There are 86 posts filed in journalism (this is page 8 of 11).
Carter Maness on his graceless firing from AOL/HuffPo:
Over my two-year tenure at AOL, I published over 350,000 words in approximately 900 posts—at least three novels worth of words. This was met with a blanket termination, with zero notice, in the form of an email that didn’t even include my actual name. Freelancers know they are just a number, but AOL really went out of their way to demonstrate that. Rest assured!
See also my chat summary of what went down there over the past few days.
Earlier today, Erik Davis announced that he would be stepping down from Cinematical as editor-in-chief. Davis’ departure comes at the tail end of a string of departures during the past few weeks, which includes former co-editor-in-chief Scott Weinberg and writer William Goss. Davis’ announcement coincidentally (?) comes on the same day that Business Insider published a sketchily-sourced story about AOL firing all of its freelancers, under the new direction of the Huffington Post (here’s a follow-up to that story).
Like former managing editor Kim Voynar, I feel like this is the “nail in the coffin” for Cinematical. The site was subsumed by Moviefone not too long ago, and has been fighting to stay alive as an independent entity ever since. Davis was one of the people that were on the front lines, trying to defend Cinematical as a purveyor of premium film enthusiast content (vs. the more mainstream-friendly fare of the broader Moviefone site). With him gone, I’d venture that the days of Cinematical being known as a major player in the movie blog vertical are numbered, if not already over.
I see this as a great loss and I know that several of my movie writer colleagues do as well. Cinematical was one of the first blogs to show that you could run a site about movies with a staff of knowledgeable, talented people and still be profitable and respected. For years, I looked up to Cinematical as a quality site, a place where I hoped to one day work and write. The idea that it may be on the verge of oblivion is a strange one to get used to.
In yet another coincidence, news of Davis’ departure comes on the heels of news that former Engadget EIC Joshua Topolsky will be starting a brand new site over at SB Nation, along with a bunch of his previous colleagues. This story in the NYTimes explains how AOL bought Weblogs Inc., which came with premium sites such as Engadget, then failed to nurture them and allow them to flourish. The unfortunate side effect of this is that they’ve now ended up facilitating the creation of a major competitor to Engadget, one with a considerable following and built-in respect (I know, because I’m one of Topolsky’s fans, and will definitely be following him over to the new site when it launches in the fall).
Ever since AOL’s merger with the Huffington Post, the new corporate overlords have been killing off respected AOL brands left and right. The recent upheaval over there reminds me of some fundamental economic realities in relation to movie websites and blogs:
1) On a basic level, one cannot be a profitable website unless every dollar you’re paying out is returning AT LEAST a dollar. For a website, this is usually done through advertising (other business models exist and they are for a different day and a different blog post). For example, this means that if you’re receiving net $5 per thousand pageviews, and you’re paying out $25 to your writers per post, you must receive 5,000 pageviews for that post to be profitable.
2) The movie enthusiast site vertical simply does not attract as many or as valuable pageviews as other blog verticals, such as technology, video gaming, or even automotive websites. To use my above example, most film websites do NOT get $5 per thousand page views, nor do their posts receive 5,000 hits each — both of these numbers are usually considerably smaller. This means that they are either losing money per post, or they are paying significantly less than $25 per post.
3) As a result, movie websites have several choices in order to survive. They can either generate enough scale/pageviews to pay their writers a significant wage, or they can not pay their writers very much, if at all (or just not have any other writers). There are exceptions to this rule. For example, if you are venture funded, or funded by a cash-rich company willing to sink money into you, then this rule does not apply (Example: Movieline). In addition, sites that reach a premium audience, which advertisers are willing to spend lavishly to reach, are also exempt from having to deal with these economic realities (Example: Hollywood-Elsewhere or Movie City News).
What has been absolutely remarkable and dumbfounding to me is my colleagues’ absolute and categorical resistance to alternative business models, such as sponsored links (For the record, /Film no longer runs sponsored editorials). Technology sites such as Daring Fireball or Mashable, which are wildly profitable, have no qualms about running these types of advertisements. Even if they didn’t run them, they would still be raking in the money hand over fist. it seems that movie writers (many of which work for websites that struggle to survive) collectively seem to prefer living a monastic existence rather than fighting to figure out a way to make their tiny audience slice profitable.
Simultaneously, I have no doubt that Engadget was profitable, and yet that site drove out all its top writers. In Topolsky’s post announcing his new gig at SB Nation, Topolsky writes: “[T]here’s another factor here that’s driving my decision. It’s that SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam — a point we couldn’t be more aligned on.”
