The problem with the Substack revolution

Matt Yglesias is leaving Vox to start his own Substack blog. There is part of me that really likes this -- my preference would be to get off social media and return to the blog glory days of the late aughts. I've tried doing it a couple of times, but I always fail to stick with it -- partly because people are on social media instead of blogs, and it gets to feeling very lonely around here.

I'll subscribe to Yglesias' free tier. But I won't spend money on him, or Andrew Sullivan, or Matt Taibbi or any of the other, um, independent thinkers who have abandoned big publications in the last year or so to strike out on their own for Substack and its subscription model.

My subscription dollars are finite. So I have to make them work efficiently. Which means they'll go to publications where I can get news and multiplicity of voices. I simply can't afford to support every writer I want to read who decides to strike out on their own. I can't imagine I am the only person in this position.

And this strikes me as a problem, both for the writers and the larger discourse.

A number of observers have already noted that rise of newspaper paywalls, while absolutely necessary to sustaining what's left of the news media, is a problem for democracy. You can get all the misinformation you want for free, but it increasingly takes cash to get reported, reliable news. Somebody's got to pay for the reporters, writers and editors -- but that means that people who can't or won't pay for that news are vulnerable to misinformation.

Similarly, if -- as appears to be the case -- somewhat independent writers increasingly feel uncomfortable or unable to exist within the framework of a larger publication where their coworkers don't all love their views, and they follow Yglesias et al to Substack and its paywall, it might also be the cases their voices go missing from the national conversation. It'll be easy not to pay to hear ideas you don't want to hear, and if you don't pay, it's less likely you'll be forced to encounter them.

I don't love everything about Yglesias, Sullivan or Taibbi, but it is also true that the three have done valuable work over the years. People are complicated! And sometimes it's good to have complicated people complicating the discourse, even if it's also irritating. It worries me that the complications are disappearing behind a paywall.

The narcissism of small differences: Pew Research edition

Seems like a better way to put this would be: Large majorities of U.S. adults -- in both parties -- believe that social media is a distraction. Emphasizing that one party believes it slightly more than the other, when lots of people in both parties believe it, does more to emphasize our differences than our commonalities.

Is the media making us think we're more racist than we are?

In Tablet, Zach Goldberg documents that major media outlets are using terms "racist" more often. Some initial thoughts about his article.

He writes:

One possible way of explaining these statistics, is that America experienced an explosion of racism over the past decade and white liberals are uniquely reflective of that change. But another possibility, perhaps more likely, is that ascendant progressive notions about race reflected in a steady drumbeat of reporting and editorializing on the subject from leading national media outlets, encouraged white liberals to label a larger number of behaviors and people as racist. In other words, while the world may have stayed more or less the same, elite liberal media and its readership—especially its white liberal readership—underwent a profound change.

Let me offer a third possibility: That there is probably not that much more racism in America than there was 10 years ago, but that racists -- who empowered President Trump and were also empowered by him -- are more vocal and prominent in American life than they were a decade ago: The societal consensus that required racists to be careful and closeted has largely, but not entirely, disappeared. That has led to growing pressure from and within mainstream media outlets to call a thing a thing -- euphemisms like "racially charged" are now widely seen as weak tea, and there's a growing sense that the media doesn't have to be mindreaders to name a racist act a racist act.

Goldberg writes:

In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017. ... Did white Democrats simply come to know more racists in these years? It’s possible, but if so that would indicate that the media’s increased reporting on racism actually correlated to a marked increase in racists being detected by white Democrats.

In other words, Goldberg's case is that the perception of racism in American life is pretty much a media-driven phenomenon -- manufactured by "woke" elites -- rather than events- or information-driven. But the  rise in the use of the term racism, you'll see in the chart above, starts around 2011. That's when Donald Trump was going around TV promoting birtherism. In 2012, Trayvon Martin was killed. In 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement got started, with events in Ferguson helping spark a wave of protests -- and coverage. In 2015, Tanehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me" came out, giving many readers a sense of what America looks like through African-American eyes. And in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The period of increased "racism" coverage also coincides pretty much with the rise of viral videos depicting police brutality against black people. A lot of actual racism that was invsible to white liberals became more visible during this time. Alongside that, so did efforts to explain and understand the contours of that issue. "Did white Democrats simply come to know more racists in these years?" Goldberg asks. Unlikely, but it seems possible that white Democrats saw how other whites -- including folks they knew -- responded to events and concluded their circle of acquaintances probably contained more racism then they had previously realized. 

