Two weeks prior, the earth stood still as we all stood pushing up against the ocean of the coronavirus. Businesses around the world came to a grinding halt, closing stores and manufacturing plants and production lines. And when you have no product you also have nothing to market. So companies starting pulling their ad spend across the media landscape. 

And with no ad revenue, and no events revenue - because what company was going to put on an event and what person was going to sit in a stuffy ballroom with 800 other people - media companies started the bloodletting. 

At the end of March and through April, my team (and every other media reporter across the industry), confused from lack of direction from internal and external leadership about how to navigate a pandemic, exhausted from that lack of guidance as well as the fear of living in a pandemic, still managed to do their jobs reporting on the destruction of our industry. Hundreds, then thousands of layoffs and furloughs. It’s emotionally draining reaching out to people, some of whom are friends, all are peers, after they’ve lost their job.

From January to October, there were an estimated 28,000 media layoffs, with May hitting the high point of 8,000 lost jobs, according to a November Variety report.

As you may know, my number was called in April. I got my walking papers on April 17, a Friday. Three days prior, I wrote what would end up as my last story in that publication. That piece? It was about the media industry’s gray Tuesday, where hundreds of journalists were laid off. I tried to find some hope in that story, looking at outlets that were still hiring or rolling out initiatives. Even starting our own, a place that would aim to connect laid off workers with potential employers. (Side note: after I was laid off, that article got scrubbed and replaced with someone else’s byline.) That was the last time for 11 months that I felt hopeful.

The February cold, if not my personal 2020 freeze, thawed this March when I started my new role. I got a job; vaccines started to pick up; stimulus money hit the depleted account; there was light at the end of the tunnel. 

And then the last two weeks, there was a jolt back in time, back to last year when the coronavirus reared its hydra’s head. 

First, HuffPost, which was “bought” by BuzzFeed at the end of 2020 for a handshake and a player to be named later, laid off 70 staffers and closed a couple of offices at the beginning of March.

Once among the digital titans, it’s been passed along to buyers the way the New York Knicks pass the rock, often and not particularly well. AOL picked up the outlet in 2011 for $315 million, and then got shunted over to Verizon when the telephone company picked up the online portal and its content subsidiaries for $4.4 billion in 2015, only to go back to co-founder and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s hands last November. And with that, a decision was made.

CNN reported at the beginning of the month:

"Though BuzzFeed is a profitable company, we don't have the resources to support another two years of losses. The most responsible thing we can do is to manage our costs and ensure BuzzFeed — and HuffPost — are set up to prosper long-term." Peretti said. "That's why we've made the difficult decision to restructure HuffPost to reach profitability more quickly. Our goal is for HuffPost to break even this year."

This week, Medium announced it is once again pivoting its editorial philosophy, making itself the Ever Given of media, stuck in a content canal never to get out. 

After realizing that it could not be a sustainable media company without a revenue plan beyond prying open Ev Williams’ wallet, it announced that it would be offering journalists across its bevy of publications a buyout. This will be at least the third time Medium has realized that it can’t be a media company. Indeed, BuzzFeed reported in 2017 that Medium “tried and discarded at least five business models in as many years.” And now dozens of peoples’ lives are up-ended in the midst of a pandemic. 

Writing about his justification, Williams said:

The bet was that we could develop these brands, and they would develop loyal audiences that would grow the overall Medium subscriber base. What’s happened, though, is the Medium subscriber base has continued to grow, while our publication’s audiences haven’t. There are many potential reasons for this, which we could debate.

So he offers buyouts, and then decides to follow the Substack model of rewarding the journalistic ‘haves’: those with a built-in audience.

For the foreseeable future, we will focus that talent on supporting independent voices on our platform. This means identifying writers — both already on Medium and not — and offering them deals, support, editing, and feedback to help them tell great stories and find their audience.

Mel Magazine, which in my opinion, was publishing the best journalism through a telescopic lens about the absolute mess that is the human existence, with a microscopic lens on digital culture, announced it was closing its doors.

Owned by Dollar Shave Club, the razor company bought by Unilever for a cool billion bucks never made the outlet a media company. By which I mean there was no sales operation. Mel was the platonic ideal of branded content, started not as a means to sell Dollar Shave Club wares, but to write about topics that DSC believed was adjacent to its ~brand.

The reporters got to go gonzo without the threat of advertisers, which is why they were able to write about everything. And now six years after starting, it’s ending. And 20 people now are looking for work.

And stretching back to the end of 2020/beginning of 2021, the major television networks announced their own rounds of layoffs: WarnerMedia,Disney, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS. 

So a year after the industry got chopped off at the knees like the Black Knight fighting King Arthur because of legitimate business challenges, why are we seeing a new wave of layoffs? 

One reason can be the obvious: these outlets (particularly Mel and Medium) didn’t have a media business plan. If you have no money coming in, at some point you need to stop the money from going out. Workers are expensive.

In HuffPost’s case, it’s a combination of redundancies, as I wrote when the deal was announced, and years of lackluster revenue. 

One of the questions going forward for all the digital darlings: when your journalism is a commodity (as in: strip away the byline and masthead, and you can’t differentiate [legacies like WSJ, NYT and WaPo have the same problem, but they’re buttressed by an alchemy these digital properties don’t have, a mix of 100+ year old brand, an influential audience and one willing to pay, and an institutional stewardship]), how do you attract ad and subscription dollars? 

Buyers routinely tell me that HuffPost and BuzzFeed are not on direct plans, instead choosing to spend less through programmatic channels. This matters. If advertisers are coming in through the programmatic back door at pennies on the dollar, they often have little incentive to come in through the front door and pay seven-figure deals. 

We’ve been writing about the shaky ground the media industry has been resting on for years. When I started this little newsletter, the first story I wrote was about how the pandemic has highlighted the house of cards we live in:

Over the last decade, media companies engaged in a race for scale. Get those clicks; get those pageviews; get that ad revenue. The metrics for digital media were always suspect. And now, when advertising budgets are scrapped and events are canceled, many of these digital darlings face an existential crisis. 

A year later, still true. Now, however, companies are looking at one last hail mary: the SPAC. 

Bloomberg reported two weeks ago:

BuzzFeed Inc., the digital-media outlet founded in 2006, is in talks to go public through a merger with 890 5th Avenue Partners Inc., a special purpose acquisition company, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Once public, the company may use its currency to target future acquisitions, said one of the people, who requested anonymity because the talks are private. A transaction value couldn’t immediately be learned. As with any deal that hasn’t been finalized, it’s possible terms change or talks fall apart.

VC-backed media companies have three outs: raise more money; sell the company; go public. Now, we have a derivative of the last one; the SPAC. To quote my favorite line in Goodfellas:

"When there's nothing left, and you can't borrow another buck from the bank...you bust the joint out. You light a match."

Our industry faces many challenges, and we’ve yet to meet them head on because, when all’s said and done, the executives at top are just waiting to hit their retirement, get their golden parachute, and pass the baton to the next group of executives who will inevitably do the same. 

“The reality is this: the media business, whether that’s digital, linear or print, is declining,” said a former television executive requesting anonymity, as they did not receive a golden parachute and currently looking for work. “We’re reliant on two revenue streams, and both are plummeting. Cable TV will go from 90 million homes to 50 million in 5 years. As that plummets, their distribution plummets - how do you replace subscription? Ad declines are a reflection of audience. They have the greatest grift in the history of the world, 35 percent watch and 100 percent pay for it. When you think about digital and offer content experiences that mirror the consumer behavioral patterns, clearly there’s no fucking answer.”

And the result? A decimated industry. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you appreciated this edition, please consider sharing across your social platforms. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time. And for those celebrating Happy Passover!

The Grateful Dead, “Help > Slip > Franklin’s” (6/19/76)

A lot has happened since we last saw each other. 

(Image via HBO/Axios)

A little more than a month ago, we learned that an Axios reporter covering the Biden campaign was dating a Biden deputy press secretary, TJ Ducklo, which landed them a puff piece in People that aimed to soften the blow of a coming Politico piece, opening the Pandora’s box of journalistic ethics, ultimately putting the deputy press secretary in the penalty box, and then resignation box after saying some abusive and gross things to a female Politico reporter. 

That Axios reporter, Alexi McCammond, was taken off the Biden beat in November to cover Congress and progressives, Politico reported on February 9. Just four weeks later, however, the 27-year-old reporter was hired to be Teen Vogue’s next editor-in-chief. On March 5, the Conde Nast publication tasked her with being “responsible for the editorial vision of Teen Vogue across digital, video and all social platforms.” 

In a statement at the time, Conde Nast editorial doyenne Anna Wintour said:

“Alexi has the powerful curiosity and confidence that embodies the best of our next generation of leaders. Her interest in fashion, wellness and important issues in the lives of the Teen Vogue audience and broad knowledge of business leaders, elected officials, influencers, photographers and filmmakers is unrivaled, and I’m so very pleased that she will be bringing her expertise and talents to our team.”

Perhaps this is where the story would have ended, should have ended; an enthusiastic new editor to take over an 18-year-old brand that has clawed its way to a media brand that stands for something after shuttering its print publication amid one of the many corporate restructurings four years ago, and perhaps give it some of that Gen Z magic.

And then came the tweets.

It turns out posting to Twitter is bad. And McCammond found out that even if you already once apologized in the past for bad tweets, what you Tweet as a 17-year-old stays with you, coming back to haunt you.

(Side note: I am quite thankful that Twitter was not around when I was a teenager.)

After the trumpets blared for McCammond, the New York Times reports today:

Her job status became shaky days after Condé Nast named her to the position, when the offensive tweets she had posted as a teenager in 2011 resurfaced. They included comments on the appearance of Asian features, derogatory stereotypes about Asians and slurs for gay people. Ms. McCammond had apologized for the tweets in 2019 and deleted them. Screenshots of the tweets were recirculated on social media after her hiring at Teen Vogue was announced on March 5.

Within days, more than 20 staff members at Teen Vogue posted a note on social media saying they had made a complaint to company leaders about the tweets, and Ms. McCammond apologized for them again both publicly and in meetings with Condé Nast staff. “I’ve apologized for my past racist and homophobic tweets and will reiterate that there’s no excuse for perpetuating those awful stereotypes in any way,” she wrote in a March 10 letter posted on her Twitter account. “I am so sorry to have used such hurtful and inexcusable language.”

Today, McCammond said she was “parting ways” with Teen Vogue.

The judgement here is bad all around. 

Conde made a poor decision in hiring McCammond in the first place. Tweets notwithstanding, giving the editorial keys to someone who has never edited or managed reporters is a curious choice; especially when editorial judgement was in question for dating a person whose boss you cover. She never had the newsroom on her side. 

Steven Thrasher, a journalism professor at Northwestern, has a long and winding thread about suppositions that cover this and some suppositions of Wintour.

The Daily Beast, which has been on the outing-journalists-saying-racist-things beat recently, first reported this story, after it also ran a piece about Ulta pulling a seven-figure ad spend from Teen Vogue because of McCammond’s tweets. 

Popular cosmetics and skincare retailer Ulta Beauty said in a statement to The Daily Beast on Wednesday that it is halting its current advertising campaign with the Condé Nast-owned publication. According to people familiar with the situation, the deal was worth seven figures.

“Diversity and inclusion are core values at Ulta Beauty—and always have been,” a company spokesperson said. “Our current spend with Teen Vogue is paused as we work with Condé Nast to evaluate the situation and determine next steps regarding our partnership.”

This was March 10. On March 11, Ulta announced it hired a new CEO. It pulled a seven-figure deal because of 10-year-old tweets from a teenager the day before it hired a new CEO after, according to Reuters, it “missed expectations of $10.61 as demand for make-up products remains under pressure due to extended work-from-home policies.”

On March 15, Teen Vogue published a story titled “Ulta Beauty's 21 Days of Beauty Sale 2021 Deals, All In One Place.”

With the specter of an advertiser pulling spend, a newsroom that couldn’t trust its editor, and an ongoing public relations nightmare, McCammond wasn’t long for that seat. 

This is a sad story on many levels and a reminder that the only rule in life to keep you safe: Never tweet. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. Thanks again for reading, and will see you soon. 

Phish, “I Been Around” 

Some interesting links:

For what could be the most ridiculous and cynical idea in a very long time:

• Facebook Is Building An Instagram For Kids Under The Age Of 13 (BuzzFeed)

For what could be the most ridiculous attempt to repeat a scandal:

• A Private Investigator Hired by The Sun to Spy on Meghan Markle and Her Father has Apologised to the Duchess – and the Queen (Byline Investigates)

For what could be the most ridiculous way to get your staff to hate you:

• Internal Memo: ICF Next Used Promise of Employee Vaccinations as Phishing Test (Agency Spy)

For advice on advertising with Fox News:

• Here’s what you should do about your Fox News ads (Branded)

For 11 more years of listening to Joe Buck call NFL games on Fox:

• NFL media rights deal locked up until 2033 (CNBC)

And then return to the newspaper and continue reading other articles about other industries and topics, and not even hesitate in accepting those articles as fact-based truth?

(Image via Shutterstock)

This, my friends, is called Gell-Mann Amnesia, coined by Michael Crichton, he of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain and countless other science-fiction books, in 2002 at a speech in La Jolla:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

I’m going to use examples from the New York Times because we as a society all agreed, at some point a long time ago, that it was the preeminent news source. If we are to hold this outlet as an example of exemplary journalism, of which it is, then we should also be able to hold it accountable when we see patterns that are problematic. 

It’s one thing to debate the merits of an issue; it’s another to understand when the foundation of facts is presented in the wrong way. 

Take, for example, this critique on a recent piece in the New York Times about net neutrality (which argued that “net neutrality is one of America’s longest and now most pointless fights over technology”) from one of the people who literally wrote the rules at the FCC.

Or how about wading into the paper’s recent story on Slate Star Codex, which has riled up Silicon Valley insiders. But what happens when the former editor of Wired weighs in to both defend the author of that article AND call the piece “a mess, both in process and content”?

There has been a conversation from the tech sector that the reason reporters get tech stories wrong is because those reporters have never worked in tech. That is reductive logic that tries to cast blame on the reporter. It’s misguided, at best. For example, would that mean that the only people who could credibly cover the president of the United States is ... a former president? 

Yes, having experience in an industry helps cover that industry—it’s not surprising that some of the clearest writing about, say, the legal system comes from former lawyers. But it is near impossible to have an industry-level expertise in writing for a general outlet. It’s also why sourcing is vital.

We’ve talked about sourcing and framing a lot in this here newsletter, and the thread below does a great job in showing how news organizations do readers a disservice by not thinking through who gets quoted in certain stories. 

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity across a wide variety of society—from employment to housing to public education to federal funding and even the jury system. This thread lays out how news organizations, from the NYT to CNN, failed to give important context while also using troublesome sourcing.

And then we get to media reporting. I have my own struggles reading media coverage. Heck, this newsletter operates on the principle that media reporting often misses the mark, focusing on the wrong things. 

Take Marty Baron, the Washington Post’s as-of-today former editor, and his publicity victory lap. The NYT, CNN, and the Washington Post itself, among others, have put Baron on a pedestal this week. 

This thread rightly highlights how while Baron and WaPo owner Jeff Bezos are important to the shape of the paper, it has taken a village. Sure, the richest guy on the planet provided the funds, and Baron ultimately signs off, but the frame of these stories — especially as “Two white guys saving journalism” — comes across as misguided.

And a former reporter who worked for Baron tried to correct some things

Speaking of missing the mark, a professor of information studies at UCLA, raised some hackles by exhibiting a poor understanding of the media business and journalism and writing a very long, but very wrong, thread on the ills of Substacks. 

The thread reminds me of conversations I had with Very Serious Journalists in the early Aughts, as they railed against blogging.

The point to all of this: media literacy is non-existent in our pedagogy; we are not taught how to read media critically. So when we come across an article on a topic we know about and we know to be wrong, we choose to not put those critical thinking skills to the test across other articles in the same newspaper or outlet. 

Of course, journalists and news organizations are fallible, like everyone else. And since we do our work in public, it’s easy to take us to the shed when we get basic facts wrong. And often, there is a disconnect between the reporter’s knowledge base and the editor’s. The reporter talked to a whole bunch of people; the editor may only know about the subject from their reporter’s coverage. I’ve seen this, often.

(But don’t mistake me: editors are necessary and good and are often the only reason more reporters don’t get in trouble.)

And a lot of this boils down to trust. Do we trust our knowledge set? Do we trust reporting? Do we trust the sources that serve to give readers the inside point of view?

Think about this scenario: you are writing a story on family issues. Who do you highlight as an expert:

• a couple who has been married for 55 years?

• a couple who divorced after 20 years?

• a professor of sociology with a Ph.D in family issues?

• a family psychiatrist?

All of these are experts in one way or another. A reporter should look at a wider range of sources and expertise to help inform not only how, but what we want to explicate to readers. 

And this becomes a problem when television news networks and programs put on talking heads, especially including elected officials, who consistently lie. How are we to take political programs like Meet The Press or Face the Nation when they continue to put people like Senator Ron Johnson on air, and give him ample space to tell millions of viewers that Donald Trump won the election?  

Perhaps we are not suffering from Gell-Mann Amnesia, and instead are living in Gaslight Nation.

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Phish, “Piper/Guy Forget”

Some interesting links:

For reporters going to Medium to tell their story:

• NYTimes Peru N-Word, Part One: Introduction (Donald McNeil’s Medium)

For bad things happening to bad platforms:

• Far-Right Platform Gab Has Been Hacked—Including Private Data (Wired)

For a look at yet another streaming plus network:

• Forget ‘Succession.’ You Can Watch ‘90 Day Fiancé’ for 100 Hours Straight. (NYT)

For thinking about media models:

• A New Media Structure: The Ownership Economy (Dark Star)

For new platform products for creators:

• Instagram launches ‘Live Rooms’ for live broadcasts with up to four creators (TechCrunch)

For smart looks at the Golden Globes:

• Streaming services do well (Axios)

• The morning after: Global warning (The Ankler)

No longer will we be able to say, “I cannot believe this website is free.”

According to Recode:

With Super Follows, Twitter will allow users to make money from content that they make exclusive to particular followers. Sample screenshots released by the company show that the payment scheme could take multiple forms. For instance, a follower could pay a creator they follow on Twitter a few dollars a month to access that user’s exclusive newsletter or to see special tweets only available to Super Followers. They might also be able to join a particular group or access a badge that shows they support that creator.

(Image via Twitter)

With the rise of the solo content practitioner—from Patreon to Substack to YouTube—it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise that Twitter sees (perhaps incremental) revenue opportunities. If they take a percentage of a cut of each Super Follow payment, the company can play the Office Space game, where a penny here, a penny there, and with a few hundred million users, adds up pretty quickly.

But I worry that it’s just another wedge between the haves and the have-nots. We are drowning in content right now, between all the streaming services and news subscriptions and social platforms, at some point it might become cost prohibitive for folks. But I guess if one really wants to get that extra content they’ll pay for it.

People won’t pay for news (sure, the New York Times can boast of huge subscriptions, but how about all the local papers?) but will they pay to read someone’s tweets? Will people add this expense on top of all their other content? Will they pay for these tweets instead of a subscription to a news outlet? Of course, like every answer in media, “it depends.”

And paying for the privilege to read tweets, especially for media outlets, raises some questions: Will media companies ask folks to pay for additional tweets, perhaps info that wasn’t in a story? Will people pay media companies for these tweets, only to get hit with a paywall on site? 

What about reporters: will they get a percentage of the pay-for-tweet if a media company uses their story for their Super Follow tweet? One way of looking at this: Twitter just gave yet another tool for reporters to shed their corporate overlords. As Twitter exists as a digital playground for reporters, I can see a world where the “star” reporters, those who have hundreds of thousands of followers, use the combination of Super Follow and newsletter to earn a living. 

And that’s where I can see the have vs. have-nots argument really taking shape. The unintended consequences of turning journalists into a brand, arguably started by and because of Twitter, will continue to cause ripple effects, both large and small, across the media landscape. 

Lots of questions, and, as the cliche goes, only time will tell. 

So now I come to some ~professional~ news. 

As of March 8, I will be an executive editor at Morning Brew, overseeing the company’s three B2B newsletters, Marketing Brew, Retail Brew, and Emerging Tech Brew. It’s been a long year for everyone, and I am very happy to be joining a phenomenal company at an important moment. 

Every one of us has had to carry unimaginable loads of stress—whether it’s juggling working remotely and parenting, or being isolated from friends or family, or navigating the byzantine health system after coming down with the coronavirus, or any of a million other stressful moments—and through all of this, I considered myself lucky. Sure, not having a job meant not having income, but it also meant not having a sense of self-worth; and applying to way too many jobs, interviewing—in several cases, five rounds and many memos—has been a struggle. 

But I have my health, my family, my friends, and, well, you.

Over the last 10 months (in fact, tomorrow is exactly 10 months from when I started this experiment), 3,764 of you subscribed (well, it’s more than that as many have unsubscribed, too) to this little newsletter. And during this time, I wrote 190 editions. Some good, some not. But what I loved the most: the emails from you after each issue. I’ve learned so much, and will continue to learn. 

As for the future of The Media Nut, I’ll be taking my foot off the gas pedal a bit with the goal of putting out a weekly edition. 

I cannot say how grateful I am that you’ve allowed me in your inbox, every day for the last 10 months. Please continue to send me your tips and thoughts. Have a restful, relaxing and safe weekend. This isn’t goodbye, but:

Some interesting links:

For potential problematic situations:

• New York Times Columnist David Brooks Wrote A Blog Post For Facebook’s Corporate Website (BuzzFeed News)

• What Happens When Facebook Slows the News Flow (WSJ)

• Email is making us miserable (The New Yorker)

For earnings:

• Gannett beats estimates for its 4Q results amid growing digital subscriptions and lower costs (Gannett)

• AMC Networks Swings to Q4 Profit on Streaming Gains (Variety)

For managing digital subscriptions:

• The Arizona Republic considers killing “zombies” a staple of its digital subscription strategy (Better News)

For P.R. platforms getting bigger:

• Brandwatch is acquired by Cision for $450M, creating a PR, marketing and social listening giant (TechCrunch)

For something I truly don’t understand:

• White House and press are at odds over plan to charge reporters for coronavirus testing (WaPo)

For tech companies needing to fix race problems:

• Bias, disrespect, and demotions: Black employees say Amazon has a race problem (Recode)

For big companies looking to shake things up a bit:

• Walmart, one of the biggest advertisers, is shopping for a new agency to handle its US ad business (Insider)

For media criticism:

• What Happens When Local News Erases Black Stories? (Men Yell At Me)

For exit interviews:

• “You’ve made The Post swashbuckling once again”: Marty Baron receives a star-studded farewell and dishes in a wide-ranging interview (Vanity Fair)

For light at the end of the tunnel:

• Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino Says Largescale U.S. Concerts Could ‘Start in Midsummer’ (Spin)

In 1974, Jeep introduced the first “sport utility vehicle,” and named it the Cherokee. On the eve of a new Cherokee, and amid the national conversation over race, catapulted by the death of George Floyd last summer, the Cherokee Nation is speaking out and asking Jeep to change the name of the car.

In a statement to Car and Driver, Chuck Hoskin, Jr, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation said:

“I’m sure this comes from a place that is well-intended, but it does not honor us by having our name plastered on the side of a car. The best way to honor us is to learn about our sovereign government, our role in this country, our history, culture, and language and have meaningful dialogue with federally recognized tribes on cultural appropriateness."

The Cherokee Nation, with more than 380,000 tribal citizens world-wide, is the largest federally recognized tribe in the country, and accounted for more than $2.16 billion economic impact on the Oklahoma economy in fiscal year 2018.

Jeep is the latest brand to face pressure to change a racist name. The Washington Football team dropped its decades-long racial slur of a nickname; the Cleveland baseball team is dropping “Indians” from its name; Aunt Jemima was replaced by Pearl Milling Company; Land O’Lakes removed the Indigenous woman from its logo. 

"I think we're in a day and age in this country where it’s time for both corporations and team sports to retire the use of Native American names, images and mascots from their products, team jerseys and sports in general," Chief Hoskin said in his statement.

According to Car and Driver:

Told of Chief Hoskin's call to end the use of the Cherokee name on its cars, Jeep said in a statement, "Our vehicle names have been carefully chosen and nurtured over the years to honor and celebrate Native American people for their nobility, prowess, and pride. We are, more than ever, committed to a respectful and open dialogue with Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr."

But [Amanda] Cobb-Greetham, who is a member of Chickasaw Nation and stresses the Cherokee Nation's sovereignty in choosing how to respond to the use of its own name, takes a different view: "If you're going to honor somebody, give them an award. If you're going to name a product after them, you're selling."

An official with Cherokee Nation says representatives from Jeep reached out to Chief Hoskin via phone earlier this month, but the nation's stance on Jeep's use of the name has not changed.

Jeep has spent the last 45 years highlighting the expanse of the American landscape in its ad campaigns, often drawing an implicit link to perception of Indigenous tribes’ connection to the land.

And so far, this year, things are not coming up Milhouse for Jeep. The company decided to pull its Super Bowl spot, starring another American icon, Bruce Springsteen, after the Boss was charged with drunk driving. 

The spot, which NPR labeled as “Most desperate use of an iconic rock star: Jeep's ‘The Middle’ starts off by showing a road slicing through the middle of your screen, and centers on a church in the middle of Kansas, in the middle of America. The metaphors, they are thick:

We see his worn cowboy boots and hear his rough-hewn voice before we see him. But there's no mistaking Bruce Springsteen's world-weary words as he pleads with viewers to "come meet here in the middle." Decked out in a simple coat, driving around an old Jeep, Springsteen conjures every ounce of his working-class hero legend to deliver a message aimed at bringing left and right together one month after a group of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building. "We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground," he intones, driving through deserted rural areas and a snow-covered city center. Well-meaning as this message is, it feels less like an inspiring call to unity than an unsure plea for sanity at a time when it is tough to know if anyone is really listening.

The ad came together after a decade of Bruce saying ‘no,’ finally saying ‘yes’, CNBC reported:

That is until Southfield, Michigan-based ad agency Doner pitched the idea of “The Middle.” After contacting Landau to say Happy New Year in early January, [Oliver] Francois [Jeep parent company Stellantis’ CMO] decided to send the ad agency’s pitch to him. Francois said Landau, upon receiving the pitch, believed it was “the right message.”

“Yes, he takes a stand, but he takes a stand for the middle,” Francois said. “It is not liberal. It is not Republican. It is just something that is trying to stand for the nonpolitical. The common ground.”

(Aside: notice how the CMO puts an equivalence of liberal and Republican, as opposed to Democrat and Republican, or liberal and conservative. Language matters.)

But after the spot ran, reports came out that Bruce was arrested allegedly for driving while intoxicated, which then forced the company to pull the spot from linear and digital channels.

At the time, Jeep said:

“It would be inappropriate for us to comment on the details of a matter we have only read about and we cannot substantiate. But it’s also right that we pause our Big Game commercial until the actual facts can be established. Its message of community and unity is as relevant as ever. As is the message that drinking and driving can never be condoned.”

Yesterday, Variety reported, after a hearing in federal court in which Springsteen pled guilty to consuming alcohol in a restricted area, the DUI and reckless driving charges were dropped, Springsteen was fined $500 and Jeep reinstated the ad. 

“As we stated previously, we paused the commercial until the facts were established,” a rep for Jeep wrote in a statement to Variety. “Now, that the matter has been resolved, we are unpausing the film.”

Jeep sold 135,855 Cherokees across the country in 2020, down 29 percent from the previous year. With a pandemic casting a long shadow across all aspects of business, having a branding issue that puts your company as a racist, while also having a swing and a miss for an ad campaign, the outlook for 2021 doesn’t seem great. 

A simple solution could be to listen to the Cherokee Nation and just remove the name. 

(Disclosure: I owned two Jeeps; a 1991 and a 1995 Cherokee. Here’s me sitting in a Jeep in Israel with aviators and a machine gun in 1987. They used to let kids do anything back then.)

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or through a colleague, please consider signing up. And if you appreciated this edition, please consider sharing. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Bruce Springsteen, “Rosalita”

Some interesting links:

For profiles:

• Carolyn Ryan is the most powerful woman in The New York Times newsroom — and she could become its next top editor (Insider)

For indirect revenue models:

• TheSkimm launches virtual financial literacy program "SkimmU" (Axios)

For righting wrongs:

• From Cleveland To Boston, Newsrooms Revisit Old Stories To Offer A 'Fresh Start (NPR)

For setting up a progressive media network:

• Inside the new $65 million push from progressives to compete with conservative media (Recode)

For problems with the cyborgs:

• Growing computer-chip shortage alarms Biden and Congress (WaPo)

For inside the NYT newsroom:

• The New York Times paints a grim picture of its own workplace culture (CNN)

For future of the web:

• Broadband Monopolies Lose Fight Against California Over Net Neutrality (Vice)

For future of journalism:

• With the Loss of Physical Newsrooms, How are Young Journalists Faring? (Nieman Reports)

For Facebook v. Apple:

• Facebook launches ad campaign to defend personalized advertising ahead of Apple privacy change (CNBC)

It’s always been interesting watching from the sidelines (I’ve never been part of a media union) how media companies approach union efforts. 

(Image via NWLaborPress.org)

Journalism, the cliches tell us, gives voice to those that don’t have one; speak truth to power; comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; but when newsrooms, often made up of low- and mid-level staffers, try to organize to make their workplaces better, management views it as an attack on the company. It’s one of those cases that highlights how convoluted our thinking is, but also how our industry is built on a foundation of lies. 

