Author: Anna Wahrman

The latest Dish, a sad tale indeed

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Almost exactly two years ago, Andrew Sullivan broke off from the Daily Beast and announced he would transition his extremely popular and much-read blog, the Dish, into its own site—one not owned by a media corporation or supported by advertising.

Said he at the time:

We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality. We want to create a place where readers — and readers alone — sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way…. Hence the purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews.

How’s that going for him? Not so great. Last week he announced his retirement from blogging; this week the Dish announced it was shutting down.

We…have come to the conclusion that the practical, financial and editorial challenges of continuing on are simply too great for us to bear as we are, let alone without me.

He cited his health as the biggest factor.

We’re all only human. At some point, the marathon has to end.

Are there any conclusions to be drawn? Perhaps that it’s a ton of work to churn out fresh content, whether you’re owned by a corporation or not. Perhaps when there are “no advertising demands,” you have to generate other kinds of revenue to stay afloat (beyond your savings account), and perhaps that’s a lot of work. Perhaps even if you grind away at it but still can’t find such an alternate revenue source, you have to do all the work yourself. Perhaps this is time-consuming and stressful.

This just in: Running a user-supported content site is time-consuming and stressful. It is a ton of work. You do have to do it all. And you will burn out.

It’s sad, for sure, to see a fallen comrade. Sullivan tried a new way of doing things, and that’s admirable. If there’s a lesson for the media at large from this affair, it’s that we have to keep trying new things. We must tackle new challenges, especially the hard ones (like how to run a site without corporate oversight and ads, for example), and we must keep going, keep reinventing, keep trying.

Not to be too dramatic, but to quote Samuel Beckett from The Unnamable, “In the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

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Media gut check: Gods (BuzzFeed and Facebook) help us!

Anna Wahrman 1 Comment

It’s too late to be timely on this, considering January is now over, but I finally read Mat Honan’s Wired piece about media start-ups. I’ve called out some key passages below, but the highlight of Honan’s piece happened off-page. The setup of the print-article-about-online-media-startups thing was awkwardly funny enough, but the punch line of the whole situation is that this was Honan’s last feature for Wired because after interviewing BuzzFeed for the article, he left to take a job at BuzzFeed. In this Wired piece, he wrote, “Everyone wants a piece of BuzzFeed.” The irony either stings or tickles, depending on your perspective.

The best encapsulation of the piece comes at the end, but I’m going to put it right up front so as not to bury Honan’s conclusion. It comes down to this:

Here is the big secret: Nobody has it figured out. Everyone’s just hoping not to be totally fucked six months from now! There’s no retreating from the unbundled story. We aren’t going to start going back to the front pages of websites any more than we’re going to go back in droves to print. Times will change, but they won’t change back. Which means that, ultimately, the best and only way for publishers to win your attention is with really good stories. A good story, well told and suited for its audience, has always been the thing and always will be. But never more than now, when the story has to live on its own.

Hey, that’s what I’m always saying! More from Honan:

The media has been so completely flattened and democratized that your little sister can use the same distribution methods as the world’s most powerful publishers. She has instant access to you—potentially to everyone—and she doesn’t need to invest in broadcast towers or a printing press, satellites or coaxial cable….Even Hearst never had to compete with corgi videos. But the thing is, the media isn’t just competing with your little sister—it’s co-opting her, using her as a vector to spread its content. She is the new delivery mechanism. The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives.

The must-see publication of the 21st century is the first vibration in your pocket. While news apps have to be fast, they also have to practice restraint. Vibrate a pocket too often and people will delete your app for being annoying. Gone from the homescreen! And good luck getting someone to try it again.

[BuzzFeed’s Dao] Nguyen sees BuzzFeed as a technology company as much as a media company, and that means investing in data and software. “When media companies think of growth, they tend to think of it as a marketing function,” Nguyen says. “We talk about growth as a technology function—building tools and products, and making changes in your platform.” …BuzzFeed has tools like a headline optimizer. It can take a few different headline and thumbnail image configurations and test them in real time as a story goes live, then spit back the one that is most effective. Once a story goes up, an algorithm looks at the early traffic and social activity and predicts whether it is going to be a hit.