It's also worth noting that Goldberg focuses his examination of the issue through the eyes of white liberals. In 2010, though, most Black Americans -- according to Pew Research -- already thought racism was a "big problem." The figure has only grown in recent years, but a lot of people for whom racism would actually be a big problem already thought it was a problem.

There may be more "wokeness" among media elites. But Goldberg barely entertains the possibility that events have helped create the phenomenon he describes. Instead, he suggests that the real problem is that newspapers started using academic jargon surrounding the issues of race a lot more. "Intentionally or not, by introducing and then constantly repeating a set of key words and concepts, publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that “color” is the defining attribute of other human beings," he writes. This is similar to the "if we don't test, we won't have cases" logic that President Trump uses with COVID-19. I won't say that elite media efforts to describe the racial landscape of the United States haven't had an effect on that landscape. But the anger over the deaths of people like Breonna Taylor, Phlando Castille, Tamir Rice, George Floyd and all the rest didn't come about because people were reading the New York Times.

The Sinclair video: TV journalism (almost always) isn't journalism.

By now, you've probably seen this video:

 

  Deadspin explains:

Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news that Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.

The problem, though, isn't Sinclair-owned stations. The problem is this: TV news, for the most part, isn't news.

I spent part of my career in a combine TV-print newsroom, so I've produced my share of packages and short readers. The station I worked for was an exception to this rule — which,  I suspect, is part of why that station no longer has a newscast.

They say politics is show business for ugly people.  Well: TV news is show business for pretty people who can't act or sing.

How you can tell this is true at the national level: If cable news was news, you'd see a lot more taped pieces telling stories and explaining stories than you do. Instead, what you get is panel after panel debating the headlines and screaming about them. Check out this NYTMag story from last year for a detailed look at how making CNN isn't really any different from producing sports - which is entertainment - or, ahem, "The Apprentice."

It's different at the local level, but there's still a problem. It's long been understood that TV news focuses on crime and disaster to the exclusion of other types of news stories — "if it bleeds it leads" — and thus presents its audience with a distorted view of their communities. And they do it because it's easy:

Violent crimes such as murders, robberies, and rapes are newsworthy because of identifiable elements. These elements are ideal for the art of story telling: definable events between individuals are concrete rather than abstract; dramatic, conflict-filled and intense stories are seen as interesting; crime is seen as disrupting order and threatening the community; TV news emphasizes short, simple and verifiable stories; and crime is visual and may be easily videotaped.

Newspapers cover crime, too. But they also cover City Hall and the Planning Commission and those stories that require some level of expertise to tell and explain — stuff that's important to the community but lacking the show-biz drama or surveillance video of a robbery.

The recent assent of Sinclair changes the dynamic: Now local news doesn't even matter at a number of local stations. They're being Fox News-ified, turned into right-wing propaganda mills. That's ... not local news.

There are exceptions to all of this, of course. And when news is breaking -  the kind of stuff that has good video - TV news is a good place to in the first formative moments.

After that? There's a reason Dan Rather explained a complicated story by asking viewers to read a newspaper the next day. The problem? They probably didn't. We're a nation of people who think they're in the know, but aren't.  TV news is part of the problem.

Is late night supposed to be fair and balanced?

I understand that late night talk shows are more overtly political — liberal, really — than they were two or three years ago. Still, I find it kind of odd that there seems to be a real push for both "balance" and comprehensiveness of coverage, mostly from the right.

This is becoming a regular thing:

Discussions of balance and story choice make sense where the news media — especially media that presents itself as attempting objectivity —are concerned. But these are comedy shows, and most comedy has a point of view. Do they owe the audience (or a portion of the audience) to address certain topics?

This isn't a defense of Harvey Weinstein. I just think this "make jokes about Harvey" push from the right is based on expectations that folks on the right don't get to have. Fair and balanced is for news — maybe — but it's a silly, unrealistic expectation for a comedy routine.

How Columbia Journalism Review gave government an excuse to crack down on reporters

Ari Fleischer makes the case that Trump is justified in treating the White House press corps like an unruly child:

The press hasn’t been kind to Donald Trump—and that isn’t its job. That job is to cover the news in a fair manner. But as the Columbia Journalism Review reported in October, campaign-finance disclosures show that those who work in journalism gave $396,000 to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump, with more than 96% going to Mrs. Clinton.

I hated the CJR report when it came out and still do. First, $396,000 is barely a drop in the campaign finance bucket. On its own, it sounds like a big number. Relative to the actual number of journalists, it's microscopic. So CJR's headline on the original piece — "Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash" — is the kind of clickbaity sensationalism CJR might well criticize in other circumstances.