Directives of committing acts of journalism, often putting sources’ livelihoods in danger, are fine when it’s about another company or industry. We need to tell the world of the problems inside Amazon and Facebook and Google and Walmart; how these companies treat their employees. But stand up to create a healthy workplace for us? Absolutely not. 

Layoffs, diversity issues, pay disparity; there are so many inequities in media and if the best recourse is to form a union to make sure that those at the top, who benefit from those at the bottom, can’t wield their power against staff, I am not sure why a newsroom wouldn’t want to organize.

Talking to CNN last week, former Gawker staffer and current labor reporter at In These Times, Hamilton Nolan gave as good a response as I’ve heard:

"I think a lot of people perceive media as this white-collar profession, but the reality of working in a lot of media jobs was really low salaries, bad benefits, very little job stability. One thing that the unions have done across the industry in many, many places is just to put in place a basic safety net for workers."

One other component: having a newsroom union can be a great recruiting tool for talent. An outlet’s perception goes beyond ~the brand~ but in how staffers talk about the company. This is a small industry; and a gossipy one. We talk to each other. We know the good companies and the bad ones. Media companies need to recognize that their biggest boosters aren’t their PR departments, but their workers.

On Monday, two newsrooms’ unions, TIME and The New Yorker, took to Twitter to highlight their efforts in getting management to have good-faith discussions about establishing fairness. These threads are interesting documents of the moment, but also of how those with power view those without.

TIME’s union said that after a year-and-a-half of bargaining, management “is doubling down to keep us from achieving a fair contract. They’ve withdrawn proposals, tried to set arbitrary rules for bargaining, and returned to issues we settled months ago. They are wasting time.”

The New Yorker union, which, along with other Conde Nast titles, has been at odds with company management for quite some time. 

Yesterday, the magazine tweeted out that it wants a better wage proposal using union members testimonials to highlight the pay problems at the outlet.

Newsroom unions are having a moment. As CNN’s Kerry Flynn noted:

Unions have had a long history at newspapers, but the more recent efforts inspired by Gawker's success launched a new era. Workers have sought to address a lack of basic benefits as well concerns about what seemed like constant editorial pivots.

Nolan, who is also on the council for Writers Guild of America, East, which represents HuffPost, Vice, Slate and other news organizations, argued that unions "should be a basic feature of every workplace" — regardless of whether the company is in a state of crisis or not — but added that they have been crucial to the media industry given its instability from the economic cycles and evolving technology.

"What has driven the unionization in media is just the power of the idea itself," Nolan said. "People that work in this industry recognize that this is clearly a good idea: to unionize and to be able to bargain collectively against your employers."

In 2015, Nolan wrote why Gawker decided to organize, and makes an argument that seems, I don’t know, good?

Though our company is relatively well run, pays relatively competitive salaries, and treats its employees relatively well, there are still certain issues that many employees would like to see addressed. We would like to ensure everyone receives a salary that is fair for their time at the company and the work they do. We would like to ensure that things like pay and raises are set in a fair, transparent, and unbiased way. We would like to have some basic mechanism for giving employees a voice in the decisions that affect all of us here.

Again, I don’t know why management would not view fairness and transparency as a good thing. On Hearst’s Union page, one of the answers in its FAQ highlights why organizing makes sense, even if you’re not unhappy at your work. 

After Gawker stuck its foot in the wedge of the union door, others bull-rushed through: BuzzFeed, Vice, HuffPost, Salon, Bustle Digital Media, Vox, NBC News Digital, Hearst, Wired, Gimlet Media, among others. And almost to a T, they all got significant pushback from management. 

The New York Times, reporting on BuzzFeed’s union efforts in 2019:

During a meeting with staff in 2015, BuzzFeed’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, expressed his opposition to a union at the company he co-founded.

“I don’t think a union is right for BuzzFeed,” Mr. Peretti said. He argued that it would put workers and managers at odds and lead to rigid job definitions that would make the company less flexible than Google or Facebook, neither of which has a union.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2017, Gary Weiss cuts to the heart of the matter:

Or to put it more cynically, young news employees are bearing the brunt of their employers’ incompetence, and they’re wearying of it. 

“This is a whole generation of young people who were basically sold a lie,” says Nastaran Mohit, the NewsGuild organizer who worked with Law360 staffers. “They were going to good schools and get good jobs. Then they enter the job market and they see how grim the prospects are, especially for journalists.” 

Staff turnover is so high that “by the time they’re 25 they’ve worked for two or three different news sites. The precarity they face, the constant precarity…. you constantly see digital news sites sprout up and shed 50 jobs, a hundred jobs.”

And in 2019, Harvard Business Review lays out the blueprint on how to organize a newsroom:

Finally, it’s worth noting that unionized media workers posses the communication skills and followings necessary to constitute a mobile corps of labor ambassadors. As such, unionizing them may lead the way to the much wider unionization of creative professionals, millennials, lower-paid workers, and industrial workers threatened by technology, skill obsolescence, and shifting customer preferences.

Going deep in 2019, Nieman Reports puts some historical context into the rise of the digital media union shop:

Unionization of journalists caught fire soon after the Newspaper Guild was founded in 1933. Many reporters and copy editors had grown fed up with low pay, layoffs, and earning far less than typesetters and pressmen. One challenge the Newspaper Guild’s organizers faced was convincing journalists that unions weren’t just for the blue-collar proletariat. In city after city, the Newspaper Guild won raises, overtime pay, and a guarantee that layoffs could only be for just cause, and it ultimately won health coverage and pensions for most Guild members. At some papers, the journalists also won a guarantee that powerful publishers—they often tilted well to the right—could not tilt the newsroom’s journalism. To be sure, unions at some newspapers were weak and not terribly effective at winning raises or better conditions.

Last year, as the invisible hand of the pandemic was choking media revenue models, we saw the difference between a union shop and a non-union one, as it seemed every Friday was a bloodletting.

But in the carnage, there was a little daylight. Take Variety’s report on Vox Media’s decisions in mid-April:

The WGA East-affiliated Vox Media Union, which reached a collective bargaining agreement with the company last year for 350-plus staffers, said in a statement that it disagreed with management’s decision to furlough employees “especially after hundreds of us told the company we were willing to take wider pay cuts to save all jobs” but added that Vox Media agreed to reduce the number of furloughs. The union also said it won guarantees from Vox Media for no layoffs, no additional furloughs, and no additional pay cuts through July 31, along with “enhanced severance for any layoffs that occur in August-December.”

Talking to The American Prospect, associate professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Nicole Cohen summed up why media unions are necessary:

“I think certainly there’s a shared consciousness, a shared solidarity among a whole range of workers loosely categorized as white-collar workers, in tech and art and media work. Having strong unions in media is really vital for having any kind of political change, let alone for democracy.”

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”

Some interesting links:

For yet another media man doing media man things:

• Slate Suspends Podcast Host After Debate Over Racial Slur (NYT)

For media revolving door:

• Sports Illustrated Publisher Maven Media Hires Rob Barrett as President (Variety)

For please for the love of God let’s get rid of the Sunday political talk shows:

• The Sunday shows are hopelessly broken (TNR)

For a future of media:

• Al Jazeera to launch rightwing media platform targeting US conservatives (The Guardian)

• Facebook restores links to Australia (BBC)

For media criticism:

• How Fox News hosts started attacking COVID-19 vaccines after Biden took over the rollout from Trump (Insider)

• With Trump gone, CNN pulls the plug on White House press briefings (Press Run)

And because we live in a connected world, we all got to watch the engine go up in flames, courtesy of Chad Schnell.

But we also get to see one aspect of modern journalism kick in to gear: the reply from reporters asking to use the video. Anyone who’s ever taken a photo or video that is deemed newsworthy, knows the drill. 

Last February, for instance, I, along with a couple thousand of my closest commuter friends, was stuck in the 10th ring of hell, Penn Station. So, doing what any digitally aware person does, I took a video and posted to Twitter:

(Also, looking at the date, February 3, I shudder thinking about how unplanned events like this at that time could have been Coronavirus super-spreader events.)

And as soon as I posted, the replies came. From CBS, ABC, NY1, all asking for permission to use the video, with credit, of course.

So why bring up this pretty mundane, if not routine journalistic practice? 

As Danish media analyst Thomas Baekdal notes, news organizations send out reporters to ask for permission for content instead of paying for it. It’s quite rich, he argues, that publishers are “screaming that Facebook should [pay] for links.”  

This thread is also important, as it shows how citation is a tricky game, one that publishers play fast and loose with. His argument, that publishers take content from the web all the time without paying for it, juxtaposed with what’s happening in Australia is a curious snapshot of digital media today.

Last week, Facebook blocked Australia from sharing news links as a response to a law, as Matt Stoller writes, that is:

designed to target a specific problem, which is the death of newspapers resulting from the monopolization of the Australian advertising market. Australia has lost 15% of its newspapers since 2008, and dozens of small cities now have no newspaper coverage. This graph from the ACCC digital platform inquiry shows part of the monopoly problem driving the collapse.

What Does This Australian Law Do?

The law says that if you are a dominant digital platform, then you have an obligation to engage in good faith bargaining with news outlets whose content you distribute over the terms of that distribution. The law only applies if there is a bargaining imbalance with media outlets. So this isn’t a tax, it is an anti-monopoly law.

Much of the bill has to do with designating who gets to be a news publisher. The bill says pure opinion stuff doesn't count, and neither does pure sports and entertainment. Media outlets have to register with the government to get bargaining rights. The bill mandates that digital platforms tell media outlets in advance what data they collect and when they are going to change important algorithms on which those outlets rely, like if they are going to change referral traffic in a way that would eliminate more than 20% of the audience and revenue. That’s totally reasonable, basically saying Facebook has to give you two weeks notice if it is going to destroy your business.

Highly recommend reading his post,as well as this thread from Cory Doctorow, which highlights why this even exists in the first place;

Remember, one of the problems this system is supposed to resolve is powerful entities (Googbook) using their power to punish news organizations for complaining about their behavior – governments were in that game long before Googbook came into existence.

And there's another problem: the structure of the Australian news market, which is yet another highly concentrated industry, dominated by a rapacious billionaire who uses his power to manipulate politics: Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch conquered Australian media the same way Googbook conquered the net: through anticompetitive conduct that was waved through by collusive regulators who never met a monopoly they didn't view as efficient.

It's not wrong to say that the only reason this regulation got off the drawing-board is that Murdoch viewed it as a way to shift a few balance-points from Big Tech's side of the ledger to Big Media's side.

Over at TechDirt, Mike Masnick argues the opposite, that this is indeed a link tax, and is just one of two major problems with Australia’s law:

First is the link tax. This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet. The government saying that you can't link to a news site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons. At a most basic level, it's demanding payment for traffic. There are two entire industries out there based entirely around trying to get more traffic from these companies: "search engine optimization" and "social media management." 

The reasons there are those industries is because everyone else in the world has figured out that having prominent links on search engines and social media is valuable in its own right and that it's up to the sites that get those links, and the corresponding traffic, to make use of it.

But here, a bunch of lazy newspaper execs who failed to adapt and to figure out better internet business models not only want the traffic, they also want to get paid for it.

This is like saying that not only should NBC have to run an advertisement for Techdirt, but it should have to pay me for it. If that seems totally nonsensical, that's because it is. The link tax makes no sense.

Masnick also argues that perhaps the bigger problem of the law is that it required Google and Facebook to give a heads up to publishers when they change their algorithms. This is, he writes, “disconnected from reality.”

Having to tell newspapers (and them alone) about those changes with a few weeks notice is basically giving those news organizations the keys to the kingdom: it's telling them how to game the algorithms. If you think bogus clickbait is a problem now, just imagine what it's like when all of the Australian press get to know the secrets behind the algorithm, and get to prepare for any changes.

The whole story is absolutely ridiculous. And the most incredible thing is that no matter what Facebook did here it would have gotten yelled at. And the proof is not hard to find. Because just an hour or two before Facebook made this announcement, Google went the other way -- coming to an agreement to pay Rupert Murdoch for featuring Murdoch-owned news organizations content on Google. And people freaked out, complaining about Google helping fund Rupert Murdoch's disinformation empire. Except... that's the whole point of the law? So it's a bit bizarre that the same people are mad about both Facebook's decision to not give free money to Rupert and Google caving to do exactly that.  

The economics of digital media today start and end with Facebook and Google. And over the last week, we’ve learned that once again Facebook lied to advertisers about metrics; that it allegedly knew its ad metrics were inflated and misleading, and ignored to fix the problems. This seems to happen quite a bit with Facebook. 

And court documents were also unsealed last week showing that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg allegedly directly oversaw the cover up.

(And for yet another damning piece against Facebook, read this BuzzFeed News story from last night about how Zuckerberg’s moving the content moderation goalpoasts for Alex Jones in 2012 had an effect on the spread of misinformation over the last couple of years.)

The one thing that is absolutely clear in all of this: readers lose. But that much has been clear for the last two decades, as digital has become a backwater for media, allowing tech companies to bend media systems to their will.

Now, however, because we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, we are forced to decide between rooting for Murdoch or rooting for Facebook/Google. No matter which billionaire wins in the end, we, the people, lose. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or a colleague’s referral, please consider signing up. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

The Beatles, “Money (That’s What I Want)

Some interesting links:

For VC injections into media:

• Pocket Outdoor Media raises $150 million from Sequoia Heritage (Axios)

For breaches:

• Clubhouse Chats Are Breached, Raising Concerns Over Security (Bloomberg)

For a look at Russian journalism:

• How Investigative Journalism Flourished in Hostile Russia (NYT)

For a future of media:

• Defector.com’s journalistic experiment began with a staff walkout. It might actually be working. (WaPo)

• Congressional Committee Presses Cable Providers on Election Fraud Claims (NYT)

• L.A. Times owner exploring sale of company (WSJ)

For buyers:

• MRC Issues OTT, CTV, SSAI Draft: Will Be Considered For Future Accreditation (MediaPost)

I also want to pause and say thank you for subscribing, sharing, commenting, and emailing me on and about the newsletter. Yesterday, we talked about a new app called U;Good?, which distills communication down to some atomic level, but also reminded me that it’s ok to take a step back every now and then. 

It’s mind boggling that almost 3800 read this little newsletter every day. And I truly love when you send me a note about something to pay attention to, or even just to say hi. 

Once again, thank you.

As always, if you have tips, or thoughts on this newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. And if you’ve liked what you’ve read, please consider sharing with colleagues or on social. If I don’t see you tomorrow, I’ll see you Monday. 

