Novara Media

As I've mentioned before on old UKpol threads, I don't really understand the ILX downer on Novara. Tysky Sour is really good, has excellent and informed guests on everything from Brazilian politics to macroeconomics to Covid policy - I don't think there is anything similar broadcasting regularly on UK current events. Especially during lockdown it felt quite vital?

The Downstream slot has had outstanding extended interviews with people like Andreas Malm, China Mieville, Kojo Koram etc. And now they have some funding they are actually doing useful investigative journalism - see Polly Smythe as the new union/labour movement correspondent, and apparently more to follow?

I really enjoyed China Mieville's October book

I think he is a v bad writer but Ash's Novara interview with him was outstanding!

Even if there are, they could do it. Instead we Luxury communism, which a dead on arrival concept.

I don't know what Luxury Communism is, but why does it matter whether Novara create this type of content or not when other channels are already creating it?

Lol I did hear good things about that interview! xp

well I am now tempted to watch that interview now

He’s awful, and has somehow not been visited by the MeToo fairy.

mieville or bastani?

always bet on the bad one being the baldy!

Mieville.

I never heard this before about CM, but it is never surprising.

one of the things I like about Ash is she's not afraid to ask "what does senescence mean?" because I sure as hell didn't know either!

I think one of the elements about class identity that writers and commentators are bad at understanding is that it isn't totally a conscious or intellectual stance, it's something ... erm different, borne out of decades of being shat on from a great height and never seeing things getting better. I'm not saying that criticism applies here, there was some good stuff about the latte sipping/mushy peas false dichotomy

senescence is my lived experience!

I'm definitely feeling the deterioration and loss of power

I agree with ILX poster Piedie Gimbel.

"As I've mentioned before on old UKpol threads, I don't really understand the ILX downer on Novara."

Surely it isn't hard to understand. Bastani, Walker don't sound v good on twitter. Their political positions are poor, so it's not like I want to engage with Novara's offering. Same with Owen Jones.

Butler has some nice interests in lit and I like what he says on that. I engage with him in a different way, and it's cool he found a niche in the LRB but even then how does he square his politics with the piece they published on Grenfell?

As councillors and MPs are removed, not through deselection but by undemocratic & bureaucratic measures, it’s no surprise that the New Statesman publishes a plea by a has-been broadcast journalist to become an MP. Brought to you by BT/Uber & God knows who. pic.twitter.com/J6lK8BmFun

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 6, 2022

nobody is really taking Mason seriously though. His half a million + twitter followers are obviously fake as well. Even the people who PM wants to take him seriously have realised he's a moron and publicly said as much. it's not exactly Big Game Hunting!

Tom Watson going to the Lords after the Carl Beech saga is absolutely extraordinary. If you think the Labour party is anything other than a vehicle for patronage for some of the most useless people in public life I've got news for you.

These people will never introduce PR. https://t.co/zUmOPpyvuT

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 6, 2022

"nobody is really taking Mason seriously though."

Bastani has done for longer than he should have.

He'll criticise Lab every day but come election time I will even give Bastani a follow, revive this thread and link to his tweets telling you all to vote the Tories out because they are "evil".

how does he square his politics with the piece they published on Grenfell?

Frankly all UK media does evil shit and LRB publishes more leftist thinking than anything else within that sphere, don't really think the fact that that they also publish tons of right wing guff should be a dealbreaker for ppl looking for writing gigs. It's not a situation like Novara where it advertises itself as leftist, no one picks the LRB up thinking they'll get the Socialist Take on Things.

I do.

They publish 20-page essays by Perry Anderson.

Yes but they also publish retired US generals explaining why Hiroshima was no biggie. I'm not saying there's NO socialist takes in the LRB, I'm saying the LRB is not a socialist publication.

Who are these generals?

You don't mean Edward Luttwak? He is truly right-wing, I believe. But rarely appears now.

It would be misleading to imply that the LRB has a 'balance' of right and left. The truth is that it is a liberal-left publication and, within that term, much more 'left' than most comparable 'liberal' publications.

That still makes it quantifiably different from a explicitly leftist project like Novara, which was the point.

"don't really think the fact that that they also publish tons of right wing guff should be a dealbreaker for ppl looking for writing gigs"

Except many of these writers go on social media and say they would never write for The Mail. The Grenfell piece was a low, and it should be acknowledged in time as such.

"they also publish tons of right wing guff"

Do they?

The only concrete examples I can think of just now are David Runciman and David Bromwich, who are arguably 'liberals', and one offensive US liberal type who wrote something vile about Bernie Sanders in 2020.

These are not typical, and they are not even right-wing by most people's standards.

"Tons" seems to suggest that a large part of the paper is "right-wing guff". I can't remember seeing it.

