"A part of another cycle, it stills the air and swallows control."
The news media business is dying. We're all worse for it.
This week’s soundtrack: Infant Island - “Another Cycle”
This week brought more bad news for the industry to which I’ve connected my particular wagon. Condé Nast announced that it would move (and restructure) Pitchfork under its GQ umbrella, shuttering the longtime music publication. Layoffs will probably come soon.
At the Los Angeles Times –the former crown jewel of Tribune Company and now another investment in a capitalist monster’s portfolio– announced it would cut another bunch of newsroom jobs (as many as 10%, according to reports), which prompted a one-day strike by the guild.
The rule of three being what it is, the truly odd media layoff story comes from our good friends at the previously prestigious magazine Sports Illustrated. This one’s weird because of the structure of SI’s ownership, licensing and structure. Here’s the letter that was sent to staff (h/t to Richard Deitsch):
Dear All:
On Thursday, January 18th, we were notified by Authentic Brands Group (ABG) that the license under which the Arena Group operates the Sports Illustrated (SI) brand and SI related properties has been officially revoked by ABG. As a result of this license revocation, we will be laying off staff that work on the SI brand.
All impacted employees will receive severance pay, and will be entitled to any applicable WARN or notice period outlined in the Union agreement (“MOA”). Some employees will be terminated immediately, and paid in lieu of the applicable notice period under the MOA. Employees with a last working day of today will be contacted by the People team soon. Other employees will be expected to work through the end of the notice period, and will receive additional information shortly.
We appreciate the work and efforts of everyone who has contributed to the SI brand and business.
It should go without saying that this is exceptionally weird and dystopian; SI is not a magazine, but a “brand” that gets licensed. The writers, editors, designers and such are all just “staff that work on the SI brand,” because work will not love you back. It isn’t a “human resources department” nor the federal government term “human capital,” but the “People team.” The grammar in the email is also atrocious.
The union agreement and notice period is the only thing that makes sense, except that one SI staffer summed up the weirdness of this whole endeavor in a tweet on Friday, when the news broke.
“I’ve been told that will come within three months” is some kind of sentence, but at least she’ll get paid during that time because unions are able to protect workers in ways like that.
Ultimately, all three examples of this media degradation – I pump up SI a lot, but Pitchfork has been a leading voice for decades and the LA Times is the most important paper on the West Coast – are happening because of weird ownership situations that I don’t think readers have any idea about. The econ 101 model we all learned in school is far from reality; the “brand licensing” involved in the case of SI is the kind of thing I’ll never really understand.
In a way, Pitchfork’s situation is the most normal, insomuch as Condé Nast is doing the kind of big conglomerate thing that such organizations do. Big ownership group money people see a vertical losing money, try to fold it into a similar – though, I find it har to believe GQ and Pitchfork as that similar – brand and be done with it. Newspapers did this a lot in the late 19th and early 20th century – hence major paper names like the Union-Tribune, Post-Dispatch and Times-Picayune – and it’s fairly standard practice. It makes sense in a world where Pitchfork and GQ are similar, which is not a world in which anyone lives.
(An aside: I’ve a very complicated relationship with Pitchfork, criticism and the online world. Arts criticism – music included – is widely derided by those making the art; Elvis Costello famously quoted Martin Mull in saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Having written a lot of music reviews in my early career, I can tell you that readers only care about two things: 1. What other bands does this new band sound like? 2. What is your rating [stars, a 10-point scale, grade, etc?]. Great music writing is something I enjoy, but the algorithm and recommendation culture has definitely replaced music criticism. )
Ultimately, the LA Times layoffs are the easiest to understand in the grander scheme of late American capitalism and the state of the industry. As mentioned, Tribune Company sold the paper (along with other Southern California media properties) to billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong a few years ago and he, according to him, has lost money over and over since he bought it.
In a fairly odiously-framed story in the New York Times, Soon-Shiong and other billionaires (Jeff Bezos, of course, is one of the main subjects) are lamenting their plight in trying to revitalize the news industry by buying newspapers and magazines. Here’s the most odious non-quote paragraph:
But it increasingly appears that the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies’ finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.
(Another aside: Forgive me if I don’t care that billionaires are making bad investments. That’s their problem, not mine, nor the laid off staff members. Billionaires losing money on toys is not new; these doofuses certainly have yachts and weird cars and homes that lose money or depreciate. This feudalistic sympathetic framing is, in fact, odious.)
I don’t know what he expected when he bought the paper, but Soon-Shiong’s people are telling his side of the story. That story seems to be similar to the above; some kind of version of “hey, I’m trying my best, but this is really hard.” I’m not a billionaire, but I’m not exactly shocked to find out that a biomed genius isn’t any good at running a media organization. Say what you will about a guy like Michael Bloomberg, but at least his background is in media and information.
There isn’t a particular solution to this, of course, and it’s tough to feel anything but pessimistic about the state of the industry. I can make gallows humor cracks about SI (sample: How do you even lay off made-up AI writers?), but if Emma Baccellieri is on the chopping block, then something is very wrong.
Lulu Update
I love snow and my dog hates it. We are a mismatched pair.
A Recommendation: Snow
I love snow. Did you know that it really does make things more quiet and peaceful outside because of its sound dampening effects? Snow is beautiful on the landscape and the trees. It’s fun to romp around in the snow. It’s great. I love it.
Here in D.C., people are seemingly afraid of snow, so things shut down tout suite as soon as snow is in the forecast. It’s great. The roads are empty and the whole city is peaceful.