kontextmaschine

Oh also if you’re like “what is up with how newspapers used to have all these tiny little quips like in @yesterdaysprint?”

Before compositing software, matching the printed length of stories to the physical length of columns of type was a skilled craft, and the compositors kept little short squibs like these on hand as shims to fill a bit of unused white space.

Using your staff’s idle thoughts for this – which could be prepared ahead of time and deployed as needed – was cheaper than subscribing to wire reports and having rewriters chop interesting ones down to fit fresh each day, as better-resourced papers did.

(This was the origin of the journalist in-joke tradition of the “bus plunge” story, where every report of a bus tumbling off a mountainside road anywhere in the world would be run at some length, using the verb “plunge”)

An underappreciated thing about media moving from broadcast to a constantly measured internet is the end of “sweeps week” rhythm, where show viewership (and thus advertising rates) was measured one week every few months, such that in the weeks that it was, every show would try to juice its ratings with fanbait, special events, celebrity guest stars, arc climaxes, etc.

Huh, Matt Yglesias going indie again, that’s got potential.

Thinking about where exactly our media was at – as in, which mediums – in 2001 such that I heard about 9/11 via an Instant Message telling me to go turn on the TV

trickytalks:

kontextmaschine:

trickytalks:

kontextmaschine:

Like, you all realize there’s a schism in journalism and urban Democratic politics generally rn between younger leftist wokies and older moderate liberals who remember and appreciate the 90s “back to the city” resolution of the “urban crisis”, the Real Estate section is a property value-loving bastion of the latter, and all the last week’s “taxpaying professionals leaving NYC for the suburbs again” discourse was really the latter issuing a command to reign the former in, backed by a Sampson Option threat?

A command? AFAICT most people plan to move back to NYC when the pandemic ends, although that may take a year to a few years, so any effect on property value is likely temporary (and we may see a return to people owning condos instead of renting in the middle-end of the crisis, if interest rates stay low).

And what the hell “Sampson Option threat” are the older liberals considering? If they stop benefits young people and unemployed young professionals will be all the more likely to move back with their parents for lack of funds. Raising interest rates doesn’t matter because so few people want to go on the market in real estate right now anyway, both because property values in NY are actually remaining steady (so no one is panic-selling), and because open houses are a hassle and a risk, and so the market has moved to individual viewings, which are necessarily slower.

Will people move back from their second homes, or stay in a UWS that’s reverting back to Velvet Underground times? People that give off enough tax surplus to sustain the rest of the city’s expenses? That’s exactly what’s being questioned, and real estate is the conversation in NYC, and that’s part of the conversation now.

Like, cities and the Democratic Party don’t have unionized industry as an economic base anymore, if the gentry gets scared off and flee they collapse, worse than the 80s. Circulation numbers are good for selling ads and if the NY Times tripled its circulation by being the voice of a new socialist generation but lost the locals who read Westchester real estate ads and the national gentry lifestylers that would be an existential failure.

I’m saying most people plan to move back because that’s what they’re saying according to various polls. It’s certainly plausible that people will suddenly change their minds, but:

1) this only applies to young people, who are more mobile; families in NYC are probably already planning to stay because of school districts and the families already in the suburbs aren’t relevant to this consideration since they’re not moving out of NYC

2) most young people who decide to live in cities do so because they prefer city life, plenty of people like living by restaurants and shops and so on. They’re not going to stop having that preference just because city life is temporarily illegal.

idc

The idea through the urban crisis was young people would come to the city to have their youth and then have kids and move to the suburbs during their high-income years. (Like, an important part of Friends was that Ross was only still in the city cause his marriage fell through.) Youth who’re going to be wealthy don’t pay the bills.

Like, stay in NYC because school districts? Part of the 90s back-to-the-city thing was magnet schools and stuff that allowed people who could move to the suburbs to get an equivalent rich-white schooling experience and not. BdB starting to trim that is part of what they’re trying to stop.

Polls, feh. If they wanted to transmute quantitative to qualitative they should’ve had someone craft a narrative. But oh wait, all the real estate narrativecrafting, which can change cities and tame politics, is in the hands of the established moderates, and the upstart narrativecrafters that were trying to build hegemony don’t have a counter prepared, that’s the point.

Like, you all realize there’s a schism in journalism and urban Democratic politics generally rn between younger leftist wokies and older moderate liberals who remember and appreciate the 90s “back to the city” resolution of the “urban crisis”, the Real Estate section is a property value-loving bastion of the latter, and all the last week’s “taxpaying professionals leaving NYC for the suburbs again” discourse was really the latter issuing a command to reign the former in, backed by a Samson Option threat?

