starting a media company in the year 2019 is significantly easier than starting a media company in the year 1919
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 18:59 (four years ago) link
ok boomer.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:00 (four years ago) link
I wonder how The Athletic is doing, afaik it's subscription-only. I'll occasionally see a link from the site tweeted in my feed but I've never come anywhere close to actually exploring a subscription. I think I would pay a monthly fee to read a site that reconvened all of the Deadspinners but I imagine as Jordan said above there aren't a whole ton of folks who have that same loyalty to their specific writers.
― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:00 (four years ago) link
ilx knows the meanings of these words: libertarian, boomer, obtuse
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:02 (four years ago) link
the founder sounds like a typical SV d-bag, but the athletic is very good imo
― mookieproof, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:05 (four years ago) link
i think they do pay people ok and i think it's because there is money behind it
― ت (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:50 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
they have like $40k subscribers. i don't think there's much deep money behind it
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:06 (four years ago) link
i'm guessing being tiny kept hmm's costs low, with the plan-model being that if they hit enough subscribers for the early roll-out they'd have brought in more contributors -- i don't think it's an intrinsically hopeless idea, blogs with attached patreons can and do pay for themselves, the ones that get the mix right, and some of them grow with surprising speedas i say, i liked it -- but i'm sadly used to things i like not being vastly popular or lasting long, i have no record whatever in judging the tastes of the market (and i'd tend to defer to an experienced gawker editor's instincts)― mark s, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:49 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
as i say, i liked it -- but i'm sadly used to things i like not being vastly popular or lasting long, i have no record whatever in judging the tastes of the market (and i'd tend to defer to an experienced gawker editor's instincts)
― mark s, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 2:49 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
ya i think current affairs/nathan j robinson is a better example of the blog + patreon (+ some starter dough) approach taking off. baffler redux had (has? does it still exist) a left benefactor iirc, no?
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:08 (four years ago) link
xp- sorry there should not be a $ in front of 40k
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:09 (four years ago) link
$30 per jacobin subscrip times 40k subscriptions is $1.2M, not counting ad revenues. wonder what they pay per article
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:11 (four years ago) link
can you buy jacobin on many newsstands? a pure subscription model is a lot more efficient (and you get the money months upfront, which is much handier than a months after)
― mark s, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:21 (four years ago) link
not many, no. very select alt book shops
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:31 (four years ago) link
selling in select bookshops is nice also, bcz they often don't mind having back copies on sale with current copies -- newsstands favour sale or return, which tends to mean expensive storage or pulping the unsold copies :D
which seems a pity wth their nice design
― mark s, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:37 (four years ago) link
if Jacobin's not getting funding from the Bernie campaign then they're just leaving money on the table and doing his agitprop for free.
(i'm at least half-kidding, it's just they seem to have a lot of folks who're deep in the tank for the Bernster).
― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:40 (four years ago) link
the editorial thrust of the magazine and its ethos is very pro dsa, pro bernie sanders
― ت (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:41 (four years ago) link
(while being trotskyist on the down low)
― ت (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:42 (four years ago) link
seems like unionizing isn't doing a tonne for these web media companies. i guess the payout from layoff is better at a unionized firm, but they don't seem to have bargained for much in terms of job security. perhaps it's too crassly libertarian, but despite the network platform stuff (which is obviously a huge challenge but maybe not totally insurmountable?) writers' labour is still like 99% of the inputs, so maybe next step is for writers to seize means of production? maybe an industry-wide strike? maybe there needs to be workplace organizing within facebook and other mega-platforms that acts in concert with new media unions?
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:42 (four years ago) link
jim do u have any evidence jacobin has deep pocketed benefactors who float it? curious as i've never seen a suggestion otherwise
"niche magazine that can build a subscriber base" seems like business that people should be able to make work but that doesn't pay a bunch of full time salaries out of the gate, it's gonna be like…a lot of freelancers being paid out of the pockets of founders working for free.
― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:43 (four years ago) link
ya for sure scaling is a challenge. seems like it will be necessary tho
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 19:46 (four years ago) link
hmm daily (which lives on at substack, the paid newsletter platform that a lot of people including xgau and luke o'neil are using to make money off writing, although i suspect returns are diminishing) was also caught up in the whole civil "blockchain, but for journalism" clusterfuck.
https://www.coindesk.com/civil-startup-token-crypto-ethereum
― maura, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:37 (four years ago) link
also there's a lot of pie-in-the-sky stuff in this thread! as someone who tried and failed while on the "go it alone with no backing" path i'm happy to answer any questions you might have!
― maura, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:38 (four years ago) link
and the athletic is vc-funded:
https://awfulannouncing.com/athletic/the-athletic-raises-22-million-in-new-investment.html
It’s been seven months since that historic round of investment was announced, and while The Athletic is known to not yet be profitable, the pace of expansion has only continued. While timing wise, a new round of investment jives with their track record (a round every six to nine months), I think many thought we could start to see The Athletic slow down a bit, given the size of their last round (which saw the company valued at over $100 million), and the report that a lot of the site’s earlier cities were profitable, thus perhaps a lesser need for outside investment.
But as The Athletic sinks their teeth into international expansion past the North American shores, while also launching more video and audio efforts, one last big gulp from the Silicon Valley elite probably makes a lot of sense. The fact that this round came from existing investors likely points to much less time intensive process, and one that perhaps could have been initiated by investors wanting to grow their investment at a time where the company could use more capital. No new investors in a funding round is not the norm for a startup, but is not that uncommon.
