What MEL Magazine's End Means to Me
Good morning. I missed a week last week and I’m sorry about that.
I haven’t really kept up with industry news over the last two weeks. First of all, last week I became eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine so I spent a lot of time finding an appointment and was lucky enough to get one relatively easily. Also, I’ve been using the majority of my spare time in the evenings to work on revisions for my novel so I can get it to a place where it's worth pitching to agents. And this past weekend was Easter and also my niece’s second birthday so I was able to spend some time with family.
I’m still thinking about how much longer I want to do this newsletter as well. It’s been a great way to stay on top of industry news and to try and build on my professional knowledge, but I’m not sure it’s the best use of my time. There are plenty of people doing a better version of what I’m doing here. I may still do a newsletter, but it might take a different approach—more of a way for me to try out ideas and and practice some essay writing.
But we’ll see. Don’t worry, I’ll let you all know before I change anything so you can feel free to jump off the ride before it gets too weird (or bad or no longer helpful).
That’s enough preamble. Let’s get to this week’s newsletter.
Your Weekly Roundup
We start this week with some fallout/followup from the big Medium story from the end of March.
On March 25th, Amy Shearn, senior editor at Forge (one of Medium’s original publications), took to Twitter to try and shed a little light on Ev Williams’s announcement, specifically that the publications aren’t shuttering just shifting strategy. It’s worth reading the replies and her replies to the replies. But specifically this one, where Shearn says, “the new editorial strategy includes devoting more time, attention, & resources to platform writers (like, it seems, you are). It's a shift some staffers are more excited about than others, which again, I get. Hopefully it'll make writing on Medium an even better experience?” There still hasn’t been any more details on this situation—unless anyone can point me in the direction of something I’ve missed.
In a piece from March 30th by Max Willens over at Digiday, he looks at how Medium never invested in paid efforts to market for or increase subscribers to its original publications.
And earlier this week, Medium announced...the return of the blogroll?
The big controversy (I guess) this week was over at Insider, where an internal memo outlining the importance of “impact points” on a piece’s overall success was leaked to Max Tani of The Daily Beast. For Insider, “impact points” are a way of measuring whether or not a piece got in front of the right readers—or basically if it was shared or retweeted or mentioned by a prominent outlet, talking head, or influencer. Mark Stenberg gave an excellent breakdown and take on this “controversy” over at Medialyte. I can attest to both the value of and difficulty in coming up with a system like this. At Artsy, we tried to do something similar by looking at prominent shares of pieces on a monthly basis (our system was not as regimented as the one at Insider appears to be) to give to our writers and editors to show them, in a digested way and more concrete way, what kinds of readers their stories were reaching. There is a value in this kind of process, but in my experience the return is perhaps not worth the effort.
In “vulture capital” news, Alden Capital’s bid to purchase the entirety of shares in Tribune Publishing is becoming even more precarious. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Maryland businessman Stewart Bainum’s joint bid with Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss is set to top Alden Capital’s offer. The New York Times has coverage of this development as well, including the fact that Wyss was inspired to get involved after reading an op-ed from Chicago Tribune journalists detailing their fears about what would happen to their paper under Alden’s ownership.
On Sunday, Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post published a deep dive on the controversy surrounding the hiring and then resignation of Alexi McCammond at Teen Vogue. If you haven’t been following this story this is a great way to get the whole picture.
On March 30th, the New York Times’s Kate Roberson ran a piece covering the resignation of two high-ranking staff members at the Texas Tribune. Stacy-Marie Ishmael, the Tribune’s editorial director, and Millie Tran, the organization’s chief product officer, both resigned on the same day citing burnout. A notable quote from Ishmael is that it has been “an absolute brutal year for many people, and especially for nonwhite people.”
Next we have a pair of platform news stories
First, on Tuesday Katie Roof at Bloomberg reported that Clubhouse is seeking an unknown amount of funding from investors with the company currently valued at $4 billion.
Also on Tuesday, Alexandra Bruell of the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon grew its share of the digital ad market from 7% to over 10% from 2019 to 2020.
Related to that last bit of news about Amazon, I enjoyed this piece at The Atlantic from Josh Marshall that gives a brief history of how digital publishing failed by trying to replicate the advertising business model that worked in print.
