Media in the Post-Coronavirus Era
Good morning!
I forgot to mention last week that we’d somehow already hit twenty editions of this newsletter. It’s gone by pretty fast! I want to thank everyone who’s subscribed and who’s said nice things so far. And for those who are new to the newsletter this week: Welcome! I hope you’re glad you subscribed!
OK, now let’s get to your weekly roundup.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with another op-ed controversy. Last Wednesday, after Joe Biden’s announcement that senator Kamala Harris would run as his vice president, Newsweek published an op-ed by John Eastman, a lawyer and professor, that inaccurately questioned Harris’s eligibility to run. Harris was born in the United States and, according to the U.S. Constitution, is able to run as vice president or president (which, you know, she already did!). The op-ed gave rise to discussions of “birtherism” (just another way of saying being xenophobic or racist) in the wake of its publication, which was espoused and led by Donald Trump over Barack Obama’s presidential eligibility. Newsweek first declined to publish an apology for the piece, but has since come out with a statement apologizing after staff complaints. The piece does still run in its entirety on their site (which is just an awful website to use, just another reason not to read it). Newsweek was once a respected publication but has fallen from grace for a variety of reasons. And this op-ed controversy comes after the New York Times published an op-ed from Tom Cotton earlier this year that called for the U.S. government to use the military to quell Black Lives Matter protests. This is another incident that calls into question the journalism tradition of allowing voices from “both sides” to have a place in a publication. But what use is a voice if it spreads lies? This is a question all media outlets must continue to answer.
In Google vs. Publishers news, on Monday, the Australian Broadcasting Company reported that Google has warned Australian users that services will worsen if the Australian government imposes its code of conduct that requires Google to work out a payment agreement with publishers based in Australia primarily serving Australian audiences. I covered the Australian government’s code of conduct two weeks ago and it seemed like a breakthrough. But I should have expected that Google would push back sooner than later.
Last Monday, McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, published an in-depth interview with outgoing CEO of the New York Times, Mark Thompson. Thompson started at the Times in 2012 and was ultimately responsible for leading their shift to a digital-first media organization, which meant figuring out how to drive and increase their subscriptions revenue. The New York Times has seen record subscription growth this year and reading the interview with Thompson is enlightening. He discusses, among many things, how their product team currently operates, how they had to go through multiple reorganizations on their digital team before they got it right, and how he led his leadership team to come up with a “creed” or “articles of faith” to operate by. “They weren’t imposed by me on everyone else,” Thompson says. “My job was much more to pull it out of the organization rather than to impose it. And they executed against it because they’d come up with it.” I highly recommend reading the entire piece.
Speaking of subscriptions, last Tuesday, The Wrap published a revealing investigative report on the Los Angeles Times and its struggle to meet digital subscription goals over the past year. The report is damning and reveals a variety of things the Los Angeles Times is doing wrong: staid leadership not actively discussing the identity of the publication, opaque rises in subscription rates, setting unreasonable quotas for valuable stories that drive subscriptions without an understanding of what kind of effort goes into those stories that leads them to drive subscriptions, an audience development team lacking the communication skills or insights to properly help editors, and (of course) a Slack channel filled with inappropriate conversations. As someone who has spent a lot of time working with writers and editors, setting goals, and trying to coach and set best practices to meeting the goals for a variety of different metrics, this piece really highlights what NOT to do.
And on Monday, The Atlantic’s newsletter The Idea noted that Time had publicly posted their forthcoming Q3 and H2 goals—one of which includes launching a new app for consumers.
On the local news beat, last week there was plenty of terrible news coming out of Tribune Publishing. Marc Tracy of the New York Times reported that Tribune was closing the office of New York’s The Daily News as well as the offices of many local newspapers around the country: The Morning Call in Allendale, Pennsylvania, The Orlando Sentinel, The Carroll County Times in Westminster, Maryland, a newsroom of Annapolis’s The Capital Gazette, and an office of The Chicago Tribune that services Chicago-area suburbs. One of the owners of Tribune Publishing is Alden Capital, a “vulture capital” firm that has preyed on news organizations and stripped them for parts in order to extract as much revenue as possible. In the wake of COVID-19 many businesses are reassessing the need for office space, but these moves reek of opportunism and a way to further an already existing plan to gut newsrooms for profit.
