The rise of independent publishing
The rise of independent publishing
High-profile media personalities are leaving traditional publishers, and it's a mix of good and bad.
Sree’s Sunday Note newsletter is produced w/ Zach Peterson (@zachprague). I took this photo at Garden Cafe in Inwood, Upper Manhattan last night. Outdoor dining has been made a year-round option in NYC as thousands of restaurants struggle to stay open.
Scroll down for Read Something; Watch Something; and a weekly tech tip from Robert S. Anthony (@newyorkbob).
TUNE IN: Sunday #NYTReadalong w/ Laurie White, President of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. and the Daily Global Covid19 Show, 9 pm ET w/ Michael S. Schmidt, NYT reporter and author of “Donald Trump vs The United States.”
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You’re reading this on Substack, welcome to the present and future of publishing!
The Sunday Note has been all politics and social issues of late — rightly, in my view — but I want to take a break (in this space, anyway) from that and get back to being a journalism professor and digital media practitioner.
The media news this week was Casey Newton’s departure from The Verge, where he’s spent seven years as a reporter covering social media and its far-ranging impacts on society — especially Facebook. Newton is headed to Substack to start a new publication called Platformer (his last piece for The Verge is an absolute banger, including leaked audio from internal meetings at Facebook).
He’s already well-known in email newsletter land for The Interface, Newton’s 574-issue daily newsletter that was as well-reported as anything he did for The Verge. The transition won’t be much of one really, and I suspect Platformer will soon come to be required reading for those of us who follow these issues closely.
Ultimately, Newton’s brand outgrew The Verge. A decade ago, he would have moved to some sort of mainstream publication as a sort of “graduation”. Now, the landscape is different. A good reputation, sizeable social media following, and a platform like Substack — one that makes monetization pretty simple — can be a recipe for a successful publication. And, why not?
In the welcome note for Platformer, Newton lays out the central thesis quite clearly:
I don’t know for certain that Platformer will succeed. But I do know we’ll never have the journalism we want until more reporters can start making it on their own terms.
This is just it. There is great institutional journalism being produced right now, especially on the investigative side. But, there have been — and continue to be — massive failings, and it’s inevitable that this is the very beginnings of a news media landscape that will be much more diverse and diffuse than it ever has been before.
This is true of Defector as well — the staff-owned reincarnation of much-beloved Deadspin (Sunday Note producer Zach says he was “lost on the internet” without Deadspin). Deadspin was a uniquely non-sports site…for being a sports site that had, it turns out, a large, loyal, and ready-to-support-this-venture audience waiting for this group of people to get back together.
In short, we’re going to see a lot more of this.
Newton’s welcome note continues:
But I can’t stop thinking about a world in which we blow up media companies into their smallest constituent parts — individual reporters, aggressively working their beats, for an audience of paying customers grateful for the work — and allow them to rebuild from the ground up. A world where hundreds of new publications are born, and thousands of journalists are once again employed — in jobs that only their readers can ever take away from them.
Hashtag journalism jobs. If this is the way to get more people into journalism, with more chances to earn money and get real, tangible experience, then I’m all for it.
There’s a lot to like about this trend. If anything, it’s a little positive news on a beat that is usually consumed with local media closings, mass layoffs, and worse. But, it all comes down to capacity and market size.
A small publication of 3-5 people doesn’t create a ton of overhead, but it’s still a lot of money. At $5-10 per month price points, it will take equally-healthy amounts of growth and retention for publications to stay afloat. And, with the seemingly non-stop flattening of the barriers to entry, one has to wonder how many $5-10 per month subscriptions people are willing to carry.
It doesn’t seem like much, but if you subscribe to 7-10 paid newsletters or niche publications, Spotify, Audible, any other news outlets, and the myriad other services so many of you are realizing you subscribe to, it’s not an insignificant amount of money. For now, niche, engaged audiences seem to be able to support a decent amount of independent media ventures. It’s up to us, the news consumer, to support these ventures.
Good journalism costs money.
- Sree
Know anyone looking for work? Tell them about a terrific workshop that Marc Oppenheim @MEOjobs, Linda Bernstein (@wordwhacker) and I are putting together Friday, Oct 2, 3-5 pm ET. https://digimentors.link/jobsearchworkshop
Read Something
There are some very hard truths about Covid19 in the U.S. in this Politico interview with Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo. In a health care system that already had deep disparities along racial lines, Covid19 has exacerbated those divisions and is affecting the Black community particularly hard. We NEED to fix this.
