Winter 2020: What Now?

winter 2020

“Journalists should think of our work as part of an ecosystem of social services.”

—Darryl Holliday, p. 16

WHAT NOW?

Clio Chang on the rise of Substack

What now?

Abe Streep on a Colorado editor’s quest for public funds Maya Binyam on whether unions deliver racial equity Ruth Margalit on our post-newsroom future Julian Brave NoiseCat on the power of apocalyptic thinking

The press is forced to reimagine itself

Adam Piore on why we’re inundated by opinions Leah Sottile on the first responders of the Portland press Mary Retta on the influence of YouTube commentary Alex Norcia on a reformed hedge-funder backing metalhead media

WINTER 2020

801 Pulitzer Hall 2950 Broadway Columbia University New York, NY 10027

Jack Herrera on service journalism in Oakland

Maya Binyam • Julian Brave NoiseCat • Clio Chang • Jack Herrera • Darryl Holliday Ruth Margalit • Alex Norcia • Adam Piore • Mary Retta • Leah Sottile • Abe Streep

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EDITORIAL

DEAN, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL

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Steve Coll

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This issue of CJR is supported by the George Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism Fund at the New York Community Trust.

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cjr.org/join-us 888-425-7782 Vol. LIX, No. 3

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Contributors

Maya Binyam is a senior

Amanda Darrach is a

Ruth Margalit is an

Michael Rosenwald is

editor of Triple Canopy,

contributor to CJR and

Israeli writer. Her work

an enterprise reporter at

an editor of the New

a visiting scholar at the

has appeared in The New

the Washington Post.

Inquiry, and a lecturer

University of St Andrews

Yorker, the New York

in the New School’s

School of International

Times Magazine, and the

Leah Sottile is a

Creative Publishing

Relations.

New York Review of Books.

freelance journalist

program. Her writing

Jack Herrera is an

Alex Norcia is a

the Washington Post,

has appeared in The

independent reporter

freelance journalist

High Country News,

Nation, the New York

covering immigration,

who often writes about

the California Sunday

Times Magazine, New

refugees, Latinx issues,

labor and drug policy.

Magazine, the New

York, The New Yorker,

and human rights. His

He has been published

York Times, and several

and elsewhere.

work has appeared in

in the New York Times

other publications.

Politico Magazine, The

Magazine, The Nation,

She is the host of the

Julian Brave NoiseCat

Nation, and elsewhere.

Salon, and Vice, among

podcast Bundyville, a

is vice president of

Based in San Francisco,

other outlets. He was

two-time nominee for

policy and strategy

he is an Ida B. Wells

born and bred in New

the National Magazine

with Data for Progress;

Fellow with Type

Jersey, but is moving

Award. She lives in

narrative change

Investigations.

out west.

Portland, Oregon.

History Museum; and a

Darryl Holliday is a

Adam Piore is a

Abe Streep was a

fellow of the Type Media

journalist, participatory-

freelance magazine

recipient of the 2019

Center, NDN Collective,

media advocate, and

journalist and the

American Mosaic

and the Center for

media entrepreneur

author of The Accidental

Journalism Prize. He

Humans and Nature. His

based in Chicago. He’s

Terrorist (2012) and The

is writing a book about

work has appeared in the

the cofounder of and

Body Builders: Inside the

basketball in Montana

New York Times, The New

director of the news lab

Science of the Engineered

for Celadon Books.

Yorker, The Atlantic, and

at City Bureau​, a civic

Human (2017).

many other publications.

journalism nonprofit

and Critical Journalism

who has written for

director of the Natural

based on the South Side.

Clio Chang is a

Mary Retta is the education columnist

freelance reporter based

Savannah Jacobson is

at Teen Vogue and a

in Brooklyn. She writes

a contributor to CJR and

freelance writer for Vice,

about politics, culture,

a reporter and writer

The Nation, Bitch Media,

media, and more.

based in New York.

and other outlets.

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CJR

Table of Contents

6 Editor’s Note

By Kyle Pope

Field Notes

Features

10 The First Responders

By Leah Sottile

22

14 The Influencer Commentariat

By Mary Retta 16 Back to the Community

By Darryl Holliday 19 Apocalypse Then and Now

By Julian Brave NoiseCat

32 How Are We Feeling?

56 New Money

VISUAL ESSAY

80 Do It Yourself 106 End Note

WHAT WE’VE LEARNED

Amanda Darrach asked journalists for takeaways from the pandemic

5 30 44 55 78 94 104

Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system—or replicate the flaws of the old one?

By Clio Chang

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For Pueblo

DATA

The Substackerati

Nikil Saval Anne Helen Petersen David French Ed Yong Troy Closson Katharine Wilkinson Alicia Kennedy

What happened when John Rodriguez, a local publisher, sought public funding

By Abe Streep

46

Out of Nowhere What’s lost and won as newsrooms close for good

By Ruth Margalit

60

“ We need to radically

redefine who we are serving.”

Speaking with Tasneem Raja, editor in chief of The Oaklandside

By Jack Herrera

WINTER 2020

5

VOIC ES OF THE PA ND EM IC

What We’ve Learned The biggest issue facing the United States media is that it tends to be chauvinistic.

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Diversity Work Media companies haven’t made newsrooms inclusive. Can unions?

By Maya Binyam

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Ideal Filler The New York Times and the unending blizzard of takes

By Adam Piore

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Skin in the Game Enrique Abeyta, a former hedge-funder, goes all in on metalhead media

By Alex Norcia

We need writing about the rest of the world that takes the intellectual and cultural lives of people elsewhere seriously.

—Nikil Saval

Pennsylvania state senator–elect and journalist

ON THE COVER Illustration by Olivia Fields

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CJR

An industry in f lux EDITOR’S NOTE

AUTHOR

Kyle Pope

KYLE POPE

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W

HEN THE UNITED STATES entered the Great Recession, newsroom employment started to plummet. During the first half of 2009, more than a hundred papers closed; ten thousand news workers lost their jobs. In the years that followed, even after the economy picked up, outlets continued shedding reporters as digital media cut into the print advertising business and social networks replaced news organizations as aggregators of information. According to the Pew Research Center, since the recession hit, American newspaper jobs have fallen 51 percent.

In 2016, Donald Trump offered an uneasy reprieve; the more the press obsessed over him, it seemed, the higher the number of viewers and subscribers. The “Trump bump” brought news, and how it’s made, to the center of public interest. Some of the benefits—felt ­mainly by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and M ­ SNBC—trickled down to local newsrooms, but not enough. Through the Trump years, America’s newspapers continued to suffer. For every happy quarterly earnings report at a cable network, a community lost a star reporter, or an entire newsroom.

It was against that backdrop, early this year, that the corona­virus erupted. The spread of the pandemic has since killed close to two hundred and forty thousand Americans and cost some thirty million their jobs, including at least thirty-­six thousand people in the journalism industry. Some editors took pay cuts, others were laid off, and a few outlets shuttered. Reporters were cast out by the dozen. Now the winter is upon us, and the pandemic is worsening. The human costs will be severe, as will the stakes for news advertising revenue and subscriptions. Many small newsrooms received federal bailout money, but the prospect of another tranche is grim. It’s also mired in the politics of Washington, where Republicans could hold control of the Senate and Joe Biden is set to replace Trump—now a resentful, misinformation-­spewing lame duck.

Once January arrives and Trump leaves the White House, it’s likely that the subscription surges and record viewership enjoyed by the biggest newsrooms during his tenure will begin to recede. “­MSNBC and other outlets that thrived on resistance to Mr. Trump may see their audiences fade,” Ken ­Lerer, a veteran media investor and adviser, recently told Ben Smith, of the Times. The audience for Smith’s paper will also “cool off,” Lerer predicted. Most news organizations have little budgetary slack, which means that this painful year may soon turn over into another.

All of that is, in a sense, the bad news. But, of course, none of it is news at all. Across the country, journalism has been grappling with these challenges for years, even as many of us have been distracted

The journalism business must be rebuilt and reconceived.

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Our reinvention starts as the most noxiously anti-­press government in American history begins to wind down.

by the chaos coming from the Oval Office. We can now treat the situation as an opportunity. Our industry, one of critical public importance, needs to be rebuilt and reconceived. What do we want to keep, and what should we let go of? How should we think about story­telling and who gets to tell those stories? Where do we belong, and where should we go next?

T

his issue of CJR is a snapshot of an industry in flux, during a time in which we can mourn what’s lost and begin thinking of what we’re better off without. In columns, features, data, and images, we examine the media in transition.

A few key ideas emerge. First, the rise of the individual and the decline of institutions. Many of us would love to work for a big, stable company with hefty benefits, but companies like that don’t exist much anymore in journalism. Those that do are often beset by the troubles of any American institution—racism, sexism, inequity. Lately, more journalists are deciding to go independent. As ­Clio Chang reports in her profile of ­Substack, the result is a proliferation of emerging voices, who sometimes earn paychecks that dwarf what they could have made in a newsroom. But opportunity is never universal, as Chang writes; the people succeeding on their own are largely those who already rose to prominence within existing systems—on Substack, the most ­popular newsletters are primarily by conservative (or otherwise contrarian) white men. The same people tend to be the most comfortable working without a net. “Writing is often considered an individualistic enterprise, but journalism is a collective endeavor,” Chang observes. “And that is the paradox of Substack: it’s a way out of a newsroom—and the racism or harassment or vulture-­venture capitalism one encountered there— but it’s all the way out, on one’s own.” Others have found a home on

Twitter, as ­Leah ­Sottile describes in her piece on journalism’s “first responders,” and on ­YouTube, as ­Mary ­Retta writes: “Individuals with large followings and the time to devote to research are seizing the opportunity to challenge the dominance of mainstream outlets.”

We’re also seeing newsrooms re-­center themselves in their communities. As local newspapers have disappeared, media chains have consolidated coverage into regional hubs, which place reporters far away from the governments and institutions that demand their attention. A movement is growing to reestablish the bond between news outlets and their readers—and to shed some of ­journalism’s oldest tenets in the process.

“We’ve got to serve our community’s information needs,” ­Tasneem ­Raja, the editor of The Oaklandside, tells Jack ­Herrera, of her newsroom’s relationship to Oakland. For three months, Raja embarked on a series of listening sessions with artists, community organizers, healthcare practitioners, and business owners, asking them what they need from a local news site. Then she designed coverage around their answers. In a column based on his experience as a founder of­ City ­Bureau, a civic journalism nonprofit on Chicago’s South Side, ­Darryl ­Holliday

KYLE POPE

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describes the sense of mission he felt recently: “As I witnessed the collective efforts taking shape around me this summer, I considered, not for the first time, the role that journalists occupy in a community—and our failure to address the fundamental human needs within it,” he writes. “I wondered: What is the mutual aid equivalent for local news?”

Another recurring theme has been the strength of the organized and outspoken worker. Data from our colleagues at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the International Center for Journalists, who conducted an epic survey of news workers in the wake of the pandemic, shows a picture of a press that is professionally weary, yet determined.

That spirit has carried into newsrooms—at the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, and elsewhere— as journalists have confronted their managers about the exclusion of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color, in terms of bylines and for whom stories are written.

Many of those frustrations have existed for decades. What is different now, and is certain to carry into 2021, is the role of unions in codifying promises to “do better.” As M ­ aya ­Binyam writes, “In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, professionals spun calls for police abolition into stimuli for workplace redress.” News workers aimed to seize the moment while “bosses, compelled to do moral good but calculating the economic losses of a global pandemic, were caught in a crisis of indecision.” Unions, she continues, have made newsroom diversity a central plank of their negotiations. In her reporting, Binyam finds that persuading managers to commit to equity is no easy task.

We also need new ownership models. First came the news conglomerate, then the chain, then private equity and hedge funds. All are now struggling. The coming years will bring experimentation and new overlords. Some of the emerging power brokers have made themselves known, as ­Savannah ­Jacobson outlines in a graphic. “The media industry’s shift, from an advertising-­based business to one reliant on subscribers and benefactors, has critical implications for the form and veracity of coverage,” Jacobson writes. “In looking at who is investing in what, we can observe what seems most promising—and what risks sacrificing

journalistic independence.” Nonprofits will play an ever-­increasing role, and the notion of public funding for journalism—enjoyed, in the United States, by PBS, NPR, and the Corporation for Public ­ ­ Broadcasting—now looks increasingly appealing. Abe Streep profiles John ­Rodriguez, a local publisher in Pueblo, Colorado, who made the case to his town’s leaders that if journalism is a public service, it ought to be publicly funded. (“This isn’t just about news,” Rodriguez wrote them in an email. “Local media also drives the local economy.”) We can expect worker-­owned projects like Defector and Brick House to ­proliferate, though we’ll never entirely lose the hedge-­ funders, as Alex Norcia writes in his story about Project M, through which an ex–­finance guy is investing in his own niche market: metalheads.

The Trump era has tested, and largely ­broken, the idea that any newsroom, and indeed any reporter, can remain removed from the news. That may well be for the good, a shift toward transparency that acknowledges ­people’s subjectivity. At the same time, we’ve seen outlets publishing more commentary, as Adam Piore writes in his piece about the business of opinion journalism, led by the New York Times. “News is commoditized; ­outlets are desperate to stand out; opinionated analysis has become a crucial value proposition,” Piore finds. Sometimes, opinion ­writers establish deep connections with readers, enticing them to pay for news; other times, when the takes are incendiary, offensive, or baseless, they have the opposite effect.

There’s much more, including the literal transition from newsroom life to remote work.

As Ruth ­Margalit reports, “Just as ­newspapers once erred in thinking that online journalism meant simply transferring print articles to the Web, a report by the ­International News Media Association finds that mastheads are in danger of assuming that ‘remote news operations can thrive with a simple shift of where desks are located.’ ” We have a lot of adjusting to do.

Now is the time to move on from Trump and address journalism’s greatest challenges. And so, as the most noxiously anti-­press government in American history begins to wind down, our reinvention starts. The ­revitalization of the press is sure to consume the nation—as it will be both covered and lived by the people who chronicle it. cjr

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Field Notes FROM THE FRONT LINES

SOCIAL MEDI A

The First Responders

By Leah Sottile

ILLUSTRATOR

Mengxin Li

T

UCK WOODSTOCK WANTED TO HELP. It was late spring in Portland, Oregon, where Black Lives Matter demonstrations were growing by the night. Woodstock, who is twenty-eight, is a freelance reporter and the host of Gender Reveal (“A podcast about what the heck gender is”). At home, they were scrolling through a nonstop feed of tweets from local journalists who were covering the scene downtown. It seemed intense. “I was worried about them and wanted them to sleep,” Woodstock said. So they sent a message to a couple of reporters from the Portland Mercury, an alt-­weekly: “Can I tweet for you for a night, and you can take the night off?”

The Mercury jumped on the offer—the newsroom was short on staff, having temporarily laid off half of its employees at the outset of the pandemic. Woodstock, who has written for Portland Monthly, Bitch, and the Washington Post, was hired to livetweet from the streets for “five-ish” days. What Woodstock saw was largely peaceful, if at times chaotic; the protests had drawn the attention of the Trump administration, which deemed the city an “anarchist jurisdiction” and sent in federal officers. “I wanted to be out there every night,” Woodstock told me. The Mercury couldn’t make the gig permanent, but Woodstock kept showing up anyway, posting updates on Twitter. They sought compensation via Venmo, Cash App, and PayPal donations.

And if followers didn’t use those apps? “Buy me Taco Bell,” Woodstock would say.

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One night became ten, then twenty, forty.

Federal officers were grabbing protesters off the streets and throwing them in unmarked vans.

More people poured in to join the uprising; national reporters helicoptered from all over the country. In late August, when a drive-by rally of Trump supporters faced off against anti-racist protesters, a self-professed antifascist shot and killed a man (the shooter was later killed by federal authorities). Ted Wheeler, Portland’s mayor, traded barbs with Trump via press conference and, of course, Twitter. All the while, people like Woodstock chronicled the events, as members of an emerging alternative, independent media almost exclusively serving social platforms. Some of these protest reporters were laid-off journalists who had lost jobs in Portland’s shrinking newsrooms. There were a number of freelance podcasters and documentarians. Others were simply people who’d picked up a camera and found themselves in the right place at the right time.

None earned a regular paycheck or benefits. Several were arrested or beaten by police.

It wasn’t citizen journalism, exactly. The coverage was nonstop, attentive. Few of the reporters posting directly to social media delved deeper than what was happening on the streets, how­ ever; they seemed to be conscious that their audience didn’t require that of them. Their followers checked in to receive bits of information and short videos directly from accounts they trusted; the trust was earned through consistent presence.

Allissa Richardson—the author of a recent book, Bearing Witness While Black, about activists whose journalism careers were kick-started by witnessing police brutality and providing accounts using smartphones and social networks—calls these livestreamers the “first responders” of media.

“A first responder stabilizes the patient, gets the patient to the hospital, and a doctor would say, ‘I’ll take it from here,’ ” she told me. “That’s the way we have to look at journalism.”

Richardson, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, first came to appreciate the power of this work in 2014, after a white police officer named Darren Wilson shot a Black teenager named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. “It was the first time I got news from a nontraditional source,” she said. This year, as the demonstrations in Portland attracted national attention and stretched on for months, she found herself drawn to social

CJR

”A first responder stabilizes the patient, gets the patient to the hospital, and a doctor would say, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ That’s the way we have to look at journalism.”

media accounts like Woodstock’s. “I’m not learning from the highly paid reporters,” she said.

Still, Richardson understood that her preferred form of coverage involved great personal risk: “People who do this kind of witnessing are putting their bodies in harm’s way. They’re opening themselves up to state violence or harassment.”

As the summer wore on, Portland became a test case for how sustainable first-responder journalism could be. By July, Woodstock was growing weary of covering a story that demanded constant focus in exchange for little money. Even more, they were starting to question what longterm personal effects their labor might have.

“I’m not getting a paycheck from this. I’m not getting healthcare from this,” Woodstock said.

“I’m not getting bylines. I’m just out on Twitter dot com. No one has my back for my personal safety.” At one point, they saw a federal officer fire a sponge-tipped bullet directly at the head of a protester. Woodstock was horrified. “This stuff is extremely bad for my mental health.”

A

s a freelance journalist who calls Portland home and often covers protests, I was enthralled by the ongoing demonstrations and found myself equally intrigued by the first-responder reporters at the scene.

Encountering people like Woodstock, I found that those consistently putting themselves in danger to provide the best accounts of the scene were, by and large, the same people whose identity made them most vulnerable to violence at the hands of the state and society. They were also people who, because of their age, race, education, or identity, tended to face barriers to jobs at legacy media outlets. “I left the newsroom because I was the only person who was trans, and I was one of the only people there that wasn’t white—I couldn’t tolerate that environment anymore,” Woodstock told me. But the first-responder crowd was more inclusive. “Of the freelancers out there covering the protests on a nightly basis,” Woodstock said, “there are a number of folks of color; there is a disproportionately high number of trans people, women, and queer people.”

Woodstock was one of the few first-­responder journalists in Portland whose coverage made national news: they sold a story to Bon Appétit, on a mutual-aid barbecue kitchen called Riot Ribs that became a fixture of the protests; they appeared on radio programs. Another person

M E N GX I N L I

LEAH SOTTILE

who broke through was Sergio Olmos, a thirtyyear-old freelancer; all summer, I woke up and went to sleep to his Twitter feed. Olmos was unflinching—he captured nearly every night of the demonstrations, shooting videos of officers delivering bar-brawl punches and jump-kicking karate-style into a line of protesters with shields; he filmed clashes in which far-right groups pulled guns on leftists. The New York Times picked up Olmos as a stringer. He was thrilled by the chance—but still, he felt like an outsider. “My parents are immigrants—they came here with no guarantees of anything,” Olmos told me. “We understand that in this country, there is a need for people who are willing to do jobs and not get health insurance, but they’ll pay you because it needs to be done. We’ll take those jobs.” In August, a group of some twenty local journalists began chatting in a grouptext thread, which they called the Portland Press Corps. Collectively, they agreed not to sell stories to any outlet below a certain rate. Financing their presence in the streets was paramount. “We don’t eat clout,” Olmos said, “and none of us give a shit about clout.”

Still, everyone felt captive to social media, especially Twitter.

The hope seemed to be what it always is: that a high enough follower count might lead to a big break—maybe a job with health insurance. In the span of a couple of months, Woodstock saw their audience on Twitter grow from four thousand to forty-four thousand. That was nice, but no career-­changing offer came. And in the meantime, the setup felt exploitative—Woodstock would tweet, giving away hard work, and make virtually nothing in return, which only kept rich tech people rich; social media engagement is, ultimately, worth more to the bottom lines of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg than to any individual reporter. Not all those new followers were fans, either. “Twenty-five percent of my followers are right-wing people who are hate-­following me,” Woodstock said. “There’s a really significant percentage of people who hate my work and that’s why they’re following, for some reason.”

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Andrew ­DeVigal, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, told me that the Portland protests demonstrated the need to build better relationships between newsrooms and independent reporters. Olmos and Woodstock and all the other firstresponder journalists were eyes on an essential story. They also had to pay rent. ­DeVigal pointed out how outlets, too, are at a loss when stories emerge that they’re ill-­equipped to cover quickly with the staff resources at hand. Why not formalize mutually beneficial arrangements, then, with these reporters? “These independent journalists need attorneys, insurance, equipment,” D ­ eVigal said. “These struggling newsrooms—which is everyone—can actually get great content and they can work with these on-the-ground observers that have built trust and recognition.”

F

irst-responder journalists have more to worry about than money, of course. Throughout the summer, freelancers covering the demonstrations in Portland, and elsewhere, had to justify their presence at impossible moments. When a reporter from the Portland Tribune and a photographer from The Oregonian were roughed up by police, Mayor Wheeler posted on Twitter that the incidents were “extremely concerning.” But Rachel Alexander, head of the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, was incredulous. There had been numerous cases of officers chasing down and assaulting people who were documenting the protests. “Suddenly the mayor seems really concerned,” she told Oregon Public Broadcasting.

“Prior to this, mostly what we documented was happening with freelance reporters.” Attorneys for the federal government said it was all a misunderstanding, since officers couldn’t differentiate who was and wasn’t a journalist. The trouble was that press credentials don’t get issued to people like Woodstock (or me), who operate independently and float around different beats. A federal judge offered a suggestion: What if the American Civil Liberties Union issued vests to journalists signifying that they were press? The idea didn’t pan out.

(Instead, it raised more questions: “Why are police beating up anyone?” Miya Williams Fayne, an

Those putting themselves in danger to report from the scene were, by and large, the same people whose identity made them most vulnerable to violence.

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assistant professor at California State University, Fullerton, wondered aloud to me. “It’s a problem if you’re a journalist or not.”)

By the time fall rolled around, Woodstock was nursing a non-protest-related injury and realized that they had to take a break. The risk of getting hurt at the protests had become too great for a solo documentarian; even colleagues with institutional affiliation were plastering their heads, chests, and backpacks with press in big white letters, for fear of being attacked. “I went out there to fill a void,” Woodstock said. “Now, consistently, the crowd at protests is half demonstrators, half press, medics, and legal observers.”

Sure enough, when Woodstock stopped showing up in the streets, the donations ceased. “I was doing it as a service to people,” they said. “I could

have definitely spent way more time pitching to outlets…or chasing the biggest bylines that I could.

Or trying to make more money off my videos. I didn’t do that, because I wasn’t there to further my career.”

Fortunately, Woodstock has had other work to fall back on for income—the podcast, as well as a business consulting newsrooms on trans and queer equity. The first-responder journalism work served its purpose, and maybe they’ll return to the scene later, if there’s a need. (It’s a form of journalism that is, by definition, unpredictable.) Woodstock will be around to observe what must be seen, and isn’t widely shown, wherever it comes up. “The reason that I am in journalism,” they said, “is to try to center voices that, thus far, have not been adequately centered.” cjr

YOU TUBE

The Influencer Commentariat

I

N SEPTEMBER 2018, Tiffany Ferguson, a twenty-five-year-old college student and YouTube personality with more than six hundred thousand subscribers, sat down in her bedroom, ready to record. She wore a navyand-red turtleneck sweater; her blond hair was tied into messy braids. Typically, she used her channel for in-depth “story times” detailing random events from her day. But on this occasion, she told subscribers, her video would be different. “I have a little bit of something to say about the YouTube algorithm and the role of rapidly rising creators,”

she said. Ferguson then launched into a thirteenminute meditation on internet fame, algorithmic bias, and the importance of relatability to an influencer’s success. She reported information gleaned from Social Blade, a social media analytics tracker, and offered her interpretation of the facts. “That’s my two cents: thoughts on the YouTube algorithm and seventeen-year-olds that I can still relate to,” Ferguson said. “I’m not that old.” The video was an instant hit (it now has more than four hundred thousand views) and inspired her to change direction. She launched a new series, “Internet

M E N GX I N L I

By Mary Retta

M A RY R E T TA

Analysis,” in which she discusses all things politics and culture: “girlboss” feminism, reality television, internet virality. Each installment has attracted more than a hundred thousand fans.

Ferguson is one of many stars on “commentary YouTube,” also known as ­LeftTube. In some cases, the creators, as they’re known, address a wide range of topics. Other channels are niche: “Ask a Mortician” talks about death, mortality, and the funeral home business; D’Angelo Wallace gives his take on intra-­YouTube drama; “Ready to Glare” covers Twitter policies, cults, and mental health. Not every video is tied to the news cycle, but commentary YouTube will ground the subject at hand in relevant cultural and political analysis. There’s a disquisition on “cancel culture,” an explainer on Marxism, a diagnosis of the controversy surrounding the film Cuties. That last post received more than two million views.

It’s no wonder these videos are popular; most Americans now prefer to watch rather than read their news. And, according to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, 26 percent of adults get their news from YouTube, with the majority of that cohort saying that the platform represents an important means by which they stay informed.

Individuals with large followings and the time to devote to research are seizing the opportunity to challenge the dominance of mainstream outlets. It’s a young crowd: the creators and audience members in the commentary-­YouTube orbit are typically no older than thirty. Ferguson normally spends about a week preparing before she sits down to record; in the final cut, she comes across as effortlessly approachable. “I don’t want to shy away from politics—I think my videos come from a leftist perspective, but I’m not as overt in making political commentary in every video,” she told me. “Because my channel is more accessible, people who maybe aren’t as engaged with news or politics can get inspired by my videos to do more research on these topics because I’m using more casual language and style.”

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or written articles, freelance journalists make, on average, around twenty cents per word. Depending on the number of ads and other factors, a twenty-five-minute YouTube video that garners a hundred and fifty thousand views might deliver its creator $580; for three million views, the sum may be closer to $6,800.

Kimberly Foster, the thirty-one-year-old behind a YouTube channel called “For Harriet,” told me

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Most Americans now prefer to watch rather than read their news.

that, as her audience swelled, she quit contributing to publications like The Guardian and HuffPost to focus on her LeftTube career. “I get to be much freer and use colloquialisms,” she said. “When I was writing, I felt more like ‘Stuffy Kim.’ But when I’m just talking to the camera, it’s more like ‘Free Kim’—I know how I’m going to present topics and what facial expressions I’m going to use when I say certain things. I know I can approach political topics with rigor but still be accessible.”

“For Harriet” videos include a historical look at how enslaved women’s bodies contributed to modern gynecology and discussions of colorism and prison abolition from a Black feminist perspective; Foster also posted a review of the movie version of Cats, from 2019. (“I want to be fair,” she joked to viewers. “I want to make sure everybody gets the blame that they deserve.”) Her analysis is of a kind that’s largely lacking on YouTube; in June, Black contributors filed a racism lawsuit, alleging that the company systematically removed their videos without explanation. (“Our automated systems are not designed to identify the race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation of our creators or viewers,” a YouTube spokesperson said at the time; it’s also true that algorithms are often racist.) Speaking one’s mind can be tricky, given the opacity of YouTube’s monetization system, in which creators may not be paid for overtly leftist material. The result, especially for Black YouTubers, can often be financial insecurity.