In some brighter local news developments, Poynter published a piece last Thursday looking at how Santa Cruz Local has managed to grow its subscriber base. Santa Cruz Local is a small media organization covering the city’s public institutions. As one of the co-founders of the organization, Kara Meyberg Guzman, says in the piece, “The story of local journalism is not all bad. There are bright spots all over the country, little tiny startups, local independent online newsrooms that are popping up all over the county to respond to the crisis that local journalism is facing.”
In some Apple News related...uh….news, last week brought two stories about Apple’s news reading app. First, last Wednesday, the New York Post ran a story about the Wall Street Journal’s choice to continue using Apple News to distribute its content as the service has helped them reach new readers and demographics they might not ordinarily reach. This is notable because the New York Times recently announced that they would no longer be working with Apple News. Also on Wednesday, Digiday ran a story looking at how Apple’s new mobile operating systems are redirecting users from reading in Safari to Apple News. Apple controls a greater ad revenue share when user read in the app, and so that kind of unannounced product shift is pretty problematic for publishers who have already had issues monetizing traffic referrals coming via Apple News.
Last Monday, the pro-democracy Chinese media executive Jimmy Lai was arrested and escorted out of the offices of his company, Apple Publishing. His arrest was justified by vague citations to China’s new national security law. Lai was released on bail on Wednesday. Lai has been an outspoken critic of China’s Communist Party and president Xi Jinping. On Friday, CNN published an interview with Lai discussing his arrest.
Following up on my newsletter from two weeks ago, about journalists taking their destinies into their own hands, on Monday, senior culture writer at BuzzFeed, Anne Helen Petersen, announced that she had left BuzzFeed to devote her time to her own personal newsletter (hosted by Substack)—including starting a paid model. This is a notable departure as Petersen has a large following, and it is another example of how writers with large followings are looking to support themselves and have more ownership over the work they create.
And, finally, in media acquisition news, the New York Times reported on Thursday that W will now be a part of Bustle Digital Group, led by the depressed-media-asset baron Bryan Goldberg. W will join Goldberg’s stable of media organizations that includes Bustle, Mic, Elite Daily, and Input. W was formerly a Condé Nast property (and where I got my start in publishing) that was sold to Future Media Group last year. Earlier this year, Future Media Group furloughed much of the staff and paused publication.
What I’m Engaged With
As you know, I love “what is the future of publishing?” articles. Last month, Digiday ran a piece looking at “5 changes that will drive the future of media post coronavirus.” Now, with packaging like that, of course I’m going to read it! And this week, I want to break down the five changes they covered and give my two cents on each of them.
The first change Digiday highlighted was “trusted publishers will be viewed as the new storefront for advertisers.” Their description of what that means veers into a lot of audience development jargon and corpo-speak (short for corporate speak), but the crux is that with an increase in online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, advertisers are more aggressively spending on their own transactional ads on social media. However, quoting Ashish Patel who is the chief insights officer at Group Nine Media, Digiday thinks there could be an opportunity for brands to work closely with trusted media organizations, utilize their user data, and drive more transactions through larger affiliate content campaigns or offerings. This strikes me as a little vague—or simply wishful thinking. Affiliate content and revenue have offered a nice alternative revenue stream, but as BuzzFeed saw earlier this year, it was easy for an affiliate like Amazon to just end the partnership.
The next change Digiday covered is the potential for increased longer-term advertising deals between media organizations and brands—partnerships that include product development. Using media audience data to develop new consumer products is actually an interesting business change that I think could and is actually happening across publishers, specifically the New York Times, which develops new consumer products to drive subscription revenue. But it’s happening in its most successful forms, as far as I know, without brand partnership. Product development is hard enough, but having a brand involved makes it even more complicated. And, as Digiday notes via a quote from Catherine Levene who is Meredith’s chief digital officer, those partnership deals take a long time to come together and can’t be relied upon for revenue.
The third change is one that I believe will stick, and that is more video or “virtual engagements,” as the Digiday piece says. Event production budgets across media organizations have been slashed or reallocated. Video content can be expensive, but not as expensive as a big event meant to drive ticket sales revenue or subscriptions. Media organizations “pivoted to video” in an unwise and unsustainable way in the middle of the last decade. But now strikes me as the time for media organizations to create smart, sustainable video franchises that can serve as valuable intellectual property in the long term.