UPDATE: Erik Davis has confirmed via Twitter that most Moviefone freelance writers have been slated for termination. As a result, many of the staff have announced that they are quitting today.
The other day, Wired ran a photo of Limor “Ladyada” Fried, the first female engineer to ever to make it to the magazine’s front cover. You’d think this would be cause for celebration, a sign that a publication as influential Wired was finally getting with the program and reversing its painful trend of only featuring woman primarily known as sex objects. But the internet still knows how to FUBAR this thing like nobody’s business.
I’m usually a huge fan of the writings of Cord Jefferson, but this piece he wrote for Good magazine really got my blood boiling:
Wired didn’t put Limor Fried on their new cover. What Fried actually looks like is below—she’s a normal young woman with a lip ring and an abnormally strong brain, and that’s worked wonders for her her entire life. What Wired put on its cover is an almost cartoonish Photoshop that caused one friend to look at these photos next to each other and ask, “That’s the same woman?”
Here, Jefferson is basically the online equivalent of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, but instead he’s screaming “THAT’S NOT WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE! SHE’S REALLY HOMELY AND BLEMISHED.” Sheesh.
Remarkably, Fried herself was incredibly gracious. Here’s the comment she left in response to Jefferson’s piece:
You found a 3+ year old photo of me in Japan, after a 20 hour flight and short hair.
The cover is stylized but that is really what I looked like. I was not ‘plasticized’ or ‘heavily photoshopped’. if I take off my glasses, have my hair done, and wear make-up its what I look like. Jill uses lighting and makeup to create a glossy look, we saw the shots right off the camera and the only things that changed are the background color and the tool. Its her style and it looks cool! Its a bit different than my every day look, especially when shot with a proper camera and lighting, but it -is- me. I do get dressed up from time to time, being a magazine cover is one of those times! 🙂My lip ring wasn’t in for most of this year so far, WIRED didn’t remove it or airbrush it. I wasn’t wearing it, just like I wasn’t wearing my glasses. If I’m happy with this and I say it’s looks like me isn’t that GOOD 🙂
A lot of things anger me about this situation. First of all, Jefferson is really complaining about a practice (airbrushing/photoshopping) that’s endemic to magazine covers as a whole. So why bitch about it in this particular case? According to Jefferson, “it makes at least a little bit of sense when the women being Photoshopped are musicians and actresses, professions that, like it or not, often require their members to possess otherworldly features. Where Photoshopping makes no sense at all, not even a little, is in the world of science.” I don’t buy that at all. Regardless of who it is, magazines will still be following the same scripts regarding how their cover models should look. That may be troubling, but it’s no more troubling because it’s Wired’s first cover for a female engineer.
More importantly, here’s a woman who’s put herself (and her face) out there in front of a national audience. Who among us has the courage to face the slings and arrows of a critical public, especially on a cover as attention-getting as this one? And you, Cord Jefferson, are going to try and “unmask” her in such a ridiculous fashion? Get a sense of decency, man.
Matt Buchanan over at Gizmodo made a great point about this too:
[M]ore interesting is what [this situation] says about the ways ultra-smart woman are perceived. What’s implicit in Good’s outrage is the assumption that Fried, badass engineer and genius, couldn’t have possibly been as attractive as she appears on Wired’s cover. The underlying message is that there has to be a distance between brains and beauty. Consider any article that marvels over the fact that Natalie Portman isn’t just an attractive celebrity, she’s like, smart. The general cultural narrative for attractive women who are recognizably intelligent is almost always one of surprise, one way or another—it’s shocking that an attractive woman is intelligent, or that an intelligent woman is attractive…
I’m not really offering a solution (unhelpful, I know!) beyond that we need more nerdy women and more exposure for them, but in a way that’s not misogynist or generally shitty. Oh, except to buy this month’s issue, so hopefully Chris Anderson won’t have that excuse for very much longer.
Right on.
Felix Salmon tries to unravel the mysteries:
This paywall is anything but simple, with dozens of different variables for consumers to try to understand. Start with the price: the website is free, so long as you read fewer than 20 items per month, and so are the apps, so long as you confine yourself to the “Top News” section. You can also read articles for free by going in through a side door. Following links from Twitter or Facebook or Reuters.com should never be a problem, unless and until you try to navigate away from the item that was linked to.
Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That’s $455 a year.
The message being sent here is weird: that access to the website is worth nothing. Mathematically, if A+B=$15, A+C=$20, and A+B+C=$35, then A=$0.