“There’s a lot of precedent of distribution companies and content companies building businesses together,” [BuzzFeed’s Jonah] Peretti says. “[But] the algorithms are always changing. We have a very long-term view, and the only way to succeed in the long run is to make content people love to share with their friends, tell stories that are meaningful to people’s lives, and break news stories that have an impact on the world.”

Honan’s summary of the media’s (co?)dependence on Facebook…

When Facebook is the distribution mechanism, its whims dictate what your audience sees. A single decision about what kinds of content should appear in the News Feed could take away hundreds of millions of readers from BuzzFeed.

…leads nicely into Will Oremus’s Slate article about the same. Oremus’s piece is a well-done brief but complete summary of the way website publishing has evolved dramatically over the past not-even-decade, from the user typing in a URL to searching on Google to social sharing. He discusses how the media ran toward the ball each time, first gaming Google’s algorithms and then Facebook’s.

In fact, Facebook has flipped the script on the publishers, who are now utterly reliant on Facebook’s social media juju for their paychecks. Basically, Facebook has told publishers that videos will auto-play on Facebook users’ news feeds—but only if those videos were uploaded via Facebook, not via an outbound link to the publisher. So if a publisher merely posts a video link to its (probably very expensively produced!) own content, it will get dinged by Facebook. Oremus summarizes the problem thusly:

Facebook is now cutting your website out of the equation entirely when it comes to videos, the fastest-growing and most lucrative online medium. If you post a video on your site, it is likely to be received poorly on Facebook, and very few people will see it, so you won’t make much money. If you post it on Facebook, it may be seen by millions. But the advertisements in Facebook’s news feed belong to Facebook, not you. The side effect of posting a video on Facebook is to make Facebook the publisher of that video and to demote [publishers] to the role of producer. The only question is whether Facebook will deign to share any of that money with you.

His prediction?

Facebook will set the terms for the sharing of revenue from videos posted in its news feed, and those terms will be very favorable to Facebook. Each website will have to decide for itself whether to accept those terms. Many will resist, recognizing that they can’t possibly make as much money from videos posted on Facebook as they did back when Facebook generously linked out to videos hosted on their own sites. But some will accept, eager to be on the leading edge of the latest trend in content distribution. Some may lose money on the deal, but that doesn’t actually matter. Because those that accept will be, by and large, startups backed by venture capitalists who are willing to lose money for years as long as they’re winning market share. The holdouts will hew as long as they can to their outmoded practice of posting links on Facebook instead of full videos, but eventually they’ll either give in or lose out.

He goes on to predict that video is just the beginning, and you just know he’s right.

If Facebook and its users find that video works better when it’s embedded in the news feed, they might soon find that the same principle applies to gifs, listicles, photo essays, and even full news articles. Facebook could start by displaying a short preview in users’ news feeds, as it does now. Then, when the user hovers over the preview, the rest of the post could drop down. Posting full articles on Facebook, rather than just linking to them, would of course be optional for publishers. But it isn’t hard to imagine a Facebook blog post in late 2016 innocently advising partners in the media that full stories posted directly to the news feed appear to be doing quite well on the social network.

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Time Inc. parties like it’s 2009, makes an app

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Image: Fiscal Times

Warning: This post contains unsafe levels of sarcasm and eye rolling.

You may have begun your winter vacation last week, but while you were enduring awkward conversations with your extended family, the Time Inc. PR department was working overtime to convince the public that the magazine producer is thriving in this newfangled technological world of ours. All those olde timey magazines? Who cares? Time Inc. is making apps now. That’s right: apps. Everyone knows that apps are the future! Ever since 2008, which was six years ago, when the App Store launched, apps have been the future. But now Time Inc. is getting into the game, so watch out every other app, of which there were 25 billion on iOS as of May 2013! Clearly we have all—all of us in digital media, and, well, all of us everywhere around the world—been waiting to see just what kind of technology the minds at the magazine company Time Inc. will devise.

Time Inc. doesn’t just want to be known and just to operate as the publisher of popular magazines like Time, Sports Illustrated, InStyle and People any more. It wants to become a technology company too, launching its own products to rival the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and even Tinder.

Does it now? I’ll bet those folks can do it! I mean, it wants to be a tech company. It wants to rival the biggest social networks on this planet. So it stands to reason that it can!

Ever since former owner Time Warner announced it was to spin off Time Inc. into a separately publicly traded company last year, Time Inc. has been making some loud noises that it’s not just a dusty old magazine publisher that doesn’t understand digital.

