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

i don't follow the politics threads when did mordy turn libertarian

one of the reasons why you couldn't just "start a new deadspin" is because the channels of distribution -- google and facebook primarily -- are based on byzantine private formulas regarding reputation and status of each news site on the web. so the staff of deadspin could "start a new deadspin" and probably achieve a modicum of small success based on the transfer of goodwill that would happen in the social sphere, but it woudl take the machines years to understand that it should funnel readers to the new deadspin and not the old one (and this is to say nothing of the literal twitter and facebook pages that the deadspin staff has spent years building an audience for, which they would not be able to retain)

I hate to feed some of the dumbest posts in ILX history but as someone

99% of Deadspin's traffic doesn't follow any of the writers on Twitter, I'm doubtful Deadspin itself is going to advertise the new site. Deadspin is profitable now but that's with over a decade of building up the brand (most of that in a very different media environment) - all the same writers on a new site is starting from zero (see also: Grantland's place in the consciousness vs The Ringer), which is not going to be profitable and not be in a position to pay all the writers the wages they earn on Deadspin for many years (without a sugar daddy).

I just moved a brick and mortar retail store - not open a new one, same name/logo/etc., six months of notice on Facebook and Twitter, six months of putting quarter sheets in every shopping bag with the moving date and new address.

I still get a ton of people absolutely confused about why we're not at the old location.

as someone who periodically fantasizes about publishing a tiny independent print magazine or online outlet despite lacking a purpose, audience, or writers for such a thing, I don't think I can imagine starting one up that would pay (let's say) a dozen editorial, business, and technology salaries from day one.

"there are now over 30,000,000,000,000 individual web pages. But I'm guessing maybe half of them are for fake Louis Vuitton bags on Amazon.com."

There was a similar thread recently. Something about being unable to find things on the internet. There was a time when if you searched the internet for a pop song, you might get some writing about that song, or album, band, whatever. You'd get Mark Prindle's website and George Starostin and lots of individual fan pages. Older articles from Usenet by people who had just bought Volume One of Hardcore Devo and wanted to share their excitement with the world. You'd get actual content written by people.

And then a switch was flipped and lyrics websites came along, and now if you search for song titles you just get hundreds of pages of machine-generated spam. In fact Google seems to prioritise them (if I search for "beach boys" "good vibrations" I get the inevitable half-page of Youtube links, then Wikipedia (twice!), then Genius Lyrics, then Songfacts, Whosampled etc, it's quite a trek before I get an actual article about the song). The sad fact is that machine-generated spam is a more viable revenue generator than human-generated content. The internet has proven with robotic precision that machines can make more money selling advertising space than human beings.

As for setting up a publication of your own, Nathan Rabin of the Onion's AV Club tried that, and it didn't work, and he was an experienced professional with lots of contacts. Roger Ebert had a subscription club and Amazon affiliate links, but I have no idea if the former still exists and the latter was apparently stopped after Illinois started charging sales tax. I remember that he revealed a couple of times he didn't earn very much from it, and he was on the television.

In the long run all magazines fail. The Vorticists managed to put out two issues of Blast before realising no-one cared. The Strand made it to 711 issues before folding in 1950. Eagle survived until 1969 before the British comics market crashed. Punch was launched when Robert Peel was prime minister and survived until 1992 before collapsing. The only magazines that seem to survive are, as mentioned, those that have a sugar daddy or support from eccentric billionaires, e.g. the second version of Punch, which was revived by Mohammed Fayed as a vanity project, or Granta magazine, which is published by one of the relatives of the junkie bloke who let his wife's body rot in a cupboard for two months. Or 2000AD, which has Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, although only the first Rogue Trooper story was any good. I don't know why 2000AD survives and yet it does. Private Eye is still going, perhaps because - who knows - its internet presence is minimal, and also because people will always need something to read on the train.

I mean, you'd think it wouldn't be expensive to put out a bunch of text articles with some photos, but the problem is getting people to pay for it. I used to buy physical newspapers, but they were just a diversion during my lunch break at work, or on the tube. I had no desire to buy a newspaper otherwise. Now the likes of Reddit and insert other example have a steady stream of recycled cat pictures and articles about the Gimli Glider. As mentioned passim I used to work as a professional writer, both print and internet, but gave it up in favour of a steady wage; a handful of "made men" and "made women" earn a lot from writing, but they aren't really writers, they're multimedia personalities.

xps treeship- summary of a recent paper on PE buyouts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2019/10/07/new-study-shows-adverse-economic-effects-of-private-equity-buyouts/amp/

paper itself https://www.nber.org/papers/w26371

RIP. What's weird for me is how quickly the doors close when the algorithms don't include you. I didn't click on a single Deadspin story this year because I don't care for sports at all, and I saw few direct links to Deadspin on my social media feeds. I had no idea my friends read the non-sports content.

i.e. if they linked to this non-sports content on social media, I didn't see it.

you didn't see anyone linking to the david roth trump stuff? that was the one avenue of stuff that was everywhere on my feed.

and the drew magary brain damage story.

RIP. What's weird for me is how quickly the doors close when the algorithms don't include you. I didn't click on a single Deadspin story this year because I don't care for sports at all, and I saw few direct links to Deadspin on my social media feeds. I had no idea my friends read the non-sports content.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 29, 2019 7:07 PM (two minutes ago)

well, this has nothing to do with algorithms or traffic. deadspin is a healthy site. it's just been overtaken by idiots who want to change it and so it's imploding.

oh hell yeah on David Roth Trump.

No idea about Drew Magary.

well, this has nothing to do with algorithms or traffic. deadspin is a healthy site. it's just been overtaken by idiots who want to change it and so it's imploding.

― J0rdan S.

Well, sure, I just meant reading heartfelt testimonials on Twitter all day from a site whose content I rarely if ever saw. It felt like a body blow.

Mordy in disingenuous/willfully obtuse shocker.

someone out there probably has a list ready to go, but the last several years is littered with the remains of talented people's indie projects that had at least occasionally good writing and didn't get the clicks.

*six

There was a similar thread recently. Something about being unable to find things on the internet. There was a time when if you searched the internet for a pop song, you might get some writing about that song, or album, band, whatever. You'd get Mark Prindle's website and George Starostin and lots of individual fan pages. Older articles from Usenet by people who had just bought Volume One of Hardcore Devo and wanted to share their excitement with the world. You'd get actual content written by people.

when I look at the stats on my music blog a lot of my top 20 most clicked-on posts are about fairly obscure albums which I assume is related to this phenomenon. I don't know if these sorts of sites are dying or if people just don't bother cuz it's hard to get traffic. hence why I tend to mostly just post my reviews on RYM, at least there I know people will read 'em. its one of the few sites in the first several pages with any actual content on it

pretty bummed about the Deadspin situation, its always been my favorite sports site especially since they've eliminated some of trashier aspects of it. their political writing was some of the best on the entire internet. and the Drew Magary brain damage story, that was absolutely nuts, one of my favorite pieces of writing ever. he had a really great piece earlier (on an NFL Jamboroo, no doubt) about reckoning with your old hyper-online edgelord persona that I really liked, felt like the definitive take on that particular subject

I'm not sure it was "hyper-online edgelord" so much as "I wrote a bunch of dumb sexist stuff on the internet back in the 2000s but I've learned and matured" but you're right, it was very well done. I assume any of us who has ever written professionally has written things we now morally regret, and the only meaningful way to handle that is to address it head on and apologize.

i think i get the rebuttal to ‘why can’t gawker writers start their own site’ (at least, i trust it’s more complex than i naively imagine) but i do think some sort of writer-owned site with maybe an alt-funding model is conceivable in the medium term and could compete with the deep-pocketed VC funded model. especially as more and more online pubs get drained. also what’s ‘Hmm daily’?