But Foster has found alternative ways to fund her work. “I never wanted to be in the position where a social media platform changes the algorithm and does not allow me to make an income,” she told me. “So around the time that websites like The Atlantic and the New York Times started relying more on digital subscriptions, I knew I would need to start relying on my audience in the same way.” A few years ago, she started a Patreon. “It’s honestly changed the game for me,” Foster said. She has more than thirty-three hundred patrons, who pay between $2 and $50 per month for extra videos and podcasts—it’s a steady living. Other creators have done the same, with even more impressive results: “ContraPoints,” focusing on leftist politics and LGBTQ stories, has more than twelve thousand backers on Patreon who contribute between $2 and $20 per month. “Now I don’t care if YouTube demonetizes my videos,” Foster told me. “I can make whatever content I want without censoring myself.”

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ser-funded video channels seem like an exciting premise: direct support of your favorite YouTube star.

But it’s an intense relationship, and one that complicates the dynamic between commentator and news consumer: you’re not subscribing for vetted journalism; what you get are hot takes. David Craig, a clinical associate professor of communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, told me that watching commentary YouTube can distort viewers’ perception of information: “You could argue that on YouTube, it’s less about what’s being said and more how it’s being said.” Loyalties develop, and opinions harden.

For YouTubers who fund their videos through Patreon, there’s an added incentive to keep viewers happy—and they might feel inclined to target their coverage to fans’ tastes. The echo chamber includes other media, too: YouTubers also function as influencers, carrying their followings to Instagram and Twitter, where they promote themselves and engage with audience members. Critical distance is impossible—and intentionally unwelcome.

“I think the appeal of commentary YouTube is being able to find a personality you like, maybe someone you would want to be friends with, and then be able to listen to them geek out about stuff you find interesting and can learn from,” Ferguson told me.

The stars of commentary YouTube are part role model, part journalist, part friend—they help you keep up with the news in a way that’s easily understandable and fun.

Void of that old-fashioned newspapery pretext of objectivity, commentary YouTube caters to a young audience whose members, well acquainted with the spoils of the internet, are seeking human connection. Their favorite videos can become their primary means of engagement with the news. “I’m definitely drawn to the personality of the YouTubers I watch, in addition to their content,” Yasemin Losee, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student and avid viewer of channels like “Ready to Glare” and “ContraPoints,” told me. “I look for creators who share similar morals to mine or who I could engage with on an intellectual level—and it also doesn’t hurt if we even have the same aesthetic.” cjr

CJR

MU TUAL AID

Back to the Community

By Darryl Holliday

T

HIS SPRING, AS THE coronavirus ravaged the United States, mutual aid groups proliferated.

In Chicago, where I live, I watched businesses close and people suddenly lose their jobs. I saw “essential workers,” mostly Black and brown folks from the city’s South and West Sides, taking the bus to fulfill their duties at the peak of the pandemic. I saw our county jail become the nation’s largest known source of covid-19 infections, even as up to a fourth of those incarcerated were there on low-level offenses, because they couldn’t afford to pay their bond. At the same time, governments and medical institutions became overwhelmed, and I saw neighbors spring into action to meet the needs of their communities. These self-organized networks distributed masks and medical supplies, delivered groceries and packages, provided child and elder care, and transferred cash. Groups of clergy members, death doulas, therapists, social workers, and healers offered mourning support for those who had lost loved ones.

The rise of mutual aid solidarity networks has resulted from untenable economic disparity and social breakdown. That should tell journalists something we badly need to hear: when government and civic institutions fail to provide equal benefits across society, marginalized people will create new systems.

The news industry is no exception. Black Lives Matter Chicago, in an August report on police violence committed against

M E N GX I N L I

D A R R Y L H O L L I D AY

protesters, put it bluntly: “We have to be our own media.” Their words underlined the fact that the dominant system of information-­sharing in place in this country is badly broken.

Journalists tend to think of themselves as individual talents; driven by their own intrepid instincts, they find and uncover the stories of others. Instead, we should think of our work as one element within an interconnected ecosystem of social services. Imagine the scene of a fatal shooting, a single tragedy that involves numerous actors: first responders arrive, families grieve, organizers launch crowdfunding efforts, insurance companies assess costs, funeral services inter the dead, academics produce reports on firearm registration, government officials write crime-­prevention laws, schools ban (or increase) the presence of guns. Meanwhile, the media tells a story that’s detached from this ecosystem—using generic details and a mug shot, both provided by police. These breaking-­ news articles are produced quickly, written to maximize attention, and designed to compete with similar stories from other outlets to be first, not necessarily useful. This approach to journalism—top-down, focused on individuals and events isolated from context—doesn’t serve readers: it skews the public perception of resource-­starved communities, diminishes systemic harms by centering individual actions, and values institutional authority and expert opinion over the people for whom the stakes are highest.

In addition, the press tends to represent communities unevenly. In Chicago—where I cofounded City Bureau, a nonprofit newsroom focused on local civic journalism—there is a stark difference in residents’ news experiences based on where they live. According to a survey of nine hundred Chicagoans conducted in 2018 by City Bureau and the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement, people living on the South and West Sides were twice as likely as their North Side and downtown neighbors to think that coverage

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of their community was too negative; they were more likely to think that news coverage quotes the wrong people; they were more likely to feel that local media does not accurately depict what’s going on in their midst; and they were more likely to have never talked to a journalist. According to one recent estimate, the South Side and the West Side are only 10 percent white; the North and downtown are 50 percent white. In a survey of the majority of the coverage by twenty-­one Chicago news organizations, conducted over two weeks in February 2019 by the Center for Media Engagement, 90 percent of outlets referred to locations on the North Side and in downtown areas of the city, yet just 19 percent mentioned the South Side and only 5 percent mentioned the West Side. When the West Side was covered, it was more frequently mentioned in stories about crime. Across the country, the American Society of News Editors’ diversity survey has shown again and again that newsrooms do not reflect the communities they serve. One revealing benchmark: of the newsrooms polled in asne’s 2019 survey, only a handful with twenty-five or more staffers met or exceeded parity in representation of people of color as compared with the communities they cover.

In the coming months and years, as each community in the US navigates four interrelated crises—systemic racism, a global pandemic, economic depression, and ecological disaster— journalism will need to adapt. As I witnessed the collective efforts taking shape around me this summer, I considered, not for the first time, the role that journalists occupy in a community—and our failure to address the fundamental human needs within it. I wondered: What is the mutual aid equivalent for local news?

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merica has a long history of mutual aid efforts. After successive epidemics struck San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century, Chinatown mutual aid societies built the Tung Wah Dispensary (known

Journalists should think of our work as part of an ecosystem of social services.

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today as the Chinese Hospital), the first medical facility serving a Chinese community in the continental United States. In the following decades, sociedades mutualistas in the American Southwest provided healthcare, insurance funds, education, and workforce advocacy for the Mexican-­ American communities that needed them. As Jessica Gordon N ­ embhard, a political economist, writes in her book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, mutual aid movements in the Black community endured from before the Civil War to the present day. “Freedmen and enslaved alike formed mutual-­aid, burial, and beneficial societies, pooling their dues to take care of their sick, look after widows and children, and bury their dead,” Nembhard writes.

In the absence of professional journalism— in so-called news deserts across the country— critical information systems are left to the algorithmic biases of a few social media giants.

Dig further, though, and you’ll find block club newsletters, school newspapers, library workshops, public access broadcasts, grassroots community teach-ins, and barbershop conversations that are for and of communities. Mutual aid efforts suggest a way forward, a new type of newsroom that serves as the nerve center for local information hubs by reflecting and connecting the people it serves, prioritizing lived experience and disavowing the notion of objective gatekeeping. These newsrooms will redistribute journalism skills away from selective and expensive higher-­education programs and to the public. They will collaborate with nontraditional news sources to reduce a scarcity of resources exacerbated by competition. They will democratize the news industry by providing more access to decision-­making processes.

These newsrooms will do away with heroes and hierarchies by sharing the responsibility of shaping how news and information are created and distributed. And this new newsroom can’t come soon enough: since 2008, half of all newsroom jobs at papers in the US have been lost, while the need for accurate, trustworthy information rises.

Some newsrooms have already remade themselves. My workplace, for instance, is inspired by mutual aid organizers and principles. Founded by four people—a reporter, an editor, a publisher, and an educator—City Bureau now has thirteen staff members who run three year-round

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Mutual aid efforts suggest a way forward, a new type of newsroom that serves as the nerve center for local information hubs.

programs: Our Public Newsroom event series has hosted more than a hundred and thirty workshops that highlight community voices.

Our Documenters program is a participatory media network composed of local partners and hundreds of nonprofessional reporters in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit who are trained and paid to attend public meetings and report on policy decisions using a centralized hub for government data. Our paid reporting fellowship has trained over a hundred journalists—mostly journalists of color new to the field—who collaboratively create community-­centered news and go on to work in local media. Our network isn’t limited to traditional journalists; it includes organizers, artists, teachers, librarians, students, parents, and many others.

We’re not alone in building newsrooms that are integrated into local ecosystems. Outlier Media, a nonprofit in Detroit, provides what it calls “service journalism on demand”: city residents can text questions directly to journalists in English, Spanish, and Arabic about subjects including food, jobs, health, schools, housing, taxes, and utilities. The Devil Strip, a free arts and culture news publication started in Akron, Ohio, in 2015, is the country’s first community-­ owned local news cooperative. Canopy Atlanta, an online news organization that launched in fall 2020, has built a community advisory board in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood to shape coverage reported by Canopy journalists as well as West End community members. These local news hubs tend to be smaller and fewer compared to what the public is accustomed to, but they operate with a set of values that encourages networked collaboration, resource-­sharing, diverse representation, and new opportunities within their local ecosystems.

To survive the upheaval of 2020, journalists must relearn much of what we know. Confronting the existential issues shaping our world requires the creation and distribution of quality information—not simply a journalism degree.

A healthy and democratic future demands that the skills journalists possess be distributed among many—not bestowed on a select few.

The journalists we need today are not heroic observers of crisis—they are conveners, facilitators, organizers, educators, on-demand investigators, and community builders. Most of all, they strengthen the systems that make communities resilient. cjr

J U L I A N B R AV E N O I S E C AT

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CR ISIS REP ORTI NG

Apocalypse Then and Now

By Julian Brave NoiseCat

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N MARCH 2019, HUFFPOST sent me to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota, to cover the work of an affordable-­housing program. My editors had a particular story in mind, and so I was dispatched to source the material to write it. The article would be a piece of “solutions journalism,” positive in outlook and neatly framed, part of a philanthropically funded series called “This New World.” My assignment letter included potential headlines: “How The Poorest County In The U.S. Is Solving The Housing Crisis”; “How The Poorest County In The U.S. Is Breaking The Poverty Cycle.”

But a week before I arrived in Pine Ridge, a different story began to unfold. The reservation was pummeled by a blizzard. Gusts reached seventy miles per hour. The snowbank along the highways towered over the cars driving past. Then the storm became a bomb cyclone, the snow melted, and the reservation’s creeks overflowed.

Pine Ridge sits on plains that are typically arid, so these extreme weather events were unusual—a

result of shifting jet streams and increasing ocean evaporation driven by climate change. They were also catastrophic. Roads became impassable, cutting families off from medicine, food, and outside assistance. Water lines across the reservation broke, depriving eight thousand people of drinking water. At least four deaths were reported.

Amid the flooding, I drove all over the reservation to survey the damage, eventually arriving at Wounded Knee, site of the infamous 1890 massacre and 1973 American Indian Movement occupation. I parked and trudged up a small hill, the mud pulling at the heels of my boots. At the top was a mass grave of one hundred forty-six Lakota. Feeling the weight of this solemn place, I was compelled to offer a prayer. Lingering awhile at the peak, I watched residents of a nearby housing development walk along the highway to the closest post office to collect rations from the National Guard. I checked Twitter and learned that Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, had driven onto the reservation with a convoy of military vehicles carrying potable water. She was not welcome. Just two weeks earlier, Noem

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had passed a bill that held protesters opposing projects like the Keystone XL oil pipeline liable for what the state called “riot boosting.” (The Oglala were among the tribes opposed to the pipeline and the bill.) Here before me, in one scene, were the interlocking forces of genocide, ecological apocalypse, resistance, and repression—the imperial roots of the climate crisis and their colonial fallout.

After my visit to Wounded Knee, I could not in good conscience write the story that my HuffPost editors had assigned. A fifteen-­hundred-word article treating the housing program as a worthy but isolated effort felt like a betrayal of the material I had gathered on the ground. As an Indigenous journalist, I decided the only appropriate way to tell a story like this was to simultaneously hold in frame poverty, climate change, and resilience, and to layer all this on the history of colonization, settlement, and genocide—one apocalypse on top of another.

To be Indigenous to North America is to be part of a postapocalyptic community and experience.

Indigenous journalists have always grappled with earth-­shattering stories: either as historical background to current events or in the deep despair of the still-­unfolding legacy of Indigenous dispossession, displacement, and death that brought nations like the United States and Canada into being. This perspective tests the limits of journalism, asking reporters to cover marginalized subjects unfamiliar to most readers with an eye on the people, histories, and systems buried and erased by colonization—all without losing the thread of the narrative.

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got my start in journalism through a fellowship covering Indian Country for HuffPost.

The challenge of the beat was to turn stories about an invisible people into news. I generally employed two strategies. The first was to work from a timely headline. “Fight For Marriage Equality Not Over On Navajo Nation,” I wrote, the week after the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges. The second was to jujitsu ignorance into curiosity. One of my most-read articles was “13 Issues Facing Native People Beyond Mascots And Casinos,” with the clickbait subhead “These are the problems you’re not hearing enough about.”

These two approaches succeeded in attracting readers, but neither felt adequate. The former forced Indigenous stories into existing media

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“The forms and styles that are dominant in journalism practice don’t always allow us to get at the historical context that is vital.”

narratives. The latter hinged on disproving misconceptions or explaining unknowns, implicitly re-­centering a colonial perspective. I knew there were complicated and emotional stories afoot in Indian Country, and those were the stories I desperately wanted to tell. Yet they felt much bigger than my beat and my skill set at the time. In the years since, as a freelance writer, I’ve tried to hone my craft so my journalism can rise to the challenge of my subjects.

This is the premise from which journalism begins: the assumption that well-trained reporters can go out into the world, gather up the facts, and shape that material into narrative and argument. Indigenous stories test the limits of this enterprise. They require journalists to draw upon centuries of history, elucidate structures of annihilation, and build trust with people who have learned to be wary of misrepresentation. The task feels almost ludicrous, like balancing a skyscraper atop a tiny plinth.

When you consider a news market in which few consumers are seeking Indigenous media and would rather spend their leisure hours with the New York Times or HBO, it feels nearly impossible. Kyle Whyte, a Citizen Potawatomi philosopher and professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, described the challenge facing Indigenous journalists succinctly: “In the space of a short piece that’s widely accessible, how do you write in a way that includes a structural analysis and a sense of history that many readers don’t initially understand?”

For insight, I called Candis Callison, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism and a member of the ­Tahltan people. She described her preferred approach as “systems journalism”—a methodology that treats news items not as isolated events but as “windows into what’s happening in underlying systems and structures.” The narratives we tell about our past and present delineate possible avenues for future action, Callison said. She urges journalists to consider how white and colonial perspectives frame our current society as normative and permanent, erasing the history of genocidal colonialism that brought us here. Systems journalism often brushes up against established methods, however. “The forms and styles that are dominant in journalism practice,” Callison told me, “don’t always allow us to get at the historical context that is vital.”

J U L I A N B R AV E N O I S E C AT

As a model, Callison pointed to the work of Tanya Talaga, an Anishinaabe journalist. Talaga, a former investigative reporter at the Toronto Star, is the author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which examines the deaths of seven First Nations youths in the town of Thunder Bay, Ontario. To tell stories about immense pain and loss, Talaga developed close relationships with her sources, many of whom she keeps in touch with today.

“Be careful, be kind, be respectful, and listen,” she said. “There’s nothing worse than being one of those journalists who crashes in and out of a community, takes a story and leaves.”

That last point is vital. When I called up ­Waubgeshig Rice, a member of the ­Wasauksing First Nation who produced broadcast and radio pieces for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for fourteen years, he said something similar. “White journalists assigned to Indigenous or marginalized communities think about the story until the end of the workday,” he told me. While they might be empathetic, their relationship to the story is different. “You get to go home where you’re comfortable and white and it’s not there anymore. It’s not there until the next time you’re assigned to one of those stories.”

CBC segments often adhered to a formula, Rice added: In the morning he’d get an assignment.

Then he’d do research, schedule interviews, and head out to record. He’d do two or three interviews, shoot relevant visuals, write, edit, and go live at six o’clock. That experience, he explained, sometimes pushed him into uncomfortable situations; he’d be asked to go into Indigenous homes and communities, extract a story, and be ready to air by evening. “The nature of broadcasting conflicts directly with our old ways of telling stories,” Rice told me.

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ecently, I picked up Moon of the Crusted Snow, Rice’s dystopian novel. In the book, a mysterious apocalyptic downturn has led to a mass blackout, bringing the formal economy to a halt. Evan Whitesky, a traditional hunter, and his Anishinaabe community find themselves uniquely prepared for these events. This is a new spin on an old idea in Indigenous literature—the notion that Indigenous peoples are survivors. Gerald Vizenor, an Ojibwe literary critic, calls this “survivance.” It’s an intriguing idea— one that could bring Natives from the forgotten margins to the center of the humanities in an era of apocalyptic circumstances.

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“Understanding who we are as Indigenous peoples is about understanding how our lives were impacted by colonialism, which was the ending of a world,” Rice told me. “The knowledge of the apocalypse also helps us make people aware of what the consequences of apocalypse are—understanding those ongoing tragedies.”

Since writing the book, Rice has left the CBC, though he maintains his practice as a journalist.

His years in the field, he said, have informed his literature, but he’s not yet sure how his fiction might shape his nonfiction.

As I write, another apocalypse feels close at hand. The coronavirus has killed more than a million people worldwide. Vast swaths of California and many other parts of the western United States have been devastated by wildfire. At times the air quality in Oakland, my hometown, was the worst on earth. The sky looked like a scene out of the Blade Runner sequel. Much of the news coverage has rightly connected the wildfires to climate change, but a reporter keen on telling a more complicated story—one that illuminates the structures underlying the crisis— might visit the gentrifying flatlands of West Oakland, to understand how the tech boom pushed families out of the Bay Area and into the smoldering urban-­wildland interface. Another might consider how the near extermination of Indigenous peoples, and their land and fire management practices, transformed the Golden State into a tinderbox. A third might consider how past epidemics opened the land to settlement in the first place. All of these stories would, of course, require deep and trusting relationships with sources.

Our stories, field notes, and communities ask a great deal of us as journalists—and, particularly, as Indigenous journalists and journalists of color—especially in moments of grave consequence, like the present. It’s hard, and in some cases impossible, to give yourself, your audience, your community, your sources—and perhaps also your land, your water, your relations— everything they want and deserve in your work.

Indigenous experiences and perspectives challenge the notion that a press corps equipped with notepads and recorders can capture the whole truth. More often than not, I’m convinced that reality defies the disciplined space of stories, waging an epistemic resistance against the tyranny of language, text, and form—something we Indians can relate to. cjr

Knowledge of the apocalypse caused by colonialism helps make Indigenous peoples aware of ongoing tragedies.

Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system— or replicate the flaws of the old one?

NE W MED IA

The Substackerati AUTHOR

Clio Chang ILLUSTRATOR

Olivia Fields

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he first week of March, Patrice Peck, a freelance journalist living in New York, started sanitizing everything. She went to Nitehawk, a dine-in movie theater, and brought Clorox to wipe down the little table by her seat, her drinking glass, the utensils. In those early days, she felt like she was the only one obsessing over the coronavirus. As the pandemic spread, she started exchanging updates with a friend via text message and calling her grandmother in Jamaica to discuss the situation there. Peck anticipated that Black people would be hit the hardest, and that this aspect of the story would not receive enough coverage. “It was just very obvious to me,” she said.

By April, shelter-in-place orders were in effect. Peck—who is thirty-­three and stylish, lately with cat-eye glasses and short hair— was holed up in her apartment. She and her partner set up to work side by side, their laptops perched on the kitchen island; Peck

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scoured the internet for news as Black people in America began dying from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, at twice the rate of whites. “I wanted to write something that would be valuable to readers and informative and empowering, particularly to Black audiences,” she said. So she did what so many other independent journalists were doing—she started a Substack.

Substack, established in 2017 by three tech-and-media guys—Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi—is a newsletter platform that allows writers and other creative types to distribute their work at tiered subscription rates. Newsletters go back at least as far as the Middle Ages, but these days, with full-time jobs at stable media companies evaporating—between the 2008 recession and 2019, newsroom employment dropped by 23 percent—Substack offers an appealing alternative. And, for many, it’s a viable source of income. In three years, Substack’s newsletters—covering almost every conceivable topic, from Australian Aboriginal rights to bread recipes to local Tennessee politics—have drawn more than two hundred fifty thousand paid subscribers. The top newsletter authors can earn six figures, an unheard-­of amount for freelance journalists. Emily Atkin, who runs Heated, on the climate crisis, told me that her gross annual income surpassed $200,000—and among paid-readership Substacks, she’s ranked fifteenth. “I literally opened my first savings account,” she said.

Peck had been mulling the idea of starting a newsletter for a while. She began thinking seriously about Substack when she saw Beauty IRL, a newsletter by Darian Harvin. Like Peck, Harvin is a freelancer—it was “really a matter of time” until she was laid off from one media job or another, she figured—and she was using Substack as a place for surplus ideas. “I take some of my pitches and just write them for my newsletter,” Harvin said. “Publications are only paying me three hundred dollars per piece, so I thought, What would happen if I took some of them and grew my audience?” Her efforts were getting noticed; eventually, Substack gave her a $3,000 stipend and a $25,000 advance (in the latter arrangement, Substack takes 50 percent of her subscription fees until the advance is paid off, but if she doesn’t reach that number, Harvin won’t owe Substack the rest).

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Peck settled on a name for her project: Coronavirus News for Black Folks. She’d produce it a few times a week, with a reading list of recommended articles and original interviews with Black essential workers, accompanied by images she’d commission from Black illustrators. At least at the start, she decided, her newsletter would be free—she wanted her writing to be accessible, especially as Black people were suffering disproportionately from the pandemic-­induced economic downturn. Her first installments were about Black men afraid of being racially profiled for wearing masks and coronavirus conspiracies circulating online; the tone was direct and conversational. (“As Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar famously said about covid-19, ‘Sh*t is getting real,’ ” Peck wrote in an early dispatch.)

After a couple weeks, Adriana Lacy, another Black journalist, interviewed Peck for her own Substack—The Intersection, focused on journalism, technology, and innovation—and Nieman Lab picked it up. A month into developing her newsletter, Peck had nine hundred seventy-eight subscribers. Not long after, that number rose to two thousand.

Peck quickly recognized the possibilities of Substack: a wandering journalist, disenchanted by an industry that was never all that equitable to begin with and is now in financial free fall, could, perhaps, claim control of her work. As more people signed up for Coronavirus News for Black Folks, Peck imagined all the ways it might grow, and wondered whether it could become a full-time job. “In an ideal world, I’m the editor in chief or editor at large of the newsletter; I’m using it to allow other journalists who like to cover these communities to have a place to write,” she mused. “And I’m able to compensate them during a time when there are so many layoffs.”

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ubstack started the same way many media ventures do—with a personal essay. In 2017, Best, a programmer from a Vancouver suburb who cofounded a messaging app called Kik, had taken some time off work and, finding himself an avid reader, began thinking about writing something himself. He drafted a piece bemoaning how the journalism industry’s failing business models incentivized clicks, retweets, and likes over incisive prose. At the time, the media

CLIO CHANG

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A wandering journalist, disenchanted by an industry that was never all that equitable and is now in free fall, could, perhaps, claim control of her work.

apocalypse was in full force—the limits of digital media were apparent (that year, Mic and Vice instituted mass layoffs after bowing to Facebook in an ill-fated “pivot to video”) and legacy media was bleeding (Condé Nast faced perennial ad revenue loss; a desperate Tribune Publishing changed its name to Tronc).

“Now we’re in this world where social media feeds optimize for engagement, because that’s how they make money, and just as kind of an unintentional collateral damage they end up amplifying all the things that drive us crazy,” Best argued. “It’s bad for us as readers and bad for society.” Best sent a first draft to McKenzie, with whom he’d worked at Kik. “He was like, ‘First of all, you’re a bad writer and you shouldn’t do this,’ ” Best recalled.

In McKenzie’s telling, he gently informed Best that he thought he was stating the obvious: everyone in media already understood what the problems were; what was missing was a solution. Before working in technology, McKenzie had grown up in a small town on the

South Island of New Zealand and attended journalism school with the hope of becoming a foreign correspondent. He spent four years in Hong Kong, where he ended up writing mostly about indie music and drinking dens. Later, he worked as a reporter for PandoDaily, a tech news site, then transitioned into writing for companies—first Tesla, then Kik. McKenzie encouraged Best to think about more than a diagnosis.

Through the spring of 2017, the two sent emails back and forth, had video calls, and brainstormed in Google Docs about what models might better serve journalism. Subscriptions, they decided, seemed the most promising—but not in the form of journals or magazines. “Paid newsletters” felt more familiar, personal, trustworthy—and more monetizable.

They had good reason to think it could work. Best and McKenzie were both fans of Stratechery, the newsletter by Ben Thompson, a former employee of Apple and Microsoft based in Taipei, who since 2014 had been writing about tech full-time, charging readers directly.

“This guy was writing this newsletter from his bedroom in Taiwan and, as far as we know, making like a million dollars a year,” Best said. (An exaggeration, perhaps, but Thompson was earning a solid living.) They wondered why his approach, which took advantage of the internet’s strengths—a global distribution network, easy payment systems—hadn’t been replicated more widely. The Skimm and Axios had built companies around monetizing newsletters, but it wasn’t an idea widely embraced by individual journalists.

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The guys devised a system of taking a 10 percent cut from subscriptions (Stripe, the credit card service that processed the fees, would take 2.9 percent, plus thirty cents per transaction), which they felt tied them to the writers. They reached out to Sethi, a developer they knew from Kik, to build out the technology. Their tagline was “We literally only make money when the writers do.” Substack’s mission, announced upon the company’s official debut, sounded more grandiose: “When it has reached maturity, the subscription-­based news industry could well be much larger than the newspaper business ever was, much like the ride-­hailing industry in San Francisco is bigger than the taxi industry was before Lyft and Uber,” the founders wrote.

“Democratizing this subscription-­based future will enable more writers to earn more money by writing about what truly matters. It puts the media’s destiny into the right hands.”

To get the future started, they recruited some contributors. The first was Bill Bishop, someone McKenzie knew from his time in Hong Kong. Bishop already ran a popular free newsletter, ­Sinocism, analyzing China-­related news, and was thinking about going behind a paywall. He agreed to move his subscriber base—thirty thousand readers—to Substack. On launch day, in October 2017, he turned his newsletter into a six-­figure business. (Bishop also became an angel investor in Substack.)

In the winter of 2018, the founders successfully applied for seed funding from Y Combinator, a company that helps startups get off the ground. By the summer of 2019, they announced that they had raised $15.3 million in Series A funding, with ­Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, as the lead backer. “Substack can solve the structural issues between publishers/writers and readers in a way that aligns the incentives between all of them,” Andrew Chen, a general partner at ­Andreessen Horowitz, wrote at the time. “This is the moment the next generation of media is being built.” Chen joined Substack’s board; they signed a lease on an office in San Francisco. As more people signed up to join the ­Substackerati, the company garnered praise from journalists. “Substack represents a radically different alternative, in which the ‘media company’ is a service and the journalists are in charge,” Ben Smith wrote in the New York Times. A Taste Media piece, anointing newsletters as the future of food coverage, argued that Substack is “allowing voices to be heard—through simple and free publishing tools—but it also allows creators to flip the switch for monetization.” Last year, ­BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz wrote that “paid email newsletters can bring in real money for writers with small, dedicated subscriber bases”; this year, Kantrowitz announced that he was leaving BuzzFeed to start a Substack.

Including McKenzie, who is thirty-­nine; Best, thirty-­three; and Sethi, thirty-­one, the team now comprises seventeen people. Since the pandemic started, they’ve let the lease on their headquarters lapse.