They’re making loud noises, people! About the assumption that they don’t understand digital just because their sites are still running on technology from the 1990s! Wha, wha, what was that? A loud noise, that’s what.

With so much change affecting the publishing industry—first with the move to web, then search, social and mobile—Time is saying “we don’t want to be surprised any more, we want to find ways to get ahead of that curve. They are working to get ahead of that curve and become a tech company.”

Oh, wow. They are working on being ahead of the curve to become a tech company! Did you hear that, all the other tech companies and websites? They are working on it!

M. Scott Havens, Time Inc.’s SVP of digital, told Business Insider “We are building [standalone] apps and businesses.”

No! They are building apps? Apps?! My god, apps! What a brilliant idea! Has anyone ever built—is it pronounced apps? Am I saying that right?

[The first app is] Cooking Light Diet, a mobile app that delivers customized meal plans on a weekly basis.

What! You’re telling me this team of hundreds was able to develop an app that updates once a week? Do they have push alerts? Because if this weekly app has push alerts…

The process started a year ago, when Time Inc. came up with the idea for the product last spring. By May, Time Inc. had 500 paying customers using the service (which, at $18.99 a month, isn’t cheap), giving it the confidence to push ahead with a full launch.

Holy moley! This once-a-week app took only a year to make! And they have 500 users! Yes, five hundred! Let’s see, 500 users times $19 each? Why, that’s almost $10,000 a year in revenue after only one year of development! So really it’s all profit, minus the roughly $5 million to $10 million in costs!

A “young guy” working on the Sports Illustrated editorial team recently had a great idea for an “utilitarian app,” which Havens describes as a kind of Tinder meets Yelp. The guy told his editor, who allowed him to work on the project (at the expense of his time working on Sports Illustrated) with Havens. The company is now working on a prototype.

Wait, what? A young guy had an idea? And they let him work on it?! Holy crap, this is a game changer. And it’s probably going to be more popular than Tinder and Yelp, because it meets them both, according to this one young guy.

Time Inc. is borrowing the tools (and buzzwords) of Silicon Valley with a fast, lean approach to product development. This “minimum viable product” has four digital product experts who work with people at the individual lifestyle magazine brands to develop new products in two-week cycles.

Oh, wow, they’re using Agile, Lean and MVP? I mean, “MVP”? Wow. Well, sorry digital companies, it’s over for you. Time Inc. has figured it out. They’ve hired four different experts, so…it’s kinda game over for everyone else.

Such a change in mindset and business focus requires a huge cultural reorganization. Processes are different, priorities change, even desk layout ought to be different than a traditional newsroom.

Wait, you’re saying that you just need to rearrange the desks in order to make this a digital company, not a “dusty old media” company? So easy! I’m not sure if the union will go for that, but they might just be right about the seating chart being the key to disrupting this whole industry.

Havens hints that everything from consumer apps, b2b technologies and content for watches, cars and refrigerators are all being considered.

Oh, wow. Is there anything this old magazine company that knows nothing about any of those industries can’t do?! Watch your back, all of those above-mentioned multibillion-dollar corporations that are also doing all of these things but with a working knowledge of their industries and without a legacy media business to run!

It’s easier for Time Inc. to adopt this approach now than it would have been a decade ago, though, said Reed Phillips, managing partner of media investment bank DeSilva & Phillips.

Yeah, totally! If they’d been able to develop social media a decade ago, they’d definitely have been ahead of the curve. Time Inc., your PR department makes it pretty clear that you have many great ideas (and plans!) on how to be an tech-industry leader. All I can say is good luck with that.

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Content management systems: Why we can’t have nice things?

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In a rare but welcome turn of events, this week I read three thoughtful deep dives about content management systems.

