rolling journalism into the shitbin thread

from the huffpo piece (this is the tip of the iceberg)

At a recent meeting that D’Vorkin held with a group of reporters and editors, one employee asked what Levinsohn’s Jan. 18 presentation meant for Times staffers. D’Vorkin didn’t have an answer, according to a current employee and a former employee. “I didn’t see Ross’s presentation” was all he would allow. Staffers pressed him, explaining that that’s not what they’d asked — they had asked what was going to happen to them. “I didn’t see Ross’s presentation,” he said again.

“The Los Angeles Times is like a Soviet circus right now,” said one current employee. “Propaganda. Dancing bears. Mercurial leaders who say weird shit. People who disappear. It sucks, because we have a good team here.”

https://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump-impact-foreign-reporting.php

Foreign news coverage has been taking a hit for decades. According to a 2014 Pew report, American newspapers even then had cut their international reporting staff by 24 percent in less than a decade. Network news coverage of stories with a foreign dateline averaged 500 minutes per year in 2016, compared to an average 1,500 minutes in 1988, according to a study by Tyndall.

“Clearly it’s harder for international stories to end up on front pages now,” says Ben Pauker, who served as the executive editor of Foreign Policy for seven years until the end of 2017. He is now a managing editor at Vox. From his own experience, Pauker says, it’s simply an issue of editorial bandwidth. “There’s only so much content an editorial team can process.”

More Newsweek upheaval: EIC Bob Roe, managing editor Ken Li and investigative reporter Celeste Katz fired, apparently for investigating their own parent company's financial woes which triggered a raid by Manhattan DA's office on 1/19...

— Keith J. Kelly (@media_ink) February 5, 2018

oh man

The publisher of Newsweek and the International Business Times has been engaging in fraudulent online traffic practices that helped it secure a major ad buy from a US government agency, according to a new report released today by independent ad fraud researchers.

IBTimes.com, the publisher’s US business site, last year won a significant portion of a large video and display advertising campaign for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency. Social Puncher, a consulting firm that investigates online ad fraud, alleges in its report that the ads were displayed to an audience on IBTimes.com that includes a significant amount of “cheap junk traffic with a share of bots.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/the-publisher-of-newsweek-and-the-international-business

Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong has agreed to purchase the Los Angeles Times from its parent company Tronc, restoring local ownership and perhaps ending a turbulent period for the storied 136-year-old institution.

Chicago-based Tronc on Wednesday announced the sale of The Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune to Soon-Shiong's investment firm Nant Capital for nearly $500 million in cash. In addition to the purchase price, the deal includes the assumption of $90 million in pension liabilities.

"We look forward to continuing the great tradition of award-winning journalism carried out by the reporters and editors of the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune and the other California News Group titles," Soon-Shiong said in a statement.

Tronc also announced that it will form a new division called Tribune Interactive, which will be led by Los Angeles Times Publisher Ross Levinsohn. The company said that an independent investigation into allegations of sexual harassment at previous companies found "no wrongdoing" by Levinsohn, who has been on unpaid leave since Jan. 19.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-los-angeles-times-sold-20180207-story.html

eye roll at that last bit

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/vox-media-laying-around-50-people-1086869

In a memo to staff on Wednesday morning, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff announced plans to lay off around 50 employees, with the Racked, Curbed, SB Nation, and Video Services teams "bearing the biggest impact."

...

Bankoff said that initiatives around native social video, while "growing successfully and surpassing audience growth goals, "won’t be viable audience or revenue growth drivers for us relative to other investments we are making." He cited "industry changes over the past few months and our long term budgeting process" as contributing factors.

the unpivot

was Vox's union ever made official?

Yeah, I saw this story tweeted out by the Vox Union account.

Creative Loafing in Charlotte just fired everybody and ceased print publication; the owner is selling the paper to his 28-year-old son, who "studies mind, spirit, & human growth at Mindvalley University."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dq2ngR-WoAE8W7q.jpg

truly, it is time for the product to be innovated

This sounds like an April Fool's joke. Tell me they just mixed up their holidays and this is an April Fool's joke. Please.

truly, it is time for the product to be innovated disrupted

― Sing The Mighty Beat (sic), Wednesday, October 31, 2018 11:03 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ftfy

Vice is fucked.

Vice Media to Shrink Workforce by as Much as 15% as Growth Stalls
Workforce reduction will happen through hiring freeze and attrition

Vice Media plans to shrink its workforce by as much as 15% through attrition and cut its selection of digital sites by at least half, according to people familiar with the matter, as growth stalls at the onetime new-media darling.