You know I think the circa say 2012 media property decision to be like “let’s recruit a new class of minority public intellectuals!… also, let’s filter them based on how good they are at getting hateclicks by trespassing against established norms!” had negative consequences

quoms:

Fox News Staffers Erupt: Bosses ‘Created a White Supremacist Cell’

Fox News is experiencing the same internal warfare as every other newsroom in America, which I guess isn’t shocking inasmuch as it fits into the broader pattern, but holy shit how did all of these people apply for jobs at Race-Baiting White Grievance Television Network and get hired and work there for years and somehow only now they’re catching on

Authors quit JK Rowling agency over transgender rights | JK Rowling | The Guardian

Well, it’s nice to remember that if American cultural intermediaries go wokemad and try to bottleneck control culture by boycotting anyone outside their cult there’ll be British outfits purged and toughened in the TERF wars waiting to grab that bag

Watching all the purged Deadspin-as-voice-of-a-downwardly-mobile-woke-professional-generation types as they notice their attempt to solidarity-boycott the new regime means that the new writers aren’t tied to that identity and the vibe’s drifting towards Barstool’s “Sports Radio Call-In Guys: The Next Generation” model

And as much as they screenshot and scorn, and commiserate, those guys are getting paid to write their thoughts into Kinja posts, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

To return to my recurring comparison of the timelines of GamerGate and the Dreyfus Affair, at this point Dreyfus is officially guilty but free after a second trial, still 6 years before he is officially exonerated and 8 before Zola is interred in the Panthéon

The Death of the Rude Press

As I said years ago, Nick Denton’s innovation was importing a vituperative British style of journalisticishness in place of the American postwar evenhanded-establishment Sulzbergerianism.

But that that venom only works as the basis of public discourse tempered by strict libel law and a sense of elite solidarity, that it’s all just a squabble among Oxbridge classmates jockeying for the top, you play your play and then clock out and have drinks together.

(America lacks the level of elite solidarity it needs for the alternation-of-absolute-power governance or cultural pillarization we’re developing either, but oh well)

And you know America does still have tabloidy, no-holds-barred journalism adapted from the British model! It has Murdoch’s Fox!

With GMG Union as like the granddaddy of this new media unionization wave

I’m not sure “all the Deadspinners quit at once” was the best option

Like if the contract was competent there was a “work to rule and make them grieve us out with benefits” option, right?

It might prove something to other private equity buyers of 2000s blogs so people no one will ever be in the position of again

Just the price they bought at and the return G/O offered as-is, you could’ve got a good Atlanta hotel instead

The real opportunity was being the Condé Nast/Time-Life that things condense around, to be the one that gets to scale up, and whats the point of scaling up with Hamilton Nolan’s “I H8 Capital” crew

You realize theyGawker sold at a discount for that, to people who calculated having to break the staff

kontextmaschine:

Splinter, the Gawker-alike the former Gawker Media portfolio whipped up to replace Gawker, is shutting down, because apparently the new private equity owners have more compelling uses for their resources than Hamilton Nolan’s project to agitate content workers against private equity

This leaves Deadspin’s “The Concourse” imprint for non-sports content as the clearest surviving heir to Gawker

And now the threatened boom is coming down, and G/O ownership is purging the non-sports stuff.

All the staffs are in rebellion, and they were first and biggest about digging themselves in with union contracts, so who knows how that goes, but I can’t picture their endgame. They drive value of ownership down to literally zero, reminding this generation of media and private equity enterprises that unions are fatal infections?

And then buy it for $1 and run it as a worker-owned co-op? They say they can make a real but non-astounding profit. But that’s with the Kinja publishing platform, with the brand names and URLs and back catalogs. With whatever physical or institutional infrastructure they built up (and the debt obligations that funded it). And that’d all be stripped off and sold as scrap.

They could restart from square one, but then they always could. They could’ve quit en masse and founded Square One Blog Network on any given day, using their own resources, or those of anyone willing to put resources in the hands of the “any resources put in our hands are ours forever to do anything we want with” people, but they haven’t yet.

kontextmaschine:

this tweet became 250% funnier when I learned she was Matt Yglesias’ ex from Harvard

I don’t think G/O (/Gizmodo Media) made any profit since it was Gawker Media, when it was making mid-1-digit millions a year, if you overlook the $140m judgement that crushed it

Splinter, the Gawker-alike the former Gawker Media portfolio whipped up to replace Gawker, is shutting down, because apparently the new private equity owners have more compelling uses for their resources than Hamilton Nolan’s project to agitate content workers against private equity

This leaves Deadspin’s “The Concourse” imprint for non-sports content as the clearest surviving heir to Gawker

Vox Media acquires New York Media (NY Mag and it’s associated verticals, mostly).

Better than Bustle and I can see it – Vox has no women’s brand, NY Mag had no sports, Grub Street can fold into Eater NY. The other brands round out Vox’s weaknesses (NYC-not-DC, the Verge stuff that never really caught)

Vox, of course, is kinda woke Millenials and unionized with WGA East, NY Mag is older media legacy unionized with NewsGuild and has since ‘16 been kinda toeing into the woke walkback, I do wonder how much of it was an acquihire that lets the money play the staffs off against each other, or at least broaden the possibility space.

kontextmaschine:

yo by picking a niche and owning it, rather than trying to be everything to everyone and maximizing for pageclicks in the open sea, Autostraddle might be the best webmag/vertical left standing

Earlier this year someone Facebook linked me their summer UFO revelations explainer and it was pretty good and I couldn’t see the lesbian angle at all, not even any Scully or Captain Marvel references

It was just like “huh, maybe I should check Autostraddle for random shit”. Like, I don’t consider Christian Scientists to have any particular in but the Christian Science Monitor was pretty good in its day

yo by picking a niche and owning it, rather than trying to be everything to everyone and maximizing for pageclicks in the open sea, Autostraddle might be the best webmag/vertical left standing

deleonism: