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

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).

the editorial thrust of the magazine and its ethos is very pro dsa, pro bernie sanders

(while being trotskyist on the down low)

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?

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.

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