1

I found myself nodding a lot at this Mediashift piece that discussed how magazines can better use analytics to determine their digital focus. Some highlights:

“We watch numbers on each of these platforms and determine what platforms can have a rich workflow and rich experience, and where we want to enhance the content with video. We also have replica editions where people are happy with just a flipbook. We make decisions on a per-platform basis [by considering] the return on investment of any of these.” —Kerrie Keegan, Reader’s Digest

“All of the different platforms — not even just production platforms like Mag+, Zinio, Adobe DPS, but also Apple versus Google versus Amazon versus Next Issue — all of those have a different set of analytics and metrics that can be obtained. Those really differ widely. It’s one of the core challenges for anybody trying to publish in this space and across those markets…. The challenges aren’t really technical at this point. The challenges are what I call infrastructure. In print, we all know what rate base is, what CPMs are going to be, what metrics we pay attention to. We don’t have the same infrastructure for monetizing digital. From an advertising point of view, does rate base matter, or is it interaction, engagement, time in app?” —Mike Haney, Mag+

2

This excellent piece from Neiman Lab gets into the inner workings of Scoop, the New York Times‘s CMS, with Luke Vnenchak. The parts I found most interesting had to do with something I always advocate: better integration of basic editorial functions, such as, oh, I don’t know, editing words, into CMSes.

Scoop incorporates a number of real-time editing options that might look familiar to Google Docs users. Different team members can work on different parts of a story at the same time: “For example, a reporter can work on the article while an editor is writing the headline and summary and a producer is adding multimedia. But one editor can’t work on the headline while another works on the summary.”

Isn’t it amazing that this very basic functionality is so hard to come by in most off-the-shelf CMSes? Additionally, for being content management systems, most CMSes are abysmal at actually managing content in the editorial sense:

One thing that is always handy in newsrooms is a system for tracking the status of stories as they move from assigning and writing to editing. Beyond knowing the status of an article, Vnenchak said they want the system to track when stories run online and in print, and how a story is performing once it’s published.

Our asks as editors are quite standard, if not primitive, from a content-making standpoint. Something as essential as status tracking being incorporated into a CMS should be common, not rare.

3

Finally, an intriguing post that could indicate the end of cobbled together, homegrown editorial CMSes. Much can be said about Google, but even its detractors have to admit that when the company puts its mind to doing something, it gets done. That something might soon be a CMS “that would unify editorial, advertising and perhaps commerce activities for media companies.”

The so-far-untapped opportunity that Google is chasing — articulated with greater frequency this year in ad tech circles — is to take a holistic approach to managing yield that spans multiple publisher revenue sources and screen form factors.

The idea that a editorial-based, unifying CMS hasn’t yet been developed is rather shocking in itself. But the arguments the article makes against Google developing such a product are the pinnacle of self-reproach and shame. It’s almost as though all of online publishing has been told by its shrieking mother, “This is why we can’t have nice things!” and internalized the message:

A CMS could be a tough sell for Google, especially as a number of publishers have lately staked their future on the strength of a proprietary CMS. Three prominent examples are Vox Media, whose vaunted Chorus CMS is considered its secret sauce, BuzzFeed, which has baked native advertising into its content platform, and The New York Times, where technology-powered storytelling is seen as core to its editorial and advertising mission. For such publishers, adopting a CMS from a large platform player like Google would be tantamount to outsourcing the very notion of innovation.

Additionally many established publishers have customized their content tools to integrate with legacy publishing systems. Many publishers use multiple CMSs, for instance a custom platform powered by Drupal alongside WordPress for blogging. So there’s a big technical hurdle to adopting any off-the-shelf solution Google has on offer. That’s setting aside the technical and human resources barriers required to migrate away from “good enough” content systems.

This last part reminds me of the great Aimee Mann song “Momentum”: “But I can’t confront the doubts I have/I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad/And so, for the sake of momentum/I’m condemning the future to death/So it can match the past.”

It seems obvious that we should embrace enhancements to CMSes for editorial, be they analytics, metrics, platforms, workflows, or appropriate ad-edit collaboration.

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The “right-sizing” of Time Inc.

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The amount of corporate-speak in the memo from Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp regarding layoffs at that company today is truly astounding. I’d be impressed if I didn’t know it meant lots and and lots of journalists were going to be joining the proverbial breadlines as the business spins out from Time Warner and attempts to make its own way in the weary world of today’s media landscape.

Where to even begin? Perhaps with “right-size,” which means “downsize,” of course. But the entire memo is a marvel of meaninglessness: “operational efficiencies,” “reengineer the business,” “redundant positions,” “positioning ourselves for transformation,” “restructuring process,” “streamlining decision-making.”

The sentence that is truly stupefying: “A single Time Inc. portfolio will give us more operational flexibility, speed decision-making and spur the development of new cross-brand products and revenue streams to help stabilize and grow our top-line revenues.”