Recently, McKenzie and Best met with me over Zoom from their respective makeshift home setups. Both wore soft-gray T-shirts, the kind that represent the day-to-night look of media company founders everywhere; Best was working on a beard. Their lives had changed a lot since the spring—not just because of the coronavirus, they explained; each of them had newborns. (“Chris and I have dueling babies; they arrived within ten days of each other,” McKenzie said.) It was also

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the case that the pandemic had boosted their company’s growth—in the first three months, as hundreds of journalists lost their jobs, the number of active writers on Substack doubled and revenue increased by 60 percent. In the same week in July, Substack was covered in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

McKenzie told me, “There’s been a huge ‘Oh, everyone’s paying attention to Substack now’ kind of feeling.”

They continued to approach potential contributors. When I asked what, exactly, they thought made someone a promising Substack writer, Best turned to McKenzie and asked, in a jokey hush, “Do we keep the Baschez score a secret?” McKenzie laughed. They have a system, created by a former employee named Nathan Baschez, that measures a Twitter user’s engagement level—retweets, likes, replies—among their followers. This person is then assigned a score on a logarithmic scale of fire emojis. Four fire emojis is very good—Substack material. Best and McKenzie will reach out and suggest that the person try a newsletter. The four-fire-emoji method turned up Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, whose Substack, Letters from an American—political with a historical eye—is now the second-top-paid. (The most popular newsletter on Substack is The Dispatch, a conservative publication founded

by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Toby Stock.) “We called it giving them ‘the religion,’ because it wasn’t about Let’s type into this box and make money because people will pay you,” McKenzie said, of recruits. “It was like, We think there’s going to be a cultural shift here.”

Lately, it seemed like everyone was a convert.

B

ecause newsletter creators retain control of their email list, archives, and intellectual property, Substack’s main selling point is independence—from bosses, from ad-dependent corporate media models, from the whims of tech monopolies like Google and Facebook. The founders don’t claim that Substack will “save” media—a promise that’s bound to disappoint—but they argue that their model is a core part of a better, more worker-­centric and reader-­friendly future for journalism. All of that was attractive to Peck, who had decided in 2019 to leave a staff job at BuzzFeed, where she had been a

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“We called it giving them the religion,” a Substack founder said.

TAY LO R M I L L E R

PATRICE PECK When she started Coronavirus News for Black Folks, Peck was the sole producer of an ambitious project.

beauty writer covering race, identity, diversity, and intersectional representation for underrepresented audiences. She’d had a bad experience there; after a round of layoffs, she was shuffled into a content-­farm role; her new manager was unsupportive. She felt like the media industry offered her few alternatives (“Where can we go, as Black journalists?” she wondered aloud), so she quit her job to figure out what might come next. Ultimately, she decided to work only for herself.

That, of course, has its downsides. A hallmark of freelance life is isolation. Peck soon found that the labor of producing a newsletter can be grueling. Because Coronavirus News for Black Folks includes outside links, it requires lots of time-­intensive r­ eading—more than three days’ worth, if she doesn’t cram.

The editing, compiling, and writing requires discipline; sometimes she stays up all night to finish. Then there’s production and the rest. Peck gradually slowed her pace, sending out installments a few times per month.

“I’m creating graphics on Instagram to promote it, tweeting it, doing everything,” she said. “It’s a one-­woman show. That gets exhausting.

I don’t put it out as frequently as I’d like to.”

Complicating work was life during a pandemic: in the middle of the spring, Peck began living part-time in Los Angeles, where her partner had gotten a job. Without vacation days, she kept on filing new dispatches—about the pandemic’s effect in the Caribbean, about a pharmacist living paycheck to paycheck and receiving a “pitiful excuse” for hazard pay. She kept accumulating subscribers. But she realized how the intensity of her efforts, and the fact that the newsletter fell entirely on her shoulders, could lead quickly to burnout.

Writing is often considered an individualistic enterprise, but journalism is a collective endeavor. And that is the paradox of Substack: it’s a way out of a newsroom—and the racism or harassment or vulture-­ venture capitalism one encountered there—but it’s all the way out, on one’s own. “Holy shit, I work anywhere from fifty to sixty hours a week,” Atkin, of Heated, told me. “It’s a lot.” Harvin, the Beauty IRL writer, said she missed the infrastructure—legal and editorial—of a traditional outlet. “I just know how valuable it is to have a second ear to bounce ideas off of, someone to challenge you,” she said. “I’m very not big into writing in a vacuum, and I think that is the thing I miss the most.” Kelsey McKinney, a journalist whose literary Substack, Written Out, has accounted for about a third of her income during the

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“It’s sort of something you have to do to get by,” a Substack writer said.

pandemic, doesn’t do any reporting for her newsletter because of the lack of legal and editorial backing. Investigative journalism seems particularly difficult as a solo enterprise on Substack, which doesn’t reward slowly developed, uncertain projects that come out sporadically.

Substack has taken a few steps to address these concerns. Using its venture funding, the company has offered financial assistance to some newsletter writers—from small, no-strings-attached cash grants to $25,000 advances and $100,000 fellowships. In July, it introduced the Substack Defender program, through which writers with paid subscriptions could apply for third-­party legal support. In the announcement, the founders promised more to come: “We will make a large investment in a services program that includes initiatives related to healthcare, personal finance, editing, distribution, design, and coworking spaces.” What all that entails, exactly, McKenzie told me they’re still figuring out; for now, they’ve started a pilot program to connect writers with editors and healthcare. “The solution to helping support a healthy ecosystem for writers and journalists is not a beautiful CMS or the blockchain or any other gimmicky thing,” he said. “It’s the entire support structure.” A few newsletters, finding the corporate help insufficient, created their own iterations of newsrooms that use Substack mainly as a platform to publish (The Dispatch, for instance).

“Substack is not the sort of thing that is going to create a sustainable next phase, but it can open the door to things that we don’t have doors

for yet,” Nathan Schneider, a media studies professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told me. To the extent that Substack fixes something in the journalism industry, it might be compared to ­GoFundMe—a survival mechanism whose resources are unevenly, arbitrarily distributed, laying bare systemic problems without directly tackling them.

“GoFundMe can help us see things we’re not seeing and put money where it would not go,” Schneider said. “Of course, we don’t want a ­GoFundMe society.”

In my conversations with Substack writers, most told me that their newsletters didn’t amount to full-time work; they still had to hold on to other gigs. Peck earns her income primarily from one-off freelance pieces and speaking opportunities; she’s only been able to take a break from regular employment thanks to the support of her partner. Some writers use their Substacks to promote other projects they’ve been working on. A few consider it a place to get weird (see: Ellie Shechet’s

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Horrible Lists, with entries like “How to give up on your dream of moving home to become an herb farmer in 11 easy steps”). J.P. Brammer, who moved his popular advice column ¡Hola Papi! from one magazine to another before arriving at Substack, called it his “retirement home from queer media.” When he’s not writing his newsletter, he’s finishing up a memoir. He appreciates Substack for what it is. “If there wasn’t a flood, you wouldn’t need to build a dam,” he said. “You wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, I love this dam.’ It’s sort of something you have to do to get by.”

the top-twenty-five lists are organized, she believes, is “to the detriment of Black journalists.” (McKenzie told me that Substack will soon revamp its leaderboards, highlighting top revenue earners in different categories.)

In general, will Substack replicate the patterns of marginalization found across the media industry, or will it help people locked out of the dominant media sphere to flourish? To a large extent, the answer depends on whether or not Substack’s founders believe they’re in the publishing business. When we spoke, they were adamant that Substack is a platform, not a media company—a familiar refrain of f you visit Substack’s website, you’ll see Silicon Valley media ventures. “We’re not hirleaderboards of the top twenty-­five paid ing writers, and we’re not publishing editoand free newsletters; the writers’ names rial,” McKenzie said. “We’re enabling writers are accompanied by their little circular ava- and enabling editorial.” He told me that the tars. The intention is declarative—you, too, leader­boards, which were originally conceived can make it on Substack. But as you peruse to show writers what kind of “quality work” the lists, something becomes clear: the most was being done on Substack, were organized successful people on Substack are those who by audience and revenue metrics, with “no have already been well-served by existing thumb on the scale” from the company. When media power structures. Most are white and I asked about their views on content moderamale; several are conservative. Matt Taibbi, tion, the founders said that, because readers Andrew Sullivan, and most recently, Glenn opt in to newsletters—unlike Facebook, there’s Greenwald—who offer similar screeds about no algorithm-­based feed—they have relatively the dangers of cancel culture and the left— less responsibility to get involved.

It’s a bit of a brain twister: Substack, eager all land in the top ten. (Greenwald’s arrival bumped the like-minded Yascha Mounk to to attract customers over Mailchimp or WordPress, has begun to look like it’s reverse engieleventh position.)

None of that is too surprising—it’s hard to neering a media company. But all the while, its earn four-fire-emoji status without having founders insist that they simply provide a platalready built up a reputation within estab- form. By not acknowledging the ways in which lished institutions. And, as this year’s anti-­ they are actively encouraging (and discouragracist activism has made all the more visible, ing) certain people to use Substack, and the those institutions are built from prejudiced ways they benefit monetarily from doing so, systems, which form working environments they obscure their role as publishers. As Study that are often unsustainable for people who Hall’s Allegra Hobbs put it over the summer, “It are nonwhite or non-­elite. “I think one of the seems the creators of Substack, in their zeal to reasons why we often see that the top-twenty- become the future of media, are trying to have five board at Substack is mostly white authors it both ways—to keep an appropriate editorial is because that’s an extension of the type of distance while also actively supporting writers audience and recognition they get for their beyond merely providing a space to publish.”

In addition, like many media companies, work on other platforms,” Harvin said.

Peck was not among those recruited to Substack is dependent on large amounts of join Substack. It was only when she started venture capital. Time and again, journalists to get publicity that McKenzie tweeted about have seen venture capitalists barge in on their her project. She’s never appeared on Sub- newsrooms with claims that they’ll solve the stack’s ­homepage, nor has she heard from industry’s problems, only to end up losing any of the founders directly. “I think Substack their jobs or being forced to churn out clickshould make it easier to discover newslet- bait. (In the case of Substack, The Atlantic’s ters on their platform,” she told me. The way Kaitlyn Tiffany has argued that tech bros are

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VO IC ES OF THE PA ND EMI C

What We’ve Learned It doesn’t matter how many New York Times stories you read about the virus spreading into rural areas; you need a local news source reporting on someone that you know, or your kids know.

How can you transfer some of the good stuff that happens on Facebook back into a paper?

—Anne Helen Petersen

Former culture writer at BuzzFeed and author of Culture Study, a Substack

monetizing an existing form of media—newsletters—that had long been used, especially by women, to foster communities that were “non-­ remunerative” and “artistically strange.”) Substack’s founders are open about the fact that media and VC money typically don’t mix well; McKenzie told me that journalists who are VC-­ skeptical feel “burned for good reasons.” But he said there was a difference between companies like BuzzFeed and Vox Media taking hundreds of millions in venture capital “on a big unproven bet that that can scale to a massive return” and Substack, which he calls “a platform that has a stable, transparent, and simple business model that is proven to work.” When I asked if Substack’s investors were looking for large returns, Best replied, “We have expectations for growth for ourselves that are at least as high as our investors’.”

Even if you accept that premise, there remains a broader question—one that the industry at large will have to answer—as to whether venture capitalism, driven by the pursuit of high returns on big-bet investments, is, at its core, antithetical to the project of journalism. (The reasons Peck made her newsletter free run at odds with the goals of investors.)

I asked Substack’s founders about the sentiment, popular among the venture capitalist class, that reporters are too powerful and need to be curbed. “Our business is a little bound up with Andreessen Horowitz, and our business is a lot bound up with writers,” McKenzie said. “We don’t look to control or influence the thought of either of those groups. We don’t own the attitudes of every Substack writer, and we don’t own the attitudes of our investors.”

It was a nonideological, noneditorial stance—one that he’d taken in conversation with me before. But often, adherence to neutrality only enforces existing power structures. In these moments, Substack’s founders veer into unsettling corporate-tech-dudespeak, papering over the fact that a “nonideological” vision is, of course, ideology just the same. When Sullivan joined Substack, over the summer, he put the company’s positioning to the test: infamous for publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve, a book that promotes bigoted race “science,” Sullivan would now produce the Weekly Dish, a political newsletter.

(Substack’s content guidelines draw a line at hate speech.) Sullivan’s Substack quickly rose

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to become the fifth-most-read among paid subscriptions—he claimed that his income had risen from less than $200,000 at New York magazine to $500,000. When I asked the founders if they thought his presence might discourage other writers from joining, they gave me a pat reply. “We’re not a media company,” Best said. “If somebody joins the company and expects us to have an editorial position and be rigorously enforcing some ideological line, this is probably not the company they wanted to join in the first place.”

I

n a broken industry, even a little agency can start to feel like control. But that won’t necessarily translate into the large-scale transformation that Substack’s founders pitch.

If “be your own boss” is a nice slogan in the abstract, it ignores the fact that power dynamics always exist, even where they’re not formalized. As time went on, Peck came up against the limits of what she could do alone. “It’s great I don’t have to go to anybody for approving stories or things I want to cover,” she said. “But I think it’s always beneficial having other professional journalists to work with and bounce ideas off of and get feedback from.” In August, to help with global coverage, she brought on a contributing editor; for any original reporting he does, she pays out of pocket. She wants to keep the newsletter free, though to keep herself going, she’s considering adding an option for subscribers to pay.

Ideally, however, her future wouldn’t involve Substack at all, Peck told me; if Coronavirus News for Black Folks were picked up by a major outlet, say, she’d have the staff and resources to build it out properly. That’s an unlikely scenario, she knows—for the same reasons that she was driven out of the mainstream media industry to begin with. “I got into journalism because I wanted to write stories about and for the Black community,” she said. “There’s not a lot of places where you can do that and get paid a decent amount and have benefits. It varies, but I don’t think a lot of Black journalists have a ton of options outside of creating their own things for themselves.” What she has now is a harbor. “Substack has some of the materials for free to help us to build our own thing,” she continued. “We need so much more, but we’re going to work with what we have.”

As more journalists embark on independent careers, the need for support infrastructure, beyond Substack, will become increasingly urgent. Labor organizing, the traditional method for making an industry more equitable, will have to adapt to the new conditions, especially as more and more industries embrace the independent-­contractor model. Accountability is harder when the company you work for refuses to acknowledge what field it’s operating in. Yet people like Peck are still workers, even if they lack a boss.

In September, Discourse Blog, a newsletter on the politics and culture of the left run by a group of journalists who used to work at a now-discontinued site called Splinter (I used to write for it, too), decided they would leave Substack for a competitor called Lede. It was the third time in six months that Discourse, which launched on WordPress, had changed platforms—perhaps an indication of some of the difficulties of creating ambitious projects independently, even as a team. When they made the announcement, the writers at Discourse said that, at Substack, they were limited in their ability to grow. One of the co-­owners noted that it was hard to attract readers through internet search alone; they wanted to track audience data. In essence, they sought, as much as possible, to steer their own destiny.

The guys at Substack aren’t sweating the loss, at least for now. Ultimately, they will be judged not by their creative output, but by how much money they can return for those who have invested in their company. The platform is new, but the metrics are not; financial concerns trump all others. When I asked Best and McKenzie about their plans post-pandemic (should that time ever come), they told me that they don’t foresee any changes to their fundamentals. “We did not build Substack to be successful only during disaster times,” McKenzie said. In a recent column, Ben Smith, of the Times, reported that Twitter has discussed acquiring Substack, though McKenzie quickly tweeted, “This is not going to happen.”

They’re still scouting writers. “Do you have a Substack?” Best asked me, at one point. “Always be closing, Chris,” McKenzie said, with a grin. I smiled and gave a noncommittal answer. As a freelancer, it seemed more likely than not that one day I would start a Substack, or something similar. What choice did I have? cjr

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How are we feeling? This year delivered a professional paradox: the coronavirus highlighted the importance of a vibrant press, yet the crisis introduced new levels of instability and viral disinformation, which piled on to the stresses of an industry already overloaded. To better understand how members of the media are faring, the International Center for Journalists and Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism began the Journalism and the Pandemic Project, surveying news workers around the world. The initial findings, from English-speaking respondents in 125 countries, provide a snapshot of the mood‌ Not great.

DATA

33

100

Hard work

0

34% felt helpless

35% had difficulty sleeping

38% experienced burnout

42% felt more anxious

72% were offered no schedule flexibility for childcare

75% were offered no time off work to rest

75% were offered no regular check-ins with their supervisors

96% were offered no training to deal with online harassment

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

The coronavirus has put journalists at physical, emotional, and financial risk. Employers, short on resources, have offered little support. Thirty percent of field reporters said that, during the first wave, they were not supplied with a single piece of protective equipment; when these journalists were asked to rank what they found to be most professionally difficult during the pandemic, mental health topped the list.

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Against a Wall Respondents listed ways the outbreak exacerbated their already difficult jobs.

Unemployment or other financial concerns Intense workload

67% 64%

Technical challenges of reporting

51%

42%

Work-life balance

We’re relying more heavily on…

Nearly half of respondents identified political leaders as major sources of misinformation, yet constraints on reporting permit few trustworthy alternatives.

23% 22%

32%

Official sources and government statements

31%

Closed social media communities (to surface stories)

User-generated content Social media communities (to fact-check and verify)

11%

Citizen reporting (e.g., unpaid correspondents)

11%

Members programs (to aid reporting)

This data comes from the work of Julie Posetti, who leads the ICFJ’s global research program, and the Tow Center’s Emily Bell and Peter Brown. Between May 13 and June 30, using SurveyMonkey, they released a poll that was completed by 1,406 English-speaking journalists and news workers from 125 countries. (The survey was also conducted in Arabic, Chinese, French,

DATA

A free and effective press needs not just protection from abuse and interference, but also financial support and a more rigorously regulated information environment.

82 % 76

35

%

report at least one negative emotional or psychological reaction to the pandemic

of respondents say their greatest need is funding to cover newsroom operating costs, including salaries

65

%

report feeling less secure in their job as a result of the pandemic

Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish; a synthesis of the complete data set will be published later on.) The Committee to Protect Journalists is a subpartner on this project; Luminate contributed financial support; and the Dart Centre Asia Pacific’s Cait McMahon provided guidance on the poll.

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ABE STREEP

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LOCA L NEWS

For Pueblo What happened when John Rodriguez, a publisher, sought public funding AUTHOR

TK CREDIT

Abe Streep

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f you ask around about Pueblo, a city in southern Colorado built on steel and coal, people from there describe it as proud, resilient, tough. A Latino-­majority union town, it’s long been a Democratic stronghold—the area went for Trump in 2016, but in 2020, it flipped back to Biden. People here love their green chile, their heritage, the fact that they’re not in Boulder. Still, there are certain advantages to being in Boulder. Following the crash of the steel industry, in 1981, Pueblo suffered immensely; countywide unemployment peaked at 18.9 percent. By the end of the decade, Colorado Fuel & Iron, or CF&I, the owner of the city’s steel mill, declared bankruptcy. The town’s leaders—including Robert Rawlings, the longtime publisher of the Pueblo Chieftain, the state’s oldest daily—sought to diversify the local economy by imposing a half-cent sales tax and creating a nonprofit called the Pueblo Economic Development Corporation, known as ­pedco, that counsels the city on how to attract new businesses. Some employers brought hope, notably Vestas, a wind turbine manufacturer; others have come and gone. The city of Pueblo now has a poverty rate of about 24 percent, more than twice the statewide average. According to the latest available data, more than 40 percent of the county’s population relies on Medicaid for health insurance.

“This town should be better,” John Rodriguez, who is forty-one and has lived in Pueblo most of his life, told me. “It hurts. It physically hurts. And it’s upon all of us. There’s a way we talk about it, like, ‘We should be better.’ It’s like generational trauma on this town.”

Rodriguez has a wide face, swept dark-brown hair, and deep-set eyes

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lately beset by shadows. He is a journalist who believes deeply that the only way for his hometown to realize its potential is to confront its shortcomings. He claims that for a long time, the town’s media outlets—the Chieftain, in particular—were “not addressing the systemic problems of Pueblo.” He blames that in part on a citywide tendency to gloss over anything uncomfortable. He also blames it on the Chieftain itself, which, he argues, has protected p ­ edco because of Rawlings’s role in forming the organization—an assertion backed up by two longtime Pueblo leaders with direct knowledge of the dynamic. ­“Bullish optimism is good,” Rodriguez said.

“But I think we get into ­Pollyanna.” Pueblo, he said, has been buffeted by “decades of neglect, failed leaders that came through, and small-town petty infighting that stopped change.” In 2011, when he bought a local monthly called the Pueblo Pulp, he imagined that it might provide an antidote.

The animating idea of the Pulp was to take an unsparing look at the systems and people dictating the lives of Pueblo residents.

At the start, Rodriguez knew nothing about

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ABE STREEP

reporting; he just knew a lot about southern Colorado. He liked to tell the story of how his father, who was Mexican American, was told to aspire to a career as a janitor, then went on to work as a guidance counselor for decades.

The other side of his family was descended from Italian and English immigrants; his maternal grandfather was a chile farmer.

Rodriguez carried a chip on his shoulder that was felt throughout the newsroom. “It felt like we all had a lot to prove,” Kara Mason, the Pulp’s former news editor, told me. “That came through from John.” Like many people in Pueblo, Mason grew up having absorbed the idea that staying in town meant failing.

She joined the Pulp in part to complicate that view—to shift narratives about home, to point out the mechanisms that created outward flight in the hopes that they might change.

At its height, in 2016, the Pulp was raw and tough and mildly profitable, billing about $18,000 worth of advertisements per month, according to Rodriguez, most of them from the cannabis industry. In addition to Mason, there were three junior employees and a rotating cast of freelance writers, many of them students. Sometimes, when Mason went downtown at night, she’d see the Pulp’s lights on: John alone in the office. He kept wanting to scale up, but growth proved elusive. Rodriguez told me that he could never find the right ad salesperson to realize his vision; Mason suspected that his aggressive editorial approach limited the paper’s income. “It was a lot of people saying, ‘Why can’t you just write something good? Why can’t you just write the good things about Pueblo?’ John and I knew that wasn’t what Pueblo needs.”

Rodriguez made enemies, especially at the Chieftain, a favorite target. In 2018, it was sold to GateHouse Media, the private-equity-­ backed media conglomerate that would later merge with Gannett; afterward Rodriguez said that the Chieftain had devolved into “a Pueblo newsletter.” (Marcus Hill, who wrote for the Pulp before moving to the Chieftain, told me, “The ideals that the Pulp had, those were good,” but he found Rodriguez’s constant bashing of the Chieftain “pretty outlandish” and thought that, on the sentence level, the Chieftain’s product was superior.)

Sal Pace, a veteran county commissioner, had a falling-­out with Rodriguez, after which they

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didn’t speak for six years. Yet when it came to the Pulp, Pace told me, “I never felt like there was any unfair treatment at all.” He added, “The Pulp’s reporting was of such higher quality than the residents of Pueblo were used to getting.” In May, Nick Gradisar, Pueblo’s mayor, told me that, following the Chieftain’s sale to GateHouse, “It’s to the point we will write a story and we can just send it to them and they’ll change a few words and publish it. You know, that’s the advantage of them not having many reporters—we get to write our own story.” The Pulp was a check on power. Of Rodriguez, Gradisar said, “He’s always been fair, tough—hasn’t always agreed with me. But he usually got it right.”

That became harder this spring, when Rodriguez was suffering from the same financial distress as local newsroom leaders everywhere, compounded by the sudden crisis of the coronavirus. He started asking around for help. He applied for a Paycheck Protection Program loan and got $5,000 grants from Google and a city emergency fund, which kept the lights on for a while. Corey Hutchins—a journalism instructor at Colorado College and a contributor to CJR—sent some promising student reporters his way. By mid-April, however, Rodriguez had laid off his last full-time colleague and cut the Pulp’s print edition, publishing only online. “I feel like I’m rearranging the chairs on the Titanic,” he said.

Then a bold, if slightly desperate, idea came to him. In his brushes with the professional journalism crowd, he’d heard about an increasingly popular school of thought: if the press is a public service, it ought to be publicly funded. That idea had recently been picking up steam in Colorado. Rodriguez figured it was worth making a case for the Pulp’s survival. So he reached out to Gradisar; the county commissioners; the president of the city council; and Jeff Shaw, the chief executive officer of ­pedco. He suggested that the town’s leaders bail out its media with tax dollars. “We are in a new world,” Rodriguez emailed Shaw, “but I think Pueblo helping Pueblo must be our future.” He acknowledged that the proposal brought potentially awkward complications. “Who wants to fund something,” he later asked me, “which could expose people for doing a bad job?” He wasn’t sure of that himself.

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or decades newspapers and magazines rode an advertising wave, floating atop the largesse of American capitalism, allowing customers to pay little for a product—reporting, human travel, vetted fact—that is expensive to produce. Then came the internet. Advertising rates cratered, driving legacy publications online, where Facebook and Google have devoured the delivery mechanisms.

Hedge funds like Alden Global Capital bought up vulnerable newspapers, gutting them and turning a quick profit. (Alden owns the Denver Post, Colorado’s most prominent paper, where there have been extensive layoffs.) According to the Pew Research Center, since 2008 American newspaper jobs have fallen 51 percent; last year, news publishers employed fewer people than coal mines did.

The shakeout has coincided with an overdue leveling of the playing field, questions about who the news is for, a reckoning with parachute journalism as an extractive and colonial enterprise. But a more equitable media is not yet a more remunerative one. The donor class has stepped in with philanthropic efforts, as have Facebook and Google, which have administered small grants and are trying, in Rodriguez’s

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Cover Story

In the fall of 2010, Mathias “Mo” Valdez, a silkscreen artist, designed a poster that read “WE ARE PUEBLO.” It quickly became a local rallying cry, and Valdez went on to create every Pulp cover but one.

JANUARY 2019

OCTOBER 2018

MAY 2018

SEPTEMBER 2017

APRIL 2017

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words, “to buy their way into heaven.” But that’s not a sustainable solution.

In 2017, Mike Rispoli, the director of the News Voices program at the Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy group, helped organize a series of community forums in New Jersey, partly to address the homogenization of news as Gannett bought up local papers.

The events were well attended, and not just by the ink-­stained. “Old-school journalists need to abandon this idea that government funding means undue influence,” Rispoli argued. He helped deliver signatures from sixty community groups to the statehouse; a year later, the legislature passed a bill creating a nonprofit called the Civic Information Consortium. Managed by an independent board with members from five state universities, the consortium was tasked with funding journalism fellowships and issuing grants to media outlets. Since then, the state has allocated the project $2 million. The delivery of that cash has been delayed, on account of budget disputes, but the progress in New Jersey gave hope to those trying to rescue news outlets elsewhere in the country. Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the Free Press, told me that there’s more appetite for the idea of public funding than at any point in the past decade, even if “it’s still an uphill climb.” In the past two years, members of Congress from both parties have introduced five bills to boost local media, via antitrust exemptions, tax credits, and other means. (None has passed—yet.)

Colorado became the next promising target.

Early last year, Melissa Milios Davis—a former journalist, now a vice president of the Gates Family Foundation (no affiliation with Bill or Melinda)—reached out to Rispoli on behalf of the Colorado Media Project, a Denver-­based effort to plot out a future for journalism in the state. The ideas were only just starting to take shape; the phrase “ecosystem building” was thrown around. ­Rispoli shared his experience in New Jersey, and the Free Press eventually started a program in Colorado to seek input on the information needs of underserved communities. By the fall, the Colorado Media Project issued a report that called for, among other things, public-­private partnerships; the creation of information districts that would allow communities to allocate public funds to journalism; and the extension of a 2.9 percent

ABE STREEP

J O H N RO D R I G U E Z

JOHN RODRIGUEZ Alone and into the night, he pushed to keep the Pulp alive.

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tax to digital advertising, with the resulting revenue going to media grants. The report was called “Local News Is a Public Good.” According to Davis, staffers in the office of Jared Polis, the governor, read it; she wasn’t sure whether he had. In April, a reporter asked Polis about the idea of public funding for journalism. “We have a free and independent press,” he said.

“That is hard to reconcile with government assistance.” He had other crises to attend to.