A message from IMPACT
As the leading national Indian American political organization, IMPACT seeks to educate, empower, and mobilize the Indian American community toward civic engagement. We are excited to share that the IMPACT Summit 2020, a virtual and interactive gathering that mobilizes our community in the final stretch of the 2020 election, will take place on Saturday, October 10, 1-4 pm ET. It’s a free event with Congressional Representatives, civil rights leaders and surprise guests. You won’t want to miss this. Register today. #desisvote
Tech Tips from @newyorkbob: Zooming from the Kitchen Just Got Easier
Each week, veteran tech journalist Robert S. Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him on @newyorkbob.
Tired of endless videoconferences? Put down that phone, close that laptop, have a seat, and turn on that smart display.
Sorry, you still can’t duck your virtual work sessions, but you can get more comfortable if you use a smart display like Facebook’s $179 Portal, which quietly gained an important feature via an automatic update last week: the Zoom videoconferencing app.
In testing, the Zoom app on the Portal, a tabletop unit with a 10-inch screen, handled the basics well, making it easy to join or start meetings. The camera can be manually adjusted to crop out background clutter, but advanced features like virtual backgrounds weren’t available.
The advantage of voice-enabled smart displays like Facebook Portals, Amazon’s Echo Show series, and Google’s Nest Hub Max, all of which will gain Zoom apps by the end of the year, is that video calling is their primary purpose.
They all feature well-balanced microphones and speakers and their high-resolution cameras will follow you as you move around, keeping you centered on the screen as you reach for that cup of coffee. Amazon’s newly announced $250 Echo Show 10, available later this year, even has a motorized base which allows its 10-inch screen and 13MP camera to rotate 360 degrees.
So, what’s the downside of Zooming with a smart display? There’s no escape if you have a wardrobe malfunction. Your undies will be centered and in perfect focus as you make your escape.
Watch Something
PBS Frontline’s series, “The Choice 2020: Trump vs. Biden”, is truly eye-opening. The extent of the damage done to the country — socially, politically, environmentally — by the Trump administration is remarkable. All of this on top of more than 200,000 Covid19 deaths and counting. The trailer for the show is below; head over to the Frontline YouTube page for the series of interviews with John Bolton, Valerie Jarrett, Corey Lewandowski, Mary Trump, and many many more. Super proud of Columbia J-school alumna Raney Aronson-Rath (@raneyaronson), the Executive Producer of Frontline.
Listen to Something
Disinformation is everywhere and Nina Jankowicz can lay out the facts better than most. Author of “How to Lose the Information War”, Jankowicz joined the Lawfare podcast to discuss the many layers of disinformation on the web, where it comes from, and the ultimate goals of misinformation campaigns. Required listening a month away from an election in which the primary source of disinformation is the incumbent president.
Odds & Ends
🗞 Sundays are busy at Digimentors. 8:30-10:15 am ET, we read the print edition of the NYT out loud for you to watch live or later. 9-10 pm ET, we interview generally positive people to put some pep in our step as we go into the new week. Today’s videos:
Sunday #NYTReadalong w/ Laurie White, President of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce.
Daily Global Covid19 Show, 9 pm ET w/ Michael S. Schmidt, NYT reporter and author of “Donald Trump vs The United States.”
The Readalong is followed Sundays 11 am-noon ET by a new medical show I’m co-executive producing with surgeons Sujana Chandrasekhar, M.D. (@DrSujanaENT), and Marina Kurian, M.D. (@MarinaKurian), called She’s On Call (watch live or later).
The Sunday #NYTReadalong is sponsored by Muck Rack and Strategy Focused Group. Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Email sree@digimentors.group and neil@digimentors.group.
🎧 Every Saturday, I host a call-in show on WBAI 99.5FM (@wbai) - "Coping with Covid19" - focused on being helpful, hopeful, and focusing on the pandemic's effects on society’s most vulnerable. Listen live Saturdays from 12-2pm EST, or later. And, of course, call in or tweet questions for us using the #wbaisree hashtag! Listen to this week’s episode here!
📺 A reminder to watch my Daily Global Show. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn something every time. We’ve had 200+ shows and 350+ guests - and 1m+ viewers. Check out the archive and please subscribe to my YouTube channel. And/or sign up for my WhatsApp alerts list (it’s not your typical WhatsApp group, just a text when I’m live!). We are in partnership with Scroll.in, one of India’s best news and culture websites.
Recent highlights:
Sapphire, whose novel became Oscar-winning “Precious” (she’s newly on Twitter!)
Dr. Keiji Fukuda of HKU, former pandemics expert at WHO & CDC
👀 Did we miss anything? Make a mistake? Do you have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let us know! Let’s collaborate!