Every journalist there must surely be thinking, “Boy, I can’t wait to have more operational flexibility so I can help stabilize and grow our top-line revenues!”

Time Inc. should be in the business of calling out this kind of nonsense, stocked as it is with Fortune, Money and the mother ship, Time. Sadly, there’s no one left at the business to write an article about it, let alone analyze the broader trend that the largest magazine publisher in the world laying off 6 percent or so of its workers (on the heels of laying off 6 percent a year ago) is a harbinger of doom for media.

I feel terrible for all those journalists who’ve lost jobs today. Let’s hope Time Inc. truly can save itself by “dissolv[ing] the complex matrixed organization” it created in the heyday of publishing and “free[ing] up investment dollars to deploy in growth areas.” Whatever that means.

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A place for magazines

Anna Wahrman 1 Comment

There is a reason that phones, tablets, minis, laptops and desktop computers all exist. Each does a different thing. Sometimes only a slightly different thing, but a different thing nonetheless. And with a few exceptions, we use different products and brands as we perform different tasks on these different devices, depending on what we’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re checking your Facebook feed, the difference between doing so on your iPhone, your iPad and your iPad mini isn’t apparent. But if you’re writing a message to a long-lost friend on Facebook, ideally you want to do so via your laptop or desktop, using a tactile keyboard, on the web. (And maybe you even want to write it first using a word-processing application.) If you’re trying to research Twitter trends or simultaneously monitor thousands of tweets, the Twitter mobile app just won’t cut it (not even Twitter’s website will cut it sometimes—just ask Tweetdeck). If you’re gaming, Candy Crush is fine on a phone, but if you want to play a graphics-intensive game, you’d be advised to do so using a heavy-duty desktop machine or a gaming console. Blog posts are easily tweaked on WordPress’s app, but I wouldn’t want to compose several thousand words by plunking them out on a virtual keyboard. I’d never want to watch Gravity on my phone.

On and on—you get the point. Or, rather, I will get to the point. Magazines are ideally meant to be enjoyed on paper at leisure. The long articles, the beautiful photos, the envy-inducing ads, the feel of the pages in the hand, the tearing out of things to remember. With the exception of some news journalism, very few brands work on absolutely all devices. The New York Times and Buzzfeed, to name two, do an exceptional job cross-platform. But even then, those in-depth, well-reported 10,000-word profiles that the Times does so well? I can’t sit still long enough to read them on the web, let alone while squinting and scrolling on a phone. Buzzfeed’s GIF-sticles? Good luck getting them to load and animate as quickly as you want them to on a tablet.

I’ve written before about how dismally magazine apps perform and tried to propose theories as to why that might be. But maybe it’s simpler than all that. Maybe it’s not more visibility in the app store or better PR or more intrusive update alerts or a consistent user experience. Maybe it’s as simple as: Each task we perform in our lives has an appropriate medium.

Last month, while lamenting the lack of innovation surrounding magazine apps, I wrote:

Jon Lund reported in October that “there’s not much room for magazine apps” on people’s phones and tablets, considering that the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone but opens only eight of them daily.

But maybe users stick to those eight apps simply because those are the eight that work best on their phones. Maybe they don’t bother with magazine apps not because magazine apps suck, but because they don’t use their phones to read magazines.

Maybe it’s simply that magazines aren’t truly viable in any meaningful way except for in the form they’ve taken for hundreds of years. (“Meaningful” in a literary sense, but also in the sense of those often-mentioned new revenue models we’re all still waiting to see take shape.)

Of course, some journalism works just great across devices. Quick text-based blog posts, 500-word essays, two-sentence breaking-news alerts—all are welcome, whether I’m on the couch with my tablet, on the move with my phone or at my desk with my laptop.

But in the vast majority of cases, every medium has its best form of distribution—magazines, yes, but also television, movies, books, etc. A place for everything, and everything in its place. So why is the media industry trying to make itself viable across all platforms? Pick a thing, realize its potential, realize its limitations, and do it well.

I previously said that “unlike many apps, the media’s brand relevance and reputation absolutely hinges on an amazing user experience across devices at all times. In short, it has to be perfect.” I stand by that. But if it can’t be perfect—and we’re realizing that it cannot—I don’t think the next best answer is to half-ass a magazine app, a website and the magazine itself. I think if there is any progress to be made, it will be by using technology to focus on task- and purpose-based distribution instead of trying to be all things to all people (and devices).