Polis’s quote lays bare a difficult reality: until this point, conversations about public funding of the media have largely been limited to members of the media and the offices of a few sympathetic legislators. The arguments in favor have yet to go mainstream. In conjunction with its report, the Colorado Media Project held a symposium on this subject at the University of Colorado Denver. Davis spoke first, making the case for an influx of public funds in journalistic outlets—what she called “our big, probably somewhat controversial thought.” Then Hutchins moderated a panel in which Gregory Moore, a former editor in chief of the Denver Post, advocated tax support of public journalism (“I never thought

that I would ever get to that point,” he said).

Rispoli reminded everyone that PBS, National Public Radio, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had been taking public funds for decades (“To me, this actually isn’t that controversial of an idea”). About an hour in, a voice rang from the back of the room, stopping everyone cold: “Get down to southern Colorado.” It was Rodriguez, looking a little ruffled, the top button of his shirt undone.

“We need you to get out of Denver,” he said.

“We are in a crisis that is beyond what Denver can even imagine. And we have survived without any real help, without any real notice.” He wanted an injection of capital, and he didn’t know where to turn. “I don’t come from this world,” he continued. “So I will be a loudmouth on this. We need your help.” Afterward, Hutchins’s students flocked to Rodriguez; they made plans. Within a couple of months, the group produced a ten-part Pulp series interrogating claims that Pueblo was “the Napa Valley of cannabis.” It took a close and hard look at the industry that provided his advertising base—and it was exactly the kind of work Rodriguez believed in.

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“There’s no assistance out there,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t think we’re serious about saving local news.”

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odriguez’s parents both worked in Pueblo public schools. (His mother was a teacher.) He grew up instilled with “a belief that you’re trying to make your family, friends, and hometown better,” he told me. “For all we fight about, there’s a sense of trying to make a difference.” As a young man, he didn’t quite know how. He graduated from the University of Southern Colorado (now Colorado State University–­Pueblo); he entered local politics, working on ballot initiatives and state campaigns; eventually he got a job with Sen. Ken Salazar, a Democrat. He knew that to go further in politics he’d need a law degree, so he got a master’s in legal administration at the University of Colorado Denver, with the plan of enrolling in law school. Then he realized he couldn’t stand legal briefs. So in his early thirties, with no clear direction, he returned to Pueblo. When he bought the Pulp— which had previously been a local arts publication—it was sort of on a lark. But Rodriguez saw an opportunity. He learned design, editing, and the business side on the fly. “I couldn’t tell you the lede from the nut graf,” he said. “I didn’t know how to take a photo. Everything was through Google U.” In January 2012, Rodriguez released his first issue. The Pulp was full of positive news—about a high-­achieving middle school, for instance.

It also included a fictitious news story, written by Rodriguez, about a massive rally in town calling for “not a change in leadership, but the display of it.” The piece ended, “The official attendance was 149,921”—nearly the entire population of Pueblo County. “Those not in attendance were half of City Council, two County Commissioners, the City Manager and heads of the organizations which receive

tax subsidies or public grant money and whose presidents live in Colorado Springs.”

In Rodriguez’s first inning as a pitcher, he’d thrown four fastballs under the chin.

The Pulp was unpolished. Story meetings were bring-your-own-beer gatherings in a furniture-less office on South Union Avenue; the paper always attracted college students willing to work for little pay (no more than $150 per article) and happy to stir up trouble. Mason arrived in 2012, as an undergraduate at CSU-Pueblo. She’d moved home after leaving college, in Washington, and was, she said, “salty.” She and Rodriguez got along immediately. “I had never really met anybody else that felt the same way about Pueblo,” she told me. Where Rodriguez had an ability to synthesize big ideas, she was detail-oriented. (“AP style was never John’s strong suit,” Mason said.) They partnered on an investigation into the use of dark money by both pro- and anti-firearm groups to recall a state senator over gun control legislation.

The piece had tangles, but showed promise, and announced the Pulp’s ambitions. Rodriguez gave Mason free rein. “I don’t think he

ABE STREEP

ever told me, ‘Don’t do that,’ ” Mason said.

“I think that was probably the healthiest and best thing for my career.” She started writing about the systemic flight of the town’s smart young people, attributing it to ineffectual economic development and a civic strategy that focused primarily on attracting manufacturers, in keeping with Pueblo’s blue-­collar legacy. “I had big questions of how we used our resources and money,” she said. “I wanted to go hard at them.”

Within a few years, however, Mason became one of those smart young people who flew away—she got a job at the Aurora Sentinel (now the Sentinel Colorado), outside Denver. At the Pulp, she had been making $30,000 a year, with no benefits. “We didn’t have money, but John wanted to do more,” she said. “I felt like he was asking a lot all the time. I couldn’t make the vision work.”

Departing was not an easy decision. “I put so much into the questions about people leaving Pueblo and what could be done to prevent that,” she said. In her new job, she expanded her professional network and discovered that journalists trained in corporate news environments sometimes possessed an aversion to ambitious coverage that challenged authority. It was weird. In February of this year, she returned to the pages of the Pulp, writing on Pueblo’s brain drain. “Last month p ­ edco said it was welcoming ­MissionSide, a Census call center, to Pueblo,” she wrote. “Nine hundred temporary jobs would start at $16 per hour.

I’m not sure my friends will return for those jobs. I won’t.”

Rodriguez kept on working. All day and night, through the death of his father, the death of his dog, and then the pandemic. As spring turned to summer, the Pulp published news about anti-­police protests, Indigenous affairs, school reopenings, and conflicts over the proposed removal of a Christopher Columbus statue, as well as a devastating video about a Black resident’s childhood experiences being targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. The latter piece resonated widely. “I don’t know how you put an economic value on that,” Rodriguez said. “But it has intrinsic value that can’t be measured.”

Still, he didn’t know how long he could hold on. He asked Davis, at the Colorado Media Project, for cash, but it didn’t work out.

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Tax Dollars at Work

In recent years, with the journalism business increasingly untenable, there have been calls for public investment across the country, at the local and federal level. —Shinhee Kang Civic Information Consortium In June 2018, the New Jersey legislature passed a bill establishing a nonprofit entity called the Civic Information Consortium, tasked with overseeing a public fund for local news. The idea was first conceived by Free Press, a media equity nonprofit; for two years, thousands of New Jersey residents organized and lobbied lawmakers in support of the legislation. The consortium was allocated $2 million, though it has yet to actually receive funding. In September, the governor earmarked $500,000 for it as part of the state’s 2021 budget.

Longmont Library In May 2019, citizens of Longmont, Colorado, proposed a taxfunded, library-run local news operation. The city was conducting a feasibility study when the pandemic broke out, interrupting progress, but local officials have recommended increasing the library division’s budget next year.

Policy Matters Ohio In July 2019, Policy Matters Ohio, a state equity nonprofit, called on legislators to boost support for public broadcasting by $5 million a year. In a report, “Breaking news: Newspaper closures hurt Ohio communities,” the organization sought state investment in the local press and proposed taxing Google and Facebook to fund an endowment for independent journalism.

House and Senate Letters In April 2020, a group of nineteen US senators signed a letter urging their colleagues to support local journalism as part of the government’s coronavirus relief effort; more than 240 lawmakers in the House of Representatives asked agencies to direct federal spending on advertising to local outlets.

Local Journalism Sustainability Act In July 2020, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the House proposing tax credits for Americans to buy local news subscriptions, for local newspapers to compensate journalists, and for small businesses to spend on advertising with local media.

Future of Local News Commission Act Introduced by three Democratic senators in September 2020, the bill proposes a thirteen-­person commission that would examine the local-­news crisis and make recommendations for federal intervention. The draft legislation suggests establishing a national endowment for local journalism and making public funds “part of a multi-faceted approach to sustaining local news.”

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(“We really wanted to put things out there for him,” she said, but the project wasn’t designed to offer bailouts. “It’s easier if you just have a sustainable business model.” Which, she knew, was the problem.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking what we could have done.”) Rodriguez joked with Mason, in one of their regular phone conversations, that perhaps the Pulp had existed just to launch her career. “There’s no assistance out there,” he said. “I don’t think we’re serious about saving local news. We’re half in and half out. Everybody wants to play a game where GateHouse is evil, but there’s no money coming into local places outside Denver.” He sighed, then added, “I’m the asshole saying, ‘How many more white journalists can they fit at the capitol?’ ” The only option left, he decided, was to ask for money from those he’d pricked. Perhaps, Rodriguez imagined, Pueblo could emerge as a unique test case, a chance for locals to identify what was needed and to be the saviors of their own story.

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n late April, Rodriguez sent a detailed proposal to Dennis Flores, the city council president, outlining a plan in which funds normally earmarked for tourism could be directed to local media, in the form of grants. The Chieftain, the Pulp, and local TV and radio stations would all be eligible. In return, those outlets would provide free or reduced-rate ads to local businesses. According to Rodriguez, Flores said he’d think about it but wondered why public money should fund media, rather than the companies that would advertise. (Flores didn’t respond to my emails.) Rodriguez also pitched Gradisar, the mayor, who was not in favor. “I don’t think taxpayer money should be used to

support media,” he said. He had more pressing concerns, like crumbling roads, and was philosophically opposed to the idea of what he called “state-­controlled news.”

In May, Rodriguez tried Shaw, at ­pedco.

“This isn’t just about news,” he wrote in an email. “Local media also drives the local economy. A story on a business or a restaurant can drive revenue to that place. Plus quality coverage about Pueblo and the region will drive tourism in the future.” But nothing came of it. Shaw told me, “There’s been initial conversations, but it hasn’t gone further than that.” Furthermore, he was hamstrung by policy: p ­ edco’s mandate is to support only “primary job” creators—which, according to ordinance, means those that export more than 51 percent of their goods. In other words: manufacturing. Local news, by paradoxical definition, does not fit that criterion, because it’s designed to stay within the community.

I asked Shaw what he thought about the prospect of a city funding its news. Was that something Pueblo should consider? “We’d have to look at the economics of it,” he said.

“Are other communities doing that? Is it

VO IC ES OF THE PA ND EMI C

What We’ve Learned The early confusion over the masking directives was contradictory information for a very suspicious, negatively polarized community, and it undercut public health later on.

Media—because we’ve siloed it so much—is a direct driver of that negative partisanship.

—David French

Senior editor, The Dispatch

ABE STREEP

successful? Is it not?” He didn’t seem eager to be a pioneer. He added, “At some point is the public, in a manufacturing sense, are they going to buy the product?” But the value of journalism is not immediately measurable by tax dollars or revenue. Rather, in theory, the return on investment is something like democracy. Maybe that’s the trouble with the business. “There were no takers,” Rodriguez told me. “There’s no forward thought.”

In July he found himself on a Zoom call, organized by Shaw, with town leaders and consultants discussing an ad campaign called Pueblo Shares—an initiative in which local businesses would tell their own stories.

Rodriguez was annoyed that the chamber of commerce was willing to fund that, but not journalism. “They’re so upset they get negative coverage,” he told me, “but have no idea how to counteract the narrative.” Later, when I called Scott Stoller, the general manager of the Colorado State Fair, to ask about the meeting, he relayed concerns that seemed to underscore Rodriguez’s analysis. “If there’s anything I can do to prevent me from being included in this story,” he said. “I support journalism, I think the First Amendment’s a pretty important thing, so I don’t want to come across as an anti-media person.”

Rodriguez was stressed, not sleeping well, overburdened. In August, when I visited him at the space he was now using as an office—a garage he shared with a silkscreen print artist who designed the Pulp’s covers—there were two very tall empty coffee cups on his desk.

He seemed resigned. “There’s no appetite for government money to save news,” he said.

There would be no great rescue of the Pulp.

He would have to get another job. The Chieftain was out. Recently, the City of Pueblo’s longtime communications director had retired; someone was needed in the mayor’s office to handle press relations about the coronavirus. Shortly after my visit, Rodriguez accepted the position. It was decided: he would stop publishing the Pulp and cross over to the other side. He didn’t feel like his work was done; he remained addicted to the news.

He told me he didn’t want to see someone else save the news in Pueblo. He had his pride.

Mason wondered how Rodriguez would do in the new role. “I don’t think I could do it,” she said. “I always thought, If I ended up in

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that position, would I be a superleaker of information? I’d be so beholden to the truth and accountability. I fear I would not be a good person for that kind of job.” But, she said, “I think at its core it’s a way for him to give back to his community.”

It was also a way for him to get a paycheck; to finally get some rest.

Most journalists realize, at some point, that the job does not love you as much as you love it. I talked to Rodriguez again, by phone, the weekend before his first day at city hall. He thought back to his first issue of the Pulp and the fictitious story about the rally demanding leadership. “That didn’t make me popular from the start,” he said.

“But I thought that’s the media’s job. What I called it was, we lived in a negative space. We’re supposed to be tough equally. You don’t ever lay off of it.” Then he added, “Let’s be real: when I’m communications director Monday, I’m going to have to give you a different answer.”

“W

e were delighted,” Gradisar told me, “that he decided to come work for the city.” The mayor professed a respect for tough old-school investigative journalism.

Earlier this year, he spoke to me with proud nostalgia about the fact that, in the early twentieth century, Pueblo was home to more than twenty foreign-­language newspapers. But in the current day, Gradisar had declined to fund a particularly formidable editor, and now that editor was working for him, writing press releases and newsletters.

“That’ll be part of his responsibility, is putting those kind of stories together,” Gradisar said. “Because, as I say, the Chieftain doesn’t have the reporters to do that kind of stuff.” He added, “It’s sad but true, I guess: if you wanna tell it you gotta write it yourself these days.”

Wasn’t that state-­controlled media? I put the question to Gradisar.

He paused, considering it. “Well, no.” He chuckled. “Because we don’t have control over if they publish it or what they do to it or anything like that. I mean, we’re just telling our story.”

I found myself in the curious position of reaching out to city leaders to corroborate an uncomfortable account involving their unwillingness to fund local journalism that had been provided by their current communications director. The most forthright source in the story was the PR guy. When I pointed that out to Rodriguez, he loved it. “We’re in comms Inception,” he said, referring to the Christopher Nolan film about the use of dream-­sharing technology to infiltrate the minds of the powerful. I wondered what role he played.

Two weeks in, Rodriguez started to type out some of his feelings about the situation—his, Pueblo’s, the Pulp’s. “Working for the Mayor has made Pueblo’s news deficiencies very clear,” he wrote. “There is no denying, I left a sizable voice in Pueblo silent and that’s been the hardest part of the move. Because of the state of news, I had to survive personally but I left Pueblo worse off.” He sent his notes to me from his Pulp email address, which still had the Pulp’s URL in the signature. He wasn’t sure if he was going to put out an official notice about the end of it. That felt like defeat. He wondered if someone else might want to take it over, as an incubator for young journalists. Maybe Colorado College. Or maybe, someday, someone like Kara Mason. (She told me she had no plans to leave her job in Aurora, but added that she’d “do anything” to save the Pulp.) “It’s like a fraction of an idea,” Rodriguez said. “A seed of an idea.” He kept the website up. cjr

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What’s lost and won as newsrooms close their offices for good WOR KS PACE

Out of Nowhere AUTHOR

Ruth Margalit

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n a freezing Thursday in March, Liz Bowie, an education reporter for the Baltimore Sun, was at her desk in the newsroom when an email started circulating that employees should take their laptops home for the weekend. “We’re going to go all Slack,” an editor said; the staff was offered a one-hour refresher course on how to use the software. The coronavirus was grinding much of the United States to a halt, and the Sun, which is owned by Tribune Publishing, announced that it would close its headquarters until the end of the year, possibly longer. The Sun had recently completed a move from downtown Baltimore to Port Covington, a development project in the south of the city—a transition the staff had dreaded. The downtown office had been symbolic: the professional home of H.L. Mencken, it was just minutes away from Baltimore’s bustling business district and courthouses; even from the newsroom’s perch, on the fifth floor, the presses downstairs could be felt churning. Now, thanks to covid-19, Sun journalists had been forced out and left entirely on their own.

Employees earning less than $67,000 were furloughed for three to six weeks; those earning more had to take permanent pay cuts of between 2 and 3 percent. (Executives’ base salaries were cut by 10

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RUTH MARGALIT

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Thomas Demand, Room (Zimmer), 1996

percent.) This was the latest in a series of cost-­ cutting measures; last year, a hedge fund called Alden Global Capital (known as the “grim reaper of American newspapers”) had become Tribune’s largest shareholder and embarked on a particularly ruthless form of corporate belt-tightening. Just before the pandemic, eleven employees of the Baltimore Sun Media Group had accepted buyouts. They were not alone: all across the country, the coronavirus was exacerbating a hollowing-­out that had been underway in journalism for the past decade—layoffs and bureau closures, amid shrinking sales and ad revenues. The latest manifestation, catalyzed by stay-at-home orders, was the elimination of newsrooms.

At Reuters, more than twenty-five hundred people tasked with breaking news were given only a few hours’ notice that they had to switch to remote work; by the end of March, 93 percent of the organization’s staff, spread across two hundred locations, was operating away from company offices. “It was astonishing how many things we thought we needed to do in the office we just didn’t,” Stephen Adler, the editor in chief of Reuters, said. In July, after McClatchy—a bankrupt media conglomerate with thirty newspapers in fourteen states— was sold to Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund, it terminated the leases on seven of its headquarters. Long-standing publications like the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer would be newspapers without newsrooms for the foreseeable future. “Revenue has fallen, and a timeline of recovery is uncertain,” Sherry Chisenhall, the executive editor of the Observer, said in a note to readers. “The move from uptown offices helps ensure that we can keep local journalists on the job.” On an August earnings call with investors, Mike Reed, the CEO of Gannett, said that the company planned to sell more than $100 million of its real estate by the end of next year. The same month, it was announced that, in addition to the Baltimore Sun, Tribune would permanently shutter five other newsrooms: the New York Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel, the Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania), the Carroll County Times (Maryland), and the Annapolis Capital Gazette.

At the Capital Gazette, the sense of loss was compounded by recent tragedy. In 2018,

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a gunman had burst into the office and fatally shot five employees, injuring others who cowered under their desks. “I remember a vibrant newsroom that took your breath away,” William Wagner, who has been with the Capital Gazette for thirty-one years, said.

After the shooting, the newspaper moved to a new office with bulletproof walls and increased security measures. Staff members hung photographs of their slain colleagues in the conference room. On Labor Day, Capital Gazette employees planned to gather in the newsroom for a final time and coordinate a walkout to protest its closure.

But when they arrived, they found that their key-card access had been revoked. (Tribune cited health warnings against large congregations.) So the staff arranged an impromptu rally at the Annapolis City Dock, where a banner fluttered in the breeze: save maryland newspapers. keep it local. Among those in attendance was Andrea Chamblee, the widow of John McNamara, one of the shooting victims. Chamblee praised the Capital Gazette’s staff for its undaunted coverage in the wake of calamity, and said that such work would be unthinkable now, given recent layoffs and the closure of the newsroom. “They can’t just drive around with a laptop in their car, and go to McDonald’s for the Wi-Fi to upload their story, and take the picture from their iPhone, and be everywhere they want to be and talk to everybody they want to talk to,” she said.

Olivia Sanchez, a government reporter, started working for the Capital Gazette a year ago. She recalled how much she had learned in the newsroom from overhearing experienced reporters interview public officials.

“What happens if we’re all just straight out of school and then sitting alone in our bedrooms, at our little desks?” she wondered. “I don’t know what happens to the paper if we stop being able to hold officials accountable in the same way. I don’t know what happens to the community.”

Bowie, of the Baltimore Sun, began adjusting to working from home. It was feasible only because of the strong relationships she’d developed with editors over three decades in the newsroom. “You can sort of read them through Slack channels and email in a way that if I was a new reporter entering the newsroom

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C - P R I N T/ D I AS EC, 14 4 X 20 0 C M © 20 20 A RT I STS R I G H TS SO C I E T Y ( A RS ) , N E W YO R K / VG B I L D - KU N ST, BO N N

RUTH MARGALIT

Thomas Demand, Ecke (Angelo/Corner), 1996

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it would be very, very difficult,” she told me.

Early in the year, the Sun’s staff had shared a Pulitzer Prize for a series of investigations into allegations of corruption and fraud committed

by Catherine Pugh, the former mayor. Bowie believes that work would have been impossible as a remote project. “There were so many moments during those months where the discussions in the newsroom resulted in better stories coming out, because we were all asking each other questions all the time,” she said.

“I know for a fact that our reporting would not have been as good if we couldn’t have been together in that room.”

T

he scrappy yet glamorous newsroom of All the President’s Men, which conjured rows upon rows of desks awash in fluorescent lights, buzzing with ringing phones, foot traffic, and furious typing, was a faithful representation of the Washington Post circa 1976; when Ben Bradlee, the executive editor at the time, visited the set, he

reportedly gasped and said, “My God, I’m in my own office!” But that is far from what a present-day newsroom looks or sounds like.

Email and Slack have replaced the phone and the clamor; newsrooms “got quiet like insurance offices,” an editor told the American Press Institute. Journalism transformed from an “industrial” to a “postindustrial” profession, Nikki Usher, a professor of media at the University of Illinois, said. Offices relocated and rearranged. Many featured a “hub”—a central area, typically reserved for breakingnews teams, around which ran concentric circles, to “facilitate the spread of information from the center to the periphery.”

Newsrooms are now on the cusp of redesign yet again; those that go back into operation once the pandemic subsides can expect a drastically reduced physical presence.

Some media companies are converting small “huddle rooms,” where reporters and editors meet, into permanent offices. It may be the beginning of the end of open plan. We’ll also

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see newsrooms making use of automation, according to the National Press Club Journalism Institute: “Think voice activation, handsfree tools, automatic doors, and touchless soap dispensers.”

Some employees will keep staggered schedules to avoid peak congestion time; others will choose to come in only one or two days a week or continue to work from home entirely.

Michele Matassa Flores, the executive editor of the Seattle Times, told me that she expects “a lot of the above.” Condé Nast is planning for an exodus, expecting that as much as 70 percent of its workforce will opt for some form of remote work. An office-less labor force is shaping up to be a defining feature of postpandemic life—in 2018, roughly 3 percent of US employees teleworked full-time; today, 42 percent do—and it looks like journalism will be utterly transformed. A profession once rooted in place can now seemingly be done anywhere with decent Wi-Fi and the ability to improvise.

For Doug Dunbar, a news anchor for KTVT, the CBS affiliate in Dallas, broadcasting now means that thrice a day he powders his face, mounts a Sony camcorder on a tripod, sets up a feedback and teleprompter unit on a “nice cocktail table,” projects graphics that are emailed to him onto a television screen, turns on three LED lights and a ring light “that was my daughter’s Christmas present last year for her TikTok videos,” and goes live. Dunbar, who is fifty-six, came of age in a “union town newsroom,” he said, in which “reporters weren’t allowed to touch the camera, and if you did you could get in trouble.”

Since March, he has been airing his news show from his home office, where a laptop set to Zoom serves as his studio monitor. If the Zoom link crashes in the middle of the show, as has happened several times, all connection to the studio is gone, and it’s “like field anchoring on the heel of a tornado.” He’s doing okay, he told me, but he misses the studio. “I think a lot of people find comfort in that—those of us who make the news and the people who watch us. What the rest of the news will look like in the future, that remains a wide-open question, because we’ve all proven we can do whatever it takes.”

Broadcasting from home lends reporters a certain authenticity—a we’re-all-in-thistogether vibe—Usher said, though she warns

CJR

that it could ultimately lead viewers to distrust their news source. “Physical presence matters,” she told me. “Zooming in from your home—there’s a potential for delegitimization.” She fears that viewers might be watching and thinking, “You’re reporting from home. How does that make you different from me?” Which, of course, they’re not, really.

Remember that BBC interview with a South Korea expert that went viral when his children barged into the room? Or how about the Spanish reporter who was interrupted in the middle of a news segment when a half-naked woman casually walked behind him? (Not his wife, incidentally, as viewers were quick to note.) As a psychologist put it, “We’re all BBC dad now.”

“Inevitably, in the middle of updates for our big 7am interview, my six-year-old son would come down and need a snack or a snuggle,” Rachel Martin, the host of NPR’s Up First and Morning Edition, told me. “And that’s in the best-case scenario.” Worst-case is “when the kids are fighting in the kitchen,” which lies directly above the guestroom-basement that Martin has converted into a home studio, and “the vents come crystal clear through.” The fact that listeners haven’t complained about the quality of the audio is “pretty miraculous,” Martin said, given that her soundproofing has been limited to “a bunch of pillows stuffed into the windowpanes” and “a bunch of blankets around my body.” Martin, like Usher, is concerned about reporters’ inability to cover stories on the ground and, particularly for radio people, about a certain lack of on-air spontaneity. “There used to be a freedom: ‘I want to go one more minute with this guest,’ or ‘We’re going to end it here,’ ” Martin explained. “We just can’t create those moments anymore.”

Pamela Paul, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, has had to adapt, too.

Unlike the rest of the Times newsroom, with its digital focus, the books department is “so far from paperless” that the Times once spent $20,000 to reinforce its floors so that they could carry the weight of all the rollaway shelves used for book storage. “There’s a visual element to the job that’s not about judging a book by its cover but it’s about seeing books in accumulation and in groupings that allows you to make associations

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If the Zoom link crashes in the middle of the show, all connection to the studio is gone, and it’s like “field anchoring on the heel of a tornado,” a broadcaster said.

and create assignments,” Paul said. Working from home “inhibits to a certain extent the serendipity and creativity.” A week after the Times shut down its office, in March, she got a notice that there was mail waiting for her. “Just put it in one of the locked galley rooms,” she replied. Then she was told there were 167 boxes. Now, occasionally, she pops by, to filter the deliveries to empty desks. She can’t take everything home.

L

ate last year Anup Kaphle, the editor in chief of the Kathmandu Post, in Nepal, received an unexpected phone call. On the line was Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of Google’s former chief executive Eric Schmidt, asking if Kaphle would like to be the executive editor of a new venture she was investing in, an online magazine that would publish narrative-driven tech stories from underrepresented countries. It would be called Rest of World. “As someone who comes from the region, this was very appealing to

me,” Kaphle said. “Being able to do these kinds of stories without imposing a Western gaze, and allowing these local views and perspectives to play out.” In mid-February, just as the world was about to change, Kaphle, who is thirty-six, arrived in New York with his wife.

She was heavily pregnant; they were expecting their first child in March, which was also the month that Rest of World was scheduled to launch. “But only one of those things happened on time,” Kaphle said. A week after their arrival, New York imposed quarantine orders. Kaphle found himself holding conference calls from the dining room table of a rented apartment in Long Island City, staring “at the skyline and the river and what felt like a very peaceful New York—with sounds of ambulance and chaos.”

Rest of World went live in May, an inauspicious time for any newsroom, save for the fact that Rest of World was never intended to function as one. There was a New York office serving editorial managers, like Kaphle, alongside

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design and product people. But most of the site’s reporters and editors fanned out internationally—in Berlin, Hong Kong, Bangalore, and elsewhere. Editorial meetings commenced, three times a week on Zoom. Writers and editors shared drafts on Google Docs; stories and editorial assignments were managed with the software Trello. The process was streamlined and efficient, Kaphle said, and will likely remain the same post-pandemic. In June, the site started a fellowship program for six international journalists to receive nine months of intensive mentorship and report from their home countries. Offering the program remotely, Kaphle explained, “gave us an opportunity to open that fellowship to the wide world and not just to look for students who were graduating from universities in the US.” As the virus has confined journalists to their homes, it has forced outlets to think past the limits of geography. For Kaphle, the idea of a decentralized office goes beyond matters of convenience or financial savings to his magazine’s core mission: “The reason it’s important to have a global newsroom is making sure we get our stories right,” he said. “That means not only what kind of countries we are covering, but who is covering these countries.… Who gets to connect

Up, Up, and Away In 2015, a few weeks before a wrecking ball was scheduled to level the Washington Post building, which had stood for three decades on the corner of 15th and L, several hundred employees gathered inside for champagne toasts and to sign their names on the walls. The event was bittersweet. They were about to leave the only building in America to take down a sitting US president—a symbol of power in a city full of them.