But let's take a closer look at the report itself.

NEW YORKER TELEVISION CRITIC EMILY NUSSBAUM, a Pulitzer Prize winner, spent the Republican National Convention pen-pricking presidential nominee Donald Trump as a misogynist shyster running an “ugly and xenophobic campaign.”

What Nussbaum didn’t disclose: she contributed $250 to Democrat Hillary Clinton in April.

Oh no! A television critic donated to the campaign!

Nussbaum should've disclosed her donation when writing about Trump (and did in a later column for the New Yorker) but holding TV critics to the conflict-of-interest ethical standards that apply to political reporters is silly and pointless.

Other examples from the CJR report:

• Orange County Register restaurant critic Brad Johnson in California this year made dozens of small-dollar contributions to Clinton’s campaign totaling more than $750. 

• Fox Sports spokesman Erik Arneson, responding to questions about three current and former employees who gave Clinton money, said the network “supports employees’ personal involvement in the political process as long as it is compliant with applicable laws.” 

• At ESPN, baseball news editor Claire Smith has made numerous small-dollar contributions to Clinton’s campaign that add up to almost $600. Smith, who in a tweet last week described Trump as a “would-be dictator & sexual predator,” did not return requests for comment, and ESPN spokesman Ben Cafardo declined to comment. 

• Lauren Goode, editor of tech and culture news outlet The Verge, explained that her $500 contribution in February to the Clinton campaign wasn’t about supporting Clinton’s candidacy—Goode just wanted, for reporting purposes, to get inside a fundraising event in Silicon Valley.

So. Lots of people whose jobs have nothing remotely to do with covering federal government — or even local government — are swept into this CJR database. That's ... obtuse.

What doesn't seem to be included in the database: People who actually covered the White House, or the Trump or Clinton campaigns, for a living.

That doesn't stop Fleischer from marshaling CJR's report as evidence of a biased White House press corps, though. CJR's standards for the database didn't reflect good sense or sensible distinctions, but it's made a handy cudgel for those who reflexively like to bash the press.

Why you should stop complaining about "the media": You're the media.

A friend posts a protest against CNN, which she thinks has done a lousy job of covering the North Dakota oil pipeline protests. In response,  I suggested that she's part of the solution — and so are you, if you have a Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat account. (This is slightly edited.)

One last thing to consider that I don't think most people have: You're part of the media ecosystem now. Scratch that: You're part of the media distribution system now. 

Which means: You don't think people are hearing enough about the pipeline protests in North Dakota? Well, you've heard about it. And you have a Facebook page! Post an article about the protests from a source you consider reliable — and there are plenty of reliable sources that have reported on it — and post your link, perhaps a few links, and add your own perspective. If your friends agree to its importance, they can and will amplify it further. 

We increasingly see examples where social media amplification prompts legacy and mainstream media to visit a topic at greater length. Protesting that a story hasn't been covered might get attention, but probably what's more effective in getting attention from big news outlets is showing them that a story matters to a sizable-enough audience to warrant a portion of their resources and time.

You're the media now. If you've heard about a story, that means someone has reported it. Spread the word. You're a vital part of the chain now.

Media Research Center on the Herman Cain scandal: Clinton! Clinton! Clinton!

The Media Research Center seems to think the media is proving its liberal bias by covering the Herman Cain scandal so closely, whereas it strained to ignore the Clinton sex scandals of the 1990s. Which is weird, because my memory of the late 1990s is that political coverage was dominated, for a time, by news of Clinton's sex scandals. There was even an impeachment or something.

Nonetheless, MRC concludes:

When one contrasts the sexual harassment scandals of Democrat Bill Clinton, which included on the record accusers, with the hazy allegations against Republican Herman Cain, it becomes clear that the networks have enthusiasm for one and ignored the other.

That's interesting framing, because the "hazy allegations" against Cain are actually confirmed cases that were settled with monetary payouts a decade ago. That makes them somewhat more tangible than the MRC suggests, it seems to me.

This is why I won't read the Philadelphia Inquirer in print

At right is today's front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It's a demonstration of why -- much as I'd like to support local journalism -- I can't bring myself to subscribe to this paper in print.

The big main story? The one that occupies the two-thirds of the space above the "fold" and is thus the main selling point to buy the paper off the rack?

It's a two-day-old story.

And it was written by the Los Angeles Times.

The first issue is one that print newspapers will always deal with. They simply can't hit the news with the same speed as the web. (The story broke late enough Sunday that the Inky, apparently, couldn't or didn't get it on Monday's front page.) And the Inky's editors, in all fairness, went with a story that analyzes the fallout from the WikiLeaks document dump instead of reporting it as "new" news.