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Diagnosis for magazine apps: Terminal lack of innovation

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Yes, I’m quoting myself back to myself. Is there an echo in here? But almost a year ago to the day, I asked whether magazine apps would be the ruin of publishers, noting that they spend countless dollars producing a product that few readers know or care about. I said that the app field has been leveled, and as an industry the media needed to develop a strategy around apps instead of blindly groping in the dark. In fact, I called for the media to out-and-out rewrite the rules to benefit our business! Rah-rah!

None of that happened.

And here we are, a year later, and things are worse than ever for tablet magazine apps. Eddie Vassallo’s piece on Gigaom today points out that this summer’s iOS7 update made things even worse for publishers, deemphasizing the Newsstand app, hiding its contents and removing its update alerts.

Jon Lund reported in October that “there’s not much room for magazine apps” on people’s phones and tablets, considering that the average mobile user has 41 apps on his or her smartphone but opens only eight of them daily.

Not to be all “I told you so” about it, but that’s what happens when you rely on others’ rules and don’t spend capital inventing or investing in ways to put your product into the public consciousness, be it via technology or user experience or content quality.

In summary, the situation is even worse than it was a year ago, when it was eminently obvious to me — a workaday journalist and decidely amateur observer of the media industry — that tablet magazine apps were sounding the death knell. So how is it not now utterly apparent to those who have the ability to actually instigate change?

Vassallo says that “it’s absolutely understandable that choosing the apparent ‘quick win’ of InDesign-generated apps…or even PDF-wrapper solutions provide a cheap and rapid route to the App store. But it’s been a false economy, and there simply is no time to waste waiting for things to improve,” adding that “It’s time for magazine publishers to abandon the easy options and make the hard decisions that will save their digital titles.”

If I could go back in time and metaphorically shake Vassallo, his clients and anyone else who would listen by the shoulders, I’d do it. With tablet sales skyrocketing yet spending on new media models nonexistent, I am gobsmacked at the lack of leadership across the magazine and newspaper industries. I’m concerned about what the future of media can possibly be if we are collective deer in the headlights as the big rig of technology bears down on us.

I said it a year ago and I’ll repeat it today: We must harness our strengths and lead ourselves forward.

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The costs of being a freelance journalist

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The Awl published a Noah Davis piece that last week in which the writer uses actual numbers, down to the dollar and number of invoices, to account for how much money he’s been able to make as a freelance journalist. It begins as less a takedown of how hard it is to survive in the new gig economy than a freelance economics lesson, or maybe a complex math equation.

Freelancing for websites is nearly unsustainable, especially in the one-off pitch, write and edit sense. But here’s the thing: It rarely makes financial sense for the website, either…. Revenue streams on the Internet are too nascent and too in-flux to provide anything concrete. A growing number of publications are able to pay something, which is an improvement, but the value of the written word cratered simply because most of the Internet’s publications, unlike their printed forebears, has no subscriber base.

Davis acknowledges that though he is doing OK for now, he doesn’t know how, or even whether, journalism will survive long-term. But at least he doesn’t claim that he has the answers, unlike so many other so-called new-media experts. He doesn’t recommend “monetizing” better or going “platform native” or making more engaging ads (as though that were even possible). He just lays out the real costs of making words, saying, “There’s a vital distinction to be made between artistic value and monetary value.”

Saying that “print isn’t the rule; it’s the exception,” he quotes the great Ann Friedman, the writer, editor and GIF enthusiast who used to work at Good: “My plan that I’m going to supplement my weekly web income with a few big print stories might not be feasible even two years down the road. I’m aware of that. But for me, it’s a race against time. How can I build a personal brand as a journalist, not to Andrew Sullivan levels or anything, but the recognition that I have job security before the parachute of print assignments goes away? That’s how I see my personal calculus.”

A race against time. The parachute of print assignments that will go away. Personal brand as a journalist. Bracing stuff. (The woman is known for her #realtalk, after all.)

Stating the obvious, namely that “the Internet democratized writing,” Davis cites some troubling numbers:

The number of “writers” exploded, even while one estimate for the number of official jobs for full-time journalists decreased from 61,000 in 1997 to 45,500 in 2012.