What I’m Engaged With
The main thing I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks is MEL Magazine laying off their entire staff and ceasing to publish stories. Or their search for a new buyer—whatever you want to believe.
Last Wednesday, Digiday published a piece titled “What Mel Magazine’s fate means for brand-owned publications and why its bad for journalism.” The story is thoroughly reported and gives a great overview MEL’s influence and legacy, the reasons why it might have been shuttered, and a brief bit of history on “brand-owned publications”—like the ones also started by Casper and Airbnb,
Some of the stats the Digiday story pulls are revealing. Mainly that MEL only averaged just under 1 million unique visitors per month in 2020, with that metric actually dipping to 450,000 in February of 2021. Having just under 1 million unique visitors a month isn’t that large of an audience by any means and won’t really attract advertisers. But MEL didn’t sell ads and the publication existed more for what kind of reputation it built as a brand vs. the actual size of its audience. But if you’re looking at it from a purely business perspective, it's not hard to imagine why a Dollar Shave Club board member or exec would make the call to pull the plug on the investment: The reach of the brand was apparently starting to wane, so it was becoming a potentially less effective marketing tool.
The Digiday story has some excellent quotes about being in the business of starting and owning a brand publication. Like this one from Jordan Cohen, the founder and CEO of a brand consultancy and agency called The Fox Hill Group: “Publications are about affinity, advocacy and brand love—the ROI is rarely black and white. Publications should be viewed as long-term investments, measured against long-term goals.”
That quote and the fate of MEL all hit close to home for me because I’ve viewed our publication at Artsy in a lot of the same ways. We’re much closer to something like Wirecutter, The Strategist, or SSENSE now—we measure the success of our articles by how well they convert to the marketplace we are attached to. In our case it's not an affiliate, it’s our own online marketplace. In the past we were more like MEL, though never as weird and not nearly as influential among the media crowd. We assigned and published stories that very often only tangentially related back to the focus of the company, which was fine art. Yet we managed to build a loyal and highly engaged audience, one who really liked the variety of things we did.
Our company strategy is different now. We’re not really in the media business in the sense that we try to directly make revenue from our content. But with the shifted approach to our coverage, we’re still able to drive a certain amount of value to the company. However, I know all too well that publications are investments that rarely have a black and white ROI, and that there will always be a difficulty in measuring their true value for a brand. It’s a long-term investment and everyone is short on time.
A Little Bit of Culture
This Week: Gosford Park (2021)
My girlfriend and I have been on a bit of a mystery kick lately. It started with us (read: me) getting around to watching the BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, and then extended to her reading Magpie Murders (2017) by Anthony Horowitz.
This mystery run led us to watch the 2001 film Gosford Park, which is a confluence of our interests: Robert Altman’s sprawling, naturalistic filmmaking and Agatha Christie-style mysteries. Like most of the Altman films I haven’t seen (and I haven’t seen most of them), I knew Gosford Park was beloved and critically acclaimed, but it was just a movie that I never found my way to.
And let me tell you, what a movie it is. I’m pretty sure everyone is in this movie. (OK, actually Tom Cruise isn’t, but I heard his agent is.) The “arrival scene,” where all the players in the mystery assemble at the film’s primary location, is astounding and such a perfect encapsulation of why I love Altman’s movies. Everyone is talking, conversations overlap, characters break off and murmur, you can barely understand what anyone is saying or keep track of who anyone is. It is dizzying. But it also feels so real, so true to what life is actually like.
The mystery itself doesn’t really matter, but the characters do; and the performances that the actors give do. Maggie Smith is a legend for the line deliveries she gives in this movie. Helen Mirren is the quiet force that drives the entire film. Clive Owen reminds you why he was such a great leading man and makes you wonder why there aren’t more roles for him right now. And I realized how much I love Michael Gambon’s voice by listening to his reprehensible, blowhard of a character carry on throughout the movie.
If you’ve got over two hours to kill (I know it's spring and I know we’re getting vaccinated, but chances are you still do) I highly recommend sinking into the experience that is Gosford Park and letting Altman and all of these actors take you along for the ride.