The second issue, though, goes to the heart of the Inky's problems. It used to be one of the newspapers of national record, with bureaus and reporters around the world. It's not that paper anymore. But it still plays at being that paper, which is why readers -- and potential readers -- are treated to front-page stories from the Los Angeles Times. Which, given 21st century technology, they easily could've read ... in the Los Angeles Times.

How would I have designed today's front page differently? Tough to say. But the Inky needs a different organizing principle. It's a Philly-Philly suburbs-South Jersey paper, and that's what it ought to look like -- not like a warmed-over New York Times. Switch up the sections -- the front page and everything in the front section should be local stuff (except in extreme 9/11-style "great moments of history" situations) and all that wire copy describing stuff going on in places that aren't Philadelphia should be relegated to the second section.

There are good journalists working at the Inquirer. I don't mean to diss them. But the changes I'm describing probably should've happened five years ago. At least. New ownership is in place. It's time to make the Inky more relevant to the communities it covers, and the front page is the best place to start.

What I got in my first issue of the Philadelphia Daily News

As expected, my first issue of the Philadelphia Daily News landed with a startle-me-out-of-my-sleep SMACK on the front steps this morning. After checking my e-mail on my iPhone, I decided to forgo electronic stimulation for a little while and spend some time with my new newspaper.

And time I spent. It takes me five-to-10 minutes most mornings to blaze through Philly headlines on my Google Reader. But that's only the "local news" headlines. There's a lot more stuff in the paper, obviously, but there's something about the physical medium of paper that slows. you. down.

Or maybe that's just me.

In any case, I spent about an hour with the Daily News this morning -- probably aided by the fact that the Friday edition is a little fatter with weekend "things to do around town" news than its sister issues the rest of the week. Here's what I found:

* CRIME: Actually, I was always getting the crime news on my RSS feed from Philly.com, but I usually raced past it. For whatever reason, I spent more time with it. There's a lot of crime in Philly! But you knew that.

* ADS: You forget how relatively ad-free most news websites are -- how the hell are they making money, anyway? -- until you dip back into a print newspaper and face an onslaught of commerce. Oh yeah, that's why news organizations are still printing newspapers. Ads for cars, ads for services, ads for apartments, ads for nudie bars. I, uh, won't make use of the last one.

* COMICS: Garfield still sucks. Still, it was the comics page that started my newspaper addiction when I was five years old. I wonder how -- or if -- today's young people might find their first connection to their local news organizations. Maybe through...

* SPORTS: Philly's a huge sports town. I've kind of not engaged that directly. But I know today that Eagles QB Kevin Kolb signed a one-year contract extension, and that Brad Lidge is coming off the DL for the Phillies series with the (boooo!) Mets. So I know way more about that kind of stuff than I did yesterday. Which means I might be able to have coherent conversations with other dudes around town.

* ATTYTOOD: No, not Will Bunch. (Though he was there, with an article about the new CEO of the Daily News, Inky and Philly.com.) I mean a tabloid sensibility to its news coverage that the staid and stuffy folks at broadsheets around the country would surely disdain. Maybe I'm staid and stuffy: I have to read past that stuff to get to the news. But a little verve probably doesn't hurt your engagement with readers.

* LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: It's like online comments. Only culled for the best ones. And with real names attached! It's actually kind of nice.

* USA WEEKEND: I didn't really need that, actually. But maybe that's just me.

It was, overall, a good time. Not perfect: There were some questionable typographic and layout choices -- but weirdly, that was also part of the charm. It's hard to screw up a web page, because most news sites are formatted to give you the same design for every single story. Trying to make the news fit around ads is a somewhat more complicated endeavor, with increased chances to screw up the look of things. It's a little more ... human.

Print newspapers aren't going to replace online news in my media diet. I'll spend some time with the New York Times and Washington Post later this morning, completely contained in the land of pixels. Maybe, though, there's still room for a bit of print in my life. Certainly, the best way for me to financially support local newsgathering is to buy a subscription to the print newspaper. And as you can see, there are benefits and charms to doing so.

Why I subscribed to the Philadelphia Daily News today

We moved to Philadelphia nearly two years ago, and for the first time in my adult life I've gone without a subscription to a local daily newspaper. Why? Easy: It's the 21st century! Why spend money on getting a printed product when you can just go to Philly.com and select the RSS feeds you want to follow?