What Digiday calls the fourth change, isn’t really a change at all. Instead, what they are calling out is really just what has always been the “holy grail” of digital publishers—having reliable and compelling first-party user data to use to create compelling content for consumers that also helps a brand achieve their goals. Paraphrasing the chief business officer of Hearst Magazines, Kristen O’Hara, the Digiday piece says, “companies that are able to produce insights from content, audiences and commerce transactions will be the most successful going forward.” That’s kind of been the case for a while.
The last change Digiday points out is that publishers and brands will focus more marketing efforts on driving cultural change. As the stories revealing the toxic and racist cultures at media organizations continue to come out, I think we will see more and more media companies try to remake or project a new image of their organization. We’ll just have to see who really means it.
So, as per usual, a “what is the future of publishing?” story is a mixed bag. But I’m a sucker for them no matter what. And that’s why I’m here: so you can get the gist without having to read them all.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: First Cow (2020)
Earlier this year, right as we were beginning to social distance in our homes, I saw a lot of cultural critics and pundits online raving about a movie called First Cow. Many of them said it was the movie of the year. At the time, that struck me as a lot of people calling their shots early—there was still a lot of year and a lot of movies left to go. Mostly I just said, “First Cow, sounds good, I’ll watch it sometime.”
Well, that “sometime” was this past weekend. And let me tell you, I don’t care how many movies could have come out in 2020 or how many will actually come out, First Cow is the best movie I’ve seen this year.
The film is directed by Kelly Reichardt. She also edits the film too. In fact, she edits all of her films. To my film knowledge (which is medium; I would say I have a medium knowledge of films) that is extremely rare. I had never seen one of Reichardt’s films before, but since I saw First Cow, I’ve been reading about all of her movies and want to watch them all. Her first major film was Old Joy (2006). The synopsis for Old Joy from Rotten Tomatoes reads as follows:
“Old Joy is the story of two old friends, Kurt and Mark, who reunite for a weekend camping trip in the Cascade mountain range east of Portland, Oregon. It is a minimalist story of friendship, loss and alienation in the Bush era. For Mark, the weekend outing offers a respite from the pressure of his imminent fatherhood; for Kurt, it is part of a long series of carefree adventures. As the hours progress and the landscape evolves, the twin seekers move through a range of subtle emotions, enacting a pilgrimage of mutual confusion, sudden insight, and recurring intimations of spiritual battle. When they arrive at their final destination, a hot spring in an old growth forest, they must either confront the divergent paths they have taken or somehow transcend their growing tensions in an act of forgiveness and mourning.”
Anyone who knows my tastes well enough can vouch that I’m telling the truth when I say that when I read that synopsis I shouted, “Holy shit! How come I never heard of this movie before?!”
So, I had never heard of Kelly Reichardt before watching First Cow. But from the moment the movie’s score kicks in as the primary narrative begins (there is a brief prologue) I was riveted. The music has a longing quality that fits the longing of the main characters in the film: a longing to be somewhere else, a longing to have something more, a longing to have a place, a longing to have someone to care for you. The film takes place in 1820s Oregon and the period details feel true. I don’t know how accurate they actually are, but they feel accurate. And the way the natural world is shot will make you feel every put-out campfire or dewdamp tent morning that you’ve ever experienced in your life.
Reviews will cite the movie’s commentary on capitalism and politics, but I don’t know much about that. All I know is that this movie is the gentle cousin of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), right down to the quiet dialogue. The performances are stellar, the ending is perfect. If this movie was in theaters, I would have seen it twice. The last movie I did that for was Phantom Thread.
Oh? What’s it about, you ask? Just spend $5.99 on AppleTV and find out for yourself.
The Action I’m Taking
Normally in this space, 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.
But this week, the only action I’m taking or have taken is to save the United States Post Office. I contacted every member of the Board of Governors for the USPS and requested that they remove Louis DeJoy from his position as Postmaster General. The citizens of our country deserve to vote safely during a pandemic and they deserve a functioning, central mail delivery service.