This morning, Japan was hit with its largest recorded earthquake in history, measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale. This earthquake also caused a 10-meter tsunami to destroy untold numbers of houses and ships along the coast.
These videos show what it was like to be there. They are insane. (via Peter Kafka)
The New York Times recently published a piece by James C. McKinley about the brutal gang rape of an 11-year old girl. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
The police investigation began shortly after Thanksgiving, when an elementary school student alerted a teacher to a lurid cellphone video that included one of her classmates. The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said…
Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said. “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”
Even on its face, the implication that the victim might have somehow been responsible for her own assault seems abhorrent in such a story (conveniently, the people explaining her proclivities are relegated to the anonymous “some”).
Emily Long explains why she thinks this article is a pretty poor piece of reporting:
And here we have another variation on blaming the victim, which is blaming the victim’s parents. For one thing, the girl’s mother did not grant permission for a child to be viciously assaulted. We have no background on what was going on in the victim’s private life (which is as it should be; she and her family deserve anonymity). For all we know, the girl was no more supervised at home than she was in the Quarters, and the reasons for that could be any number of possibilities. Within the article, that makes for two quotes working against the victim, and none against the accused beyond statements about how devastated the community is by the attack as a whole.
Mary Elizabeth Williams chimes in with a thoughtful, well-written analysis (as usual):
The question, however, is not what that girl or her mother did to bring this on. And it’s sloppy journalism for a reporter to run a story that casts a victim and her mother as somehow responsible for an attack, especially without including a single quote from anyone in town with a more sympathetic view of the family. That’s far from the balanced journalism the Times aspires to. The girl’s mother, identified only as Maria, told the New York Daily news this week that the family has received several angry phone calls, and that the child has been moved to foster care for her protection. “These guys knew she was in middle school,” she said. “You could tell whenever you talked to her. She still loves stuffed teddy bears.” Where’s that quote in the Times story?
It’s a painful thing to contemplate that a girl’s circumstances may have made her more vulnerable to attack. But being vulnerable does not put the burden of what happens on the victim. No 11-year-old deserves a word of questioning or doubt on that front. No one who has ever been sexually assaulted, and certainly none who has ever been sexually assaulted in such a sustained and inhumane way, deserves to have her makeup or clothing brought into the conversation, regardless of her age. And how demoralizing, how outrageous, how sickening that once again, when a female is brutally and inhumanely attacked, the issue of what her multiple assailants apparently did somehow pales next to the curiosity over what she must have done to provoke it.
On The Media [transcript] has a fascinating exploration of what makes a story on a news website climb up the “most e-mailed articles” list. The most common factor among them? Awe:
We had a number of research assistants read stories and we described to them what the concept of awe is; it’s something that opens the mind and is inspiring. And we made sure that they had a good understanding of this concept. We had them read some articles with us and come to a conclusion about what an awe-inspiring piece would be. And then they rated about 3,000 stories each on how much awe they inspired…
One is “Rare Treatment is Reported to Cure AIDS Patient.” Another story was called “The Promise and Power of RNA.” A final example would be “Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul,” a story about the archeological discovery of an inscription on a Turkish monument from the eighth century, indicating a belief that the body and the soul were separate. What we find interesting is the connectivity issue. People tend to proselytize about awe-inspiring experiences. This is one of the main ways that religion has been thought to spread. When I have an amazing experience, I tell others about it.
Joe Coscarelli has a great summary of the problems that Gawker sources have in staying anonymous after they give the blogging empire a massive scoop:
[I]t’s not that the Gawker Media reporters hoped to have their sources outed. It happens to every news organization. But the way Gawker’s narrative sensibilities work, the account of the unnamed is crucial to the storytelling, thus littering the features (which also often include photographic proof with faces barely edited out) with clues. Then the entire internet latches on to the anonymity and won’t stop until they have their own piece of the pie. In some cases, like the Christine O’Donnell leak, it’s because the anonymous source comes off like an ass, and the hive mind is out for revenge. In others, like for Callahan, it’s merely a thirst to have the knowledge which has been withheld — a good detective-like hunt for any hungry journalists. In an age when almost everyone has something of an online trail, it’s not even very difficult! But Gawker tends to make it even easier.
I’m fascinated by this stuff every time it happens. What are the consequences for people like Dustin Dominiak, who has to live with this Google search any time he wants to land a date from now until forever? I’d like to know…Maybe a future episode of The Chencast? Either way, the price of that can’t be worth the $5,000 he was paid for the story.
