hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

"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.

ya for sure scaling is a challenge. seems like it will be necessary tho

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

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!

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.

starting a media company in the year 2019 is significantly easier than starting a media company in the year 1919

― 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

starting a media company in the year 2019 is significantly easier than starting a media company in the year 1919

― Mordy, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:59 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

is this post a hilarious joke

Well it's a joke

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

sorry i should've said adjusted for inflation

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

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

diana moskovitz and lauren theisen also leaving deadspin

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)

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, 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?

xp I think "small" is probably an overstatement, but the market broadened and it was a long time before the contraction of the market

jim do u have any evidence jacobin has deep pocketed benefactors who float it? curious as i've never seen a suggestion otherwise

― 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?

Per a number of tweets just now, it appears there's been a mass resignation among Deadspin staffers.

ya they prob have a couple donors greasing the wheels, but also a healthyish revenue stream from ads and mag subscriptions

whoa. did they say who? xp

popula’s (and hmm’s) struggles can be explained by civil being a huge boondoggle. which honestly was to be excepted.

yeah when it rolled out some sites I remember being like "oh somehow these blogs are a cryptocurrency scam, cool"

xxpost So far I've seen Tom Ley, Lauren Theisen, Kelsey McKinney, and I'm sure there are numerous others.

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

xpost Laura Wagner as well.

xp. wow, reading up on civil and it sounds about as well thought through as Verrit

do u think if it weren't on blockchain it could've worked out tho

mass exodus at deadspin, looks like everyone's going

Yup. Redford just confirmed he's out.

oh my god they took the comments off of deadspin

— Lauren Theisen (@theisen95) October 30, 2019

Can confirm.

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?

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.

I mean given the state of the industry wouldn't you rather have a union in that case?

I don't think a union offers you any protections when they don't have any real leverage.

effective solidarity is built from all the fights you lose together until you start to win

or you can give up in advance and sneer at any fightback as deluded i guess

*points, laughs*

G/O spokesperson on Deadspin resignations: "They resigned and we're sorry that they couldn't work within this incredibly broad coverage mandate. We're excited about Deadspin's future and we'll have some important updates in the coming days."

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) October 30, 2019

to support iatee's thought, i'm represented by a union that mixes ft/pt staff and while the pt staff do benefit from the arrangement they hardly seem to enjoy what you would call 'protections' because of it, other than various nice-sounding ones that never become relevant to the actual churn of low-wage precarious employment. it's the ft staff who have whatever leverage there is. so i could see how a union starting out with only workers without leverage would be in a tough spot.

many xps and prior to the sudden ship jumping but for anyone unclear as to why maura would actually be a really knowledgeable point of reference on this whole "make your own magazine thing": http://www.maura.com/12/hello

Maura, if you had it to do over again in 2019: a) would you? b) what would you do differently?

A statement about the resignations at Deadspin. pic.twitter.com/NrUmtHzZbq

— GMG Union (@gmgunion) October 30, 2019

The Gawker union has been effective at protecting writers up to the point where the ownership is willing to go nuclear and shut the whole thing down.

That doesn't make the union pointless or even losing - it worked for its members as far as it possibly could.
Without the union, G/O media could have done all this unilaterally months ago with zero repercussions.

Quite right.

i'm sure they've seen the writing on the wall for months now, but it's pretty gutsy to resign a media job that actually pays money. they can't *all* join the athletic

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, October 30, 2019 6:08 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmark flaglink

it was not a denial of reality, it was an acceptance of it. it was people saying, we're all probably going to lose our jobs eventually anyway so let's lock our benefits in and make sure we get money on the way out. even for people who got nothing out of a media union except a pay bump upon the contract being signed and a check on the way out, it was worth it. there are ways to structure a union contract to ensure people's jobs... in the early meetings for the gawker union we decided we didn't want to go down that path, and instead attempted to find something that allowed for "flexibility" owing to the nature of the industry... anything beyond that was not really realistic on a number of levels and we knew that. as more and more media unions have been formed, the rhetoric has gone to different places, but i can say that at the beginning it was simply an attempt to claw back some rights and slices of the pie for the workers, and i find it impossible to say that wasn't accomplished. last year deadspin's previous owners bought out 40+ people, and they were forced to give them all 4+ months of severance. i can promise you that never would've happened in a million billion years at a digital media company had there not been a contract that forced them to come to the table in that manner.