In a few months, another office building would begin rising in its place, amid a trend of newspapers abandoning their stately headquarters in the hearts of

the dots and spot all these patterns and tell you why the story is important, not just for US readers but also why it’s so important to the people who live there.” Questions of representation—which stories are told, how, and for whom—have always been crucial in journalism, if under-thought; the sudden shift in perspective brought on by remote work has made clear how the newsroom itself, for all its social and collaborative aspects, can be a place of exclusion. “One of the first things we discovered was that our basic daily news meeting ended up being dramatically better with all of us at home than in the office,” Adler, of Reuters, told me. Although the Reuters leadership team is spread across several continents, it’s concentrated primarily in New York and London. “So without us really understanding it, we had a two-tier process where the people in the room were gossiping with each other, sharing asides, laughing, eating lunch, and everyone else—especially if you’re in Asia or any of the bureaus—really felt left out.”

Within the United States, racial and ethnic minorities compose less than 17 percent of staff at print and online outlets, even though, according to the Census Bureau, they make up about 40 percent of the population.

The Pew Research Center has shown that

American cities to downsize and save money. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had just left the Boulevard of the Allies.

A year and a half before, the Miami Herald, whose newsroom overlooked Biscayne Bay, had been vacated. Soon, the Boston Globe would depart Morrissey Boulevard.

The coronavirus has accelerated the breakup between the journalism industry and its buildings—which, from the days of the penny press, were designed and situated to be powerful structures overlooking the cities they covered. The idea of newspaper buildings as physical beacons of authority dates to 1872 and the death of Horace Greeley, the NewYork Tribune’s founder and swashbuckling editor. “Not a month after Greeley’s death it was decided that architecture

should be the chosen instrument to fill the void left by his absence in the public realm,” Aurora Wallace, a scholar of media and communications at New York University, writes in Media Capital: Architecture and Communications in New York City (2012). Greeley’s successor, Whitelaw Reid, used funds from his predecessor’s life insurance payout to design and build a nine-story building with a soaring clock tower overlooking Park Row. “As per Reid’s directions, the building was a massive, fireproof stone-andbrick structure,” Wallace writes. “Lightcolored granite and redbrick contrasted in a striking pattern that helped it stand out against its neighbors.” Reid thought the building was so monumental, both in magnitude and metaphor, that the

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53

22 percent of American newsroom employees live in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC—urban centers that happen to be three of the most expensive cities in the country. These figures reflect a media workforce unrepresentative of how most Americans live. The placement of newsrooms also results in “location bias” among employers: a tendency to hire people in the vicinity of an office, often at the expense of diversifying the staff. Doris Truong, the director of training and diversity at the Poynter Institute, believes that journalism’s fast and sweeping shift to remote work will make it easier for employers to enlist people from different backgrounds. “Since we’ve seen that people are able to work effectively from many different locations during the pandemic, this would be a perfect opportunity to hire someone who maybe is unable or unwilling to leave a particular location but who could still get to know your community,” Truong said.

If workers no longer have to clock in to an office at a certain time, and can instead have more flexible schedules—to allow for such things as providing care for young children or elderly parents—then the newsroom of the future has the potential to be a more inclusive place. “There’s a lot of ways in which it sort of evens out things,” Truong added. Of course,

paper devoted ten thousand words to describing the architecture to readers.

“Every ornament has its uses,” according to the Tribune. “The position of every stone is dictated by the necessities of construction; and the whole work exhibits the overruling influence of a consistent idea.” And that idea was simple, Wallace writes: “The building was intended to attract attention.”

There was a religious component, too. With their buildings, newspapers were trying to outdo churches, whose spires towered over cities. In Chicago, Wallace writes, “when the Tribune Tower first overtook the Trinity Church spire on the skyline, it was a gesture intended to show the momentum of progress and the dominance of mass communication as the more

news organizations still need to provide their employees with the resources required. Fiftyfive million Americans do not have access to broadband, according to the Brookings Institution; Native Americans are particularly disenfranchised when it comes to technology.

Recently, when Truong held a virtual leadership academy for journalists, a participant from rural Mississippi had to travel to South Carolina for the week because she didn’t have a good internet connection.

Newsrooms must also compensate for what else is lost out-of-office—the off-thecuff praise, the little pep talk, the transparency that comes from being able to walk by the conference room “and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I should be in that meeting! Why am I not in there?’ ” Truong said. Just as newspapers once erred in thinking that online journalism meant simply transferring print articles to the Web, a report by the International News Media Association finds that mastheads are in danger of assuming that “remote news operations can thrive with a simple shift of where desks are located.” Mental health, after all, is as essential as Wi-Fi. Matassa Flores, of the Seattle Times, tries to check in with her staff regularly and congratulate them on big stories. “But it’s more timeconsuming and less satisfying and just harder

authoritative source of information.”

The result: publishers came to be seen as “community leaders, public servants, statesmen.”

When newspapers couldn’t construct tall buildings, they settled for locations close to city hall, reminding citizens—and elected officials—that someone was always watching nearby.

Newspaper headquarters also infused a sense of righteousness, strength, and bravado into the reporters who worked inside. “When journalists walked into these buildings, they felt the power,” Nikki Usher, a University of Illinois media scholar who studies newsroom culture, told me. Now, as those spaces fade away, “one of the biggest challenges facing traditional journalists in a postindustrial environment for

news is not economic survival—it’s ego survival,” Usher wrote in a 2014 Tow Center report.

Usher spent time with Miami Herald employees before and after their move out of their downtown headquarters, at One Herald Plaza, and into the suburbs. They spoke as if Miami had lost a human being—a “major institutional figure,” as a reporter put it to Usher. An editor told her: “It’s bad for the psyche for there to be no building to exist for people to see every day that’s associated with a traditional media company.” Another editor said: “We felt very proud. You could see the building, and it was not hard to think about the glory days of newspapers.”

—Michael Rosenwald

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The sudden shift in perspective brought on by remote work has made clear how the newsroom itself, for all its social and collaborative aspects, can be a place of exclusion.

to do that from home,” she said. “Every day I feel the weight of not doing that very well.”

Her newsroom, like most, is closed at least until January—and even once it reopens something will have changed: gone are the openface “pods,” where teams of four reporters used to work; in are cubicles heightened with Plexiglas barriers to maintain social distancing. Given the traffic in Seattle and its high cost of living, which has pushed many employees out of the city, Matassa Flores anticipates that a large number of her colleagues will choose to stay remote. “There’s a whole subterranean part of this, which is about collaboration and mentoring and the psychological impact of working in isolation,” she said. “Those things we’re just beginning to see.”

O

ne of the greatest challenges posed by remote work is how a young journalist coming of age in the time of coronavirus will experience what’s left of a newsroom. First, she has the towering hurdle

of finding work in an industry battered by financial loss. But say she manages to cross it: she is now largely on her own. For Alex Andrejev, a twenty-four-year-old sports reporter at the Charlotte Observer, the move out of the newsroom meant that she had no veteran coworkers around to learn from. She’d taken the position in January; the Observer was her first full-time workplace in journalism, and she was new in town. “You have to go out of your way a little more to get that sense of mentorship,” she said. When she started her job, she was excited to discover a whole group of new recruits, all of them young and most of them female. “It was very promising,” she thought. Now their camaraderie is confined largely to Zoom and Facebook. “I think we can all be better at trying to separate work from life and trying to actually talk to each other off the clock,” she said.

Andrejev’s beat meant a local emphasis on nascar—which, unlike most sports, never really went away, by the strange virtue

RUTH MARGALIT

of its relative lack of contact. First came virtual races, in which drivers competed (sometimes barefoot) on simulators from their homes. Then actual races resumed, in a siloed way. Some were streamed online; others were closed to fans but open to reporters. By now, Andrejev has gotten in the habit of having her temperature checked upon entering a track, then being ushered up to the press box, which she doesn’t leave for the duration of the race. Rather than having to elbow one another for drivers’ time once a race is over, Andrejev and the rest of the press pool have their interviews coordinated on Zoom by nascar media representatives. All of this is convenient (and necessary), if a little self-defeating.

Part of the thrill of being a sports reporter is jostling for scoops, Andrejev said. “It takes the competitiveness out.”

The inability to meet athletes in person has proved especially onerous for a new reporter like Andrejev, who finds it almost impossible to cultivate sources. “No one really wants to do more Zoom calls,” she said. (In a rant that went viral, a nascar driver named Clint Bowyer told reporters, “Zoom meetings suck!… I think everybody ought to have a free pass at Zoom when we’re all done with this crap.”) But the relative lack of access to athletes has also allowed Andrejev to reflect more broadly about her profession. “There’s been a lot of stories this year that aren’t just about the sports story lines,” she said. Game analysis has given way to articles about athletes protesting police brutality and more expansive examinations of what sports will look like in the future. These subjects, she’s found, are the ones most worth her time.

When we spoke, Andrejev sounded resigned to the reality of remote work, which has effectively meant “a lot of typing from random parts of my house.” She understands it as a cost-saving way to keep local journalists on the job. Still, it’s hard. “It’s sort of like you’re doing it by yourself,” she said. “It definitely takes more discipline, and it’s easy to feel lonely.” She added, “A lot of people have asked how I like Charlotte since transitioning here.” Often, she’s not sure how to respond. “I like my house,” she’ll reply, wryly. She bought herself a desk. cjr

55

VOIC ES OF THE PA ND EM IC

What We’ve Learned A science journalist’s default mode is writing about small updates and individual studies.

This is basically what I’ve been doing for my entire career.

Editorially, when we’re given the time and space to swing big, it really pays off.

And I hope that’s the lesson that we can take into the future.

—Ed Yong

Staff science writer, The Atlantic

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DATA

New Money W hile most news outlets are slashing budgets, an emerging class of philanthropists and streaming services—plus the country’s largest newspaper, the New York Times—are spending ambitiously, transforming the way Americans tell and consume nonfiction stories.

Netflix, Hulu, and HBO are merging reporting with entertainment—­documentary meets reality TV. Spotify and the Times are investing in podcasts. As Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund, buys up newspapers and chops them down to stumps, charitable organizations have arrived to help—on their own terms. The

AUTHOR

Savannah Jacobson

Knight Foundation has supported projects to preserve First Amendment protections; some of that money goes to journalism, or to organizations that think about the press. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, funds digital security reporting (including for this magazine); through Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs looks to “empower storytellers”; Kathryn Murdoch—whose husband, James, is the younger son of Rupert Murdoch—focuses on the climate crisis. A few patrons banded together, raising $42 million to found the American Journalism Project, which supports thirty-five local news organizations around the country.

The media industry’s shift, from an advertising-based business to one reliant on subscribers and benefactors, has critical implications for the form and veracity of coverage. In looking at who is investing in what, we can observe what seems most promising—and what risks sacrificing journalistic independence.

the fire starter PIERRE OMIDYAR/FIRST LOOK MEDIA

In October 2013, Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, started First Look Media—a part nonprofit, part for-profit news organization seeking to provide “fearless, investigative journalism.” First Look promised to back a slate of new sites, starting with The Intercept, that would be honored by the Pulitzer Prizes and the Academy Awards. Since then, there have been before-it-began closures (see: Racket), layoffs (see: Topic and The Nib), and sourcing scandals.

$250

$3

MILLION

MILLION

The amount Omidyar spent to establish First Look Media, which got The Intercept off the ground

The amount First Look Media has given, in tandem with the Democracy Fund, to each of the following: ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Center for Investigative Reporting

$4

MILLION The amount First Look Media has given the Press Freedom Defense Fund for its work on First Amendment cases

DATA

57

the audiophile

The evangelist CRAIG NEWMARK

SPOTIFY

An audio streaming service with music and ­podcasts hosted by Joe Rogan, Michelle Obama, and many others, Spotify is home to at least half a million shows. Custom playlists, created for ­subscribers, now include podcasts, and the ­company has reportedly been hiring a staff to work on audiobooks.

$200

$183

MILLION

MILLION

The amount Spotify spent in February 2019 to buy Gimlet Media, a podcasting company known for Reply All, Homecoming, and other popular shows, which draw millions of listeners per month

The amount paid in February 2020 for The Ringer, a sports media company with popular podcasts

$155

BILLION

MILLION The amount spent in 2019 on Anchor, an app for making and distributing podcasts

$56

x

MILLION The amount spent in 2019 on Parcast, a podcast network known for truecrime stories, daily astrology programming, and a new show featuring the TikTok star Addison Rae

$46

x

Spotify’s value, which reportedly increased thanks to an exclusive licensing agreement with The Joe Rogan Experience—a show famed for platforming bigoted conspiracists and, on most days, the most popular podcast in the United States

The billionaire founder of Craigslist— which democratized classified ads and took that business away from newspapers—Newmark funds digital security and journalism (including for this magazine), among other things.

$20

x

MILLION The amount Newmark has donated to the City University of New York Journalism School, now known as the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism

$20

x

MILLION The amount Newmark donated to help establish The Markup, an investigative website focused on digital security

$10

x

MILLION The amount donated to establish the Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at the Columbia Journalism School.

(Newmark helps fund CJR and sits on our Board of Overseers.)

$5

x

MILLION The amount donated to Poynter’s Center for Ethics and Leadership, on top of at least $655,000 to Poynter’s newsroom

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THE LOST CHILD KATHRYN MURDOCH/ QUADRIVIUM

Perhaps eager to escape the family legacy, Kathryn Murdoch—whose husband, James, is the younger son of Rupert—and her foundation, ­Quadrivium, have invested in fighting the climate crisis and, lately, in promoting journalism. She is on the board of, and a major donor to, two climate news organizations—SciLine and Climate Central. To the latter, she’s given $500,000.

$1

The amount given to The 19th, a news site x focused on women and politics

MILLION

THE GRANDdADDY THE KNIGHT FOUNDATION

A nonprofit foundation formed in 1950, Knight brands itself as a fierce protector of democracy (its stated goal is to “foster informed and engaged communities”) with a focus on the First Amendment. Recently, it has come under criticism from journalists for investing in projects that extol the values of reporting, instead of reporting itself.

$30

$20

MILLION The amount the Knight Foundation donated to establish the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University

MILLION The amount given to help establish the American Journalism Project, an initiative supporting local nonprofit news

$50 the arriviste LAURENE POWELL JOBS/ EMERSON COLLECTIVE

Named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson Collective is a social justice initiative founded

by Laurene Powell Jobs, a billionaire from the fortune of her late husband, Steve, a founder of Apple. In 2017, Emerson Collective bought a 70 percent share of The Atlantic. The following year, Emerson Collective acquired PopUp Magazine Productions, a live-storytelling company, and the California Sunday Magazine; in 2020, P ­ owell Jobs pulled out, forcing California Sunday to suspend publication. The Atlantic also suffered layoffs.

$100 MILLION

MILLION To each of the following, Knight has p ­ rovided $5 million: KNIGHT INTERNATIONAL FELLOWS REPORT FOR AMERICA PROPUBLICA SOLUTIONS JOURNALISM NETWORK THE NEWS LITERACY PROJECT THE WORLD WIDE WEB FOUNDATION THE CENTER FOR AN INFORMED PUBLIC THE CENTER FOR INFORMATION, TECHNOLOGY, AND PUBLIC LIFE THE INSTITUTE FOR DATA, DEMOCRACY & POLITICS

The amount Emerson Collective paid for a majority stake in The Atlantic

THE CENTER FOR INFORMED DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CYBERSECURITY

DATA

59

The Survivor THE NEW YORK TIMES

America’s dominant newspaper, based in Manhattan. Where some see a successful model that embraced digital subscriptions early, others see a monopoly gobbling up the competition. In January, the Times announced that it had met a goal of doubling its annual digital revenue, to $800 million—a year ahead of schedule.

$25 MILLION

The amount the Times paid in July 2020 for Serial Productions, ­maker of the w ­ ildly popular eponymous true-crime podcast

$8.6 MILLION

The amount the Times paid in March 2020 for Audm, a company that delivers written journalism as audio

$25

13

MILLION

The number of companies in which the Times is invested, including The Skimm, a daily newsletter; Atlas Obscura, a travel magazine; and Shine, a wellness app

The amount the Times paid in 2016 for The Wirecutter, a consumer-goods review site, and its s­ ibling site, The Sweethome

the brute ALDEN GLOBAL CAPITAL

A New York–based hedge fund that owns some two hundred newspapers, more than almost any other American company, Alden poses a threat to robust local journalism. Its strategy is driven by a belief that the news industry is destined to die—and so it might as well profit from that demise. Per Neil Chase, f­ormerly the executive editor of Northern California’s East Bay Times, an Alden paper, “They don’t care one way or the other about journalism. It’s all about the spreadsheets and the numbers.”

$765 $159 71x MILLION

The value of the assets Alden manages—many of them in media, including the Denver Post and the East Bay Times, which won Pulitzer Prizes. Some of Alden’s newspapers, like The Saratogian (upstate New York) and Michigan’s Macomb Daily, employ the only daily reporter for miles.

MILLION

Alden’s newspapers’ annual profit, according to the most recent figures reported

The percentage by which employment in Alden’s NewsGuild-represented newsrooms dropped between 2012 and 2019, according to testimony the NewsGuild delivered to Congress

“We need to radically redefine who we are serving.�

Jack Herrera speaks with Tasneem Raja, editor in chief of The Oaklandside

JACK HERRERA

61

P E T E ROSOS

I

n the age of ­covid-19, The ­Oaklandside, a nonprofit local newsroom, is an anomaly: the pandemic marked the beginning, rather than the end, of its publication. In September of last year, The Oaklandside—in Oakland, California—began the initial stages of a methodical, deliberately slow start-up period ahead of a July 2020 launch. By March 2020, there were still only two people on the team: ­Tasneem ­Raja, the editor in chief, and ­Darwin ­BondGraham, the news editor. When the coronavirus hit, Raja had to figure out what to do. Instead of delaying plans, she accelerated them: together with ­BondGraham and a team of freelancers, she began producing dedicated public-­service coverage about the local stakes of the pandemic. Raja also forged ahead with hiring a staff. “We just realized, We can’t wait,” she said. In a time of crisis, Oakland needed information.

Central to The Oaklandside’s development have been dozens of listening sessions and one-on-one meetings that Raja has held with community members. More than pre-­reporting, these in-­person discussions have informed the foundation of The Oaklandside’s identity.

Raja did not want to load The Oaklandside with established assumptions of what journalism should look like; instead, she aimed to build it around what would be most useful to readers. The listening sessions were, of course, interrupted and altered by the pandemic. But by mid-June, The Oaklandside had a seven-­person team working to help people navigate an unprecedented year. The staff turned articles into flyers, in order to reach unhoused community members; they translated explainers about ­covid-19 testing into Spanish; they dedicated scores of hours to oversight of the Oakland Police Department’s use of force during the summer’s protests against racist violence.

The Oaklandside is a sister publication to ­Berkeleyside—a nonprofit newsroom in Berkeley, just to the north. Together, the two sites now exist under the umbrella of Cityside, a new nonprofit organization dedicated to local coverage. Funding for The Oaklandside comes from an array of donating members, philanthropists, and a $1.5 million seed grant from the Google News Initiative. When I reached Raja, the smoke from the California wildfires was still lingering in Oakland, just a few days after ash had turned the skies a terrifying deep orange. This interview has been edited for clarity.

TASNEEM RAJA As editor of The Oaklandside, Raja has held dozens of community listening sessions.

62 HERRERA The Oaklandside has pursued a community-­ relationship model with Oakland. Could you tell me about your relationship with the city?

RAJA I lived in Oakland for several years, until 2015, when I was working as a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine, with a focus on data journalism. Much of my journalistic lens has been shaped, and been shifted, by conversations and relationships with Oakland community members over the years.

I began considering the relationship that local newsrooms have had with the people they cover, and the walls that have been put up between local newsrooms and community organizers, community activists—people who are deeply invested and deeply engaged in on-the-ground issues. My relationships and conversations and experiences that I had in Oakland really challenged my very traditional sense of this invisible wall that journalists are encouraged to keep up. My relationships also challenged me to rethink the value of work like investigative journalism—and magazine-­ style features journalism, longform journalism, all of this. I began to question how we can do better to ensure that the journalistic resources that we’re bringing to bear are reaching and serving and including people who are directly impacted by policies and problems that we’re digging into.

HERRERA Could you talk about the past few years—how you left and came back to Oakland?

RAJA In late 2014 I was asked to consider joining the Code Switch team at NPR, in a leadership position, as a senior editor, and it felt like a sort of natural outflow of the work that I had increasingly begun turning my attention to at that time, in terms of journalism that investigates and explores intersections of race and culture and identity with everything else in America. So I left Oakland, and I went to NPR briefly and worked with the Code Switch team. Then life took another turn.

For family reasons, my husband and I spent three years in East Texas, where we founded a totally scrappy, totally bootstrapped nonprofit community news platform called the Tyler Loop, which was kind of a culmination of a lot of that work and thought in Oakland

CJR

and elsewhere. We were really coming at it from a data-­driven perspective and from a community voices perspective. For example, we began a big, very widely well-­received live storytelling show. I got to learn a lot about how that can work, what it can mean for communities, to start your work in community listening. And a few years after we founded the Loop, I started talking with the good folks at Berkeleyside, who had launched this tremendous local news publication ten years before in Berkeley, California. From the beginning, readers of Berkeleyside in Oakland had been saying, “God, we wish there were a publication that was truly looking at social issues from a community perspective and doing that work for Oakland as well.” And from my background at that point in listening-­driven journalism—and pushing back on traditional breaking-­news approaches, shifting more to participatory journalism—this became an opportunity. Not to create Berkeleyside 2.0, but to actually create something totally new, from the ground up, in conversation with Oakland community members and stakeholders.

HERRERA Could you tell me more about what that’s looked like? Starting a publication with months of listening sessions?

RAJA We spent the first three months going around the city in conversation: one-on-one conversations with artists, community organizers, healthcare practitioners, business owners. And really asking—not even news, we really weren’t talking about news—we were much more asking, What do you want journalists to do for Oakland? And What are your information needs in the city? What information do you find yourself lacking on a daily basis, or every now and then, that just makes it harder for you to enjoy and impact and understand this beautiful, complicated city?

HERRERA I can imagine that those listening sessions were affected by the outbreak of ­covid-19.

RAJA Absolutely. It’s a very different world than I was expecting this newsroom to launch into. This was all pre-­pandemic, pre–­ protest movement, pre–­fire season. And it’s been heartbreaking: we had to curtail our

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JA N E T YS K A / D I G I TA L F I RST M E D I A / E AST BAY T I M E S V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S

BREAKING NEWS The coronavirus prompted The Oaklandside to debut early; soon, fires became a top story.

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live engagement program, and we had to really shift a lot of our thinking about what this work was going to look like. Now we’re challenged with figuring out how to continue to really, truly engage with our communities, to continue the listening work that we built this newsroom’s foundation on, given that we’re not able to meet face-to-face and be in the same room together. And as a newsroom, as a team of journalists, we’ve absolutely been impacted greatly. We’re all members of this community. And, you know, we have several members of our newsroom who have elder loved ones nearby who they are, one way or the other, caring for, and certainly worrying about.

HERRERA Can you give me some examples of how you’ve used The Oaklandside to respond to the pandemic—and the fires and the uprisings?

RAJA Before we launched ­Oaklandside.org, ­ ne of our contributors, Azucena ­Rasilla, did a o story that we initially published at Berkeleyside, where she called dozens of pharmacies across the city after a night of civil unrest and protests in Oakland that resulted in pharmacies across East Oakland boarding up and then shutting down. Obviously, in a pandemic, this was really, really bad for our community. So Azu called dozens of pharmacies, and we created a table, which was: “Is your pharmacy open?”

This was service journalism. We were asking, What do our community members need to know right now? You see, it’s not enough to just tell the news. The news is that “pharmacies in Oakland have closed down because of the civil unrest.” But that’s not enough—what value is that to the person who was sitting there saying, Now, okay, is my pharmacy closed? What do I do now? So we’ve got to take this one step further.

It’s not enough to just break news. We’ve got to serve our community’s information needs.

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HERRERA I want to talk more about how The Oaklandside’s guiding principles contrast with more established newsrooms’. You built your model on listening sessions—could you tell me what you’ve learned? And how have your own assumptions about what journalism should look like been challenged by your neighbors?

the people who would typically be targeted by advertisers in your section. So we have a tradition of service journalism newsrooms, but we need to radically redefine who we are serving.

That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with over the past nearly ten years of my career: Who is this work for?

RAJA There’s reporting about communities, and there’s reporting for communities. And much of the work that I had been trained to do earlier in my career was squarely in the vein of reporting about, not reporting for. I started as a local reporter in Philadelphia and Chicago, and it was made very clear to me— whether explicitly or sort of indirectly—that my audience were largely people like me, and people like my colleagues in the newsroom, and certainly not always people we were reporting about, and people who were dealing with serious, intractable, life-­changing, life-­threatening, life-­curtailing problems in those cities. It was very obvious that we were not intending for this work to really be useful or even necessarily valuable to the people who were spending a whole lot of time with our reporters—and spending that time, of course, in hopes that it would make a difference, for their lives or the lives of other people in their communities and communities across the city. I mean, what’s the evidence that simply telling stories moves the needle on inequity in our world? I am not convinced that that is enough in and of itself. I think it can certainly be an important piece of the puzzle. But it’s just not the be-all and endall. And it becomes an unhealthy dynamic of ownership over someone’s story.

HERRERA How, at The Oaklandside, have you pursued service-­oriented journalism for less resourced communities?

HERRERA How does reporting for look different from what existed in the past?

RAJA If you think about traditional newspaper sections, like dining or travel or business— we were always providing service journalism for more resourced communities, for communities that were attractive to advertisers. We really were not providing service journalism— really smart, savvy, data-­driven, discerning journalism that can help people make choices about different products or different programs or learn how to navigate complex systems— for audiences that were not as resourced as

RAJA I think a really good example of this is a resource that our housing reporter, ­Natalie ­Orenstein, produced a little while ago, where she was reporting about a class action lawsuit against ­Caltrans—which is the big statewide transportation agency. Caltrans workers had been accused of removing property illegally from homeless encampments. They were clearing out and essentially just taking people’s stuff and damaging people’s property. There was a class action lawsuit; the plaintiffs settled. And so now, if you are a person who believes that you have had property removed or damaged by Caltrans workers in a certain time period, you can file for reimbursement. Natalie wrote that story in a way where she has sort of a classic, traditional lede; she starts by talking about people who have been in this situation and hearing what they have to say. And then the whole middle of her story is a guide. It is, “Here’s who to call. What can you expect? What information do you need to have at your fingertips? How much money are we talking about? Who’s eligible?” And it is service; it is just a guide to filing for this compensation.

And then in the last third of Natalie’s story, she comes out of that and back again into this traditional narrative format where she talks about how people have been involved in fighting for this lawsuit for a long time. So you can do both styles. You can absolutely do both. And we have to do both.

HERRERA What news organizations have you drawn inspiration from?

RAJA We’re certainly learning from outlets like Outlier Media, in Detroit. Their entire model is: How can we surface information that is of value to Detroit residents, many of whom

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“What’s the evidence that simply telling stories moves the needle on inequity in our world?”

are dealing with utility shutoffs and foreclosure and other housing problems? And their work largely happens via SMS, responding to people’s direct information needs. I’m also so grateful to City Bureau, in Chicago; Lewis Raven Wallace and Press On; MLK 50, in Memphis; Hearken, and their approach of saying, How are we creating feedback mechanisms through which readers can engage with our work? We are not doing this work alone.

We are not doing this work in a vacuum. I very much want to avoid any implications of, like, “The Oaklandside is forging ahead or pioneering all by itself.” That’s not what we’re doing—that’s not accurate. We are in an ecosystem where we’re learning from, and hopefully contributing to, a community of practitioners who are doing this work.

HERRERA It’s easy to talk about “the Oakland community” or to say, “This is what the community wants.” But there’s a big

question in there: How do you know who the community is? And when you go to talk to the community, how do you know who to talk to?

RAJA You know, it’s funny—we can fall into these habits of shorthand. But in our work, in our reporting, even as part of our style guide, we say that we don’t talk about “the Oakland community.” We understand that there’s no such thing as “the Oakland community”— or “the Latino community” or “the queer community.” There are communities within each of these large categories. So, to me, I think it starts with relationships. It starts with this idea of continuing to engage with people about their information needs. An example of that is when we started our coverage of local elections—we did not start with the candidates. We did not start with the horse race. We started with a survey that we distributed through a number of different

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“It starts with this idea of continuing to engage with people about their information needs.”

paths, asking people, “Tell me about life in your neighborhood. Tell me about what’s working in your neighborhood school. What keeps you up at night? What would make life better around you?”