Led Zeppelin, “Thank You”

Some interesting links:

For profiles:

• How Rafat Ali’s startup Skift is Weathering the Pandemic (The Juggernaut)

For rock and roll:

• Led Zeppelin songs, ranked (Uproxx)

For how TV can attempt to right wrongs:

• The story we’re told about ‘evangelicals’ is wrong. ‘The Black Church’ aims to fix that (L.A. Times)

For arguments against putting your ads through sketchy pipes:

• Thousands of the world’s most trusted brands—including Pepsi, Starbucks, Comcast, Verizon, Marriott, and even the CDC—have funded COVID-19 misinformation, including Chinese and Russian propaganda websites (NewsGuard)

For more on the relationship between social platforms and 1/6:

• A Macedonian misinformation site dominated Parler before the Capitol riot (Protocol)

For why it’s really hard to trust Facebook as an ad partner:

• Facebook knew ad metrics were inflated, but ignored the problem to make more money, lawsuit claims (CNBC)

For why it’s really hard to trust tech:

• How Oracle sells repression in China (The Intercept)

For understanding ad rates:

• Ad prices forecast to inflate 3 percent (MediaPost)

The social platforms, the most dominating social tools on the planet, have created a world that turns people into “users.” We need to tell the world what we’re doing; we need to tell the world how we’re feeling; we need to tell the world that we want to be heard. We are addicted. 

And while the modes swing from text to video to audio, the foundation is the same: create a place where people can communicate with each other. Even if that communication is toxic and dangerous.

But what happens when that communication (which is, to oversimplify, what we call the process of information exchange between sender and receiver, with a lot of static in between) is filled with more noise than signal? And what if all you want to do is a quick check-in without that weight of a conversation, but also leaving the window open for that conversation if your friend really needs it?

A new app, U;Good? wants to answer that call. 

As the pandemic spreads, and we become isolated, many find that communication has become a burden. Maybe you don’t want to call; maybe you text, but you don’t want a full-on conversation. I want to know how you’re doing, but I don’t want to talk to you. Let’s call this the Pandemic Communication Conundrum. 

“Communication is such that people want to say a lot without saying a lot,” Evans Anyanwu, co-founder U;Good? told me. “People don’t want to be over-burdened with communication, and there’s been such a degradation in the way we communicate. So when you hit the buttons it accomplishes that.”

The buttons Anyanwu refers to are the three possible ways to engage on this anti-social media social media app. You open the app up, and you announce to your contacts in the app how you’re feeling; whether you’re good (Green), so-so (Yellow), or no, I’m not good (Red). 

The idea is simple: by these colors, I can indicate whether I want someone to talk with. If I hit red, my contacts know to check up on me, and there are a few automated responses so that receivers can take a specific action. If you hit the red button, the app will also give you resources like the suicide prevention hotline to call. 

That’s it. There’s no added communication, no rush of endorphin by posting, just the simple form of checking in: you good?

(I’ll do the necessary disclosure here that I am friends with Evans, ever since he was a roommate of one of my childhood friends many years ago in college.)

The impetus for the app, Anyanwu said, was that he hadn’t heard from his friend, Ali Gates for a while. When he did get a hold of Gates, Gates said he was ok, but a little off.

“I said, ‘I’ve had this idea; I get concerned about friends who I don’t hear from for a while, but don’t want to go through the lengthy conversations.’ Life is busy. So I explained the idea to just check-in to people,” Anyanwu said. “Ali was doing stuff with the government, so mental health was in the back of his mind.”

And it all clicked from there. After connecting with a couple of developers, and explaining what it was, Gates and team knocked the app out in 48 hours.

Anyanwu and Gates describe the app as the anti-social media social network, but also as a tool for talking about mental health, especially for people of color, as data shows how the pandemic is disproportionately affecting Black communities. 

A July New York Times article reports:

Latino and African-American residents of the United States have been three times as likely to become infected as their white neighbors, according to the new data, which provides detailed characteristics of 640,000 infections detected in nearly 1,000 U.S. counties. And Black and Latino people have been nearly twice as likely to die from the virus as white people, the data shows.

“I’ve been sitting on the sideline for quite some time with mental health,” Gates said. “Going to the Ivies and working for powerful people, I never had a voice to express my concerns or share arguments around mental health and people of color.”

An October Psychiatric Times article concludes:

The social disruption and losses have generally impacted black Americans more severely than whites due to a host of primarily social factors that cause inequity in the United States. Longstanding effects of racism and racist policies must be addressed in order to improve the mental health of Black people in general and those with mental illness particularly. The pandemic has shed a clear light on these challenges and, with sustained efforts to fight racism, may help lead our society to increased empathy and action to reverse racial bias and disparity. 

And there’s concern about how people express their mental health. For many, when you reach out to a friend with a yes or no question, people can respond with a book, which can be a lot to take in.

“People just want a simple ‘I’m ok,’” Gates said. “A lot of that went into the design process.”

On Monday, Anyanwu said that he and Ali had a call with two Nigerian NGOs that deal with mental health, and the two were taken aback when they were told that the nation, with 200 million people, only had 150 psychologists. 

“We see this as a big global outreach that addresses the stigma and situation regarding mental health,” Anyanwu said. “It goes with the theme we’re pushing: this is the anti-social media. We don’t want you to stay on the app. We don’t want to sell you anything. We want you to engage the app, open it and check in on friends.”

And that right there is why I find this interesting. When was the last time you saw an app or tech product designed to actually facilitate real-world connectivity? The hot new toy in Silicon Valley is an app that has invented the cross section of 1980s party lines and panel sessions at conferences. It is, by nature, a lot of noise searching for a signal. Why not cut out the noise? Because there is money in the noise. 

Anyanwu and Gates both emphatically said that revenue is not the goal. They have day jobs (Anyanwu, a lawyer; Gates, currently leading product at a crypto company after stints as a subject matter expert for the government and product at Google). Gates told me he wakes up at 5:30 a.m to work on the app, fixing bugs, answering emails from people. 

Gates said that he rarely checks “metrics,” and hasn’t checked in about two weeks. Since the app’s official roll-out on January 19, Gates there have been about 30,000 downloads across iOS and Android, but he really doesn’t care about that, yet, instead focusing on what he calls “engagement and usefulness.” 

“Most important for us, we see at the top of the funnel, 73 percent of people that start an account right away will send a first check in,” Gates said. “I spend measuring how often people check in on one another; we try not to position this as a business. We’re not looking to raise money, it’s purely a labor of love project.” 

I see this app as a digital example of Wittgenstein’s Language Games, where the philosopher investigated the core tenets of how we communicate. Writing in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein explores the nature of language:

Let us imagine a language ...The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words 'block', 'pillar', 'slab', 'beam'. A calls them out; --B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. -- Conceive of this as a complete primitive language. 

Wittgenstein ends up explaining how Builders A and B can effectively communicate because they have a shared definition of the words—meaning, context, situation, etc. (Just a note: this was a gross over-simplification of a major work of philosophical importance; I am not a philosopher.)

The psychologist James Hillman writes:

In the modern language games of Wittgenstein, words are the very fundamentals of conscience existence, yet they are also severed from things and from truth. They exist in a world of their own. In modern structural linguistics, words have no inherent sense, for they can be reduced, every single one of them, to basic quasi-mathematical units. The basic fantasy of a number of irreducible elements out of which all speech can be constituted is a dissecting technique of the analytic mind which applies logical atomism to logos itself—a suicide of the word.

Of course there is a credibility gap, since we no longer trust words of any sort as true carriers of meaning. Of course, in psychiatry, words have become schitzogenetic, themselves a cause and source of mental disease. Of course we live in a world of slogan, jargon and press releases, approximating the newspeak of Orwell’s 1984.

U;Good?, by removing the friction between words and meaning, distilling communication to three modes—I’m good, I’m so-so, I’m not good—changes the way we use technology, changes the way we communicate. We don’t need 280 characters; we don’t need video; we don’t gifs. Perhaps all we need are red, yellow, green to signify our feelings and how to prompt our friends that we’re ready to talk.

At the very least, it can draw us together without the toxicity of the social platforms. And we can check-in on one another without feeling like we are breaking some glass. So. You good?

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or through a colleague, please consider signing up. And if you appreciated this edition, please consider sharing. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Blackalicious, “Alphabet Aerobics”

Some interesting links:

For the future of media:

• News Corp and Google agree to global partnership on news (News Corp press release)

• Hedge fund Alden Global is buying newspaper chain Tribune Publishing (CNN)

• Vox Finds Its Next Top Editor at The Atlantic (NYT)

• Baltimore Sun Media poised to be acquired by nonprofit from Tribune Publishing (Baltimore Sun)

For media living in glass houses throwing stones:

• Former Gimlet Media staffer dishes on the company’s attitudes toward race as Gimlet produces four-part series on Bon Appetite's racial struggles (Eric Eddings thread on Twitter) 

For transitioning to first-party data:

• After 18 months in the oven, Forbes’s first party data play hits the market (Digiday)

• iHeartMedia to Acquire Triton Digital From Scripps (WSJ)

For media criticism:

• CNN’s Chris Cuomo is reminding us why conflicts of interest poison the news (Washington Post)

• 70% of GOP voters support Covid relief —the entire Republican Party opposes it (Press Run)

For privacy issues:

• TikTok targeted over ‘misleading’ privacy practices and ‘ambiguous’ terms in Europe (Fortune)

Perhaps the second-most important tweet ever, it offers both advice and context to how Twitter, and the world-at-large, works. Don’t be the main character. 

I’d argue the most important tweet, Rule No. 1 of Twitter, whose origins escape me and one that several hundred million each day (including yours truly) ignores: Never Tweet. By never tweeting, the odds of you being the main character on Twitter drops significantly.

Today, it’s likely that The Sporting News, a Canadian hockey publication that entered a content distribution relationship with Maven, a media company that has picked off the remains of some of the media world’s former crown jewels like Sports Illustrated and run by longtime media executive Ross Levinson (he of Yahoo, Fox News and Guggenheim fame), will be a main character for ignoring Rule No. 1.

The publication tweeted, then deleted after about a half-hour of merciless dunks, the following:

Going big on diversity by putting a white player on the cover. 

According to WDET, as of January 2020,

less than 5 percent of the NHL is made up of players of color — that’s 43 players out of more than 700 in the league.

In October, FiveThirtyEight did a deep dive into poking holes into the league’s “Hockey is for everyone” campaign:

There’s ample evidence that the NHL knows it has a racism problem. Its “Hockey Is For Everyone” campaign is proof of this; its slate of Black History Month commercials — which featured no Black players in 2020 — is proof of this; its mobile history museum, which tells the story of the Coloured Hockey League, an all-Black league that formed in Nova Scotia in 1895 and is responsible for the invention of the slapshot and the butterfly goalie stance, is proof of this; the white paper it produced in 2018 in conjunction with the Brookings Institution — which acknowledged that demographics in North America are shifting, that 44 percent of American millennials are not white and that the league needs to get better at reaching out to Black people and people of color — is proof of this too.

The Hockey News’ brethren, Sports Illustrated, wrote in January how players are stepping up where the league isn’t in regards to addressing racism. 

With this backdrop, it’s hard to understand why a hockey publication would, when touting it wanted “to go BIG” about diversity, put a white player on its cover. I reached out to the publication for comment, but haven’t heard back. 

The outlet did, however, take to Twitter to apologize, where it said that it “mistakenly labeled ‘The Diversity Issue’ in a previous tweet” :

However, the URL says otherwise; that it was planned to be ‘diversity’ content.

It’s unclear how diverse The Hockey News staff is, or if someone raised their hand to say maybe this isn’t a great idea.

This, of course, isn’t the first time (nor will it be the last time) there is a disconnect between intent and execution. I’m sure The Hockey News wanted to highlight the league’s Black players, and a quick look on its site there doesn’t seem too much recent content around diversity. There’s a February 11 piece about diversity in college hockey and a story yesterday on P.K. Subban, one of the league’s few Black players, that helpfully ends with this kicker quote:

The down time also gave the Toronto native a chance to reflect on the state of the world in 2020, on a range of topics from the coronavirus pandemic to racial injustice. Subban says it's important to listen and educate himself on what is going on.

“We just have to make sure that we’re all living on this planet together,” he said. “We’re all living in Canada and the United States together. We have to get along and make each other feel comfortable. Getting up every day, being a good citizen, and being able to walk in your own skin, I think that is very important.

“But that is a collective initiative. It is not just down to one group of people, one race, one background or one religion. We need everybody to get on board and be involved and play a role in that.” 

Media, which plays an outsize role in shaping our perceptions of reality, needs to step up. From hiring to processes and policies of equality, and all points in between, media companies have spent the last year stumbling towards a change. Whether that change can actually take hold, that story isn’t written yet. 

We see it with the obsessive stories about the New York Times newsroom or podcasts about Bon Appetit (if you haven’t listened to Reply All’s coverage on this, please do), but also in the lack of coverage of the lack of diversity in other newsrooms or how magazines photoshop Black and brown people.

We are a long way from parity, and as long as media companies package “diversity” into a single magazine issue or newspaper edition, it will be a long time before equality truly reigns. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter (yes, yes, I know). If you arrived here via social or through a colleague, please consider signing up. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Boston, “Foreplay/Longtime”

Some interesting links:

For social media’s positive attributes:

• Reddit Is America’s Unofficial Unemployment Hotline (NYT)

For the tech-versus-media debate:

• Clubhouse, a Tiny Audio Chat App, Breaks Through (NYT)

For media failing us all:

• How ‘American Idol’ Used Claudia Conway (Variety)

• Facebook users rarely saw voting misinformation labeled ‘false,’ says study — especially if it came from Trump (The Verge)

For tech policy:

• U.S. eyes flurry of new taxes on Amazon, Facebook and Google, trying to force tech to pay its ‘fair share’ (Washington Post)

• Big Tech’s Unlikely Next Battleground: North Dakota (NYT)

For content moderation:

• Financial Services Companies Join Social Platforms in Moderating Content (Adweek)

For interesting bedfellows:

• Exclusive: Gannett, McClatchy team up to sell ads (Axios)

For platform advertising:

• TikTok's U.S. ad business roars back as Trump's threats recede (Reuters)

As we grapple with the implications, as well as the first time a president has been impeached twice, we can also see how news organizations regress back to the mean in what they cover.

Media coverage, by definition, is navel gazing, especially the way most media reporters go about their beat. There are few who look at the machinations of the business, instead focusing on the fallibility of the humans who work inside newsrooms. 

The two are connected, but few take the time to connect the dots, for example, between the decline of ad revenue brought by depressed CPMs from the advent of ad tech AND the way newsrooms operate. Understanding the business isn’t as sexy as telling the human story. I get it. 

And the last four years of a Trump administration meant focusing on the existential threats to our way of life caused by the spread of disinformation, the rise of conspiracy, and the adversarial relationship between the press and the political powers they cover. Journalists, Trump (and let’s not forget his GOP sycophants) often said, were the “enemy of the people.” How does a media reporter cover the missteps of a newsroom when they are put in literal holding cages at political rallies?

Last week’s reporting of the struggles inside the New York Times newsroom (the resignations of Don McNeil and Andy Mills; though it seems the former is the more-talked about, as the discussion around intent and speech is fraught with interpretation; the latter seems more clear-cut) is an example of the media world is slowly shifting back to its pre-Trump axis, as media reporters race to breathlessly report, anonymously of course, on the Kremlinology of the NYT. 

But today, reports of a Biden White House deputy press secretary threatening a Politico reporter sucks us back into the adversarial relationship between those in power with those seeking to find the closest thing from truth.