what happened at deadspin today could've been prevented -- or at least held off -- if the staff's union comrades at g/o had walked out or enacted some other form of protest on their sites in solidarity. why that didn't happen i don't know, but it is a far more logical first step than an industry wide strike, and would have been effective. no one running a digital media company -- including the VC backed ones -- has the liquidity to hire hundreds of people before there is irreparable damage done to their business. oh well. to me, the digital union movement will end up being something like occupy wall st. everyone was already too under the thumb for it to change the world by a long stretch, but just as occupy wall st presaged the current political moment, i don't think we will look back at digital unions in in ~10 years and think "haha! what was that about??"

I always got the impression that Deadspin and Splinter (and Gawker, once upon a time) were off in their own clique compared to the rest of the the sites, I would guess that has something to do with the lack of solidarity action.

also, if by setting an example you can improve conditions for everyone at the sites that aren't being actively fucked with by Spanfeller, it's a good vibe to not imperil those people as well

Burneko's out:

I've resigned from Deadspin.

— Dracubert Nosferatko (@AlbertBurneko) October 30, 2019

Chris Thompson too:

i have quit my job at Deadspin.

— Prince Perspiro (@MadBastardsAll) October 30, 2019

Wow.

Magary's been RTing a lot of these. As of yet, he's not said anything about himself...though he did post this earlier:

Hello it's me the not-repentant-enough capitalist. https://t.co/X4eMaw0pi7

— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) October 30, 2019

Which...I can't get a read on.

it was not a denial of reality, it was an acceptance of it. it was people saying, we're all probably going to lose our jobs eventually anyway so let's lock our benefits in and make sure we get money on the way out. even for people who got nothing out of a media union except a pay bump upon the contract being signed and a check on the way out, it was worth it. there are ways to structure a union contract to ensure people's jobs... in the early meetings for the gawker union we decided we didn't want to go down that path, and instead attempted to find something that allowed for "flexibility" owing to the nature of the industry... anything beyond that was not really realistic on a number of levels and we knew that. as more and more media unions have been formed, the rhetoric has gone to different places, but i can say that at the beginning it was simply an attempt to claw back some rights and slices of the pie for the workers, and i find it impossible to say that wasn't accomplished. last year deadspin's previous owners bought out 40+ people, and they were forced to give them all 4+ months of severance. i can promise you that never would've happened in a million billion years at a digital media company had there not been a contract that forced them to come to the table in that manner.

what happened at deadspin today could've been prevented -- or at least held off -- if the staff's union comrades at g/o had walked out or enacted some other form of protest on their sites in solidarity. why that didn't happen i don't know, but it is a far more logical first step than an industry wide strike, and would have been effective. no one running a digital media company -- including the VC backed ones -- has the liquidity to hire hundreds of people before there is irreparable damage done to their business. oh well. to me, the digital union movement will end up being something like occupy wall st. everyone was already too under the thumb for it to change the world by a long stretch, but just as occupy wall st presaged the current political moment, i don't think we will look back at digital unions in in ~10 years and think "haha! what was that about??"

I mean the question is whether these gains are worth it if it also helps lead to sites imploding more often when the business people don't find it worth the trouble to deal with the union + try to expedite the shift towards more freelance labor and crowdsourced content.

and as far as presaging the future - I just can't really see a future, heavily unionized or no, where people who write online are better off 10 years from now than they are today + there are more jobs - the driving forces here come from outside of the digital media companies not within them. mark zuckerberg doesn't care if deadspin has a union.

Sure, but why are you posting this defeatist twaddle now?