HERRERA To me, it seems like one of the important parts of answering that question— about what Oakland really needs—is having people on your team who are Oakland residents. Original residents. What’s the relationship between your team and this city? And what’s your personal relationship with Oakland at this point in your life?

RAJA We’re a small team, so these numbers are small, but three of our seven newsroom members had been living in Oakland for ten-plus years when we launched. Azucena is another great example there. Azu was Oakland born and raised; she has lived here her whole life; she has deep family

roots. She was freelancing for us, and later she became our arts and community reporter. When it became clear that testing was going to become really important during the pandemic, she instantly said, “We need a guide. We need a guide to find these testing sites, and how to find free testing sites.”

Very, very early on, she went out herself. It wasn’t just a set of addresses—she literally talks about, “I went here, I went there, then this happened.” And we have an En Español section; we have three bilingual, Spanish-­ speaking reporters in our newsroom. Whenever we have a piece like Azu’s, we’re sure to translate that into Spanish, given Oakland’s large and growing Latino population and the large population of monolingual Spanish speakers. We also have a partnership with a really fantastic community news organization called El Tímpano, which works with monolingual Spanish- and Mam-­speaking Oakland residents.

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67 HERRERA You’ve been responding to a pandemic; you’ve been starting a newsroom; you’re also responding to your staffers’ individual needs. As an ­EIC, you have a big job right now. What have been some of the harder parts of it?

RAJA Not being able to sit across from somebody you work with closely all day, and not to be able to just go to lunch with people, or just to be near someone, to be face-to-face and look someone in the eye while you’re talking to them, without the barriers of a screen. It’s hard. I’m thirty-­eight, and this is my sixth or seventh newsroom, depending on how you count it, and so I have the benefit of coming up in those environments, and getting to go out with people for drinks after work, and to just sit side by side next to an editor and watch them mark up my copy and tell me why they’re making the changes that they’re making. To get to develop those organic relationships and just be friends—to just, like, soak it all up. And it’s hard not to have that right now.

HERRERA For this local news model going forward, I think I have to ask: What’s the plan for funding The Oaklandside over the next five, ten years?

RAJA We’re a nonprofit newsroom under the banner of Cityside. And if you look at the nonprofit newsrooms, at the state and national level, that have survived and thrived over the past decade, there are a few common denominators. Number one, you have to start with investment. You have to start with the capacity to hire the people who are going to keep the lights on in the long term. So that means that if you look at successful models, like the Texas Tribune or ­ProPublica, you certainly see that there was a crucial founding investment in the longterm sustainability of that work. I’ve worked with some of the largest nonprofit groups in the country, like NPR, and then I founded one of the smallest in the country, the Tyler Loop. What I’ve found was the importance, of course, of a diversified revenue stream.

So that means that you cannot put all of your eggs in any one basket—you have to have a lot of different baskets, and you’ve got to

be able to have the capacity to work with people who really understand these various support streams. Membership is very important to us—that’s individual, small-­dollar ­giving—and I’m very happy to say that we have well over a thousand members. That means anybody who’s given anything, from a dollar to a thousand dollars. That might be a monthly recurring donation, or it might be a one-time donation. Our numbers continue to grow.

HERRERA For my last question, I want to ask, what’s been heartening? What’s been the best part of your job so far?

RAJA Oh, man, there’s so many things. I would say showing that you can—quote, unquote—do both: that you can do the longform, investigative, deeply in-depth reporting, and also direct service. We did this visual investigation of what happened in downtown Oakland the night of June 1, when Oakland police and other local law enforcement agencies fired less-than-lethal weapons on a crowd of protesters ahead of an official curfew. OPD said that they did this because people on the scene were fashioning Molotov cocktails to throw at the police line. Well, we looked at hundreds of photographs, dozens of videos; we door-­knocked, asking people in the vicinity of that intersection for more evidence.

And we unearthed more video that was really illuminating about what did not happen that night and what did happen that night. This was, like, a four-­thousand-word investigation. So we do that, and then, side by side, we publish stories like Azucena’s guide to pharmacies and Natalie’s piece helping unhoused residents navigate this class action lawsuit.

We did a version of Natalie’s story that we turned into a flyer. That middle section— where she was laying out the nuts and bolts of how to apply for the compensation—we just turned that into a flyer, and we consulted with the editor of Street Spirit, a paper that we have here in the East Bay that has been serving unhoused communities for a long time.

We made a list of intersections that are near homeless encampments and other high-­ traffic areas and posted them around the city.

We’re just really grateful for the opportunity to contribute to that body of knowledge. cjr

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Media companies haven’t made newsrooms inclusive. Can unions?

ON STAFF

Diversity Work

AUTHOR

Maya Binyam ILLUSTRATOR

Lincoln Agnew

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or two decades, from its genesis in the mid-­ nineties, Vice Media branded itself in the image of the dispossessed. The earliest issues of its magazine, originally called the Voice of Montreal, were supported by a Canadian welfare grant and copublished by a Haitian nonprofit. But by the summer of 2017, two of its founders—Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith—had traded government funding for private investment and dropped their titular claim to communal representation with the jettison of a single vowel: the Voice became Vice. The company received multimillion-­dollar investments from Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, but still self-­described as “countercultural.” And although its reach was global, with channels streaming throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa, it claimed a cult status. The predicament felt quintessentially Gen X: How many contemporary entrepreneurs, newly flush with the despotic capacities of freshly minted cash, try to align themselves with the 99 percent?

Outwardly, Vice aimed to preserve its brand by cultivating an ethos of unconventionality and titillation. Internally, however, the culture was troubled—a problem not only of self-presentation, but also of management. Upon their hire, employees were asked to sign a “non-­traditional workplace agreement” that contractually obliged them to feel at ease. “Although it is possible that some of the text, images and information I will be exposed to in the course of my employment with VICE may be considered by some to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing,” read the agreement, “I do not

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find such text, images or information or the workplace environment at VICE to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing.”

In the fall of 2017, as the ­#MeToo movement crescendoed, what had been an internal crisis became a public nightmare. Accounts of violent sexual advances, retaliation, and coercive settlements circulated first among Vice workers, then in news reports, and, finally, around the world. In November, the Daily Beast published an exposé in which more than a dozen current and former employees described a “toxic” culture of sexual harassment. (Gavin McInnes, a cofounder who was no longer at the company but remained associated with it, had recently founded the Proud Boys, a neofascist and misogynist organization.) By winter, Alvi and Smith had to admit that the “truth is inescapable.” In a company-­ wide email sent on the cusp of another investigative report, this one published in the New York Times, the founders admitted defeat. As an antiestablishment enterprise, Vice had failed its “egalitarian values.” It was “part of the problem.” As repentance, Alvi and Smith pledged to instill within the company “a truly modern work culture.”

The company’s president resigned, and two other managers were fired. The non­traditional workplace agreement was scrapped. A Diversity and Inclusion Board was assembled to “implement changes.” Its members were high profile, including a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, and Kamala Harris’s sister. Gloria Steinem, the celebrity darling of the second wave, became the board’s figurehead. In the spring, it was announced that she would be holding office hours for employees to discuss their grievances. The initiative comprised a single hour-long session, which was, according to Sara David, the publication’s astrology editor, “useless”— the women in attendance asked Steinem questions about sexism in the newsroom, but she had no meaningful response. In a statement to Jezebel, her assistant said that Steinem was “accessible and reachable,” but the company hadn’t given her an email address, and employees had no means of getting in touch.

Management had sent the workforce a clear message: the revolution might not be televised, but it would be star-­studded all the way to its dead end.

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Meanwhile, in mid-2018, the Vice Union, which had won recognition two years earlier, geared up to negotiate its second contract. The first had yielded concessions that were primarily economic. Employees had been guaranteed severance pay, compensatory time off, and payroll increases of 5 percent. But this time, as the bargaining committee surveyed its members, a less remunerative concern began to emerge. “Overwhelmingly, diversity was the number two thing that everyone wanted to see change at Vice,” said David, who at the time was the sole nonwhite member of the union’s bargaining committee. The new contract, ratified in January 2019, introduced a series of clauses devoted to sexual harassment, nondiscrimination, and representation. As a union, David told me, they had rejected management’s “aesthetic actions.” Corporate inclusion policies had done more to rehabilitate the outlet’s public image than to win back the trust of its workers, and the union wanted the company’s good intent committed to paper.

If Vice initially presented itself as the underdog of corporate media, it has subsequently become an exponent of the corporate style. Over the past five years, as digitalmedia CEOs have shown their willingness to genuflect at the altar of private interests, with profit margins contingent on advertising revenue and readership at the mercy of mercurial algorithms, the industry’s workers have begun to organize. Among demands for increased minimum salaries, cost-of-living raises, and extended benefits, media unions are presenting management with a new kind of proposal: a set of clauses under the banner of “diversity” or “diversity and inclusion.” These efforts are designed to correct the homogeneity of the industry, which has historically and systematically exercised hostility toward workers who are not white, male, and wealthy— which is to say, workers who represent the vast majority of the world.

This summer, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, professionals spun calls for police abolition into stimuli for workplace redress. Some CEOs offered public apologies; others were forced to resign. Workers, meanwhile, strategized about how to seize the moment. Their bosses, compelled to do moral good but calculating the economic losses of a global pandemic, were caught in

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As a moral imperative, diversity has nebulous returns, but as a branding principle, it’s demonstrably lucrative.

In America’s other cities, an alternate form of collectivism materialized. In Boston, Buffalo, Newark, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and elsewhere, Black people of all ages assembled to protest policing, unemployment, and quotidian forms of racism. Their tactics were direct.

Stores were looted and precincts burned. In t the apex of the civil rights era, the Detroit, the riots were deemed an insurrection media industry, like all American in order to justify the deployment of armed enterprises that claimed for them- federal forces. After twelve thousand guardsselves the capacity for redemption, began to men and paratroopers descended upon the develop a racial consciousness. In 1967, dur- city, assisting local police in making more ing the Summer of Love, more than a hundred than seven thousand arrests and killing dozthousand young hippies, most of them white, ens of Black people, including Tanya Blandconverged upon San Francisco’s Haight-­ ing, a four-year-old seeking shelter in her Ashbury district to claim a new, communal living room, the New York Times declared the way of life. The media, for the most part, cov- unrest officially over: “Detroit’s Battles Have ered the occupation with intrigue, if also a Died Out, But Not Negro Youths’ Hostility.”

Early in 1968, after the Haight-­Ashbury dash of skepticism, as if building an ethnography of a band of long-lost cousins. “The fresh hippies formally disbanded their occupainflux of curiosity-­seekers has proved a great tion with a mock funeral and rioters mournboon to the legion of psychedelic beggars,” ed the deaths of their friends and families wrote Hunter S. Thompson, in the New York at real ones, President Lyndon B. Johnson Times Magazine. “They’ll share what they col- announced the results of the Kerner Comlect anyway, so it seems entirely reasonable mission, a report investigating the cause of the uprisings. Among its findings was the that strangers should share with them.”

a crisis of indecision. Where do we go from here? media companies asked, often word for word. Most are still scrambling, even as the paths toward newsroom diversity are whittled down to two options: the corporate policy or the union contract.

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observation that the country had been split into two societies, “one black, one white— separate and unequal,” with the media partly to blame. “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” the report read. Newsrooms had “failed to analyze and report adequately on racial problems in the United States, and, as a related matter, to meet the Negro’s legitimate expectations in journalism.” To right its wrongs, suggested the commission, the industry would need to diversify.

Over the next two decades, advocacy groups assembled to protect the interests of nonwhite journalists. The National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association for Hispanic Journalists held annual conventions, empaneled special task forces, and distributed thousands of dollars in scholarships to further the professional advancement of their constituents.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors (now the American Society of News Editors, or asne), a membership organization founded in 1922 with the charge of promoting “principled journalism,” took up the mantle of rehabilitation. The society’s Minorities Committee, convened in 1978, adopted a set of resolutions, chief among them a modest pledge for parity: by 2000, the racial makeup of newsrooms would match that of the general population. By 1998, though, it was clear that the industry would fall significantly short of those aspirations, and the target year was pushed back to 2025.

In some newsrooms, sympathetic managers tried to do their part but were thwarted by the allied bad faith of their colleagues, who clung to the milky-­white composition of the workplace as if its renown depended upon it. Max Frankel, who served as the executive editor of the New York Times from 1986 to 1994, developed a one-for-one hiring policy, which required that each new white reporter be matched by a new Black reporter, so that each was hired at the same pace. The editors under him, however, protested the initiative by refusing to fill vacant positions, even as their staff size dwindled. The policy was deemed a failure and eventually revoked.

Meanwhile, across the country, the Los Angeles Times launched the Minority Editorial

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Training Program, a crash course in reporting, copyediting, and photography designed to increase the number of nonwhite journalists in the newsroom. Fellows were provided two years of training and guaranteed a single year of employment. But according to a 2018 report compiled by the LA Times Guild, graduates of the program who subsequently joined the Times as full-time staffers reported “depressed wages” as well as a sneaking suspicion that they were being treated like “second-­class journalists.” The fellowship continues to run but has been reformulated to include participants of “diverse backgrounds or life experiences”—white journalists, in other words, are welcome to apply.

For all the reports, committees, and statements of benevolent intent, newsrooms have remained overwhelmingly white, even as the inclusion economy has flourished. According to asne, only 40 percent of participating newsrooms increased racial diversity between 2001 and 2018, despite the fact that the corporate diversity industry has swelled to a value of more than $8 billion. Consultants like Robin DiAngelo, whose book White Fragility sold nearly five hundred thousand copies in the month following Floyd’s death, charge upwards of $15,000 per training session, a price that companies paradoxically budget as a cost-­cutting measure: consciousness raising, fueled by AI anti-­bias technologies and “blind spot” trainings, will always be cheaper than litigating a discrimination suit.

As a moral imperative, diversity has nebulous returns, but as a branding principle it’s demonstrably lucrative. According to Thomson Reuters, whose Diversity and Inclusion Index measures and ranks the performance of the top hundred publicly traded companies with the “most diverse” workplaces, inclusion is a “growth engine.” So where are all the workers?

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t the dawn of digital media, corporate diversity was starting to resemble a pyramid scheme—its promises increasingly virtuous, its deliverables suspiciously out of sight. This was the scene in which workers began to organize. In 2015, Gawker, typically regarded as an eccentric pioneer in the short history of digital-­media unionization, published a post announcing

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that its staff had met with the Writers Guild of America, East, a labor union that typically represented entertainment writers but had just won jurisdiction over digital media. One month later, union elections, usually held behind closed doors, were announced via public post; members declared their votes in the comments. The organizing process had been unconventional—or as Kevin Draper, then a writer for Deadspin, put it, “fucked up.”

Nevertheless, a contract was ratified less than a year later. Among clauses stipulating grievance procedures, editorial independence, and intellectual property rights was a single line devoted to diversity: “The Company will participate in meetings with an editorial diversity committee formed by the union on a regular basis to discuss diversity in hiring and ongoing concerns at the Company.”

The provisions in Vice’s 2019 contract were similarly vague. Management committed to making “strong and sustained efforts” to recruit candidates from “traditionally under-­ represented backgrounds” and to interviewing “diverse candidates” in “good faith.” In a statement, a Vice Media Group spokesperson said, “VICE is fully committed in our comprehensive approach to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Over 40 percent of our team members identify as bipoc, and our goal is to reach 50/50 racial/ethnic representation across US managers and leadership by 2024. 52 percent of our new hires identify as bipoc.” But without binding contract language, these commitments are legally unenforceable. Even laudable goals can be scrapped on a whim or with a change of leadership. In the year after the contract was signed, the proportion of nonwhite employees at Vice grew by only 3 percent. “We’ve definitely had cases of management acting in good faith,” David told me.

“But it’s just not permanent.”

Newsrooms that have organized more recently, including The New Yorker, The Intercept, Pitchfork, and BuzzFeed News, have honed the language of their diversity provisions, in part to negate the need to rely on the sympathy of individual managers. Typically, though not always, the union will form a diversity and inclusion subcommittee, whose chairs assess the grievances of employees and then devise a set of proposals to be passed along to the union’s bargaining committee.

Once negotiations are complete, and both management and the union have agreed to contract language, proposals are ratified into a tentative agreement, or TA. If the union is successful, the TA will commit management’s good intent to specific actions, making budgetary asks and measuring diversity efforts in terms of concrete goals. “Even the attempts of the best, most well-meaning, most thoughtful individuals end up coming up against the limitations of a structure that doesn’t recognize why these things are important,” Susan ­DeCarava, the president of the New York chapter of the ­NewsGuild, the oldest union for journalists in the country, said.

“The role of the union is to create structures that have accountability and transparency.”

Nearly every union organizer I spoke with expressed some variation on the belief that their managers genuinely wanted to possess diversity. At the bargaining table, most bosses even tout it as a common cause. But when presented with language that would bind the company to concrete obligations, these same managers fall back on noncommittal rhetoric or vacate the conversation altogether. In 2019, Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, issued the company’s annual “Update on Diversity,” affirming that inclusion was a “top priority.” But when the BuzzFeed News Union delivered a diversity proposal to management this past February, the company neglected to issue a counter­ proposal. It wasn’t until mid-June, amid nationwide uprisings against racist violence, that management responded. As a fig leaf, they agreed to the union’s request to form a joint diversity committee, though not necessarily to implement the committee’s recommendations. “They’ve agreed to the idea of a committee,” Stephanie M. Lee, the union’s diversity and inclusion cochair, told me. “Our concern is that we don’t want to just discuss issues. If we brainstorm ideas and come up with recommendations, we want them to be carried out.”

At The New Yorker, where bargaining has been ongoing since November 2018, management has taken an obstructionist approach.

This past summer, they refused to negotiate on the union’s proposals, including its language on diversity and inclusion, until the union handed over its demands for wages,

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“It doesn’t really matter who’s leading,” a union rep said, “because everybody is failing.”

which are typically discussed during the culminating stages of the bargaining process. The magazine’s tactic, Natalie Meade, the union’s unit chair, told me, had effectively turned diversity into a “bargaining chip.” (A spokesperson for The New Yorker contested this characterization, writing, “We felt negotiations would be most productive with all proposals on the table, as opposed to negotiating piecemeal.”) Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker and recently hired the notorious union-busting law firm Proskauer Rose, maintains that its dedication to diversity is evident by virtue of its massive reach. “As a global company, we are inherently multicultural,” reads a “Diversity and Inclusion” statement on its website. Its origin story, almost quaint, appears on a separate vertical: “From the very start, Condé Nast has been unafraid to take risks.” Alongside that declaration is a British Vogue spread from 2015, which positions a snow-white model against a backdrop of masked Bhutanese monks.

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cross shops, perhaps no fight has been as pitched as that which routinely erupts around quotas. Contract-­based diversification strategies are typically various, including language that accounts for career advancement, mentorship, and professional training, but because a significant roadblock to a diverse workforce is the workforce that already exists, hiring has become a natural point of intervention. In an effort to reform an insular industry whose growth patterns are often nepotistic, many unions attempt to stipulate that a minimum number of interviewees be from underrepresented backgrounds. Most shops favor percentages, with 50 percent emerging

as something of a magic—if modest—number. (Of the union members and organizers I interviewed, none were able to tell me where this figure had come from.) Managers, for their part, have tended to declare even arbitrary goals too lofty: although nearly every manager professes a desire to hire “diversely,” almost none has been willing to quantify those efforts according to a joint arithmetic.

At BuzzFeed, whose newly minted Inequality Desk was initially overseen by two white men, management has agreed to a numeric goal for interviewing, but has counter­ proposed language that would obscure its obligation. Rather than commit to a minimum quota of 50 percent, management initially suggested that the stipulation simply be that “multiple” interviewees come from underrepresented backgrounds; in a recent counterproposal, management removed the word “multiple” and left the requirement blank. Repeatedly, management has struck language detailing what would happen if they fail to meet the agreed-­ upon goal. (When asked about this approach, a representative from BuzzFeed said that the

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company “is negotiating with the union in good faith—but at the bargaining table, not in the press.”) At Pitchfork—which, like The New Yorker, is owned by Condé Nast—quotas were initially stonewalled. According to the union, management rejected percentage goals outright, telling workers that “it’s hard to find qualified applicants from underrepresented backgrounds” and “not every job is created equal,” an excuse whose play on the founding principle of the Declaration of Independence is so direct as to appear like a refutation. Management at The New Yorker has taken a similar tack; its initial counterproposal suggested that the percentage goal be replaced with the Rooney Rule, a recruitment policy in the NFL that requires teams to interview at least one nonwhite candidate for top vacancies, but at The New Yorker was modified to stipulate that “at least one person from an underrepresented group” make it to the interview phase of hiring. “I think that Condé Nast, as a company, to their core, believes that white men are the most qualified,” Vrinda Jagota, the cochair of the Pitchfork Union’s diversity and inclusion committee, told me. “They’re okay with one newsroom being led by one politically aware editor in chief deciding ‘I’m going to meet this’ or ‘I’m going to hire people from underrepresented groups,’ but they don’t want it to be the standard.”

Of the shops that have begun to introduce quotas, only a few, such as The Intercept, the Daily Beast, and Vox Media, have managed to ratify their proposed language into enforceable contracts. But even the most captivating success stories have subplots of resistance, with management making concessions only when faced with public or internal pressure.

At Time, the union’s original diversity and inclusion proposals were adopted in full in July—stipulating that 50 percent of the interview pool for open staff jobs, and 60 percent for senior positions, come from underrepresented communities—but management didn’t want to commit to contract language “until the urgency of the current moment” showed them “how important it was,” Cady Lang, the unit’s cochair, said. At Vox, whose union contract, ratified in June of last year, has some of the most liberal stipulations in the industry—awarding a joint diversity

committee an annual budget of $50,000— management was opposed to the suggestion of interviewing quotas until more than a dozen union members presented personal testimonials, union members told me. (Vox Media declined to provide an on-­record statement.)

When I asked M ­ ariya ­Abdulkaf, the chair of the Vox Union’s Diversity and Equity Committee, whether she considered the Vox contract a beacon in the push toward newsroom diversity, she told me that the question was moot. “It doesn’t really matter who’s leading,” she said, “because everybody is failing.”

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hould the labor movement seem like an obvious vehicle for challenging racism, it is only because organizers have recently made it so. Like all member-­led tactics, collective bargaining is subject to the proclivities of those who engage in it. At its best, it can return the means of production to those who toil; at its worst, it can reinforce prevailing notions of who is considered the collective’s natural subject. Historically, the designation “worker” has been flexible, serving as a stand-in for a matrix of power relations that govern the lives of those who produce capital. If the labor movement initially emerged as the worker’s obvious advocate, so too has it arbitrated which working people it deigns to represent.

Upon its founding, in 1886, the American Federation of Labor, the country’s largest coalition of trade unions, vowed to initiate “great and accompanying improvements in the condition of the working people.” The AFL’s inaugural president, Samuel Gompers, who served a dictator’s term until his death, in 1924, dedicated much of his appointment to legislating who, exactly, would reap the rewards of the organization’s original promise. He denounced Chinese people for their “vice and sexual immorality” and in 1914 recommended that “all races native to Asia” be permanently barred from entry to the United States. And despite considering the “slaves of the South” to be “kind and faithful,” Gompers codified the exclusion of Black workers into AFL policy. In cases where it appeared “advisable and to the best interests of the trade union,” Black workers were organized into separate locals, colloquially referred to as “Jim Crow unions.” The AFL, Gompers wrote,

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“does not necessarily proclaim that the social barriers which exist between the whites and the black could be or should be obliterated.”

In an article published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1913, “The Negro and the Labor Unions,” Booker T. Washington conducted an informal survey. To the heads of labor unions throughout the country, he posed a question: “Do Negroes, as a rule, make good union men?” The responses were almost uniformly sinister. “I must say that the Negro lathers in Cleveland have failed absolutely in meeting the general requirements of union men,” read one reply. “They do not seem to grasp the significant feature of the trade-union [movement],” read another. A third didn’t mince words: “They are the most difficult to organize of any class of people.” Washington himself deployed the gag of predisposition: “The Negro,” he wrote, “is naturally not inclined toward labor unions.” The naturalism line was a strange one to peddle, given that unions had attempted to maintain artificial labor shortages by classifying certain jobs as “white man’s work,” effectively shutting Black workers out of some unionized industries. Even in integrated unions, organizers often negotiated contracts that stipulated separate paths toward promotion for white and Black workers, barring the latter from senior and supervisory positions.

In some industries, the only jobs available to Black workers were as strikebreakers. In the summer of 1917, when workers at the Aluminum Ore Company in East St. Louis went on strike, the company hired a small group of Black people from the South to continue operations. The striking workers, stoked by the race-­baiting rhetoric of their leaders in the AFL, launched one of the most devastating and comprehensive assaults of the twentieth century. Unionized workers set fire to entire Black neighborhoods in East St. Louis, murdering as many as two hundred Black people and leaving up to ten thousand others homeless. If the violence was said to be an act of retaliation, designed to stunt the emergence of a “race of strikebreakers,” it was a fantastical revenge plot of the labor movement’s own making. “If the colored man continues to lend himself to the work of tearing down what the white man has built up,” Gompers warned, “a race hatred worse

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than any ever known will result. Caucasian civilization will serve notice that its uplifting process is not to be interfered with in any way.” Gompers failed to recognize that white workers had been hired to serve as strikebreakers, too.

Gompers, like all tyrants, eventually died, but his opinions, like those of any good union leader, didn’t belong to him alone. Under his soft-­spoken successor, William Green, who encouraged the public to recognize the organization as a “melting pot,” the AFL continued to enforce legislation that sidestepped Black workers. In 1949, a federal Fair Employment Practices bill proposing the “elimination of discrimination in industry and labor unions based upon race, color, religion, national origin, or ancestry” was passed only when the phrase “and labor unions” was removed from the motion. Just two years later, Green declared that the labor movement had “done more than any other organization or group to advance the cause of interracial justice.” When the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to form the ­AFL-CIO—which counts both the N ­ ewsGuild and Writers Guild as affiliates—it adopted a constitutional provision stating that “all workers without regard to race, creed, color, national origin or ancestry shall share equally in the full benefits of union organization.”

Tens of thousands of Black workers joined the movement, but local unions could still exclude them by special bylaw.

Meanwhile, cross-­racial coalitions began to advocate against discriminatory employment practices, adopting policies that prohibited separate lines of promotion and eliminating segregated locals. By the time the A ­ FL-CIO endorsed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the labor movement was seen as a crucial component in the fight for equal opportunity. In part due to their exclusion from the structures that governed collective bargaining, workers who faced prismatic oppressions—occurring along the axes of race, class, immigration status, gender, sexuality, and disability—stood to benefit the most from its promises.

As the movement embraced its position as the rightful inheritor of antidiscrimination activism, so too did it attempt to address its lily-­white history. The ­AFL-CIO, like the

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CEOs it took to task, adopted a set of resolutions in 1995 aimed at promoting “diverse and inclusive leadership” within the organization, creating “greater opportunities” for women and minority workers, and demanding “diversity through concrete improvements in diversity of all labor council committees.” Nevertheless, twenty years later, the federation remains a home for white nationalism. Since its founding, the International Union of Police Associations has been an affiliate of the ­AFL-CIO, which also houses law enforcement in unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees and the Communications Workers of America. The federation has routinely rejected resolutions to disaffiliate from the IUPA, even as it publicly denounces the inevitably lethal effects of policing. In 2014, after the death of Michael Brown, a Black teenager whose mother and killer were both members of AFL-CIO-­ affiliated unions, Richard Trumka, the federation’s president, delivered a speech in which he chalked up Brown’s demise to fratricide: “Our brother killed our sister’s son,” he lamented. And this summer, after the Washington, DC, offices of the ­AFL-CIO were burned during protests, Trumka called the property destruction “senseless” and “disgraceful,” even as he characterized the federation as “united unequivocally” against “forces of hate.”

Spray-­painted across the union building’s entrance was a newer movement’s enduring slogan: black lives matter.