Revenue at the Brooklyn-based company is expected to be roughly flat this year, the people said, coming in between $600 and $650 million, on par with 2017. That number is more than $100 million below the projection Vice offered private-equity firm TPG in the summer of 2017. TPG’s investment gave Vice a $5.7 billion valuation, the highest of any new-media company.

Vice lost more than $100 million in 2017 and is on track to lose more than $50 million this year, people familiar with the matter said.

At a board meeting in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Vice Chief Executive Nancy Dubuc suggested the company focus on areas of growth, such as its in-house advertising agency, Virtue, and make more television shows and movies for third parties.

The plan outlined by Ms. Dubuc, who took over from co-founder Shane Smith in May, essentially shifts Vice’s emphasis away from the kind of online content that originally put it on the map for young users, but struggled in recent years as traffic stalled.

Vice runs more than a dozen online “verticals” such as Munchies for food, Noisey for music and Broadly for women. Ms. Dubuc plans to fold several of them into between three and five verticals, according to people familiar with the matter.

To reduce head count, Ms. Dubuc issued a companywide hiring freeze about six weeks ago, leaving about 220 positions open at the company of 3,000 employees, according to the people. Through that freeze and natural attrition, she plans to slim down Vice’s ranks by between 10% and 15% overall, they said.

Web traffic to Vice’s own sites has declined to 27 million unique visitors in September from 36 million two years earlier, according to comScore.

oh well

Eh, I know one person who works there that I like.

boy this a real moral conundrum

rot in hell vice

obligatory kim kelly exception

So

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/business/media/mic-staff-layoff.html

venture capital will kill us all

More and more, I'm glad that I got out of full-time journalism fairly quickly.

The Mic employees said that the company had come to rely too heavily on a partnership with Facebook, which provided funding for a Mic-produced show on the social network’s Facebook Watch video platform.

they sold the assets to bustle, whose bryan goldberg is on the mic board. and bustle is planning to “rebuild the editorial team”

the content age is such a scam

I just went to the site and got this "subscribe to Mic Daily" pop up with a place for me to enter my email address, which seems kinda gauche today

rip rookie

http://www.rookiemag.com/2018/11/editors-letter-86/

wow can you believe it a private equity firm's purchase of a magazine has been bad for the magazine? WHO WOULD HAVE EXPECTED

https://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-sunset-magazine-woes-20181130-story.html

this detail (reinstein is the guy who owns the equity firm):

Every year, the magazine renovates at least one house to showcase the latest trends. Tickets are sold to the public to tour the redesigned home. Advertisers and designers provide services and products, such as new doors, windows, cabinets, tubs and other design elements for free or at a steep discount because the finished house is prominently featured in the magazine.

When plans to build a house in Palm Springs fell through, Reinstein volunteered his own house in Beverly Hills. He said sponsors had already been lined up, he wanted to keep the program going, and that he incurred some of the construction costs himself. The house was featured in the November issue under the heading: Project Refresh.

“My No. 1 goal was to keep the advertisers happy,” Reinstein said.

oh sure. "the advertisers." these fuckin' people

This story is fucking amazing. This reporter made up features for Der Spiegel (and possibly other outlets he wrote for) for years, winning major prizes in the process, and now it's all unraveled.

It's infuriating how often I google a story to verify it, and the results are:

1) NYT (no free articles left)
2) Fox News (always free)
3) WaPo (no free articles left)
4) Breitbart (always free)
5) Daily Caller (always free)

Guess what people end up reading when this happens?

— Matt Jameson (@RogueNotary) February 28, 2019

I guess I'll post this here

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8530075/spin-stereogum-vibe-layoffs

Wow. Media measurement giant Comscore and its former CEO have been charged with fraud by the SEC. https://t.co/L4LoB1Q7yw

— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) September 24, 2019

in the hour or so since this story broke i have definitely popped at least one (1) blood vessel in my mouth while laughing mirthlessly

Comscore's entire business model is to provide key metrics for media companies, entertainment giants and publishers. Now it is being accused of using artificial numbers fo inflate its revenue.

— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) September 24, 2019

New York magazine acquired by Vox Media.

https://deadspin.com/sports-illustrated-eventually-holds-transition-meeting-1838752787

tbf, Sports Illustrated is only slightly more deserving of being called "journalism" than, say, Vogue or Cosmpolitan.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/10/18/us/dominican-republic-deaths-natural-causes/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F

The whole "omg SERIOUS DEATH EPIDEMIC" angle that the media either tried to push or didn't try and dispel has been gross. Nobody died unusually, the death rate was never out of the ordinary, a panic was created for nothing, because it was some "scary foreign republic"

Jones’s Vanity Fair is trying to embrace a more progressive future — a recurring theme at the new Condé is trying to monetize stylish wokeness — but the company’s appeal had always been about speaking less from a place of hipness than authority. Executives on the business side eventually confronted Jones in a meeting this year, pointing out that her vision for the magazine was making their lives difficult. When I brought up that meeting to Pam Drucker Mann, Condé Nast’s chief revenue officer, who had been there, she insisted it wasn’t different from meetings pressing other magazines on their commercial prospects. She used an analogy for thinking about the old Vanity Fair versus the new: “There’s a song Bill Withers may have written and sung that people of his time are like, ‘This is the best,’ and then Drake might remake it, and the people that love Drake will be like, ‘This song is amazing.’ ” I took the point, then asked if there actually was a Drake remix of a Bill Withers song that I had missed; she said it was a hypothetical but would get back to me with a real example. An hour later, a Condé Nast spokesperson emailed me her revised answer: “ ‘Old Town Road,’ original by Billy Ray Cyrus. Remix by Lil Nas X.”

...

anyway this piece sure is a lot. can't wait til anna wintour retires

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/conde-nast-anna-wintour-roger-lynch.html

AnnaWintour definitely goes into the Things You Just Don't Care About thread. Stupid shallow big sunglasses narcissistic nonsense woman.

she's a pox

I seriously don't get this: are traders just stupid? We've done THREE ROUNDS OF THIS. My god. https://t.co/uojfTcP9EM

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 13, 2019

Wrong shitbin thread

Wrong shitbin thread

This thread needs a revive just to serve as a graveyard for all the journalistic outlets this hell year is gonna claim. FACT magazine has laid off all its staffers; Film Comment magazine is gone; alt-weeklies are begging for donations to keep the doors open, and it's only gonna get worse.

Its a fucking bummer

I went to the Voice site today to check an old music link and was surprised to find it was still there and posting (an obituary and some archived pieces by Michael Sorkin). Maybe it's just one or two people who look after it, I don't know.

https://www.theringer.com/2020/4/11/21217843/sports-illustrated-grant-wahl-fired-maven

If you buy a subscription to SI, you give money to Heckman and Levinsohn. If you fight back like Wahl, you get fired. If you assure displaced SI writers they’ll do great things in this business, you ignore a melting economy.

There’s one only move left. It’s not much when journalists have lost jobs, but it’s something. The Maven guys want to be known as cold-eyed mavericks. The last six months have shown that as craven as they are, they will always be more buffoonish. Our last move is to point at them and laugh.

Cleveland's last remaining daily paper, the Plain Dealer (founded 1842) is effectively gone as of last week. In chronological order, several headlines covering the story from Cleveland SCENE, our alt-weekly:

https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2020/04/10/after-being-given-opportunity-to-cover-clevelands-outlying-counties-10-of-remaining-14-plain-dealer-reporters-have-walked-instead

https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2020/04/13/clevelandcom-editor-chris-quinns-corporate-toolery-is-the-opposite-of-journalism

https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2020/04/09/plain-dealer-editor-tim-warsinskey-is-a-liar-and-advance-publications-doesnt-give-a-shit-about-cleveland

City Pages in Minneapolis closing down effective immediately.

Tribune owner shut it down, putting onetime ilxor and the arts editor there Keith H#rris Among others without a job.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/assistance-for-city-pages-staff

New SEC filing reveals Alden Global Capital is aggressively undermining an effort by Maryland hotel magnate Stewart Bainum to buy Tribune Publishing and possibly make its papers nonprofit charities.

Murdoch ended publication of 112 regional papers in Australia ten months ago, closing 36 and turning 76 digital-only. Now at least 20 of those remaining digital mastheads are closing too.

Over a third of the continent now has no local reportage.

Meanwhile, it looks like Alden is broke, having abandoned its offices in NYC, London, Mumbai and Dubai to operate out of a fake office address in Florida, and planning to force the Tribune group to take on $375 million in loans in order to sell themselves to Alden and then be shut down.

Other tenants using the same suite number include a false eyelash distributor, realtors, attorneys, financial services, and several outdoor tent companies.

what, as opposed to indoor tent companies?

well they're not in the suite, we know that

NY Daily News running in-paper pleas for someone to buy them before Alden can take over completely.

A reporter at a Trib paper in Pennsylvania notes "All of us have been working for months to get new owners that can help us escape ownership by the worst hedge fund in America. It may be down to the wire but we will not stop."

The NewsGuild union, representing eight of nine Trib metros, argues to the shareholders that they should stop turning down better deals.

