rolling journalism into the 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.