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f corporate inclusion initiatives resulted in empty air, and trade union inclusion efforts, designed to hold those same corporations accountable, protected racist government institutions, what could diversity achieve? A number of the organizers I spoke with indicated that it was just a word.

As a catchall term, it could easily be replaced by any number of anodyne compounds: Diversity and Inclusion; Equity and Inclusion; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—the list went on. “It can be used as a description or affirmation of anything,” Sara Ahmed, a feminist scholar, writes in On Being Included, her 2012 study of institutional diversity.

According to Ahmed, the word originated as a “replacement term” for the more critical

language of anti-­racism and equality. A ­ rsenia ­ eilly-Collins, the director of contract camR paigns for the Writers Guild of America, East, described the word as “more palatable” than its alternatives. (“Diversity,” writes Ahmed, “evokes the pleasures of consumption.”) As a tactical expression, diversity initiates a “yes” politics, encouraging those in power to reaffirm their tolerant values, rather than a “no” politics, which would suggest they relinquish that power altogether. “Diversity is regularly referred to as a ‘good’ word precisely because it can be used in diverse ways,” Ahmed writes. The sociologist and philosopher H ­ imani B ­ annerji is more indicting; in The Dark Side of the Nation, she identifies the apparition of diversity language as a “coping mechanism for dealing with actually conflicting heterogeneity.”

Most of the union members I spoke with, though, told me that terminology was beside the point. “The main thing is not so much the words we use, but the results,” ­DeCarava, of the N ­ ewsGuild, said. But language is causing problems—or, at the very least, creating discrepancies. Quotas designed to fix a lack of internal representation all depend upon a shared understanding of who is “underrepresented,” but parity is a difficult quality to measure, especially when there exists no referent to judge it against. At Vice, where management has committed to interviewing “diverse candidates” from “traditionally underrepresented backgrounds,” neither “diversity” nor “traditionally underrepresented backgrounds” has been defined. At the Daily Beast, diversity is defined in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, age, disability, sexuality, and gender, with no specification that cis white women should not be counted in diversity statistics. At The New Yorker, an early hiring counterproposal from management added the phrase “including women” to the union’s stipulation that a percentage of interviewees be from “underrepresented backgrounds,” which would ensure that management could meet its obligation by interviewing cis white women. The union subsequently struck the addition and revised the language to “traditionally underrepresented backgrounds,” which remains formally undefined. The Pitchfork Union has put forth proposals that measure

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VO IC ES OF THE PA ND EMI C

What We’ve Learned The disparities exacerbated by the pandemic and highlighted by the protests didn’t start in March, and they’re not going to end with a vaccine.

We need to make sure we’re telling stories through perspectives of people who are living through them.

—Troy Closson Metro reporter at the New York Times

newsroom representation against the population of New York City, which would leave cis white women out of hiring statistics. The BuzzFeed News Union has employed the same New York City–based metric for the purposes of hiring, but the non-hiring-related clauses of its diversity and inclusion proposal are more capacious, including women of all races.

Unlike affirmative action plans, which target discrimination, this new wave of hiring initiatives is meant to correct an imbalance.

Almost all of the organizers I spoke with conceded that it was only a first step. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Reilly-­Collins told me.

Quotas are designed to make good on the industry’s foundational claim to representation, but won’t necessarily counteract its racism. When used as a placeholder for redistributive justice, the politics of parity will always be winking, holding as its consolation prize the possibility that white people, if they are one day eclipsed by their nonwhite colleagues, will also be able to reap the rewards of “underrepresentation.” And although it remains an open secret that the easiest way to change the makeup of a workforce is for white people to quit, swift wars are not the union’s to wage. It was a freelancer, ­Tammie ­Teclemariam, who in June tweeted a photo of Adam Rapoport, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, in brownface, leading to his resignation. That same month, when the New York Times published an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton calling upon the military to violently suppress Black protesters—a decision that Bill Baker, the New York Times Union unit chair, called “the straw that broke the camel’s back”—it was the collective speech of Black employees, who took to social media in coordinated action, that forced the resignation of James Bennet, the opinion editor.

“Collective bargaining is more harm reduction than solving for the revolution,” Reilly-­ Collins told me.

Historically speaking, it’s not unfair to argue that the professional diversity movement has no specific or singular aim. As a tactic for facilitating representation, it can be deployed to advance the interests of anyone who claims for themselves the feeling of being in the minority. And without a governing politics to determine whose

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representation is redistributive, and whose is simply revenge, it carries the danger of advancing nothing at all. “The fact that diversity is not a scary word is part of the problem,” Ahmed writes. “If it is detached from scary issues, such as power and inequality, it is harder for diversity to do anything in its travels.”

Union organizers know this already. The media industry is more precarious than it has been in years. Everywhere you look, someone is losing their job or their health insurance. According to Business Insider, seventy-eight hundred media workers were laid off in 2019 alone; this past April, the New York Times reported that an estimated thirtysix thousand news employees had been furloughed, laid off, or had their pay reduced since the beginning of the pandemic.

But everyone is someone’s colleague, and peers are natural advocates. This past spring, the BuzzFeed News and Los Angeles Times unions brokered work-share agreements with management that prevented the majority of proposed layoffs. And across the industry, at-will employees are demanding that management adopt a policy of just cause, a provision that requires an employer to have reason for taking disciplinary action against an employee. (The New Yorker finally granted the provision in October, after Alexandria O ­ casio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren pulled out of the magazine’s festival in solidarity with the union.) Unions are beginning to introduce managers to the scary language of justice, even if that language is ultimately blunted. Upon bargaining their new contract, which will be ratified later this year, employees at HuffPost proposed trainings devoted to “anti-­oppression, anti-­ discrimination, and unconscious bias.” After negotiations with the company, which has deemed diversity “critical” to its mission, the proposal emerged with sanded edges.

The final agreement commits management to conducting “a climate assessment” and “relevant privilege awareness trainings.”

Corporate diversity rhetoric, in other words, continues to overhype its deliverables. After six employees of Bon Appétit resigned in August, alleging homophobia, pay inequity, and a workplace culture that treated nonwhite employees, who weren’t

compensated for their video appearances, as a “second class,” Roger Lynch, the CEO of Condé Nast, issued a public statement reiterating the company’s commitment to “retaining and nurturing a diverse and inclusive workforce.” In the meantime, Lynch turned to his union-busting law firm to undertake an investigation, which found “no evidence that race played a factor in setting compensation” for the video team and that “everyone was compensated fairly.” New committees were assembled, and a “Diversity and Inclusion report” was accelerated. When the report was shared with the public, in late September, the vast majority of the initiatives it introduced, touted as totems of the company’s “excellence,” had been cribbed from the proposals of its unions, which management had repeatedly rejected—including the 50 percent interviewing quota. “It’s much easier to change your mission statement than it is to actually apply that mission within the company,” ­­ DeCarava told me. Corporate policies are so favored precisely because they’re flawed: unlike union contracts, “commitments” have an escape hatch—they can always be revoked. When asked whether The New Yorker planned to cement Condé Nast’s percentage goal into binding contract language, a spokesperson said, “We are pleased that Condé Nast has announced this standard across the company, and we plan to pick up this conversation at the bargaining table and, we hope, reach an agreement very soon.” According to the union, however, by the time this article went to press, these conversations had yet to come to fruition, and management has been unresponsive to the union’s attempts to continue negotiations.

Any historically bereft movement will relinquish its potential to the fleeting interests of the present. In the context of corporate media, those interests will always be in service of profit. BuzzFeed, The New Yorker, and the New York Times have all established new councils, committees, and task forces but continue to obstruct or ignore proposals made by their unions. Diversity continues to sell. But if it has a future, it will depend upon the efforts of workers to hitch it to the struggles of years past. Empty words will never be emancipatory. Aimed accurately, they can at least begin to accrue meaning. cjr

The persistence of indie mags as pure expressions of taste.

VI SUA L ESSAY

Do It Yourself AUTHOR

Savannah Jacobson

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Left to right, from top: Library Excavations, St. Sucia, Polyester, iJusi, Genda, and Dizzy

orporate media is suffering. Risk-taking is a notion from another era, before financial constraint and hostile politics. But in independent publishing, things still happen organically. From a porch in San Antonio, a dorm room in upstate New York, or a library in Chicago, the makers of indie magazines say that their beautiful, surprising, original projects came about as a natural culmination of years of experimental art or writing for an audience of one.

It’s no utopia: very few people get rich making indie publications.

But there is freedom. “We made up our own rules for ourselves,” Isabel Ann Castro, a founder of St. Sucia, which she describes as “a zine where brown girls just talk shit and be very real,” said. “Because Coca-Cola wasn’t sponsoring it, there was no one to pull advertising because of abortion stories.”

As we focus on the layoffs, the bankruptcies, the journalists jailed for doing their jobs, it’s worth remembering that there’s one form of journalism that can never really be killed—someone who has something to say, and says it without asking permission.

Polyester

Polyester—whose John Waters–inspired tagline is “have faith in your own bad taste”—is gaudy, in the best way.

When you read an installment of the newsletter on Polyester’s website, small pink hearts trickle down the screen as you scroll; the black arrow clicker disappears in favor of a red heart with an angel’s halo and devil horns. Polyester takes racism, transphobia, and systemic injustices seriously, but not itself. Here, counterculturalism is supposed to be fun.

Ione Gamble, Polyester’s founder and editor, said she was “obsessed with magazines growing up, so I always saw print as this aspirational goal. I wanted to make something that everyone could be involved with, as opposed to having this higher attitude about it.”

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Photograph of Ione Gamble by Jender Anomie, shot in October in Peckham, London

“Just show people something that they will relate to more and feel uncomfortable for the right reasons,” Gamble says.

iJusi

If you’re ever in Durban, South Africa, and you spot a man jumping off his bicycle to pry an ordinary-seeming flyer from a lamppost, it’s likely you’ve found Garth Walker.

A graphic designer, Walker has been documenting street design in South Africa since the 1980s. “So by 1994,” he said, “I had this large archive of stuff from the streets and townships that I was interested in doing something with, and the easiest way to get this body of work out there was to design a magazine.”

He published the first issue of iJusi in 1995, just after ­Nelson Mandela had been elected president in the country’s first fully democratic vote; an art scene was reviving postapartheid. Before then, Walker said, the country’s design industry sought to appeal to the white minority. But he wanted to answer the questions—and to provide a platform for South Africans of all backgrounds to consider— “What makes me African, and what does that look like?”

Each issue since then has explored those questions, enlisting contributors who are graphic designers, photographers, or writers. The answers are always changing, Walker said. Now on its thirty-fourth issue, iJusi has delved into topics as diverse as human rights, porn, the legacy of ­Mandela, and African typography.

Dizzy

TK CREDIT

The founders of Dizzy, a pair of artists named Milah Libin and Arvid Logan, value childhood. Dizzy’s homepage greets you with a cartoon of a young girl with blue hair, enlarged eyes, a plaid dress, and ­enormous sneakers. A turtle is next to her; it does not look happy.

Libin cites Cricket, a literary magazine for children, as an early influence. “It really took children seriously and their work seriously,” she said. “Kid art is the best.

I’ve always felt that way. It doesn’t have any of the ego that grows when you enter the art world. It’s not even a choice—it just happens.”

The resulting independent art magazine has been cited in the New York Times and called, by ARTnews, “Something that makes you remember what you loved about magazines in the first place.”

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Photograph of Natasha I. Hernandez (left) and Isabel Ann Castro, taken in October in San Antonio by Julysa Sosa

“We didn’t know what was gonna happen once we started it,” Castro says.

St. Sucia

The idea for St. Sucia began when Isabel Ann Castro was in college and her friends would pray to Catholic saints, asking for a date to go well or for their Plan B pills to work.

“You guys can’t be asking Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary for this shit! We need a separate saint, a modern woman who gets it,” Castro would say. “It’s gotta be a dirty girl— a sucia.” Soon, “St. Sucia” became an in-joke.

Castro later spotted Natasha I. Hernandez, an acquaintance, at a bar. “There was music playing really loud, and she was standing by a trash can getting ready to go outside and have a cigarette. And I was yelling in her ear, ‘Do you want to make a zine where brown girls just talk shit and be very real?’ ” Although the zine was initially filled with short stories, quizzes, listicles, and poems about love and dating, it also covered weighty topics, including reproductive justice, education, gender identity, and immigration, from the start. Late last year, Castro decided the zine had run its course—but the spirit of St. Sucia will live on through new projects, like a screenplay that Castro and Hernandez are working on.

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Genda

TK CREDIT

Of the many traps that the American media set for itself during the Trump presidency, a facile dedication to studying “societal divides” is perhaps the most grating. Genda magazine is an antidote. With a ­masthead split between China and Italy, and contributors from around the world, Genda devotes each issue to a single, often esoteric, theme—like “landscape as abandon” or “endless scenarios”—and uses photography to examine what its editors call “misunderstandings and complicities at the base of every concrete exchange.”

Genda takes its name from a mistranslation of the Chinese word zhenda (“really”). “Our hope,” Silvia Ponzoni, one of the editors, said, “is that misunderstanding could be a way to know each other better.”

Library Excavations

Public libraries, Marc Fischer would like readers to know, are not just for books. The “frequently strange and unsettling world of US Department of Defense training photographs” is waiting to be discovered in the National Archives at College Park, in Maryland, much like the 1970s booklets produced by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health sitting at the University of Illinois, and the archives of the Montana Prison News that live in the Montana State Library.

“There’s stuff that’s been sitting online for a decade, and maybe thirty people have looked at it,” Fischer, the founder and editor of Library Excavations, said.

Fischer treats libraries “the way that maybe other people would visit a museum or a flea market. Sometimes you’re trying to return to your favorite section, and other times you’re exploring aimlessly.” Excellent graphic design, after all, can be found anywhere, like in a 1978 Volvo car repair manual.

“It’s a process of maintaining openness and receptivity.”

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The New York Times and the unending blizzard of takes

OPINIO N

Ideal Filler

AUTHOR

Adam Piore ILLUSTRATOR

Diego Patiño

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n 1961, John B. Oakes was appointed to lead the editorial page of the New York Times. “Oakes” was a rewrite—his father, George, had tacked it onto the name Ochs, as in his brother Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the paper, in 1896; they were all part of the family business. John B. Oakes was deeply concerned with the problem of groupthink in America and wanted to use his platform as a way to challenge conformity. His department recruited non-journalists—subject-matter experts, public officials, novelists—to challenge prevailing beliefs, disagree with one another, and let readers draw their own conclusions. In 1970, he gave his pundits a new venue: the Times op-ed page. As Michael J. Socolow, a media historian, has described in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, the page soon sparked controversy, which also meant notoriety.

And it was “remarkably cost-­effective,” he added: “the first six months of op-ed operation produced a net profit of $112,000 on $264,900 of revenues.” Within two years, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and other papers had established similar pages of their own. Op-ed contributors went on to become enormously influential in shaping the national political discourse.

Recently, fifty years later, it was reported that the Times was publishing a hundred and twenty opinion articles per week, providing a podium for authors to air their takes not only to the paper’s readers but to the whole of the internet. Among the astonishing number of pieces, there were some infuriating ones; in June, James Bennet, the editor of the opinion section, resigned after the Times published a particularly inflammatory op-ed by Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, under the headline “Send In the Troops.” The piece relied

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on a debunked conspiracy theory and called for the military to crush the summer’s protests against racist violence. “Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-­ arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy,” Bennet offered, by way of defense; then he admitted that he hadn’t vetted the submission before it went online. Later, he apologized to his colleagues, saying that he’d let his section be “stampeded by the news cycle.” In a memo to staff, A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, diagnosed a breakdown in the editing process, promising that the opinion desk would now enter “a period of considerable change” and produce less.

An unavoidable question reverberated across the media world: Why must we read so many bad opinions? The abundance of takes, as we know, is not limited to one outlet or type; everywhere, underpaid and overworked writers and editors are trying to squeeze as much copy as possible into a day: some great, some terrible, some concerning news that will change in a few hours. “Now,” Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor, told me, “if you want to have a rich opinion section that is both presenting really diverse viewpoints on the main stories of the day and surfacing interesting cultural and academic and political and social issues that are not on the front page, you can’t do that in five pieces a day. If you’re on top of that, trying to provide a useful forum for debate about what’s happening in the Middle East or in China, you need more quantity.” Sewell Chan, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, pointed to the “complete multimedia cycle,” in which cable news networks “are nonstop opinion machines.” He continued, “It has become harder, I think, for serious, civil, carefully argued, rigorously presented opinion to break through.” Merrill Brown, an erstwhile editor and the founder of a business-of-journalism startup called the News Project, described the pressure that opinion purveyors feel: “Everybody wants to get today’s take right,” he said.

“But ‘thoughtful commentary’ on the day’s news is almost an oxymoron.” The result, he added, “is more about being clever than necessarily doing your homework.” Supplying one’s opinion, whether or not one has something worthwhile to say, may be an essentially

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American pursuit; hearing all those opinions can be exhausting and exasperating.

It may come as no surprise that the ubiquity of opinion pieces in recent years mostly comes down to money. As new platforms have chipped away at the traditional role of informational gatekeepers, legacy news organizations have become a bit more like everybody else, jostling to make themselves heard above the ceaseless cacophony of opinions, gossip, breaking stories, and misinformation blaring forth from social media, cable television, and talk radio. News is commoditized; outlets are desperate to stand out; opinionated analysis has become a crucial value proposition. Just as Oakes discovered as the architect of the New York Times op-ed page, commentary is a cheap and powerful attraction. His successors across the media industry, dejected after years of economic hardship and the acute distress caused by Big Tech, have come to see opinion as a way to make their business work.

“O

pinion” is many things, and its distinction from “news” is often murkier than journalists are wont to admit. It’s impossible to write a story without making judgments. When the United States was a young country, the press was garrulous, robust, and overtly opinionated. A nascent form of “straight” reporting began with the penny papers of the 1830s, though it did not become the industry standard until 1846, when five daily papers decided to split the cost of covering the Mexican-­American War by forming the Associated Press— designed to produce articles that could run in any outlet, regardless of political orientation.

The New York Times joined the group in 1851, the year of its founding; when Ochs took over, he decided to carve out his place in a crowded market by pledging “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” (He also cut the price of the Times to one cent when other New York papers of repute cost at least three.) It was a successful model, and over time “neutral” journalism became the norm. Newspapers fenced opinionated writing into an “editorial” page; some, like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, experimented in the early to mid–twentieth century with the op-ed format as a place to run additional

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“ ‘Thoughtful commentary’ on the day’s news is almost an oxymoron.”

commentary and letters. Socolow told me that, at its founding, the New York Times op-ed page aimed “not to tell people what to think, but to tell them what to think about.”

CNN debuted in 1980, igniting the twenty-­ four-hour news cycle and airing political debates on Crossfire and The Capital Gang.

The networks had pundit-fests, too—disagreement as entertainment. Eric Alterman, in his history of punditry, Sound and Fury (1992), writes that the mainstream opinion class comprised “a tiny group”—about two or three dozen people writing for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the newsweeklies, then appearing on TV. To be included, one needed the right job or the ability to excel at “conflating one’s career as former secretary of something or other with a healthy dose of self-­ promotional talent.”

In 1987, under President Ronald Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required broadcasters to devote airtime to controversial matters of public interest and to reflect contrasting views. Now TV and radio hosts were free to pontificate unchecked. The

next year, Rush Limbaugh, a former DJ, premiered his nationally syndicated talk show.

AM radio, which had been a struggling business, found a lifeline; by 1993, Limbaugh was on six hundred and ten stations, reaching seventeen million listeners per week. Limbaugh— and his legions of imitators—painted the reality-­based press as a biased liberal organ.

“Rush is coming along as a partisan, and he’s saying, ‘I’m the objective voice,’ ” Brian Rosenwald, the author of Talk Radio’s America (2019), told me. “What they did,” however unintentionally, “got rid of any sense that there was one unified gatekeeper and challenged the idea of objectivity. They pushed us into silos.”

Then came the internet. The Drudge Report and Salon appeared in 1995. Slate, 1996. In 1997, when MSNBC.com, one of the largest news distribution sites in the country, introduced some of the first mainstream news blogs, Brown, who was the site’s editor, observed how, in the internet age, space was not a constraint. Opinion pieces, which cost little, proved to be ideal filler. “We can actually give space, if you will, to new voices that print never could,” he said—voices that would appeal to different segments of the market,

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VO IC ES OF THE PA ND EMI C

What We’ve Learned We’re not connecting the dots between the pandemic and the climate crisis enough.

So much of what we have done is paint the picture of unfolding catastrophe, but we’ve done very little to paint the picture of what could be.

—Katharine Wilkinson

Writer, climate change activist, editor in chief of Project Drawdown, and cohost of the podcast A Matter of Degrees

pulling in readers whom major news organizations hadn’t reached before. Google was founded in 1998, making those opinions easier than ever to find. Outlets’ audience sizes were poised to expand, but digital advertising rates amounted to a fraction of what they were for print, so large publishers mostly left those crumbs to the growing number of upstarts attempting to break through. Talking Points Memo, 2000. Gawker, 2002. Facebook arrived in 2004.

In 2005, at the spring meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (now known as the American Society of News Editors), in Washington, DC, Rupert Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, gave an address.

He told his colleagues that they were being “remarkably, unaccountably complacent” in the face of the digital revolution. “Like many of you in this room,” he said, “I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know.” Young people, he explained, were “no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways.” He cited a report by Brown, published through the Carnegie Corporation, that found that people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-­four were increasingly using the Web for news consumption; just 9 percent described newspapers as “trust­ worthy”; 8 percent found them “useful.”

Murdoch concluded, “They want a point of view about not just what happened, but why it happened,” and “they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet the people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”

The next month, the Huffington Post went live. Headed by Arianna Huffington—a writer, socialite, and former California gubernatorial candidate—the site was conceived as a liberal response to Drudge, with a splashy home­page full of stories cribbed from legacy publications. Huffington brought in Jonah Peretti, a former scholar at the MIT Media Lab, who coined the term “contagious media.” Under Peretti, the staff constantly monitored Google and generated stories tailored to show up in popular searches. Huffington also leaned on opinion pieces, by celebrities she knew

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(George Clooney, Deepak Chopra, Nora Ephron) and anyone else who had something to say. Those submissions were unpaid, tremendous in volume, and highly clickable. “Opinions are essentially a form of rewrites,” ­Vijay ­Ravindran, a former chief digital officer at the Washington Post Company, told me. “Opinion is the easiest way to create breadth of content and then build the machine around that to get traffic.”

In 2006, as a side project, Peretti began working on what would become BuzzFeed. (“Originally, BuzzFeed employed no writers or editors, just an algorithm to cull stories from around the web that were showing stirrings of virality,” a profile in New York magazine explained.) The same year, Twitter launched and Facebook debuted its “share” button.

Even if legacy publications didn’t yet want to believe it, the power of influence was shifting to those who best understood how to exploit the emerging technology. In 2007, the first iPhone shipped, signaling a new era of obsessive social media consumption; the following March, Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg, from Google, to help the company grow. And soon it was the fall of 2008, when the Great Recession pushed print media’s advertising revenue off the side of a steep and deadly cliff.

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etween 1999 and 2009, weekday newspaper circulation dropped by nearly ten million. In the first six months of 2009, more than a hundred newspapers shuttered; ten thousand newspaper jobs were lost. The New York Times was more than a billion dollars in debt. Increasingly, people were accessing the news not through traditional outlets, or their homepages, but by using search engines and social platforms. Facebook introduced the “like” button, making it possible to track what individuals were reading and to determine which posts to display prominently in news feeds. The effect on publishing, which until now had coasted on brand advertising, was severe. Digital advertising for newspaper websites “collapsed,” ­Ravindran said. “Facebook and Google had way more inventory and better targeting because of the amount of data they were working with.”

Publishers began to invest in trying to reach people—how to get shared and liked—and thus earn a cut of social media’s direct-­response ad

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revenue. The most obvious strategy was to produce more stuff; the simplest way to do that with a dwindling bank account was to minimize reporting costs. BuzzFeed continued to develop virality algorithms (in 2010, the site’s most popular post was “Watch Miley Cyrus Take a Bong Hit”); the less sophisticated outlets commissioned pieces of interpretive analysis. Newspapers, seeking to distinguish themselves from the aggregators, began encroaching on the territory once held by the newsweeklies, which in turn drove more magazines into the chase for relevance, with commentary an obvious route. Opinion writing made sense editorially—it seemed a natural fit for the Web—as well as financially.

“A huge factor in this is budget,” a longtime magazine editor told me.

“Reporting is expensive, and it is just not as expensive to publish opinion writing.” More and more takes went up, in pursuit of clicks; by mid2010, Facebook had five hundred million users. “If your most fiery opinion story got a ton of page views, that was considered a huge success and that would help you drive up advertising rates,” Megan Greenwell, now the editor of Wired magazine’s website, said.

But even as publishers came to understand the dynamics of social media, that wasn’t enough to sustain a newsroom. In 2011 and early 2012, ten major papers, including the New York Times, erected paywalls; several hundred smaller outlets did the same. Between 2011 and 2013, the number of visitors to the Times homepage plummeted from more than one hundred forty million to around sixty million. By then, more than a billion people were on Facebook, which changed its algorithm to emphasize journalism in the news feed. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and expanded its digital presence. Every media outlet was now eagerly feeding the beast, yet it was clear that the revenue trickling in from direct-­response ads couldn’t replace brand marketing. “You can’t think about editorial product in isolation from technology and business,” Kinsey Wilson, the former editor for innovation and strategy and executive vice president of product and technology at the Times, told me recently. “It doesn’t mean that you violate ethical norms, that you allow business to have undue influence over your editorial product. But there has to be a level of coordination.”

In June 2014, the Times introduced NYT Opinion, a stand-­alone subscription and app that offered access to opinion coverage (including editorials, columns, op-ed pieces, and “Op-Docs”) along with additional features like Q&As in which writers responded to reader questions and comments. NYT Opinion also offered commentary from elsewhere around the Web, curated by Times editors. The idea was to draw an audience that wanted to read more than the ten free articles available per month, and liked opinion, but who weren’t yet ready to commit to a full Times subscription. (NYT Cooking went live around the same time.) But it was a short-­lived experiment, discontinued just four months after it began. NYT Opinion “hasn’t attracted the kind of new audience it would need to be truly scalable,” the bosses wrote in a memo to staff. Ben French, who held various product roles at the Times, told me, “The truth is, what we found is that people didn’t really want to just buy a chunk of our coverage. It needed to have some utility and some sense of purpose, and opinion sitting by itself—you want to be able to read a news story and then read an opinion story about it.”

The next fall, the Times decided to commit fully, announcing that it would pursue a subscriber-­first business strategy aimed at

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multiplying its “deeply engaged” digital audience. The hope was that, if the Times could double its digital revenue by the end of 2020, the newsroom would be in healthy enough shape. The opinion section—a place to experiment ambitiously with voice and subject matter, where columnists could forge lasting connections with their followers—was a promising department for growth.

“If you go back to the idea of the habitual reader, opinion columnists are precisely the kinds of writers who attract repeat visits and drive habitual behavior,” Wilson said. To lure new subscribers, the consensus was that the Times would need a greater variety of opinion contributors. “People should see themselves reflected in the Times,” Tyson Evans, a senior editor for opinion product and strategy, told me. “I think opinion is a pretty powerful place to do that at scale, quickly and effectively.” No matter whether a newsroom was chasing virality or subscriptions, it seemed, commentary was king.

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he 2016 presidential election was rough. Afterward, amid widespread criticism that Facebook had allowed itself to be used as a vehicle for Russian meddling, the company quietly began tinkering with its algorithm to de-­emphasize posts from media outlets. In 2017, Facebook-­driven traffic to media companies dropped by 15 percent. At Slate, between January 2017 and May 2018, traffic from Facebook fell by 87 percent.

By then, for the first time, more Americans were getting their news from social media than from newspapers. “We’ve all been buffeted by the changes and the force of the algorithms, and the force of competition,” David Shipley, who heads Bloomberg Opinion, told me.

But the New York Times was doing okay.