The Guild’s brief highlights that Tribune Publishing CEO Terry Jimenez voted against the company board recommending the deal to shareholders and has indicated he will vote against it May 21.

Jimenez has two decades of experience in the industry and four as chief financial officer and CEO of Tribune Publishing. None of the other six directors has any publishing experience, the Guild contends, so Jimenez is the better judge of the company’s earnings potential.

Three of the directors are associated with Alden, which already owns 32% of the company. The other three are “independent” directors who formed a special committee to consider offers — all three from nonjournalism financial backgrounds.

bless her heart

As an American journalist, you never expect:
1. Your own govt to lie to you, repeatedly
2. Your own govt to hide information the public has a right to know
3. Your own govt to spy on your communications

Trump's unAmerican regime did all of these.
No one should accept this.

— Michelle Kosinski (@MichLKosinski) May 8, 2021

??????

To quote Dan Aykroyd in Tommy Boy, "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." And that goes triple for "journalists," apparently.

As an antidote to that, here's a shockingly cogent interview with Hunter Thompson from 1975:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRqLcD-1sE

100 Chicago Tribune workers held a rally to attempt to stop the sale of Tribune Publishing to Alden

The Tribune is “essentially debt free, profitable and has more than $250 million in cash, according to its first-quarter earnings report.” This is not a dying company — if it does become a hollowed out husk, it will be at the hands of a hedge fund that only wants to extract $$ https://t.co/LIOvhWTdMo

— Nina Metz (@Nina_Metz) May 16, 2021

Journalism classes are definitely going to have to teach the @grace_panetta headline format pic.twitter.com/lu7OykxZhj

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) May 25, 2021

In closing the Tribune deal, Alden borrowed $278M, all of which goes on Tribune's books. $218M comes from PE firm Cerberus; $60M from Alden's other news co, MNG, at an eye-popping 13% interest, additionally lining Alden's pockets on Trib's balance sheet https://t.co/etkQtLT4uM

— Lukas I. Alpert (@lalpert1) May 25, 2021

it would be nice if everyone involved in making this deal dies painfully of genital cancer in the next year

Interesting maybe not terrible news...

Chicago Public Media, which owns WBEZ Radio, has decided to buy the Chicago Sun-Times and run it as a not-for-profit subsidiary.

that sounds like good news

I have experience in nonprofit journalism, and think it can be a good thing, yes.

We will never return to the world in which legacy-print outlets are either a great money-making venture or a major determiner of cultural consensus, however. To a sizable chunk of the public, "public media" is basically an arm of leftist propaganda that they will never believe or take seriously. To a different chunk of the public, they're not leftist enough, so again, not to be believed or taken seriously.

While I am sad about this state of affairs, I don't know that there's enough duct tape or Bactine or baling wire or whatever the missing ingredient is to fix the current information landscape. In one sense, there used to be a rough consensus about reality. It was deeply flawed, in incredibly harmful ways, but it was mostly shared.

People nowadays can inhabit mutually unintelligible epistemological spaces, and I am having a hard time being optimistic about the future of information. Sorry, downer

We will never return to the world in which legacy-print outlets are either a great money-making venture or a major determiner of cultural consensus

You say this but the New York Times is doing a pretty good job at both these things

People say it’s an anomaly but it worked very hard to get that way

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/a-little-bit-of-salary-transparency-in-travel-journalism-was-a-nice-thing-that-happened-on-media-twitter-today/?fbclid=IwAR2fkHbDda66QocVyT1toPP4Zze5lkf1OQYqTszJufC8Mj1HxiaLAb4lJ8M

https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/entertainment-weekly-print-digital-instyle-1235175928/?fbclid=IwAR196-ip7DWUYnj0ApimDQTWpCT8zjI-B5ZiImB6IaHQIcXmFDDYQMQ0K4k

In a tense, 3-hour meeting with Baltimore Sun staff, new owner David Smith said he didn't read newspapers, asked staffers to rank each other, suggested they be more like Fox45. And more ... reports @LeeOSanderlin @codyboteler https://t.co/QrIWCe7ny2

— Kimi Yoshino (@kyoshino) January 17, 2024

Ah yes, what Maryland needs right now is more right-leaning paper-based media.

Ok please forgive my bitterness but in the year of our lord 1985 I had a journalism teacher who had never worked for a newspaper or, as far as I could tell, had never read a newspaper.

If this is how print journalism dies, let it be so. I will pull some deck chairs out to the shoreline and wistfully watch it burn.

I've known a few advisors who've never worked for a newspaper. but weren't conservative hacks.