Amusing that a Novara thread has turned into an LRB thread - I feel like Mark S would have a theory for this, viz. "all threads are ultimately about the LRB and Perry Anderson" or the like.

ru thinking of this?

the moral arc of an ilx thread can be long, but it bends toward rory mcgrath

Quite.

Though my own arc, as you know, is usually towards Perry.

Except many of these writers go on social media and say they would never write for The Mail.

Well one we weren't talking about "many of these writers", we were talking about one writer in specific.

But also there is an obv difference between the two, as the Mail is unlikely to publish lenghty pieces of leftist analysis. Flattening it so they are equally bad doesn't scan to me.

If Butler should worry about squaring his politics with writing for it, shouldn't those of us who buy and read it also make that calculation?

I don't intend to flatten them (though I did pull out "the tons of right-wing guff" bit), but given we are talking about a leftist project I am wondering about where a founder goes onto another ship that can publish that Grenfell piece. This is where the people coming from it aren't trustworthy.

this is moralising shitlib nonsense alph

Yeah, looking at the UK media landscape I do think that the only place he could go that hasn't done far far worse than the LRB is unemployment.

Still unsure as to why leftists buying and reading the LRB is ok in that case tho?

I am not the one pushing guff like Luxury communism.

no you're just talking brainless anti-politcal nonsense

I am not the only one in the thread pushing the "they only want a seat in the media table" angle here. Sorry if this offends.

https://novaramedia.com/2022/10/05/trusss-conference-speech-heckled-by-greenpeace-update-on-chris-kaba-killing/

Tysky Sour this Wednesday. Bastani unusually in the anchor role. Dalia Gebrial quite good.

Good factual analysis of Truss speech and its lies. I hadn't realised it had been so awful - predictable as that sounds.

Funny rhetorical thing about Tysky Sour is that whenever they disagree they say "I'm going to push back on that slightly".

you would love the rhetorical convolutions of the office workplace pinefox. 'That generated some pushback' = 'people disagreed with what we/they/i said'.

couldn't sleep and actually got up because i thought i had something to say on this thread, but it turns out i don't.

...a few minutes pass...

so anyway.

mark's comment upthread on the pp of soc-med making tactics and strategy harder was nagging away at me, and i'd like to get into that a bit more, but it turned into a tangle of content distribution, the economics of journalism and epistemic health in my head, and now i'm too tired to untangle.

i did think at one point 'how do you solve a problem like comrade alph'. sorry not sorry though because what i was actually wondering is what is the publication model that works for xyzzzz here. I think 'loud twitter account with a mario avatar' is a good baseline, and to xyzzzz's point, if your content doesn't get above that floor, then what's the point. Also I can legit see that Novara doesn't pass that test for alph (or me for that matter, probably for slightly different reasons), tho Sarkar is good not bad and boils the piss of the right people, even if it is a bit of a gig, and Butler's writing and thinking is good enough in other places to pass that test.

that 'other places' needs testing in 'the content publication and distribution model that works for xyzzzz' world.

assuming briefly a very compressed narrative

• newspapers were more or less congruent and part of the liberal project (this is open to argument, i think mainly on the edges though, and it seems to me obvious, socially, technologically, to such an extent that i find 'how can x publication present content of different editorial positions!' a bizarre... or maybe better, a very *modern* criticism.)
• i was going to say: despite self-perception, their market value turned out to be in the distribution model, not the editorial model, but that's not fair. that *was* where their value was, and the internet smashed the distribution model and broke the editorial+ads commercial value *and* the self-perceived (by journalist, editor *and* reader) value of the newspaper*. subscriptions are a fairly desperate and unsustainable attempt to manage this (you never had a model before where you tried to buy a paper and they said sorry you've got to pay for a year).
• content creation rapidly unbundles, with writers and readers able to have a direct relationship
• the commercial model across content creation and distribution, of writers being able to sell their articles directly to readers while still retaining the rights, is still turbulent however - the most popular writers ('a steady output of journalism for which readers are willing to pay') are able to make far far more than they ever would as part of a newspaper (someone estimated that, say, Bill Bishop Sinocism newsletter on China: 70,000 subscribers, $1 million dollars per year as a writer). But of course there is no cross-subsidisation of writers in that model. if you don't want to read other writers, that's a good thing - you're not paying for them - but equally it reduces the range you're able to access for your dollar.
• medium, substack, still haven't shown themselves to be durable models for content.