He goes into a bit of a tangent about how the real problem might be that up-and-comers don’t have mentors now, and that’s definitely true, especially because journalism, more than most careers, is an almost entirely on-the-job learning experience. But if you asked a clerk, mail carrier or stock broker, I’m certain they’d make the same claim — without calling their jobs a (cue eye roll) craft. Without getting too deeply into the mire, I can state unequivocally that I learned everything I know about making words and making them better through my various jobs and the people who were kind enough to teach me.

But back to Davis, who concludes that he likes life as a freelance writer for the most part:

The lack of long-term stability can be troubling, especially on those frustrating days when editors aren’t returning my emails, but that’s a conscious trade-off I made for being able to go running in the middle of the day…. In a world that’s less about traditional, one-company one-job careers and more about bouncing around and trying to find a way, it works for now.

How long “for now” lasts is a bigger problem as we kick the can down the Future of Journalism road. Still, the post is an enlightening take on the real world of freelancing, good and bad, and worth a read in full.

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Time Inc.’s, and the media’s, death by a thousand cuts

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Michael Wolff isn’t my favorite person. Actually, I find him quite loathsome — repellent and creepy in the same way I find Woody Allen and Ricky Gervais. He has described himself as a crank and an obnoxious know-it-all, and he has a decidedly Mr. Burns quality about him. But as a chronicler of the media industry, its rise and its collapse, the guy is singular and clear-headed. (Call me a sap: I started to pay him slightly more mind after reading his heartbreaking essay about his aging mother in New York.)

In his essay detailing the decline of Time Inc. from “greatest magazine company in the history of the form” to “farce,” Woolf levels his gaze at several factors that led to that company’s downfall. He applies his trademark snarky criticism, of course. But what caught my eye was not just the utter truth of it, which I’ll get to in a moment, it’s that in it Wolff displays a stunning encyclopedic institutional knowledge that’s lacking in most news reporting on media, let alone specific news about this merger (or sale, or whatever we’re calling this new magazine company that will be run by Meredith with mostly Time Inc. titles). This essay is precisely the kind of media reportage that’s going the way of the dodo (or, more to the point, the way of print). I doubt Wolff had to look up a single fact in his piece. The knowledge probably rolled right out his head and into his fingertips; after all, the man has studied this industry, written about it and thought about it for decades.

Compare this with the latest garbage produced by…pretty much everyone these days. I’ve talked about David Carr’s pollyanna-ish views before. The entirely of Huffington Post’s media beat apparently consists of reprinting emails and press releases. Keith Kelly and Jeff Bercovici do a fair job not out-and-out fellating their media subjects most of the time, unlike some of their peers. But I can’t remember the last time either of them actually broke news, and I definitely don’t remember the last time Bercovici actually wrote anything controversial — or original, for that matter. This “article” about Tim O’Brien leaving the Huffington Post features zero original reporting; it’s just a republication of the internal email. Really? There’s nothing more to dig in on about the company’s allegedly “rule” that a person can’t both write a book and be on staff simultaneously? That’s a new one to me and everyone else in the industry, so there’s probably something else going on. Pick up a phone and call some people. This is called news reporting.

Back to Wolff’s piece, which doesn’t have a ton of original reporting either, but is instead an informed assessment of what Time Inc. was and could have been, followed by no small amount of anger and sadness about what it ultimately became — and even a bit of enthusiasm for the small life it might yet have left in it.

Even in the context of the general decline of the magazine business, Time Inc. warrants special shame and humiliation. Not long ago, it was America against the Italy and France of its two closest rivals, Conde Nast and Hearst. But then Time Inc. became the Soviet Union. Now it is likely to be taken over by Meredith. Meredith. From Des Moines. Which is, well, Iowa.

Wolff captures my experience of the Time Inc., and I’m sure everyone else’s who has worked there, too. It’s a frustration that we know these titles and their web presences are huge and influential, and we’re proud of them, but navigating through the “warring fiefdoms,” as he calls them, and “dysfunctional management” really take it out of you on a day-to-day basis, and that is why the company has stagnated and stalled — and finds itself in the position it does.

While vast resources and considerable brain power in the company were devoted to digital adaptation, the result was to do as little as possible while building as large a bureaucratic foundation as possible. I’m not sure there is any company that has spent so much time talking about its digital future to such little effect. This was farce on quite an amazing scale.