How it started:

On Monday, People Magazine wrote a puff piece about the romantic relationship between TJ Ducklo, a White House deputy press secretary and Alexi McCammond, an Axios reporter covering the Biden campaign. 

Eyebrows were raised. The story acknowledges this:

They know news of their relationship will stir disapproval over the optics and the timing, at least. The way the press covers politicians in Washington, D.C., is endlessly scrutinized — too lax or too harsh, too familiar, too fond. 

McCammond, a rising star on her beat, has talked about the added dynamic of being a Black woman in an industry not historically welcoming to either. And, as a group, female reporters have long faced the misogynistic accusation they become inappropriately involved with male sources. 

The trouble with this piece is that it was placed to get ahead of a damning story. It was an “exclusive,” or industry talk for when a PR person sends a story in a bow to a reporter at an outlet. 

But more than met the eye, it seems.

How it’s going:

According to Vanity Fair today, 

A White House official tried to quash a story about his relationship with a reporter by issuing threats and using derogatory language to another reporter pursuing it, according to two sources familiar with the incident. In a sympathetic profile Monday, People revealed that White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo is dating Axios political reporter Alexi McCammond, who covered the Joe Biden campaign. But behind the scenes, Ducklo had previously lashed out at Politico reporter Tara Palmeri, who was reporting the story, exhibiting behavior that led to tense meetings between the Washington news outlet’s editors and senior White House officials.

The confrontation began on Inauguration Day, January 20, after Palmeri, a coauthor of Politico’s Playbook, contacted McCammond for comment while one of her male colleagues left a message for Ducklo, according to sources. Ducklo subsequently called a Playbook editor to object to the story, but was told to call the Playbook reporters with his concerns. But instead of calling the male reporter who initially contacted him, Ducklo tried to intimidate Palmeri by phone in an effort to kill the story. “I will destroy you,” Ducklo told her, according to sources, adding that he would ruin her reputation if she published it.

While speaking at his swearing-in ceremony, Joe Biden told his appointees that:

“I am not joking when I say this, if you are ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot. On the spot. No ifs, ands, or buts. Everybody...everybody is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity. That’s been missing in a big way the last four years…. I’m confident you have the capacity to do it. We’re gonna be judged. We are gonna be judged whether or not we restore the integrity and competency in this government…. I need your help badly. We have to restore the soul of this country, and we’re counting on all of you to be part of that. It’s not hyperbole. The only thing I expect with absolute certitude is honesty and decency—the way you treat one another, the way you treat the people you deal with. And I mean that sincerely.” 

This is a far cry from being fired:

When Biden won the White House, there were lots of stories about how his communications leadership team was staffed with women. The systemic and casual misogyny that exists in politics and media has been an underlying current for years, coming more into focus over the last four. 

It’s been 23 days since Biden was sworn-in as the President of the United States, and while he’s worked hard to overturn many of Trump’s disastrous executive orders, it’s clear there are some things you can’t fix with a speech or a signature. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. Apologies for the lack of posts this week; had a few job interviews I needed to prep for. Thank you reading! Have a safe and relaxing weekend, and I’ll see you next week. (I may take Monday off as my daughter has the day off for President’s Day.)

Phish, “Fluffhead”

For grifter implosions:

• Former Lincoln Project Staff Ask to Be Released From Nondisclosure Agreements (NYT)

For the effects of messaging:

• A year of election misinformation from Trump, visualized (WaPo)

For the future of advertising businesses:

• The ad industry is preparing for a big year of M&A as private equity circles (Business Insider)

For spy games:

• The Long Hack: How China Exploited a U.S. Tech Supplier (Bloomberg)

For Facebook:

• Inside the making of Facebook’s Supreme Court (The New Yorker)

For a different publisher revenue stream:

• Why your favorite magazines are morphing into books (CNN)

The 75-minute documentary, which is ostensibly about Spears’ legal considerations (she is under a conservatorship, since 2008, that places her father in charge of all aspects of her life) and the social media-turned-real-life movement #freebritney, is more, at least to my eyes, a narrative about the media’s (from news to entertainment, and of course, the paparazzi) thirst to build up a person beyond any sense of “normalcy” and then tear them down. 

(Here’s a great BuzzFeed piece on the #freebritney movement)

The viewer is put into an uncomfortable position when they see adult journalists like Diane Sawyer asks a 21-year-old Britney Spears about being a virgin, her break-up with Justin Timberlake, and experimenting with drugs:

The cringe part comes when Sawyer digs into her relationship with Timberlake, which the documentary highlights: (~24:00 in the link above): 

Sawyer: “He has gone on television and pretty much said you broke his heart. You did something to cause him so much pain so much suffering. What did you do?” 

Britney: “I was upset. I was upset for a while. We were both really young...”

Sawyer: “But you said, ‘I’ve only slept with one person in my whole life, two years into my relationship with Justin.’ And yet he left the impression that you weren’t faithful. That you betrayed the relationship.”

Sawyer, after Spears gives her non-answer answer, cuts to expository of how Timberlake “has made a kind of sport out of retaliation,” showing a clip of him going on the radio and saying he had sex with Spears. 

Which then leads to the documentary showing how Sawyer pivots to the ‘harlot as role-model’ theme that pop culture both pushes and abhors, highlighted by how Sawyer explains to a shaken Spears that the then-First Lady of Maryland, Kendall Erhlich, said, “really, if I had the opportunity to shoot Britney Spears, I would. (30:53 in the link above).”

Spears reacted appropriately: “Oh, that’s horrible.”

Sawyer doesn’t respond appropriately; instead of saying, “I know, right?! That’s absurd,” the journalist justifies Erhlich by saying, “because the example for kids; and how hard it is to be a parent and keep all of this away from the kids.” 

Spears, again, reacts appropriately: “Well, that’s really sad.”

On Saturday, Erhlich simply posted a link to a non-apology apology from 2003:

Meanwhile, people are flooding TImberlake's Instagram page with comments, BuzzFeed reports, calling on him to apologize to Spears.

Liz Day, a NYT editor on the doc, writes about the media’s role in shaping Spears:

In 2006, Matt Lauer asked Ms. Spears to respond to criticism that she was a “redneck.” That same year, did the paparazzi actually take a graphic up-skirt photo of Ms. Spears a couple of months after she gave birth, and the public’s reaction was to largely laugh?

During the height of her public struggles in early 2008, a “Family Feud” episode featured contestants gleefully shouting out answers to “something Britney Spears has lost in the past year” with “her husband,” “her hair” and “her mind!” (Other approved answers included “her kids” and “her dignity.”)

There is a system at play, and one with which the New York Times mentions (through the smart perceptions of Wesley Morris) but yet doesn’t feel compelled to explain its own role in perpetuating the systemic misogynistic and sexist themes of ‘celebrity coverage.’

It’s easier to explore the 100,000-foot view, looking down, but it would serve the viewer, if not the subject, more to show how media covered Britney and other famous women of that era. There is a nod when we see this 2006 New York Post front cover about Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan pop up on screen:

Want some more cringe? Here’s the lede to a 2004 Rolling Stone article about Lohan:

LINDSAY LOHAN HAS BEEN EIGHTEEN FOR JUST UNDER A WEEK when she tells me her breasts are real. I did not ask (gentlemen never do), though my reporting (discreet visual fact checking, a goodbye hug) seems to confirm her statement. Lohan fields queries about her breasts in most interviews, which is probably why she decided to pre-emptively address the issue. “My little sister reads that stuff,” Lohan says. “She called me up one day and was like, ‘I heard you got that Pamela Anderson thing.’ It’s just so retar-” Lohan stops and glances at her assistant. They smile at each other in an inside-joke sort of way. “Stupid,” Lohan continues, and when I look puzzled, she says, “I have to watch myself. I guess I say ‘retarded a lot, and this group got mad at me.”

There comes a time in the life of every teenage girl who works for the Disney Corp. when that girl realizes she has suddenly – how shall we phrase this? – “broadened her appeal.” For Annette Funicello, back on the original Mickey Mouse Club, that point came when boys began to notice the tightness of her regulation Mouseketeer sweaters. In more recent years, fallen Mouseketeers Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera recognized that music videos involving school uniforms and/or nude body stockings would exponentially increase fatherly, big-brotherly and creepy-uncle-y tolerance for music that’s pretty much unlistenable if you’re not a thirteen-year-old girl.

For its part, the New York Times has 3,001 results for “Britney Spears” since 1999. And it looks like the first mention, on February 28, 1999, is a single mention in an article questioning what makes a pop artist these days. 

Where a generation ago, rock critics and record companies announced the arrival of a new ''masterpiece'' every month or two, mainstream pop has reverted to the detached consumerist ethic of the pre-Beatles era. Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys rule, and audience loyalty to a new act rarely extends beyond one or two records. As for art-pop, the radio formats that sell records leave little room for sounds that don't conform to strict niche-market formulas.

Looking through the NYT archives, she is referred to everything from a “vixen” to a “train-wreck.” 

Ok, back to the documentary.

Journalists weren’t the only offenders here. The late night comedians used Spears as a punching bag. Earlier today, former late night talk show host Craig Ferguson was trending on Twitter because he specifically and vocally chose to not use Spears as a cheap joke. 

While the documentary is about the tangled web of Spears’ life—from who controls it to how she navigates it—it also holds a mirror to society’s lust for creating stardom, and then salivating while we destroy what we created. 

So the question, like many documentaries on uncomfortable truths pose, becomes: now what? What have we learned and how do we prevent repeating our mistakes so that we don’t have to say, “oops, I did it again.”

The doc’s title gives an answer: framing. When we’re writing about women entertainers, whether in film or music, especially in arenas that play off their sexuality, we don’t have to actually make a whole entire story about a woman’s breasts. Their skill and talent and work ethic should be enough. 

We can also hold men accountable. One thing that comes through loud and clear in this film is that male equivalents of Spears are not put under the same microscope. Why does Timberlake get a pass? Why does Jamie Spears, Britney’s father, get to play guardian and savior? This is what it means when we talk about systemic issues.

The good in all of this: we can change these systems. First by understanding they exist, and then working to dismantle them and build something better, more equitable. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social media or through a colleague please consider signing up. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Billy Joel, “The Entertainer”

Some interesting links:

For superhero origin stories:

• Who really created the Marvel Universe? (The New Yorker)

For the future of media:

• Spaghetti-Os Pie: Why gross viral food videos are popular (The Atlantic)

• Mark Cuban is co-founding a podcast app where hosts can talk to fans live and monetize their conversations (The Verge)

• EU ready to follow Australia’s lead on making Big Tech pay for news (FT)

For lawsuits:

• Fox News files motion to dismiss Smartmatic defamation suit (L.A. Times)

For using local media to push an agenda:

• Inside Biden’s heavily local media push for his coronavirus rescue package (Washington Post)

For potentially problematic workplace issues:

• Reporter Forgoes Covering President as Romance Blossoms with Biden Aide Battling Cancer: ‘Didn’t Think Twice’ (People)

For media criticism:

• Describing a Slur Is Not the Same As Using It (NY Mag)

The second, and more important: there is a fine line between viewing the world as it is versus how we want it to be, and as Kindred’s CEO Ian Schafer told me on Twitter last night, “And that’s advertising.”

(If you missed any of the spots, or want to watch them again, CNBC has you covered)

Last night’s broadcast reminded us that there are indeed two Americas; an America that applauds its most vulnerable citizens for doing the jobs that allow the other America to protect themselves; an America that will go to a large event during a pandemic while other Americans haven’t seen their families in a year; an America that tells its citizens to wear a mask while showing commercials of maskless Americans. We are a nation divided even as the NFL reminds us “it takes all of us” and brands tell us “we’re all in this together.”  

The New York Times reminds us today that we are not in this together. Reporting on the disparity between grocery and retail workers, and the companies they work for:

Brookings found that while 13 of the largest retail and grocery companies in the United States earned $17.7 billion more in the first three quarters of 2020 than they did a year earlier, most stopped offering extra compensation to their associates in the early summer. At the same time, some opted to buy back shares and gave big sums to executives.

The tale of two Americas and the main messages of the night—of unity, of sacrifice, of hope — were on full display, with the quiet star of the evening, the coronavirus, serving as the backdrop for every moment of the broadcast—from the types of commercials and their messages to the realities of the game (from the crowd to the players to the naked streaker dude), the coronavirus cast a long shadow on the evening. 

The Super Bowl is America’s vision, of corporate sponsorship and governmental (if not military) might, beamed into TVs around the world. There is no more land to conquer, so we try to conquer hearts and minds using sight, sound, motion. And a whole lot of fireworks. 

The NFL, an $11 billion-a-year organization, has entwined itself with the American government for decades. We see the overt relationship when military fighter jets (which themselves cost billions of dollars) roar over stadiums; we get the interview with the President of the United States. 

On a positive note, this relationship has yielded vaccine centers. The NFL is opening up all 30 stadiums to administer vaccines. 

But we see the more subtle relationship, the softer-sell, through the narrative connective tissue between the myth of American exceptionalism and corporate sponsorship of the league.. 

We talk of unity, of sacrifice, of togetherness. But the images—from the 25,000 in attendance to the cutout cardboard people to the slate of commercials—belie that message. 

New York Magazine reflects on this:

If you’re impressed by those 7,500 vaccinated fans, remember that the other 17,500 not only weren’t vaccinated, they weren’t even tested coming into the stadium. (There were 7,000 positive COVID cases in Hillsborough County in the last week, and of course, the Buccaneers were playing in their home stadium.) Social distance all you want, there isn’t a stadium in America with 25,000 fans in it that doesn’t hit traffic when visitors hit the concourse, concessions, and restrooms. And even if everything were safe inside, there are still the optics of a full-seeming stadium in the middle of the worst public-health crisis of the last 100 years. When you take a step back from it, it actually looks worse that the NFL wanted the stadium to look fuller than it was. Why would you want to advertise to people that they can gather, that everything is normal? Doesn’t that make it worse?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Advertising numbs us, makes us see the world as we wish it were, not as it is. And during a pandemic, it’s dangerous to have a false sense of reality. 

AB InBev’s “Let’s grab a beer” spot shows us people doing people things, saying “When we’re back, let’s remember, it’s never just about the beer. It’s saying it’s about that simple human truth: we need each other.” 

We do need each other. This is how society works. But we’ve learned in the last year that many people actually don’t believe this. Our social contracts have been ripped up. Know how I know? Americans violently stormed our Capitol because they bowed down to a false orange idol.

Or look at Jeep, which has, for the second year in a row, tapped into the Boomer vein. Last year, it brought Phil Connors (aka Bill Murray) back to Punxsutawney; this year, it asked Bruce Springsteen to lend his voice to talk about the two Americas.

It opens up with a road in the middle of the screen, literally dividing the scene. But it’s a visual twist as he talks about ‘the middle,’ something we need. The soil is common ground he said; we can make it to the mountaintop, through the desert. He mentions hope on the road (it is a car commercial after all). Advertising, as politics, is about campaigning in poetry.