Today, however, that changed. Money's still tight in the Mathis household -- full-time employment sure would be nice! -- but it seemed like a declaration of values is needed. I subscribed to the Philadelphia Daily News. Our first issue should arrive on Friday or Saturday.

Again, why? Again: Easy. The Daily News has new owners. And I want them to know how important Philadelphia journalism is to me.

To be clear, this isn't passive-aggressive gotcha with Brian Tierney, the would-be media mogul who lost control of the Daily News -- and the Inquirer, and Philly.com -- today. I've been critical of Tierney's seeming cynicism and hucksterism -- but if Tierney possessed those qualities in abundance, one has to give him props for continuing to support good journalism in a challenging era. The Daily News won -- and deserved -- a Pulitzer Prize this year.

Now that he's out, and a group of creditors is taking over, the question will almost certainly be raised: Can the Daily News survive?

Since I've been in town -- and, so I'm told, for years before that -- the tabloid has been spoken of as the weak sister in the city's daily paper constellation. Since the Inquirer is owned by the same company, the thinking went, what were the benefits of having two daily newspapers that robbed each other of circulation? Why not poor all that money into one paper and reap the benefits.

I have my own answer. For me, the Daily News is a real Philadelphia newspaper.

Oh, I could do without its annual "sexiest singles" roundup, and it's self-conscious "People Paper" conceit. But the paper is aggressively local: It covers Philadelphia closely and aggressively. Its Pulitzer was won for a series of articles that exposed corruption on the Philly police force, a good and necessary example of local accountability journalism.

The Inquirer, meanwhile, still seems stuck in an identity crisis. Look at the front page on any given day and you'll see that it's still ruled by the idea that it can be a "paper of record" for events beyond Philly and its environs -- lots of national and international stories, most days, culled from wire services. News that you can (and probably are getting) from other, online sources. It's a pale imitation of the days, 20 and 30 years ago, when the Inky had its own bureaus out around the world.

And even the local news isn't always so local. The Inky's audience -- and thus a huge chunk of its newshole -- is largely out in the suburbs. That's fine. Except I don't really need to read as much about New Jersey politics as the Inquirer wants to sell me. The Daily News, meanwhile, is Philly, Philly and Philly some more.

But the Inky has a bigger circulation. Probably a more lucrative audience base. And so if the decision comes to cut back to one newspaper in this town, well, it's probably the Inky that will survive.

So today I subscribed to the Daily News. It's a statement to the new owners -- small and unconvincing though it might be -- that the DN's journalism is important to me, and (I think) to the community. Even with new ownership in place, it's likely that rough times are still ahead for Philly newspapers, and the industry as a whole. (Don't be surprised if we start hearing about layoffs at both papers, and soon.) If my 30 dollars can keep the Daily News rolling a little bit longer, it's a price I'm happy to pay.

The essential Deborah Solomon interview

I've long hated Deborah Solomon's Q&A interviews in The New York Times Magazine. They've always come across -- to me, anyway -- as a weird combination of needlessly combative and unilluminating: confrontational for the sake of confrontation in a lot of cases, without any real payoff that helps the reader understand a subject or interviewee any better.

In today's magazine, she gets down to the essence of her style in an interview with Craig Robinson, a basketball coach and the brother of Michelle Obama. He has a new book out, which leads to the following exchange:

Are you aware that in your new book you erroneously describe Princeton, N.J., as “the first capital of the United States”?

Oh. I was thinking that it was the first capital because that’s what I thought when I got to Princeton on the first day. I was awed by it.

It was the second capital under the Articles of Confederation. I wonder why your editors failed to catch that.

I wrote it, so I don’t want to blame them.

Don't get me wrong: Solomon is right on the facts. But the accident makes no material difference to the memoir, does it? It's an aside in the book, as best I can tell, but Solomon elevates it to a matter of importance ... why exactly? So she can not look like a pushover?

I can't decide if that's better or worse than this exchange:

You’re very discreet and clearly not following the Billy Carter model of wacky presidential relatives. Do you drink beer?
I actually don’t mind beer, but I just don’t drink it to excess.

Why is this in the New York Times? You can't just say it's a puff piece, because even puff pieces in the New York Times have coherence and identifiable logic about them. The best I can determine is that Deborah Solomon interviews -- if they're not just a hoity-toity version of The Chris Farley Show -- are performance art pieces, designed to elicit discomfort in interviewees and readers to no good purpose at all. I wish the Times would get somebody else to do this job.

The Inquirer and the worst lede ever on a weather story

Seriously, it's hard to top this:

A month after setting new standards for whiteness, the region is setting new ones for wetness.

I mean: Ewwwwwww.