Wolff describes the “hopelessness and frustration” of editor-in-chief John Huey, and I assure you that trickles down.

Cuts became the constant norm. Quality disintegrated. Influence dissipated. The end of the company was all but certain. The raging hostilities within the enterprise made redemption or progress or a new idea or even good will impossible.

As soon as the world’s largest publisher hired an advertising executive instead of a publishing one to lead the company last year, it was obvious and inevitable that the company was headed toward oblivion. I know there are other factors at play, mostly macroeconomic ones — the ruinous economy, the dismal advertising climate, the digital (r)evolution. But it used to be that Time Inc. took pride in its ability to survive disaster. When I was there, I was bucked up more than once by the stories of the company surviving wars, catastrophes, the Depression. It seems hard to believe that what took down such a blue-chip publisher — with its own freakin’ building in midtown! — was…what? Banner ads and CPMs? Bureaucracy? Upping circ by lowering itself to the poor quality of its competitors? Bad decision making at high levels?

It’s a sad state of affairs. I guess this is what is meant by death by a thousand cuts. It’s too bad, because Time Inc. was always a beacon of quality and determination, a leader in the field. RIP. Which is a sentiment even the gimlet-eyed crank Michael Wolff can get behind.

Disclosure: I once worked at Time Inc. (obviously!) and at AOL.

Update: The Meredith deal fell through, and Time Warner announced March 7 that it plans to spin Time Inc. into an independent public company; current Time Inc. CEO Laura Lang will step down.

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RIP, EveryBlock

Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news start-up that used data to filter neighborhood news and spark discussion, has been shut down by its corporate overlord. Apparently, NBC News acquired it last year (which itself was news to me) but couldn’t find the business model to continue operating the site. That’s a common tale among hyperlocal news sites, but it still stings when one closes down.

It’s too bad — I think it had more going for it than many similarly themed sites — and its founder, Adrian Holovaty, seems shocked that the site has met its end. When he sold the site last year, he was proud of its success and confident in its future:

“EveryBlock users have used our service to accomplish amazing things in their neighborhoods: starting farmers markets, catching flashers, raising money for their community, finding/reporting lost pets…and generally getting to know their neighbors and forging community bonds. These days, something like this happens on the site nearly every day — which casual onlookers might not notice because of our long-tail, neighborhood-specific focus. EveryBlock has become a force for good, and it’s got a bright future.”

Sigh. I suppose it’s not particularly interesting that a start-up failed to locate a business strategy or that it didn’t “pivot” quickly enough to “disrupt” via its “MVP.” What is interesting about this case is that the site was a news-centric one that really challenged newsgathering tactics, asked questions about the use and display of public data and, in its small way, wrought lessons for the [cue horror-movie scream] Future of Journalism. It began, after all, as a recipient of a Knight Foundation grant.

Even more interesting is that it evolved so much over its short life (actually, wait, is six years long or short in technology?). When it began, it was just one news-tech guy’s realization that news should not be story-centric but instead should be gathered as structured data. He married the programmer’s philosophy of the separation of content and presentation with the journalist’s instincts for ever-better storytelling. Holovaty’s blog post from September 2006 is, in retrospect, both amusing and prescient. In it, he calls for parsing data and creating CMSes that support content types other than words, two notions that are laughably obvious six years later.

(On the flip side, also laughable are the mention of PDAs and the idea that tagging was “trendy.”)

Holovaty turned those 2006 idea germs into EveryBlock’s mapping and reporting functionality and, ultimately, he created a robust community around neighborhood news. The site put forth a notion of what the oft-dreaded Future of Journalism could be, or one version of it, anyway. It tried something new. It experimented. And the experiment did yield results; unfortunately, the conclusion was that this model might not be quite right.

In its sad and clearly hasty post today confirming the shutdown news, EveryBlock seems to acknowledge that it was a victim of the unforgiving pace of change in the online journalism industry:

“It’s no secret that the news industry is in the midst of a massive change. Within the world of neighborhood news there’s an exciting pace of innovation yet increasing challenges to building a profitable business. Though EveryBlock has been able to build an engaged community over the years, we’re faced with the decision to wrap things up.”

In short: “We tried. We’d like to keep trying, but trying doesn’t pay the bills.” And that’s too bad.

 

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