Jeep tries to remind “us we are stronger than the obstacles in our way, and invites us to remember all the ways we are connected as Americans” even as we are more disconnected than ever.

Yet implied in these sponsored messages is hope. And while not a bad thing, to look forward to a time when ~all this~ is in our rear-view mirror, perhaps we’d be better off seeing the world through a less rose-colored lens. Why? Because even as we’re being told “we’re in this together” companies used the Super Bowl’s platform to espouse a hustle culture, where people have to get side jobs because they can’t make enough to live. How fucked up are we?

Fiverr’s spot on freelancers and Squarespace’s “5 to 9” spot, flipping the Dolly Parton song (she rewrote the lyrics: “Working 5 to 9, you’ve got passion and a vision/Cuz it’s hustlin’ time, whole new way to make a livin’”) emphasize the dichotomy between people who have been able to work from home during the pandemic and those who haven’t. 

The conflicting messages can create whiplash, oscillating between a nation trying to figure out how to move forward and a nation trying to survive today. Perhaps nothing was as confusing than the one magical moment of every Super Bowl, when the winning quarterback looks into the camera and says where he will be celebrating. 

A maskless Brady and Gronk telling the world they are now going to go to Disney World is as twisted as it is hopeful. A tale of two Americas. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, please drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or through a colleague, please consider signing up. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Phish, “Two Versions of Me”

Some interesting links:

For when analytics companies get bought:

• WordPress VIP acquiring content analytics company Parse.ly (Axios)

For the evolution of Twitter:

• Twitter Considers Subscription Fee for Tweetdeck, Unique Content (Bloomberg)

For media criticism:

• Consider the Source: How the New York Times deceived Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. (Mother Jones)

• Big Publishing Pushes Out Trump’s Last Fan (NYT)

• Marty Baron considers his time at The Washington Post (The New Yorker)

• Analysis: The end of the road for Lou Dobbs (CNN)

• The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows (Glenn Greenwald)

For what the future holds:

• Tesla to accept bitcoin as payment in ‘near future’ after $1.5 billion investment (The Verge)

For journalists:

• New research shows how journalists are responding and adapting to “fake news” rhetoric (Nieman Lab)

For more editors-going-through-the-revolving-door:

• Rolling Stone editorship opens up amid industry-wide leadership shuffle (Vanity Fair)

We establish our understanding of an event, a moment in time, as it occurs. But we also establish a broader meaning, of both what the image presents and what it represents, to help us build our understanding of the world.

It’s why Canon’s 1990s slogan, “Image is everything” was so brilliant, playing off the fact that it’s a camera company (a device used to take pictures) and celebrating celebrity (recall Andre Agassi’s flowing main).

With this as the backdrop, let’s look at the world’s largest advertising stage on Sunday and the current fixation on Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and how these two current events are shaping our reality through images. 

As Aristotle reminds us, we think in images. If I were to ask you “what immediately comes to mind when you think of Abe Lincoln” odds are you’re literally picturing the tall, lanky, bearded, stove-pipe hat-wearing man and not, say, his Emancipation Proclamation or Gettysburg Address. 

Back in June, I wrote about the power of social video; how Neil Postman 

laid out how the Age of Television ushered in an era where “discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery,” to the point where we not only converse, but think in images. 

“The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media,” he wrote. “You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.” 

And yet. Every time Rep. Greene is photographed, every time she’s on camera, what do we see?

Here’s my Google search result. Notice the thumbnails of her mask.

Clicking through articles, seeing her pictures spread on social platforms, we’re greeted with her messages: 

Free Speech:

(Via CNBC)

Censored:

(Via Politico)

Stop the Steal:

(via The 74)

We see several messages at once. First, the signification of wearing a mask; it’s become a symbol of many things—of health, of conscientiousness, of liberty and freedom. Greene wears one because she has to, not because she wants to. Much like other pieces of clothing, the mask can symbolize who’s behind it.

(Aram has a great thread on this.)

For instance, I wear a Phish mask. While I wear a mask for the purpose of preventing the spread of a virus, I also wear a mask to show who I am. When I walk down the street and another Phish fan understands, I get the knowing nod, or in some cases actually talk to another human being.

Greene signals the same thing: this is her message (of course an irony here is that she is constantly saying how she’s being censored. And yet.) And that message gets spread much faster today across social media.

What happens when, however, the absence of a mask is a message? 

In Image-Music-Text, Roland Barthes writes: 

“In advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentions; the signifies of the advertising message are formed a priori by certain attributes of the product and these signifieds have to be transmitted as clearly as possible. If the image contains signs, we can be sure that in advertising these signs are full, formed with a view to the optimum reading: the advertising image is frank, or at least emphatic.”

In a wonderful piece today by my friend and former colleague Robert Klara, we learn that Super Bowl ads will have few images of masks. There are several reasons, he reports.

For starters, there’s timing. America is only 30 days along from a Capitol insurrection that proved, if nothing else, how politically divided the country is. And while wearing masks may have started out as a public health measure, they morphed rapidly into a signal for one’s political affiliation.

“There’s no question that brands are working so hard to avoid any appearance of partisanship on the Super Bowl,” said Tim Calkins, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “All of these ads have been designed very carefully to not offend either side, the Democrats or Republicans.”

The AP explains that there are 20 new Super Bowl advertisers this year, including this DoorDash spot starring Daveed Diggs and Super Grover. Yes, the Sesame Street resident. Notice how none of the stars of the spot are wearing a mask.

For a company that took in $2 billion in revenue for the first nine months of 2020, per Wired, clearly the pandemic was a boon. But is it irresponsible of both the company and Sesame Street, a show beloved by kids, to impart an intentional message of not wearing a mask during a pandemic?

Klara also writes:

Not only are masks not shown or mentioned in most ads, [Calkins] continued, “there’s no mention of any of the big issues facing this country,” he said. A contested election? Black Lives Matter? The 6.7% unemployment rate? Not in this year’s ads. “All of those issues, which are major issues, they’re not directly discussed,” he said.

But Calkins also pointed out that while masks may be absent in these spots, Covid-19 is not. The pandemic receives subtle nods in the form of the messaging (Bud Light Seltzer reminding us that “2020 handed us all those lemons”) and, more noticeably, the settings.

Those settings: backyards, homes, front stoops, inside cars, etc. Generally places inhabited by one person or nuclear families. 

“We were careful not to have any big, large crowds,” said PepsiCo Beverages North America CMO Greg Lyons. “That was part of the creative process this year.” Owing to set restrictions, big groups “would have been very difficult to shoot anyway. We wanted to be sensitive.”

When you put all of these ads together, interspersed through a football game where, presumably, athletes and coaches will be seen wearing masks, messages get muddied. 

But what’s clear, as Barthes notes, the intentionality of the images and the messages create a perception in the receiver. Whether it’s a political stance from a conspiracy theorist-turned-Congresswoman to ads, the impression an image leaves with us can stay for a long time. 

As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or through a colleague, please consider signing up. If you appreciated this edition, please consider sharing. Thanks for reading! Have a great and relaxing weekend; enjoy the Super Bowl and the ads, and I’ll see you on Monday.

Paul Simon, “Kodachrome”

Some interesting links:

For wowsa lawsuits:

• Fox News Is Sued by Election Technology Company for Over $2.7 Billion (NYT)

For the pipes working way too well:

• They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them. (NYT)

For curious management decisions:

• G/O Media Told Staff It Fired Editor for Activism, Union Says (Bloomberg)

For wondering if print ads work:

• AT&T customer since 1960 buys WSJ print ad to complain of slow speeds (Ars Technica)

For ad tech M&A:

• Magnite acquires Spotx (Magnite)

For agency life:

• Ogilvy’s new global CEO Andy Main is leading a big turnaround (Insider)

For student journalism:

• Student journalists at an HBCU campus newspaper took on racist local media—and won (Scalawag)

For ruh-ohs:

• Universal Music Pulls Song Catalog From Triller, Saying TikTok Copycat ‘Shamefully’ Withheld Artist Payments (Variety)

With revenue reliant on subscribers than advertisers, media companies run the risk of making decisions to mollify the subscriber. This could be from how stories are decided, how they’re written/shaped, or written at all.

Let’s say a healthy proportion of your subscriber base doesn’t want you covering labor issues, and tells you they will unsubscribe if you continue, what do you do?

(Image via Andrew Harrer—Bloomberg via Getty)

The company reported 7.5 million subscribers, with a boost of 2.3 million digital-only subscribers in 2020. The paper (can we really call it a paper anymore?) has built a powerful subscriber base for its articles, but also for its audio, cooking and games products. Subscription revenue jumped 14.7 percent to $315.8 million. Diversification, the name of the game. 

Subscription revenues in the fourth quarter of 2020 rose due to growth in the number of subscriptions to the Company’s digital-only products, which include our news product, as well as our Games (previously Crossword), Cooking and audio products. Revenue from digital-only products increased 36.8 percent, to $167.0 million. Print subscription revenues decreased 2.9 percent to $148.8 million, largely due to lower retail newsstand revenue, while revenue from our domestic home delivery subscription products grew 2.2 percent.

The Company ended the fourth quarter of 2020 with approximately 7,523,000 subscriptions across its print and digital products. Paid digital-only subscriptions totaled approximately 6,690,000, a net increase of 627,000 subscriptions compared with the end of the third quarter of 2020 and a net increase of 2,295,000 subscriptions compared with the end of the fourth quarter of 2019. Of the 627,000 total net additions, 425,000 came from the Company’s digital news product, while 202,000 came from the Company’s Cooking, Games and audio products.

But as the company grows its revenue from a direct relationship with its reader, it continues to free fall down the advertising chute, as ad revenue dropped 26 percent last year to $392.4 million (print accounted for a 39 percent drop). 

Fourth-quarter 2020 digital advertising revenue decreased 2.3 percent, while print advertising revenue decreased 37.9 percent. Digital advertising revenue was $90.1 million, or 64.7 percent of total Company advertising revenues, compared with $92.2 million, or 53.8 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2019. Digital advertising revenue decreased primarily as a result of lower creative services revenues, which were partially offset by higher direct-sold and open market programmatic advertising. Print advertising revenue decreased as the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated secular trends, largely impacting the entertainment, media and luxury categories.

So the story now starts to turn, and something the New York Times and other companies focusing on building subscription models to compensate for loss of ad revenue need to start asking: at what cost?

Advertising revenue is an equalizer of sorts. Companies looking to distribute their messages through inventory (whether that’s a print ad, a banner ad, a tv commercial, whatever) choose media partners through a labyrinth-type decision-making process. Usually involving some alchemy of audience, scale, brand, and relationship between buyer and seller. And because of this, walls are built between sales and editorial so that sales can’t influence what reporters cover.

While it is rare that an advertiser pressures editorial to cover a topic or story, it has happened. Like the time BuzzFeed removed three posts because advertisers complained about the content. Two of the stories were eventually reinstated. 

What happens when your model is funded by people and nor corporations? Will news organizations that operate through subscription models buckle under pressure to take down stories, or even change their editorial mission or philosophy, if a significant amount of subscribers lay down ultimatums? Will stories reflect the ideals and values of the subscriber in order to keep them? 

As media companies look to subscriptions, these are the questions they’ll need to answer. Or at least start discussing and weighing. The New York Times has a brand (and some cash) that can experiment with new formats and models. 

Indeed, in a statement, the paper’s CEO Meredith Kopit Levien set her and the company’s sights on getting more subscribers, indicating that with a broader universe of readers, any potential for mass subscriber cancellations can be alleviated. 

“With a billion people reading digital news, and an expected 100 million willing to pay for it in English, it’s not hard to imagine that, over time, The Times’s subscriber base could be substantially larger than where we are today.”

While it may be good business for the New York Times, it’s unclear if it’s good for readers.

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via a colleague or through social, please consider signing up. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see ya tomorrow!

The Bee Gees, “Stayin’ Alive”

Some interesting links:

For executives staying in their job for a little while longer:

• Jeff Zucker announces he will stay on at CNN through the end of the year (CNN)

For executives not staying in their job anymore:

• Parler CEO John Matze says he’s been terminated by board: ‘I did not participate in this decision’ (Fox Business)

• What to expect from Amazon’s new CEO Andy Jassy (Recode)

For platform and misinformation:

• TikTok creates prompts to help people consider before they share (TikTok)

• New study: Social media’s alleged anti-conservative bias is ‘disinformation’ (Fast Company)

For brand experiments:

• Valentine's Day at Lowe's? 50 couples will win a 'Night of Lowemance' date, plus there's a virtual event for all (USA Today)

For content analysis of a propaganda film:

• Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda (Just Security)

For dark money influencing everything from media to sedition:

• How one billionaire family bankrolled election lies, white nationalism — and the Capitol riot (Salon)

For a new sheriff in town:

• Klobuchar unveils sweeping antitrust bill, laying out her vision as new subcommittee chair (CNBC)

One thing that is remarkably the same (especially given the above, which we’ll get to more detail in a moment): the exuberant price tag of running a Super Bowl spot.

If you want to put together a 30-second commercial to run during the most-watched event of the year, it’ll cost you about $5.5 million for air time alone. It can cost a few million more to actually produce a spot, from paying talent to your agencies.

And this year, for a slew of reasons—from loss of revenue due to the pandemic to opting to “do good” with their spend—advertisers and buyers are looking at the “is spending in the Super Bowl worth it?” question a little closer than normal.

And predictably, like many things in this world, the answer lands on “it depends.”

One argument goes like this: If you are a company that spends hundreds of millions to multi-billions of dollars each year in advertising and marketing, advertising in the Super Bowl makes sense. 

“It’s not for everybody,” said Aaron Goldman, CMO of Mediaocean, an advertising services and software company. 

While Goldman said that running a Super Bowl spot is worth it, he did add that a Super Bowl spot is not a good idea for everyone. 

“But for the brands that do do it, they get their money's worth,” he said. “Every brand is going to have their own formula of what value means and what worth it means.”

Mediaocean analyzed TV social lift* over the past month for 38 brands who ran Super Bowl last year or are scheduled for this year’s game. The agency found that brands booked for 2021 had a combined TV social lift of 74 percent vs. 67 percent for brands that are not participating this year. 

The company indicates that this shows a halo effect around Super Bowl ads, as brands generate buzz on social media in anticipation of their participation in the game. For example, Amazon is participating this year and generated 146 percent social lift and Pizza Hut saw 126 percent lift. Budweiser is not participating this year and only netted 86 percent lift while Audi’s lift was 77 percent.

*Methodology: To assess the TV ads generating the greatest response on social media, Mediaocean fuses data from its proprietary social affinity database with 2 billion+ interactions across Facebook and Twitter with Kinetiq Teletrax data covering ad occurrences on more than 1,300 U.S. channels. By comparing each brand’s social media engagements in the two-minute period after the start of a TV ad to the brand’s average social media engagement rate, Mediaocean calculates the TV social lift. Ultimately this is a measure of how much more likely a viewer is to engage with the brand on social media after seeing one of their TV ads. The time period for this analysis was Dec. 22 through Jan. 22, 2021.