Bennet, who had been hired in 2016, was tasked with expanding the opinion section’s domain. Donald Trump’s victory—and the shortfalls of the Times and other news outlets in covering the story—led Bennet to a conclusion about the political orientation of his writers: “There wasn’t really an advocate for the Bernie Sanders view of the world formally in our pages,” he told colleagues at a staff meeting. “And we’ve had fewer voices to the right for quite some time.” He hired

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Lindy West, an author who contributed to Jezebel; Michelle Goldberg, a former writer for The Nation; Bret Stephens, a Wall Street Journal conservative skeptical of the climate crisis; and Bari Weiss, another Journal expat, who has a Zionist focus. (The Intercept observed that the additions “hardly” brought diversity to the editorial page.) The new columnists spoke to specific audiences that the Times—through data analytics and interviews with demographic groups, as well as a general envy of the Journal’s hold on conservative readers—had deemed promising subscriber targets. By December 2017, when it was announced that A.G. would be made publisher, the Times story covering the news declared, “With 3.5 million paid subscriptions (2.5 million of them are digital-only), The Times is one of the few newspaper companies whose newsroom is growing at a time when the industry is struggling.” The opinion section was producing less than 10 percent of the Times’ total output, yet opinion pieces represented 20 percent of all stories read by subscribers—which meant that the takes were punching well above their weight.

The subscriber model attracted more believers, with commentary an inexpensive way for an outlet to assert its value and build customer loyalty. The Washington Post launched a global opinions section, hiring a slate of new columnists to weigh in on international affairs; after that proved successful, the Post hired a half dozen more, running an additional page of opinion in its print edition three days a week. A Post spokesperson told me that opinion has accounted for “some of the top subscriber-­converting content from the newspaper.” In March 2018, The New Yorker announced its intention to double its paid circulation, to more than two million, and hired more writers who could chime in online with their thoughts about American democracy, “Insta-­ celebrity engagements,” and everything in between. Editors talked less about virality and more about the number of minutes readers spent with each article. “In the time I’ve run newsrooms,” Greenwell told me, “deeper engagement is certainly what’s strived for and certainly what business partners—whether they’re advertisers or sponsors of some sort—seem to care about.”

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Still, consciously or not, social media remained an important factor in everyone’s judgment. “You look at the Twitter competition for followers among pundits—it’s intense,” Brown told me. “In the world of punditry and opinion, it drives things. Writers are hired, and raises are given, based on Twitter engagement. It’s in many ways defining.” Plus, there’s ­fomo. Having adapted to a relentless pace, it now feels impossible to drop out. “There was a time when the president was giving his acceptance speech at the convention on a Thursday night, the editorial board would listen, and on Friday morning they would meet and discuss it; somebody would write an editorial, the editor would edit it, and we would publish it thirty-­six hours later, on Saturday morning, and that would be fine,” Hiatt said. “If I did that now, I’d be a laughingstock. It’s gone from No, we have to be in the next morning to If we’re going to have a response, we have to have a response that night.”

When opinion writers publish pieces that contrast with facts reported by journalists under the same banner, staffers have little recourse. Vox argued that, in the Bennet era, opinion had “elevated trolling the Times’s liberal readership into a kind of raison d’être.”

Opinion is separate from the newsroom— Bennet reported directly to A.G.—but most readers have never made that distinction.

“Does op-ed care at all about how its actions affect the newsroom whose legitimacy and sweat it trades on in order to sling hot takes?” a Times staffer complained. “It’s not clear that they do.” Even within the paper’s opinion section, Bennet’s sense of mission differed from others’—and the Cotton piece proved how far apart they were. There was a feeling of being “disempowered in ways that may have prevented this from happening,” a Black employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me. “Of all the people in opinion who could’ve read it, there were no people of color who did a first read. James didn’t find it important enough to read.” (A Black photo editor had voiced objections that went unheeded.)

The Cotton op-ed was so offensive that Times employees were moved to act; a Twitter campaign, created by Black staffers and amplified by colleagues, protested the piece.

An apologetic editor’s note was appended

to the top; Bennet was replaced. A.G. managed, mostly, to ride out the uproar—vowing in meetings, emails, and calls to make a lesson of the op-ed fallout. Dean Baquet, the executive editor, said he felt proud of how members of the newsroom banded together to stand up for what they believed. (Though they had all tested the limits of the company’s social media rules, no one seems to have been punished; there was strength in numbers.) What, exactly, the Times learned from the episode remains uncertain, however. To what extent did the editor who shepherded the Cotton piece, a young man who’d come from the Weekly Standard, believe that he’d be rewarded for delivering virality? Where did the leaders of the Times set their limits on opinion—and where will they, in the days ahead? In October, with Bennet long gone, the Times published yet another stinker: an opinion piece by a Chinese apparatchik advocating a crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong.

Budget-wise, the outlook is clearer: the New York Times met its ambitious digital revenue goal a full twelve months ahead of schedule. Today, with more than six million subscribers, it’s safe enough, one might infer, for A.G. to commit to diminishing the opinion output to protect the reputation of the Times. (BuzzFeed is now in the more difficult position; in the past two years, hundreds of employees have been laid off, and Peretti told the remaining staff that he hopes to keep 2020 losses below $20 million.) “Trying to publish hot takes that go viral on Twitter for being most outrageous is sort of a sucker’s game,” Ben Smith—the former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, now a media columnist for the Times—told me. “It always struck me as an unsustainable thing. Brands are defined by their highest-­profile work, and if it’s a bad take, that’s a problem.” He added that “places still tend to be defined by their opinion writers, even if they are doing less of it.”

It occurred to me, as I surveyed the world of takes, that John B. Oakes would be satisfied—there is no question that we now have “diversity of opinion,” which he called “the lifeblood of democracy.” Nobody is worried anymore about a lack of published thoughts.

The problem today is democracy, and making sure the opinions that circulate are those that serve it. cjr

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Enrique Abeyta, a former hedge-funder, goes all in on metalhead media

AUTHOR

Alex Norcia ILLUSTRATOR

Esther Wu

M

att S ­ aincome was used to ignoring people. In 2014, he and his friend Bill ­Conway cofounded The Hard Times, a satirical website often described as a hardcore version of The Onion, and ever since they had been shooing away potential buyers. There were Hollywood types who wanted to turn The Hard Times into a BuzzFeed-­like YouTube channel, tech companies that hoped to optimize the ads, larger magazines that offered to remake the site as a comedy show. For almost six years Saincome, a former music editor at ­SF Weekly and the more business-­savvy of the two, listened to every proposal and rejected all of them. So far, he and Conway had been self-­reliant, with no outside funding; they weren’t looking to sell. And that was an accomplishment. Especially when you consider that their scrappy enterprise had survived the media industry’s most tumultuous time—as hedge funds and private equity firms became notorious for buying up suffering local newspapers and digital properties, then stripping them for parts. Saincome likes to say The Hard Times was “born in the shit”; a more pleasant image is that it was nimble and slim, relying on a stable of paid freelancers who believed in the vision. Layoffs, pivots to video, Hulk Hogan: Saincome and Conway didn’t have to deal with any of that. They had the luxury of not being in financial trouble.

Saincome’s thinking hadn’t changed last October, when a stranger cornered him during a Hard Times book launch at Saint Vitus, a metal bar in Brooklyn. It was yet another guy saying that his company—some firm created by Wall Street shakers—was keen on buying The Hard Times. As usual, Saincome agreed to chat. He figured he had nothing to lose from hearing the man out.

By May, The Hard Times had been sold to E ­ nrique ­Abeyta, a former hedge fund manager, who acquired the site through Project M Group, his digital media and ­e-commerce company. Founded in 2017, Project M is helmed by Abeyta, who serves as the CEO, and Skip Williamson—a

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financial strategist turned independent record label executive and Hollywood producer, whose title is chief creative officer. “These guys quit Wall Street,” Saincome told me.

“They’re huge metalheads.” The name Project M is an in-joke, an allusion to the fact that investment bankers don’t label their projects what they actually are, fearing that documents might leak into the market. The M might stand for metal, media, monetization. Abeyta won’t say. “If you want to paint Enrique as a guy who is investing in publications and not harming them, that’s a hundred percent correct,” Saincome said. “He really is more similar to me than you would expect.”

A self-made millionaire and second-­ generation immigrant with tattoos on the side of his head, a mangy beard, and unkempt hair that resembles a mohawk, ­Abeyta, who is forty-­eight, jokes that he looks like a pirate.

He has seen the band Tool in concert at least forty times. His buddies call him Rick. When we met, he wanted to show me he isn’t like any other hedge-­funder I may have come across. He rattled on with the assured vulgarity of a Guy ­Ritchie character—“fucking Yelp,” “fucking tattoos,” “the fucking Yankees”—and at times sounded like a slam poet.

His favorite metaphors involve the ocean: he rode the nineties hedge fund wave, saw the tide of local news “going out in front of a tsunami,” showed his employees how to surf the startup waters. He does not do well with silences; he is constantly about to say one last thing. “People like goblins and ghouls and witches and gods,” he told me. Then he added, “Everybody wants a bad guy.” He doesn’t believe he is one.

It was only a few years ago that Abeyta put on a tie for work. At the end of his hedge fund days, he was a senior analyst at Falcon Edge, in Manhattan, earning seven figures. (The chairman, Rick G ­ erson, is a good friend of ­Jared ­Kushner’s and later became wrapped up in the ­Robert ­Mueller investigation.) Abeyta’s attention often wandered toward media properties and direct-to-consumer companies; in 2016, he closely followed the success of the Chernin Group, the investment advisory firm that bought a majority stake in Barstool Sports, and the CHIVE, a photo blog that slapped Bill Murray’s face onto T-shirts. Seeing vertical integration—of journalism and consumer

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goods—piqued Abeyta’s interest. So when a mutual friend introduced him to Williamson, and Williamson made him a proposition—a venture in publishing that would capitalize on the fan base of metalheads, their kin—it lured him. He’d already had years, he said, when he “made seven figures, lost seven figures, and made something in between”; he was accustomed to volatility and ready for the next thing.

He abandoned his comfortable salary and invested what became $2 million in Project M. Abeyta and Williamson set off with a mission: first, they would buy struggling or underperforming media companies with passionate, niche audiences with whom they identified; second, they would resurrect those companies with capital; third, they would sell merchandise to their enlarged reader base.

Before The Hard Times, they acquired Revolver (heavy metal) and Inked (tattoos). “My life’s work has been to study strategy in media, as part of my investing,” Abeyta said. “I’ve always been a student of the game. At my last firm, they called me the master of the ‘Game of Thrones,’ because through time, I had a great ability to identify moves in the media space by thinking strategically.”

Abeyta was indeed different, though he fit a type: he reminded me of Bryan Goldberg, the founder of Bustle Digital Group, and Shane Smith, my old boss at Vice—bloviating men whose braggadocio could eclipse common sense. It’s considered prudent to be wary of those guys, yet by making Project M in his image, and insisting to editors that his hedge fund days are behind him, Abeyta has managed to sell people on his alt-finance-bro brand. “What we try to do as a great partner is, we say, ‘Here’s how you can own a stake in this, here’s how you can do more of what you love to do, and we can do all the crap that you don’t like to do and also put you in a position to do more cool shit,’ ” he said. It helps that Project M has managed to turn a profit. Saincome told me, “It seemed like a perfect fit.” n late July, I drove north of Phoenix, past thousands of acres of untouched Sonoran desert, to a small town called Cave Creek, where Abeyta was living with his wife and children. He compared Cave Creek to Marin County, by which he meant that it’s

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B E N ST RU B L E

ENRIQUE ABEYTA A media investor who left hedge funds for heavy metal, he’s moved from Arizona to Wall Street and back again.

far enough away from Phoenix (an increasingly liberal-­leaning city) to maintain its own libertarian idiosyncrasies. Sometimes Cave Creek makes national news: in 2009, for instance, a judge decided the outcome of a tied council election with a deck of cards; this year, as Arizona became a hot spot for covid cases, the Wall Street Journal reported that a popular saloon in Cave Creek waited until the end of June to require masks. Abeyta asked me to have lunch at a Wild West–­themed restaurant in town called the Horny Toad. After we sat down, and there was a brief lull in our conversation, he took out his George Costanza–­size wallet and showed me a deposit slip: it was the first million in his bank account, he explained.

He’d kept it for years, as a memento, the numbers faded from rubbing against credit cards.

He continued on, narrating the story of how he amassed riches. A few times, I heard him say, “I made money on 9/11.”

Abeyta has always been driven by a desire to earn. His father, a Mexican American from New Mexico, was often out of work and suffered from alcoholism; his mother, born in

Uruguay, left her homeland in the late sixties, a few years before a military dictatorship took over. They bounced around; as a child, Abeyta lived in Utah, Colorado, and Spain before settling in Phoenix. For a few nights, his parents couldn’t afford the motel where they were staying, and they were kicked out, homeless. They slept in the car. “Being poor sucked,” he said. “I wasn’t really anything except poor. I don’t really know that you get a chance to develop much of a personality in that situation.”

He did, anyway. He collected comic books; he played Dungeons and Dragons. He was gifted and popular, he told me, while maintaining a self-­proclaimed “edge.” In high school, he was the freshman treasurer, the sophomore president, the junior president; his senior year, in 1990, he was the salutatorian and voted “most likely to succeed.”

He interned in the office of Sen. John McCain. When it came time for college, what he wanted most was to learn the quickest, surest way to get rich. So he chose to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he earned a BA in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a BS in economics. His friends were pedigreed; they liked chatting about stocks. He pledged a frat (Sigma Alpha Epsilon), signed up for investment management clubs, and rose to be the editor in chief of The Red and Blue, a conservative newspaper. He met a Jewish woman and adopted her religion. (He continues to pray.)

In 1993, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, a nonprofit that helps young people from underserved communities land jobs, placed him in an internship at Lehman Brothers, which led to a full-time position.

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Bad Boys

When investors show up, promising to reinvent or save the news industry, it often portends chaos. Some of the most notorious figures have cost thousands of journalists their jobs.

—Feven Merid Heath Freeman Known as a “vampire,” Freeman owns more than two hundred outlets through his hedge fund, Alden Global Capital. Since taking control of Digital First Media, in 2011, Alden has cut two out of every three staff positions in its newsrooms. After the Denver Post went through Alden’s layoff procedures, Freeman bought a $4.8 million mansion, the price of which could have paid the salaries of twenty-­five Post reporters for more than two years.

Shane Smith A cofounder of Vice, Smith presents himself as a punk pioneer of digital media; his antics and lies have attracted investors, but also resulted in financial disaster. His former girlfriend told New York magazine, “Shane would talk all the time about how stupid people were for giving them money.”

Bryan Goldberg A founder of Bleacher Report, Goldberg went on to become a media slumlord with the Bustle Digital Group, which owns Bustle, Elite Daily, Mic, and other outlets. He slashes and burns and union-busts; in 2018, he bought Gawker.

Elizabeth Spiers, a founding editor of Gawker, has called Goldberg’s strategy “Lazy Entrepreneur Solipsism.”

Jim Spanfeller In the aughts, Spanfeller oversaw the website of Forbes; in 2019, when Great Hills Partners, a private equity firm, acquired G ­ /O Media, he was installed as CEO. At Deadspin, Spanfeller ran headfirst into conflict; after the site’s editor submitted her resignation, he “let out a cruel barking laugh.”

Soon, all twenty people working for Deadspin quit.

Anthony Melchiorre As the founder of Chatham Asset Management—the hedge fund that owns American Media Inc.— Melchiorre publishes the National Enquirer and other tabloids.

Chatham acquired McClatchy’s newspapers, including the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, and the Sacramento Bee. Melchiorre has been called (by his former boss at Morgan Stanley) a “street fighter”; as a press boss, he’s kept a lower profile.

Guy Gilmore The COO of Digital First Media Inc., a newspaper publisher owned by Alden Global Capital, Gilmore waited just a week after the East Bay Times and the Mercury News had won a Pulitzer Prize to cut twenty positions from those newsrooms.

Recently, Gilmore opted to outsource news design of Digital First’s California newspapers to the Philippines, shrinking the staff even more. A former colleague of Gilmore’s told The Street, “He may not be that popular with those who work for him, but he makes his numbers.”

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He started as a technology media telecom banker, then transferred to hedge funds. At the time, the World Wide Web was beginning to emerge, and hedge funds were booming— not only because of penny stock fraud, but also thanks to legal data gathering; smaller funds could make big money fast. Abeyta began at ­Atalanta ­Sosnoff, where he became fascinated by the consolidation of radio stations and newspapers. His boss had voting shares in the New York Times; Abeyta sat in on some meetings with the paper’s management, taking notes. Fox News debuted in 1996, and when the parent company, Fox Entertainment, went public, Abeyta, then in his mid-twenties, met Rupert Murdoch in a conference room at the World Financial Center. He was enamored.

“Whatever you may think of men like Murdoch, he was an incredible business and value builder,” Abeyta said. “My views on journalism and media weren’t made up with me in front of a fucking screen, blogging.” Abeyta’s other idol is John Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media Corporation, which controls ­SiriusXM, among other holdings. Over the years, Abeyta told me, he invested between $2 billion and $3 billion of his clients’ money in Liberty Media, and flew out to Denver to meet with Malone. (Through a spokesperson, Murdoch declined to comment for this article; Malone’s flack did the same.) When I pressed Abeyta on what, specifically, he learned from these men, he compared himself vaguely to a line cook shadowing a great chef. “It’s a million things,” he said. He seemed to be overstating his proximity to his heroes, but in any case, a lesson stood out: both Murdoch and Malone had a knack for constructing “flywheel” businesses—grouping media assets together. They were rulers of kingdoms.

Abeyta came to view the stock market as “the most fascinating intellectual monetary competition in the history of humanity” and to pride himself on being “a great intellectual athlete.” In the aughts, he continued to play.

In 2001, he built his own fund with a few partners; in late 2007, he cashed out and started another. He developed a reputation for being able to extract commitments from institutions and high rollers. (“He says that he’s a ‘make money’ investor—I loved that phrase,” Whitney Tilson, an ex–hedge fund manager who runs a newsletter service called Empire

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In Abeyta’s view, the problem with Wall Street plundering the press hasn’t been the downfall of journalistic scrutiny, but that nobody’s earned enough money to make the effort worthwhile.

Financial Research, told me.) Abeyta was an active short seller. Then the Great Recession hit, in 2008, which marked the end for many newsrooms across the country, their demise accelerated by Abeyta’s colleagues.

In the past decade, hedge funds and private equity firms have colonized the media, as the main bidders for financially strapped local newspapers and digital properties that were now distressed assets. Abeyta observed two ways in which his cohort approached the press. First, there was slashing: buy a declining business with an assist from the bank, cut costs, and recoup more than originally invested. This has been a popular tactic at local newspapers, where reporters have lost their offices and careers by the thousands. (“Newspapers are dead,” Abeyta told me. “I hate to say what they’re doing was going to happen one way or the other.”) The most feared and despised predator in this category may be Heath Freeman, the president of Alden Global Capital—which owns or has a stake in some two hundred newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Denver Post. In a major

bid in August, Chatham Asset Management, an investment advisory company, won the bankruptcy sale of McClatchy and its dozens of local papers (the Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee). It’s difficult to estimate just how much money these firms are making, but in 2017 Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst at Nieman Lab, reported that Alden was enjoying profits of almost $160 million from Digital First Media, just one of its assets.

The second move, Abeyta went on, was the “next-gen version,” or consolidation. “If I own ten newspapers, and all of them have an ad sales person, and all of them have a digital person, and all of them have somebody in logistics, I can ditch nine of those ten people and stick with the newspeople,” he said. “And you used to have twenty tenured reporters, and their”—the investors’—“belief is, ‘I can go find three college kids who are bloggers that can do the same thing.’ ” He gave as an example Maven, a digital-platform company that last June added Sports Illustrated to its roster of titles, which also included ­Maxim, Ski, and History. The new managers promptly laid off the most respected and best-paid staffers and later revealed that they would hire a few less experienced, lower-compensated replacements.

Abeyta wasn’t impressed by either strategy. “You’re still playing in the same revenue pool,” he told me. The media industry is brutal; advertising is no longer a reliable source of cash. “These hedge funds, they don’t know jack shit,” he said. “I was one of these guys, and I thought I was pretty smart about this. I had so much to learn.”

In his view, the problem with Wall Street plundering the press hasn’t

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been the downfall of journalistic rigor and civic engagement, but that nobody’s earned enough money to make the effort worthwhile: “Those guys are picking up nickels in front of steamrollers.” The logical move, Abeyta said, if one is interested in media, is to “own” an audience, feeding them material they like to read along with stuff they want to buy. That is his way, and what became the basis of Project M. hen Abeyta set his eyes on Revolver, in 2016, he sent an out-of-the-blue LinkedIn message to Brandon Geist, who had worked at Revolver for ten years and was now the editorial director of Rolling Stone’s website. Geist had been gone from Revolver only two years, and he wasn’t dying to return to what he called the “small and very complicated pond” of metal. Besides, Revolver was trending toward oblivion; at one point when Geist was in charge, his online budget was zero dollars. In meetings, he’d have to justify himself to the owners by explaining Slayer’s importance. But Geist was exhausted from the pace at Rolling Stone and told Abeyta that he’d be willing to talk. They got together near Geist’s office, in Midtown Manhattan. Abeyta showed up sweating in spandex; he’d biked there. “Initially, I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” Geist said.

Abeyta detailed his vision for Revolver and Project M. “You could tell there was a lot of exciting energy coming off him,” Geist recalled.

To conclude, Abeyta opened his laptop: “He showed me a spreadsheet

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of every concert he’s been to in his whole life, meticulously laid out. All these details were noted, and he told me his various rules about what counts as a show. It was really kind of amazing. It spoke to his personality, but also to his fandom.” After Abeyta bought Revolver, he tattooed the magazine’s logo, a single R, on his hand.

Geist was impressed by Abeyta’s devotion to heavy metal, but it’s also true that Abeyta is, more broadly, a fan of fandom. That’s the lens through which he regards media, as an array of outlets serving their fan bases; Revolver is to metalheads what Fox News is to Republicans. Abeyta is not a moralist and claims that he isn’t political; he only wants to cultivate a community of active consumers, united by their interest. In his acquisitions, he is bundling publications with similar audiences, centralizing what had been decentralized.

It took him some time to work out the particulars. For the first two years, Project M’s expenses were too high, and there was no money coming in. Abeyta and Edmund Sullivan,

VO IC ES OF THE PA ND EMI C

What We’ve Learned Food media has a good lesson to learn from the pandemic.

Our food systems are kept afloat by unsustainably low wages, by undocumented workers, by food that is not ecologically sound.

You have to dig deeper into the political and economic forces that control how food gets to a plate.

—Alicia Kennedy Freelance food journalist

ALEX NORCIA

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the chief financial officer, kept writing checks to stay afloat. During that period, Abeyta was also consumed with personal hardship: members of his family died at a rapid clip—his mom, his dad, his grandma. He packed up his apartment in New York and moved to Cave Creek.

Then Abeyta sought out Inked, which was thematically close to Revolver but came with robust merchandising capabilities. (You can decorate an entire house with stuff you’ve obtained on Inked’s website, like Day of the Dead–­patterned plates, mystical shower curtains, and vampire-­cat fleece blankets.) “We just didn’t have SKU numbers,” Sullivan said.

“We didn’t have T-shirt manufacturers. And we didn’t have the audience to sell into.”

After the deal closed, Abeyta estimated, 80 to 90 percent of Project M’s revenue started to come from e-­commerce. With Revolver, Inked, and now The Hard Times, Abeyta is building a network in which each site’s products appear on the others’—one big store. “We haven’t quite optimized that yet,” he said. “We’re crushing it so much in merchandise.”

As an extra incentive to keep the business up, Project M offers its senior employees, including Geist and Saincome, partial ownership. “All my employees understand what our monetization is,” Abeyta told me.

“I will also go, ‘Here are five stories: this is how much this will make us, and this is how much this will make us.’ Just so they know.”

It’s the kind of conversation that typically signals disaster—a collapse of the wall between business and editorial. Producing coverage to maximize profit is just too tempting. When I spoke with Geist and Saincome, however, they didn’t seem all that concerned. Abeyta was hands-off, Saincome said; his involvement in The Hard Times was limited to stuff like suggesting which headlines could make for good T-shirt slogans. Geist’s tone suggested a sense of resignation. “I’ve always been told that I’m a very branded-­content- and marketing-­friendly editor,” he said. “There are some editors who draw very sharp lines, but I’m not like that.”

At the Horny Toad, Abeyta asked me why journalism existed: “Is it a public good, or are newspapers actually moneymaking enterprises?” He already had his answer. “The reality is, they are moneymaking enterprises.

I’m not making a moral judgment on that.

I’m not saying that’s the way society should or should not be. I have zero commentary on that. But it is a factual statement.” His professed lack of a moral stance was, nevertheless, a moral stance; he remains, first and foremost, a finance guy. (He even moonlights for Tilson, blasting out a newsletter on investing strategies to thousands of subscribers; recently he and Saincome unveiled a vertical, “Hard Money,” that’s a satire of day traders investing with internet platforms like Robinhood.) Abeyta has no desire to expose truth to power; he avoids negative or salacious coverage. By design, the outlets he has acquired are soft news, lifestyle, humor. Revolver features band interviews, vinyl spotlights, video premieres; Inked includes Q&As with celebrities about their tattoos, updates on the goings-on of viral tattooed TikTok-­ers, and an “Inked Girl of the Week.” Geist told me, “We had a mission statement on the content side from the very beginning. One of those was to be very positive and community-­building.”

Muckraking it’s not. Then again, there’s something appealing about the way Project M’s strategy has fostered loyalty. The metal­ heads want what they want; somebody’s got to cover it for them. I wondered if some version of that approach might be replicated elsewhere in media, and called ­Penny A ­ bernathy, an expert in news deserts and the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina. “It’s much more difficult to create a sustainable business model for general news,” she said. “The print advertising model has clearly collapsed, and a digital model hasn’t come to be.” Still, she was interested in what local newspapers might be able to borrow from Abeyta—how he develops a sense of community and cultivates a variety of revenue streams. The few instances of success in local news, she said, typically feature a creative and disciplined leader who has strong ties to the audience being served.

The unlikely virtue of Abeyta may be his level of commitment. Hedge funds are predatory because their only goal is turning a quick profit; Project M, it appears, has sincere longhaul ambitions. That’s enough for Saincome.

“There’s something about owning these things,” he said. “The person who owns it, at the end of the day, really should have some skin in the game.” cjr

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End Note

TK CREDIT

F R E E P R E SS

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here can be no future without the past. In journalism, how we tell the story of what happened can help set the course for what’s to come; moving forward requires a hard look back. Media 2070—a project by Free Press, an advocacy group focused on media reform—invites journalists to reimagine their industry by documenting its origins in anti-Black racism. In an extensively researched essay, Media 2070 argues that America’s media institutions were created to establish and maintain white supremacy—and that the press continues to serve that function. Consider that, in 1969, all major outlets were white-owned; since then, journalism’s forms of delivery have changed, but the power structures have not. The news bulletin above, from 1898, announces a convention to demand reparations for slavery. Media 2070 is making a call today for media reparations: for journalists to find ways to repair the harms caused by their institutions. Equitable media is “a world we have never known,” the project’s organizers write, and we must make it together. —Camille Bromley

An image from the Media 2070 essay, which calls for reparations

winter 2020

“Journalists should think of our work as part of an ecosystem of social services.”

—Darryl Holliday, p. 16

WHAT NOW?

Clio Chang on the rise of Substack

What now?

Abe Streep on a Colorado editor’s quest for public funds Maya Binyam on whether unions deliver racial equity Ruth Margalit on our post-newsroom future Julian Brave NoiseCat on the power of apocalyptic thinking

The press is forced to reimagine itself

Adam Piore on why we’re inundated by opinions Leah Sottile on the first responders of the Portland press Mary Retta on the influence of YouTube commentary Alex Norcia on a reformed hedge-funder backing metalhead media

WINTER 2020

801 Pulitzer Hall 2950 Broadway Columbia University New York, NY 10027

Jack Herrera on service journalism in Oakland

Maya Binyam • Julian Brave NoiseCat • Clio Chang • Jack Herrera • Darryl Holliday Ruth Margalit • Alex Norcia • Adam Piore • Mary Retta • Leah Sottile • Abe Streep