November, it is going to be the hard job of large, legacy, mainstream media organizations to realize that fact and determine how they are going to shape and direct coverage.
That’s a lot of bureaucracy, tradition, and accepted protocol to overturn in a short time.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Chadwick Boseman
First, I want to say rest in peace to Chadwick Boseman. As many of you already know, the actor passed away at the age of 43 on Friday. His passing was shocking and sudden to the public, but Boseman had been suffering from colon cancer for several years, privately and courageously.
I’ve been strangely impacted by Boseman’s passing and I’ve been trying to figure out why. And to do that, I’ll admit something that feels somewhat hard to admit in this moment: I never really liked Black Panther. I understood its cultural importance and what it meant to so many people. And I knew that as a piece of culture, it didn’t have to have the same impact on me as it did to Black audiences or non-white audiences who wanted to see a hero who wasn’t white represented at the center of a sweeping and hugely influential piece of pop culture and mass storytelling for the first time. I just didn’t think it was a great movie. But that’s a matter of taste and not an indictment of the movie itself or of Boseman and his performance.
When I learned of Boseman's death, I immediately thought of his performance in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. In the movie he plays “Stormin’” Norman, the squad leader of the main characters during the Vietnam War. Norman died in Vietnam while the others survived, and persists in their memory as an idealized, heroic presence. That role, and Boseman’s portrayal of a character with that psychological weight and importance for the other characters in the film, is what opened my eyes to his ability as not only an actor, but a screen presence. Boseman as Norman is filled with righteousness, he holds himself like a hero, and his delivery of dialogue, his movements on screen, are filled with grace. Near the end of the film, in maybe the most powerful moment of the movie, Norman appears as a vision to one of the main characters and makes the man admit the truth about something that happened in the war. Then, Boseman’s Norman embraces the man fully and completely and offers him forgiveness. It works on a level with the themes and the stakes of the film, but I also believe that moment is so moving and was so striking to me because of Boseman’s performance. You know the character of Norman, who is dead, believes in forgiveness from the afterlife and, in some respect, the way that Boseman plays Norman makes you feel that Boseman the screen presence, Boseman the person, Boseman the actor, believes in forgiveness and compassion too.
And so on Saturday, as I scrolled through Twitter observing the collective grief over Boseman’s death, I encountered several different videos of the actor: giving speeches, interviews, participating in SNL sketches, and surprising people with Jimmy Fallon. The speech that has stayed with me the most, was watching Boseman discuss the conversations he had with children who had cancer but who were so looking forward to seeing Black Panther. Boseman describes how hearing that overwhelmed him, but allowed him to step into a child’s mind and feel the excitement he used to have for something he couldn’t wait to experience. Then, he says that when he learned the children died….but he can’t proceed; he breaks down. At that moment, Boseman probably knew he wasn’t going survive his battle with cancer. He may have been preparing himself for his own death. When I see him in that interview and in other clips being shared, I begin to tear up because I can’t reconcile the fact that the man in those clips, so handsome, so warm, so poised, and so graceful, is now dead. And how in those moments, now captured on film to be shared and appreciated as long as we are able, he knew he was dying and yet persisted.
I didn’t like Black Panther as a film. I never truly appreciated Chadwick Boseman as an actor while he was alive. The films are there and I’ll watch them and the full loss of his talent will probably sink in when I do. And I’ll feel a sense of loss, as I do now, because a life was cut short, a talent never given its full chance to shine. But I’ll also feel sadness because no one knows anything, especially not me. No one knows what anyone is going through at any given moment, and then, when they’re gone or when it's too late, we realize the grace and beauty with which they lived, with which they persisted. And then we cry.
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.