There is also a sense of the haves versus the have-nots at play; those that can afford to drop seven-plus figures on a spot and those that can’t.

For example, he said, the haves can afford to surround the Super Bowl spot with an actual campaign. Doing a one-off for the Super Bowl is a waste of money and time, he said.

Ideally, a brand can use the Super Bowl as a starting point for a year-long campaign. But that takes money. If your advertising budget is $50 million for a year, can you justify spending 10-to-20 percent of that in one shot?

“The Super Bowl is a case of the rich getting richer,” Goldman said. “Those who can afford $5 million can afford big campaigns across the 360 digital linear experience; that extra amplification can milk off the rest of the year. Unless you have the budget you won’t get the value.” 

Brad Geving, vp of media buying and ops at Tatari, a data and analytics shop, looks at it this way: having the direct attention of 100+ million people for 15-30 seconds, on a big screen, is huge. The commercials are part of the viewing experience and people look forward to them. 

“What does that really mean? You have a viewer's attention for 15-30 seconds on a big screen,” he said. “Compare that to the viewing experience of an Instagram feed-- your creative must make someone stop scrolling and keep their attention beyond a few seconds. On a lot of days, some people may turn to their phone during the commercials- but that will happen significantly fewer times on Sunday.”

But, as we mentioned, it’s not cheap. When one evaluates the opportunity cost of spreading that investment across more media, Geving said, “it becomes readily apparent that on the surface, all other things being equal, a spot in the Super Bowl is not worth the amount of media you could buy otherwise. So in order to make it worthwhile you need to get something extra out of it that other media cannot provide.”

When you start to factor in the halo effect of having a Super Bowl spot—the trade press (and my lord is there a ton of trade press), the earned media on social and mainstream media, running the ad leading up to the game but also for a period afterwards—buyers and advertisers can start making their argument for giving the network that airs the Super Bowl some cash.

Kantar, last year, said that the Super Bowl has generated $3.6 billion in ad revenue the last 10 years.

But, what if you take the argument that actually advertising in the Super Bowl is not worth the price tag? That the ad doesn’t actually “perform.”

If you’re using the spot for immediate direct lift proportional to cost, it will “almost ultimately fail,” said Sean Halter, CEO of the agency Connectivity Marketing and Media.

Even beyond the immediate lift, some say it’s still not worth it.

“It’s not worth $5 million for a sport that’s been steadily decreasing in ratings,” Bennett D. Bennett, an independent consultant told me. “This isn't just on traditional broadcast but streaming as well. If you’re steadily declining as a sporting event, clearly something needs to change. Media companies should have to adjust.”

The WSJ reported in December amid a run of bad ratings for the the NFL that

TV networks are feeling the strains of disappointing NFL ratings, as they are forced to restructure deals with advertisers to make up for the smaller audience, and their opportunity to make money off remaining games during the lucrative holiday season narrows.

According to Statista, even though viewership has crept up the last three years, overall NFL viewership has declined over the last decade. 

And mainstay Super Bowl advertisers, like Budweiser, Pringles and Toyota, to name a few, have said that they’re putting their Super Bowl ad spend toward pro-vaccine messages. 

Coke is also riding the pine this year. “This difficult choice was made to ensure we are investing in the right resources during these unprecedented times,” spokesperson Kate Hartman said.

And for smaller brand, the investment may not be worth it, Geving said, though he noted that “additional benefits come from the increased efficiency felt in other marketing channels. Brands will start to see the efficiency of their social media improve, for example, as name recognition helps people feel comfortable with the brand when encountering a banner ad.”

He also added that other objectives may be in play, like “signaling to competitors that they are a real threat (and maybe should be an acquisition target?) and the Super Bowl offers that opportunity to show the world that the brand has arrived.”

But Bennett believes that a brand has to consider more than just the eyeballs or that you’ve arrived, arguing that maybe it’s not in a brand’s best interest to support a league that has had real problems of social injustice, has handled the private and public concern of concussions by burying its head in the sand, and he says, how sloppy the NFL handled this season due to the pandemic.  

“If we say ‘the future is female’ or it’s driven by Black people, you need to invest more money that openly supports those communities, and that’s not going to be done when you waste $5 million for media buy and a million or more to shoot a commercial,” Bennett said. “Part of it is racial equity; part of it is consciousness as a brand, but the third is: how are you going to get ahead of the curve if you put money towards a halftime show (or closely adjacent to it)? I don't think it's smart; especially for a brand today to think that you’ll think you’ll get most of your eyeballs this way.”

Indeed, some brands are choosing this option. Like Planters, according to CNBC:

Kraft Heinz’ year-long circle-of-life campaign around Mr. Peanut culminates Monday with a new storyline and an announcement that Planters will take the roughly $5 million it would ordinarily spend on a Super Bowl ad slot and instead route that money to recognize people doing charitable acts. The brand is calling them “acts of substance,” a play on positioning the snack as a substantive alternative to options like potato chips. 

If 2020 was a year that companies (let alone the public) grappled with the effects of systemic racism, all while racing to say how they support equality, 2021 will be about how companies are measured against what they actually say and do. 

(And just a reminder that the way the NFL treated [and continues to treat] Colin Kapernick, who took a knee in protest of police brutality against Black people, has led to many of the NFL’s challenges.)

“If you have a budget (talking hundreds of millions of dollars) and you’ve got a big launch this year, or you’ve got a rebranding, or a need to change the perception of your company, or take a big stand on corporate social responsibility, a Super Bowl spot is a great way to do that,” Goldman said. “But it’s one thing to make a statement you support BLM, but it's another to change your board of directors, or supply chain, to reflect the BLM movement. This is another case of you have to back up your talk. If you go on record with a Super Bowl spot, you have to be there the rest of the year to deliver on that brand promise.”

And of course, through all these changes, we have to also consider the consumer, Bennett said.  “The consumer’s lifestyle has shifted. There will always be core football fans, and maybe if the NFL does treat racial justice and become a safer sport in a way that doesn’t alien fans, then maybe the Super Bowl will be worth watching again,” Bennett said. “I don’t think it’ll ever be the prime time it once was, even 10 years ago.”

So there you have it. Is it worth advertising in the Super Bowl? Maybe so, maybe not. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or a colleague, please consider signing up. And if you appreciated this edition, please consider sharing across your social platforms. Thanks for reading! (Due to the insane amount of snow I will have to shovel tomorrow, I may be taking a snow day.)

Phish, “Stash”

Some interesting links:

For understanding how GameStop employees feel:

• GameStop employees on r/WallStreetBets: 'They’re rubbing [it] in our faces.' (Input)

For platforms:

• Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued ‘Groups,’ Now Plans Overhaul (WSJ)

• Facebook developing a tool to help advertisers avoid bad news (Axios)

• Survey says: Never tweet (NYT)

• Ford is partnering with Google to bring its cars into the modern era (Protocol)

For media companies trying their hand at community:

• Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.com (Philadelphia Inquirer)

For branding:

• Huawei hires ad giant WPP to promote its brand in the US as it tries to overcome Trump ban (Business Insider)

For gift guides:

• The Verge’s Valentine’s Day gift guide (The Verge)

This week alone: 

Twitter bought Revue, a “service that makes it free and easy for anyone to start and publish editorial newsletters.”

Facebook, the New York Times reports, is building a newsletter platform. 

The product, which is still in its earliest stages, could be similar to those of other newsletter companies, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so publicly. That could include features to help writers build their followers on Facebook and curate their email lists, the people said, as well as paid subscription tools to help journalists make money from their newsletters.

Forbes introduced its “Journalist Entrepreneurs” program, which is basically the outlet hiring business folks to write newsletters.

As Forbes staff, “Journalists Entrepreneurs” receive a salary and benefits, as well as a split of the revenue they generate, helped by Forbes’ editorial, marketing and customer service/support functions, as well as the extensive reach of the site. They can self-publish their work through Forbes’ industry-leading CMS, Bertie; establish their own profile page on Forbes.com, and easily create and distribute their own customized paid newsletters, which are then distributed, marketed and managed by Forbes.

(Image via Ian Kington/AFP/Getty Images)

The last year has seen an explosion in journalistic-style newsletters. Like this one! And this boom, from journalists with huge social followings leaving their cushy editorial gigs for the toil of flying solo to individuals who lost their gigs looking for some structure in their lives, has now led to platforms and publishers looking to cash-in on the newsletter craze. 

As I wrote many months ago, newsletters are great, but they’re not magically going to let writers live the Graydon Carter existence, writing a newsletter from the south of France. Some, yes, will be able to make megabucks writing to an audience willing to pay. But those are few and far between. My analogy has been that of a rock band.

Me, from September, writing about newsletters, naturally:

At best, most of us newsletter writers are in a garage band. We practice like we want to be rock stars; we play clubs and bars hoping to build that audience and catch a few lucky breaks along the way. Some inevitably will matriculate from playing local pubs to opening up for bigger acts to maybe even hitting rock star status. But the odds are not in our favor. The end result for most of us: a good side hustle to bring in a few extra bucks, but not something we’ll be able to call a job.

Reading Drew Austin’s Kneeling Bus newsletter, I’m reminded of the strangeness of “creating.”

What’s the point of posting or creating something that isn’t meant to be liked or even seen at all, especially when doing so isn’t part of some dumb game? Concepts like Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame (1968) and Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (2004) raised the possibility that notoriety and audience sizes would become more evenly distributed as creative output itself became more heterogenous—until eventually we’d each be broadcasting our own perfectly unique material to only ourselves and maybe our close friends and family (in fact, Anderson praised this exact condition in his Long Tail essay: “As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month”). Of course that arrangement was never sustainable: The Long Tail is a paradise for consumers, not producers, and we’re all increasingly both, so a new compromise became necessary. Today, the Long Tail manifests itself as Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one, anxiously awaiting the moment when the view counter finally ticks from zero to one. The minimum tolerable amount of recognition is clearly higher than what the Long Tail promises.

Writing is, generally, a solitary exercise. Sure, we talk to folks to get viewpoints and an expertise we don’t have on a particular subject. But we typically write alone, an activity that goes like this:

Brain > fingers > screen > brain > fingers > screen, and so on, until we are content with what we see on the page. If we’re lucky, we get someone smarter (or at least a fresh perspective) to read what we’ve written before we send it out to the world. 

And once we hit publish, the writing is gone; it is not ours, it becomes how the reader interprets the words; what the reader wants it to be. As a writer, you hope your message is conveyed. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not. 

And, like a bar band, sometimes you write and no one reads. In Austin’s newsletter, he notes Dean Wareham’s book, “Black Postcards,” and how Wareham “recounts Galaxie 500 playing a show to an audience of six indifferent bar regulars during a snowstorm in Boston, earning $12 to split among three people.”

As a failed musician, I can relate. I once played a bar in Ithaca with my band in the midst of a blizzard to about five people. It wasn’t bad! (Though clearly not as fun as playing to a sold out Wetlands or Stone Pony.) Sure, the muted applause after each song was slightly deflating, but we took it as a paid practice. In other words, we were getting paid to work on songs, work on stage presence, work on ourselves. 

Newsletter-writing, much like any other writing, is like this: constantly practicing your craft in public. One never knows if anyone actually is interested, or enjoys it (though writers ALWAYS know when someone doesn’t like what you wrote). 

The platforms and media outlets, however, seem to be betting that people want more newsletters, and will pay. Though it’s interesting that the platforms are playing catch-up here instead of leading, and that publishers, after years of giving away its product for free, will convince people to pay up for a reporter’s notebook.  

For platforms, maybe they think that in order to get more users and to keep them on their platform for as long as possible, give ‘em the newsletter option. 

LinkedIn started one a few months back, after years of pushing itself as a modified media company for thinkfluencers who wanted to spew their aphorisms and broetry to their audiences. It’s easier to bring your followers on a journey if you already have them, right?

But do you really want a newsletter from a Facebook friend or a Twitter connection automatically appearing in your inbox or DM? What one looks for in newsletters is different, I imagine, than what one looks for in a platform or a news outlet. 

I started this newsletter because I was laid off, but also wanted to get back into writing. Nine months, 177 editions and 3,710 subscribers later, the only thing I’m certain about newsletters: I know nothing. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here serendipitously, please consider signing up. And if you appreciated this edition, please consider sharing. Thanks for reading! Have a safe and relaxing weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday. 

Boston, “More Than A Feeling”

Some interesting links:

For things that make you go hmmmm:

• Google Deletes 100,000 Negative Reviews of Robinhood App From Angry Users (Gizmodo)

For deplatforming works:

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Twitter’s Trump Ban (NYT)

For media moves:

• Conde Nast Eyes Shift to New Jersey, Cutting NYC Offices (Bloomberg)

For media criticism:

• What the GameStop rally has revealed about financial media (New Republic)

For this smells fishy:

• Subway’s tuna is not tuna (WaPo)

Companies spend a small fortune on monitoring media (traditional and social; legacy and digital; all points in between) for mentions of their brand. And when they start to bubble up, how to react. The last thing they should want to do is create a Streisand Effect.

(Image via South Park)

For those who might not know what the Streisand Effect is: In 2003, someone took an aerial picture of Babs’ beachfront home as part of a series documenting erosion in California. She didn’t like that, so she sued the photographers for $50 million. Which, of course, had the inverse effect of drawing media attention to something few even knew about because a) Streisand is what you might call uber-famous; and b) $50 million is a lot of money. 

Psychology Today writes:

In the month before the lawsuit, the picture had been downloaded only 6 times, including twice by her lawyers—whereas the image was downloaded more than 420,000 times during the month following the lawsuit. This paradoxical result—where an attempt to silence, suppress, or stop something backfires—was dubbed the Streisand effect.

Over the last few days, as the world watches the power of social media collide with the influence of Wall Street in real time, one narrative tributary is that of how a company trips into the Streisand Effect. 

The tl;dr—as Vice reports, Redditors “purchased huge numbers of GameStop stock at low prices (and then kept buying more as the prices rose), held it, and are currently forcing something known as a “short squeeze” that is driving the price up and is emptying these hedge funds in the process.”

This caused a whirlwind for hedge funds, ultimately ending up where today, when Robinhood, an app meant to democratize trading, giving the little guy the ability to make some money, decided that it was going to dismantle its public perception by aligning with institutional investors. 

Some good explainers here

• The Discourse: The house always wins

• The Margins: Game. Stop. 

• Vice: Send This to Anyone Who Wants to Know WTF Is Up With GameStop Stock

• Platformer: Reddit roils Wall Street

Talking to a couple of reputation and public relations experts, by blocking trading and seemingly aligning itself with those institutional investors and not its user-base of retail investors, Robinhood has done quite a number on itself.

“When your entire messaging is built around the idea of democratizing trading and rooting for the little guy, a move like this is pure poison,” said Ed Zitron, founder and CEO of EZPR. “There’s an argument to be made that this was somehow in service of protecting users from making bad decisions, but if that was the case they would have done it days ago. If they were so against the little guy losing money, they never would have launched an options product in the first place. Or maybe they’d have cut options products when a guy killed himself after being assigned millions of dollars of leverage.”