― maura, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:40 (four years ago) link
― Mordy, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 1:59 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink
The majority of media companies in 1919 were local, independently-owned newspapers. if you measure success in actual paying subscribers and number of owners and reporters who were making a living on their wage, it wasn't insignificant. corporate ownership of a number of publications across the country wasn't widespread outside of the Hearsts, and their empire didn't launch into magazines until the 1920s
In 1919, there 20,489 newspapers in the United States with 22 million subscribers
― mh, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:41 (four years ago) link
― Mordy, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:59 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink
is this post a hilarious joke
― american bradass (BradNelson), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:45 (four years ago) link
Well it's a joke
― When I am afraid, I put my toast in you (Neanderthal), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:45 (four years ago) link
fwiw, from what I can gather the magazine market was relatively small before the 1920s and many north american long-running magazines started in that decade. Time, Readers Digest, The New Yorker, Better Homes & Gardens, a bunch of others all started during the magazine publishing boom of the '20s
― mh, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:47 (four years ago) link
sorry i should've said adjusted for inflation
― Mordy, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:47 (four years ago) link
lol we're gonna do the same argument about farmers in the 16th century from the p4k thread last week but for music pubs in the 1920s aren't we
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:51 (four years ago) link
I was just nostalgic for the mid 90s when I'd hang around the magazines at the grocery store as my family did shopping and browse publications with titles like "THE INTERNET" and it'd be a couple articles explaining what gopher or ftp were followed by pictures of strange shit on the nascent world wide web and maybe some pondering about whether newsgroups were still good
Now half of the still-functioning websites out there are 90% "here's strange shit from elsewhere on the web/twitter/instagram" including my local newspaper's web presence
― mh, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 20:58 (four years ago) link
diana moskovitz and lauren theisen also leaving deadspin
― mookieproof, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:00 (four years ago) link
mh when you say the market was small before the 1920s do you mean the combined readership or the number of titles -- there were a *lot* of 19th century titles, including some big nationalish names still extant (harpers, the atlantic, scientific american just off the top of my head)
obviously the the 1920s was a very rich time for new start-ups, so i think there probably was a step change as you suggest (economic? technological? i don;t know)
― mark s, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:08 (four years ago) link
― maura, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 4:38 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
i'm more just wondering aloud abt what could come next rather than saying this is something someone could do here/now. im also curious as to why popula didn't work, i know ppl were skeptical about it bc of the blockchain thing, but as a worker-run/reader-owned endeavour it seemed promising. do you think there's a future paradigm/model for online writing on the horizon, or as we stuck with vc-funded whimsical slapdash private equity model for ever?
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:22 (four years ago) link
xp I think "small" is probably an overstatement, but the market broadened and it was a long time before the contraction of the market
― mh, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:32 (four years ago) link
― flopson, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 12:42 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink
pure scurrilous innuendo. just things like buying the tribune and launching Catalyst seem like things you have to be very flush to do and yet no-one else seems to be doing this well?
― ت (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:32 (four years ago) link
Per a number of tweets just now, it appears there's been a mass resignation among Deadspin staffers.
― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:43 (four years ago) link
ya they prob have a couple donors greasing the wheels, but also a healthyish revenue stream from ads and mag subscriptions
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:43 (four years ago) link
whoa. did they say who? xp
― frogbs, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:48 (four years ago) link
popula’s (and hmm’s) struggles can be explained by civil being a huge boondoggle. which honestly was to be excepted.
― maura, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:48 (four years ago) link
yeah when it rolled out some sites I remember being like "oh somehow these blogs are a cryptocurrency scam, cool"
― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:50 (four years ago) link
xxpost So far I've seen Tom Ley, Lauren Theisen, Kelsey McKinney, and I'm sure there are numerous others.
― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:50 (four years ago) link
I don't want to tar journalists as credulous but I wanna know why anyone burned by previous iterations of digital media layoffs and crashes thought bitcoin was gonna be the way forward
― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:51 (four years ago) link
xpost Laura Wagner as well.
― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:52 (four years ago) link
xp. wow, reading up on civil and it sounds about as well thought through as Verrit
― ت (jim in vancouver), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:54 (four years ago) link
do u think if it weren't on blockchain it could've worked out tho
― flopson, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 21:54 (four years ago) link
mass exodus at deadspin, looks like everyone's going
― gbx, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 22:00 (four years ago) link
Yup. Redford just confirmed he's out.
― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 22:03 (four years ago) link
oh my god they took the comments off of deadspin— Lauren Theisen (@theisen95) October 30, 2019
Can confirm.
― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 22:05 (four years ago) link
the whole drive to unionization at these places felt like a willful denial of reality - they're in an industry with real struggles right now and an even bleaker projected future, working at sites that could go under or be sold at any moment, and producing content in an world where there's just too much and too many talented writers. an industry wide strike would be impossible to organize, easy to scab and barely noticeable by the public at large. unions make more sense when workers can expect a lasting relationship with your employer - they can't here, for reasons even beyond their employer's control.
― iatee, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 22:08 (four years ago) link
I mean given the state of the industry wouldn't you rather have a union in that case?
― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Wednesday, 30 October 2019 22:13 (four years ago) link
I don't think a union offers you any protections when they don't have any real leverage.
― iatee, Wednesday, 30 October 2019 22:17 (four years ago) link