I'm not sure it was "hyper-online edgelord" so much as "I wrote a bunch of dumb sexist stuff on the internet"

potato potato

hmm daily was tom scocca's blog after leaving g/o and before joining slate

it's probably key evidence for how you can't just put the same writers online elsewhere and make it work financially

also, lol

New: Farmers Insurance has pulled out of a seven-figure ad buy with G/O Media. The move comes after several G/O sites published posts criticizing the ad experience and noting reader complaints about the ads.https://t.co/cTJn7PqRB0

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) October 30, 2019

i liked hmm daily bcz i think scocca is an excellent writer, concise and incisive, but i didn't ever get much sense of readerly life round it (as opposed to responses from fellow writers in the dispersing gawkersphere): in retrospect i wonder if the tininess of its staff (just of two of them that i'm aware of, scocca and joe macleod, tho there may have been a couple of other backroom ppl) worked against it, in terms of creating off-page buzz as it were

which makes me wonder if the kinja chatrooms that were so obviously a source of energy and ideas in the gawkersphere have led those who made their way up in that world to be a bit blase abt the role of non-writing readers beyond simply paying subscriptions and sharing links -- not that i've thought my way thru to the end of this idea, but all of these titles, whose work i generally enjoyed, sometimes seemed a little too self-sufficient, almost… i don't mean self-satisfied (i mean it sometimes shaded into that but honestly i think that's baked into magazine journalism, it certainly isn't a new problem, it's something every title i've ever spent time reading seemed to risk at points) so much as not really encouraging potential readers to have a strong sense of all that could be known that no one was yet covering, something like this -- something to pull readers into a shared sense of exploratory mission, as opposed to likeable echo-affirmation

as i say, i really haven't worked my way even to the early middle of this as an idea, let alone to any useful critique -- so i'm nowhere near knowing what an answer to it might be. and maybe some of it just me, nearly 60, lamenting what i can't get from media now that i certainly got when i was in my 20s. but i do actually think there's a lot more there out there not yet being engaged with or adverted to, and that our current media structures are very poorly equipped to recognise this effectively, let alone get out there and report on it

After that clutch of posts yesterday, only one new one on Deadspin today thus far, Drew Magary's weekly letters column. The final letter is the fuck-you keeper:

https://deadspin.com/can-i-fuck-to-my-friends-band-1839423282

AJ Daulerio (held personally financially liable for the hogan stuff IIUC?) has https://thesmallbow.com/. this was the launch post https://thesmallbow.com/2018/09/05/how-to-not-sell-a-recovery-memoir/, and he wrote this about rob ford/gawker, etc. https://thesmallbow.com/2019/03/18/rob-ford-was-two-years-sober-when-he-died/

hmm daily was tom scocca's blog after leaving g/o and before joining slate

it's probably key evidence for how you can't just put the same writers online elsewhere and make it work financially

― mookieproof, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 12:06 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

it was *just* him though, right? also, he didn't write much at gawker (edited mostly iirc?) and mostly does insider-ey media criticism rants. which has its niche for sure but is by def kinda limited

it wasn't just him (there was also joe mcleod, see above) and it wasn't limited to insidery media crit rants, tho these did feature

sry missed that, never heard of mcleod. it was a weird concept and not surprised it was short-lived. but i still think a site that 'got the band back together' might have better pull than just one editor's personal blog

feels like any independent site has to be backed with some significant funding, eg there's no fucking way in hell jacobin is just super profitable.

jacobin seems like a good model actually

except i dont know how much they pay anyone lol

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 speed

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)

jacobin seems like a good model actually

― flopson, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:46 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

except i dont know how much they pay anyone lol

― flopson, Wednesday, October 30, 2019 11:48 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think they do pay people ok and i think it's because there is money behind it

i feel like people are massively underestimating the non-writer headcount (ads sales, tech, social, business) needed to support a new media company.

yeah, the premise of this whole series of posts from the last day or so has been hilarious

"starting a media company in the year 2019 is easy!"

you have to pay someone dedicated to knowing exactly how badly facebook is fucking your new company over and how they might unexpectedly fuck you over in a new way at any time, for example

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

ok boomer.

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.

ilx knows the meanings of these words: libertarian, boomer, obtuse

the founder sounds like a typical SV d-bag, but the athletic is very good imo

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

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 speed

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?

xp- sorry there should not be a $ in front of 40k

$30 per jacobin subscrip times 40k subscriptions is $1.2M, not counting ad revenues. wonder what they pay per article

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)

not many, no. very select alt book shops

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

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).