Zitron points out that the company’s brand position from its start has been about “enabling people to trade and take advantage of the same mechanisms that the elite have used to get rich. They have positioned themselves as ‘us’ and other brokerages as ‘them,’ and they’ve now starkly, brutally said that they are truly in the camp of the haves.”

As Matt Van Hoven, co-founder of Raven Public Relations, puts it: “Robinhood just screwed the very group of people they purported to be in existence for.”

“First off, the irony of a brand called Robinhood screwing retail investors (aka 'the poor') is not lost on the 2.7m million members of /WallStreetBets - they're all talking about it,” Van Hoven said. “For a company that had a banner year in 2020 built on people being stuck at home and playing with stocks as entertainment, this was a massive fail.”

Adding that over the course of a few hours, Robinhood effectively destroyed its reputation.

“It's decimated. Like I said, 2.7 million people are in that group, but now the story has gone international,” VanHoven said. “People around the world are buying GME on apps etc. that are allowing them to do it, just to stick it to 'the system' they see as keeping the little guy down. It's a global phenomenon.”

And as if to put an exclamation on le affair RobinHood, when you manage to unite Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you know you’ve stepped into a danger zone.

“This is going to hurt them long term, though I doubt it’ll kill them,” Zitron said. “Their entire messaging strategy is in the toilet now - how can you say you fight for the user when you do something like this? Who’s going to believe you?”

Or, perhaps we’re all going about looking at this incorrectly. NYU professor, book author, and podcast host Scott Galloway tells us this, and apparently all of life’s issues, can be solved by letting young men have more sex.

Thank you for allowing me into your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social, please consider signing up. And if you appreciated this edition, or want to dunk on it, please consider sharing across social. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

The Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

Some interesting links:

For privacy nerds:

• Global Privacy Control wants to succeed where Do Not Track failed (The Verge)

• Facebook's 'Oversight Board' overturns 4 cases in first rulings (NBC News)

• Responding to the Oversight Board’s First Decisions (Facebook)

• Facebook CEO Calls Apple ‘Significant’ Future Competitor (Bloomberg)

For former employee calling out old workplace:

• I called Arizona for Biden on Fox News. Here’s what I learned (L.A. Times)

For platforms:

• YouTube says its TikTok competitor is getting 3.5 billion views a day in India test run (CNBC)

• Facebook predicts ‘significant’ obstacles to ad targeting and revenue in 2021 (TechCrunch)

For tales in SEO:

• What time does the Super Bowl start? (WSJ)

For retailers-turned-media companies:

• Walmart revamps ad-sales business to expand its reach (WSJ)

For the second time in eight years, there is no joy in Mudville, as the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) decided that there would be no members elected into the baseball Hall of Fame (HOF) this year. This is the ninth time in the HOFs history that no one was elected. 

(Image via Hall of Fame on Twitter)

The NYT has a fun piece about the previous eight times no one was elected. 

Not one player hit the 75 percent mark; Curt Schilling came the closest, knocking on the door at 71 percent.  

The guidelines, as indicated by the BBWAA, are as follows:

Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.

This rule was amended in 1989 because of Pete Rose.

 “It was only when it was realized by the Cooperstown guardians that there was a great danger (Pete) Rose (Appendix A) might be elected to the Hall while banned from baseball that the rules were amended (in 1989) (Vass, 2008)” to include “Rule 3 (E). Any player on Baseball's ineligible list shall not be an eligible candidate.”

The HOF is about to enter a period in which the bar to get in gets higher and more abstract, which will mean more years of no members. 

Why? Well, if the two greatest baseball players of their generation can’t get elected by the writers who not only covered them, but looked the other way (recall, the steroid scandal came to light because of investigative reporting, and not baseball beat writers—more on this in a moment), who can get elected?

If you have “integrity, sportsmanship, character” as defining characteristics into the HOF, then many of the 333 members already in shouldn’t be. 

(For the record, I am in the Bonds and Clemens should be in the HOF camp. And so should Pete Rose. No amount of juice can help you connect your bat with a ball travelling 100mph at your head; least of all 762 times. It can, however, keep you healthy to play for a lot longer than you should. And while not every ball player was juice, enough were. And let alone the uppers that players took in the 40s, 50s and 60s to help them recover. But the further away we get from on-the-field theatrics, we see that the writers are just upset that Bonds and Clemens weren’t very nice people when they played; hence the reliance on the character clause as justification. You can yell at me in the comments below.)

The writers, in their infinite wisdom, did, however, elect Bud Selig to the HOF in 2017. Bud Selig, who oversaw the game at the height of the steroid era, gets a pass from writers, character be damned. 

And now we get to talk journalism and history: It’s a good reminder that sports journalism had historically been ancillary part of a newsroom, that the idea of an independent press, a fourth estate to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable is a newish phenomenon for sports reporting.

FanGraphs wrote in 2017:

The relationship between the baseball press and the baseball establishment is a symbiotic one. The baseball reporter’s job doesn’t and couldn’t exist without the access granted by owners and executives. The owners and executives, naturally, expect something in return: free advertising and publicity, putting baseball into the minds of readers and viewers, ideally in a way that paints the league in a positive light.

In her book about Mickey Mantle, “The Last Boy,” Jane Leavy writes about the relationship between the press and the ball players, using the infamous Copacabana brawl between several Yankees and a bowling team (details only emerged last year of what really happened), as an example.

“The ‘Copa Caper,’ as it became known, might not have become public had it occurred on the watch of the baseball beat writers whose unstated code of honor was to look the other way. News-side reporters had no vested interest in maintaining cordial relations in the Bronx. When they broke the story, it was the first major breach in the Fifties seawall between ‘on-the-field’ and ‘off-the-field’ reporting.

Baseball writers ate, drank, and traveled with the team. Their tab was often paid by the team. ‘You couldn’t write one word of it, the debauchery,” said Jack Lang, the longtime executive secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America. ‘It wasn’t just the liquor. It was the women.’

Access journalism is a foundational aspect to sports journalism—it should come as absolutely no surprise why political reporters and sports reporters use the same language and processes to cover their industries; also, political journalists want to be sports journalists, and sports journalists want to be political writers.

Jack Shafer, writing in 2012, explored the mirror images of political and sport reporters:

The jobs of political reporters and sports writers are almost identical: Determine who is ahead and who is behind; get inside the heads of the participants; decode the relevant strategies and tactics; and find a way to convert reader interest into sustainable enthusiasm. Then, maintain reader enthusiasm for the months and months of caucuses or preseason games, primaries or regular season games, conventions or playoffs, and the general election or Super Bowl (or World Series).

From the Sports Media Guy:

Robert McChesney wrote that sports coverage became important to newspapers in large part because sports is ideologically safe — it doesn’t offend people, boosts civic pride and contributes to the perceived well-being of a community. This ideological safety, however, runs counter to the self-perceived role of traditional news journalism. This leads news journalists to view sports journalism as mere entertainment, not “real journalism.” Where news journalism has its roots in the idea of being the fourth-estate and the public watchdog on public officials, sports journalism’s roots are far more promotional.

So the BBWAA had a long and storied history of not actually telling stories that would threaten the symbiotic nature of their role. This, by the way, is also the biggest challenge in trade media. It’s hard to cover a company or executive when your publication’s CEO and sales team are asking them to pay to enter made-up awards and honorifics. 

It’s this history that BBWAA casually ignores as it puts itself up on a pedestal. How, they think to themselves, can we vote in a ball player accused of taking performance enhancing drugs? Or in Schilling’s case, aligning himself through words and actions with the worst people? 

Schilling took to Facebook on Tuesday evening to post a letter he said he sent to the BBWAA (he starts out saying it was “written privately and for their eyes only”, and then posts it on the world’s largest platform). It’s meandering and pandering, but mostly it’s him trying to walk around the BBWAA character clause, as his reputation has plummeted since his bloody sock days. 

He frames his life with those of Bonds and Clemens, though doesn’t actually mention their names (wonder if this is a legal thing, as neither Bonds nor Clemens has tested for or proven to take steroids, big heads and biceps aside):

But I’m now somehow in a conversation with two men who cheated, and instead of being accountable they chose to destroy others lives to protect their lie.

Schilling closes by saying he wants to take his name off consideration for next year. The BBWAA said, “nope.”

Sports journalism stopped being a backwater section of the industry a long time ago, and as the digital age has ushered in new ways of covering teams—from artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that write reports based on the box score to MLB become its own high-powered media company and platform—the role of the BBWAA and selecting the greatest players of an era also needs to evolve. 

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or a colleague, please consider signing up. If you appreciated this edition, or want to dunk on me, please consider sharing. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

The Simpsons, “Talking Softball”

Some interesting links:

For the dying of the TV light:

• TV providers on track to lose around 5 million subscribers in 2020 (Protocol)

For important video journalism:

• Proud Boys Were Key Instigators in Capitol Riot (WSJ)

For context on media hiring (you can hire me!):

• Washington Post joins publications searching for an editor-in-chief (Axios)

For tech companies trying to be media companies:

• Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital behemoth, plans to eat the media (CJR)

• Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper (One Zero)

For tech policy:

• Social justice groups warn Biden against throwing out Section 230 (The Verge)

For media criticism:

• I Left My Career in Prestige Media Because of the Shitty Men in Charge and They Are Still In Charge and Still Fucking Up (Jennifer Barnett)

• Newsweek's opinion editor has an anti-tech side gig (Axios)

The reporter, Joe Gould, recently discovered that 

The attached jpeg resembled a Defense News story complete with my byline, but instead of my work, it was a cocktail of lies and paranoia. There was the layout of one of my stories about the new defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, but some of the words matched a Washington Post article ― and it included both a false headline about Austin “defunding and dismantling” the U.S. Army and an equally false quote about America looking to China for its national defense.

Over the next few days, I’d receive more than five dozen more emails from strangers, most of them fearful this viral fake news was true. Meanwhile, I watched the meme stubbornly spread on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and maybe most of all, Telegram, a chat app popular with QAnon adherents that was first developed in Russia.

This story is one that reporters, newsrooms and yes, even corporations, need to pay attention to, as it sits at the intersection of two prevalent themes that have risen in the last several years and promise to only become more intricate: the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the contagious spread of mis- and disinformation at a global scale. 

A third leg of this stool: the role of the platforms spreading manipulated images, stories, what-have-you. 

As Gould writes:

It was dispiriting that my flagging of several dozen individual posts as “false news” through Facebook’s own notification system had no immediate effect. Only after Defense News and Memetica contacted Facebook did the memes disappear en masse.

For its part, Facebook said its team determined that the posts violated its policies toward digitally altered images leading to misinformation, that it deleted them and that similar posts should be automatically screened in the future.

Several users I contacted acknowledged the meme was false but stubbornly left it up because, to them, it showed larger truths about the new Biden administration.

“Not as farfetched as you think,” one man replied with regard to Austin. “What do you know of his past? Why was he chosen? Why did Biden already move in Syria? Why did he just make us dependent on foreign oil? Why is he against jets just sold to UAE? Why did he support past funding for Iran? Why did his past administration take out Seal Team Six and not lend aid to Bengahzi? Not farfetched at all. Corruption runs very deep with this guy.”

But anyone with an internet connection can watch Austin’s confirmation hearing and get the facts.

This, of course, assumes people are intellectually curious and honest. Watching memes spread on social, I have my doubts. 

The danger, naturally, of being able to replicate a news organization that is designed to trick people as they see the image bubble up on their news feed is multifaceted. On one level, it sows distrust; on another level, it creates (or amplifies) an echo chamber of lies and propaganda. And since we aren’t taught media literacy, it becomes all too easy to convince people that there is a ring of Democratic politicians secretly running the government as they mastermind a pedophile criminal ring that only Donald Trump can save. 

Imagine instead of Defense News, someone decided to create a fake New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

(This is a different scenario of someone scraping a website’s content, re-purposing it—The New York Times Post—and taking in ad revenue. The scams are elaborate.) 

The trouble gets magnified when media manipulation enters the political world. Indeed, in 2019, the New York Times reported on deepfakes and the impact on politics across the globe.

In recent months, video evidence was at the center of prominent incidents in Brazil, Gabon in Central Africa and China. Each was colored by the same question: Is the video real? The Gabonese president, for example, was out of the country for medical care and his government released a so-called proof-of-life video. Opponents claimed it had been faked. Experts call that confusion “the liar’s dividend.”

“You can already see a material effect that deepfakes have had,” said Nick Dufour, one of the Google engineers overseeing the company’s deepfake research. “They have allowed people to claim that video evidence that would otherwise be very convincing is a fake.”

With advancements in manipulating media, we can now take the words out of your mouth. Conversely, we can also add them. 

Here’s a good CNN video on deepfakes. 

Companies are already using technology to explore ways of manipulating media. While early versions were just inserting long-dead actors like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astair into commercials, this year, for example, State Farm used 1998 footage of a Sportscenter clip with ESPN anchor Kenny Mayne to “predict” 2020. 

Each day, we see how a healthy percentage of our population is detached from reality. The ability to change information and then distribute that to unknowing people is a crisis. We saw the tip of the iceberg over the last four or five years, and it will be hard to stamp much of it out. It will take regulation, corporate cooperation, and media literacy programs teaching people how to absorb information. This is a years-long process, one that might be too late.

Twitter, however, looks to ask its users to help combat misinformation, with its new “Birdwatcher” forum. But what if users can’t discern from a real video and faked one?

It may be innocuous to have a Snap filter that swaps your face with someone else’s, and though the creators of South Park might disagree, it’s not all fun and games. 

Serially.

Phish, “The Final Hurrah”

Thank you for allowing me in your inbox, today and everyday. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social or through a colleague, please consider signing up. And if you appreciated this edition, please consider sharing. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow!

Some interesting links:

For retirees:

• The Post’s Marty Baron set to #30 on Feb. 28 (WaPo)

For giving the keys to your outlet to a bad-faith actor:

• 100+ Politico Staffers Send Letter to Publisher Railing Against Publishing Ben Shapiro (Daily Beast)

For newsletters:

• Twitter acquiring newsletter publishing company Revue (Axios)

• Newsletters are growing up and leaving the coop (Axios)

For journalists getting fired for irrational reasons:

• ‘It’s a shot at my reputation’: Lauren Wolfe reacts to NYT’s statement about her dismissal (WaPo)

• An Idaho newspaper editor struggled to get Excel access for staff. After tweeting about it, she was fired. (WaPo)

For looming financial crisis:

• When SPACs Attack! A New Force Is Invading Wall Street. (WSJ)

For video services not named YouTube:

• IAC’s Vimeo Raises New Funds at $6 Billion Valuation (Bloomberg)

• Videos scraped from Parler reveal incitement on Capitol Hill (Tech Policy Press)

For the fox guarding the hen house:

• Rupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’ (NYT)