But to take xyzzzz's baseline as a starting point.

if your platforms are free publication (mario avatar), then you have a problem of curation, gatekeeping and epistemic health - a fairly significant burden on the individual. it also gives you problems of increasing your knowledge at the margin - you may be able to curate your core interests successfully, but what's your quality filter for adding to that - i guess this is sometimes referred to as the bubble, though that is really used politically rather than epistemically. editorial bundling is/was ofc in theory a higher grade solution to that quality problem.

ultimately soc-med/twitter to me doesn't seem to me desirable for mainly for reasons of its unhealthy mimetic and memetic dynamics, which I think play directly into the mark s point that was nagging away at me.

there's also the vexed question of platform 'we're not publishers!' responsibilities, which I imagine will become very visible if Musk's purchase of twitter goes through. Right now, the same opprobrium isn't levelled at twitter in the way, say, it would be at any publication that shared similar content.

so, let's see if there's a model we can run which enables us to get above that unsatisfactory (to me, maybe not to xyzzzz) baseline.

let's assume the basic unit of value in this unbundled world is the article (accepting this may need to include 'tweet or twitter thread' though it's extremely rare that any of these of value don't refer to content outside of twitter). the question then becomes 'what articles would xyzzzz pay for?'. If the answer is 'none' then, sorry writer of cogent left-wing analysis and mobilising principles, to Daniel RF's point, you're unemployed, or see you at the LRB, Tribune or Guardian or whatever. And accepting the soc-med challenges above, it's game over - there's no model that works for our Beloved Comrade.

If the answer is 'I will pay price of a cup of coffee (or whatever) for articles on certain subjects, or by certain writers', then ok, we can move on, turn to page 254 etc.

there are organisational challenges (this I think is the flip side to mark s's tactics/strategy point) in the unbundled model. particularly from a political point of view. so the next question becomes, what organisational/aggregation editorial model of publication would create a sufficient level of article quality density for xyzzzz to pay for either a subscription or the regular purchase of a publication. We know it's not Novara - that doesn't have any density of quality that breaks the mario avatar baseline, (apart from maybe the China Mieville piece). Tho he, as has been pointed out correctly, sucks. One model *might* a political organisation with a sufficiently strong set of editorial principles that would make sense in terms of 'politcal donation + editorial output' value for xyzzzz. I liked xyzzzz's point about something that would interest him would be if the shouting 'I am a communist!' at Piers Cunt got expanded. So let's assume that's its editorial principle. Tho 'whatever the viewing figures' caveat to that is surely the problem here.

I'd like to think it is actually a reasonable assumption that with sufficiently low production costs there is enough interest in teh UK and beyond to generate enough cash to sustain this as a viable model. After all, and Mark S will set me straight here, left-wing publications have either had extremely low production costs, and still relied on content creator goodwill, or have had patronage (the LRB model) that enables them to endure.

However, given the baseline, the problem of generating income across bundled content is far far harder than it's ever been, and requires consistent levels of quality that are hard to achieve. I think at most we tap out at individual article purchases, which leaves organising principles a big challenge. Probably time to dig out the copy of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest that I never read. Mainly, I think we're stuck with Novara for the foreseeable.

* i guess one view much of the journalist as campaigning, investigative corrector of social justice floods out from this loss of self-perceived value, leaving a scum of journalistically self-satisfied opinion on social justice correction.

oh look, dawn.

Fizzles: it's not that I am unfamiliar with 'pushback' or 'pushing back' in general, just that in Tysky Sour's case it is the *default* term for 'disagree', to a possibly amusing extent.

As you can tell, I don't share your view of Novara Media. I think it's good. While other media organizations do indeed have historic crises of funding, etc, it doesn't currently appear that Novara shares this problem, and I think that's good too.

We need to genuinely consider the possibility that the Tories are now actively trying to lose. https://t.co/bWNN1PZMjF

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) October 7, 2022

Dr Bastani makes identical observation to ILX.

ILX expresses contempt for Dr Bastani's judgment.

It was already reported on the bbc that some Tory MP's at the conference expressed the opinion that the party might benefit from a period of opposition to rebuild their brand. They might well be preparing to lose and perhaps some on here might agree. That doesn't mean when Bastani starts telling people that it may be a stark choice, but they HAVE to vote for Kieth he will be any less of a wanker!

There are many opinions on ilx. ILX doesn't think one thing, for one.

I don't think they are trying to lose. A wing of the Tory party that doesn't care for veterans has taken over.

"That doesn't mean when Bastani starts telling people that it may be a stark choice, but they HAVE to vote for Kieth he will be any less of a wanker!"

I think that's a reasonable statement, but it's hypothetical - he hasn't said it yet.

What he has repeatedly said is that he will vote for a party that promises PR, and not for one that doesn't. He has also said that KS would never introduce PR.

He is not always reliable so may change his stance in some way, I agree.

I didn't expect this. Oliver Eagleton, on Novara, on the need for a peace deal in the Ukraine war.

https://novaramedia.com/2022/10/07/liz-truss-doesnt-care-about-stopping-the-war-in-ukraine/