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Note: I originally wrote this for the newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I’m the chief digital writer

When Protocol, a new site focusing on technology coverage, launched in February, expectations were high. After all, the man behind the site — Robert Allbritton, who owns it through his holding company, Capital News — also helped create Politico, one of the most successful digital media companies of the last 20 years or so. And it sounded like Protocol was going to duplicate the Politico model: hire a bunch of talented writers away from leading publications, set them loose on a topic, and then rely on a combination of advertising and high-end subscription revenue to pay the bills. Lather, rinse and repeat. Except that’s not what happened. This week, Protocol laid off 13 of its employees, according to one report, and it appears that more than three-quarters of that total — or 10 staff in all — were reporters and editors. The site’s entire complement of editors and reporters numbered about 25 before the layoffs, according to Protocol’s About page, which means that Allbritton just laid off almost half of the site’s newsroom.

Obviously, no one in the media industry saw the coronavirus coming, and it has thrown a wrench into the revenue plans of virtually every news publisher out there, big or small. Companies have been cutting salaries, putting reporters and editors on paid leave, and taking other steps to curb their spending in the hope that they can survive the virus-triggered downturn in advertising. But it’s difficult to think of a publisher that has taken the kind of extreme step that Protocol has, and laid off more than 40 percent of the staff that report and edit its news. In a memo to staff, Allbritton and two senior managers said that the coronavirus “has done nothing to shake our faith in Protocol’s mission or our long-term opportunity,” but added that its spinoff effects have “profoundly changed the economic realities of the present” (CJR tried to get a comment from Protocol or Allbritton, but they didn’t respond by publication time).

In a memo to staff at Politico, Allbritton said the current crisis “has elements of the fear that we felt after 9/11, the financial worry that we experienced in 2008, and the unknown that surrounds a natural disaster like a hurricane or tornado all rolled into one.” He went on to say that Protocol “hired ambitiously in anticipation of rolling out a significant number of new growth products in the second half of 2020,” and that he had to make the “difficult but necessary decision to reduce short-term costs until a more robust revenue pipeline resumes.” What’s confusing about the layoff decision, given this statement, is the finality of it. Many companies have put their staff on furlough, which implies that they will be able to come back once the economic downturn starts to recede. If Protocol’s owner was genuinely committed to its “mission and long-term opportunity,” why wouldn’t he keep some of those 13 people around by putting them on paid leave, or cutting salaries enough to meet short-term goals?

Continue reading “Protocol layoffs raise some troubling questions”

Note: This was written originally for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

As the coronavirus quarantine stretches into its second month, there are signs that some people are growing restless after being locked inside their homes with virtually no contact with the outside world, and some of them are pushing the boundaries of the lockdown restrictions in various ways. In some cases, groups of protesters have been gathering at town halls and other government buildings, or stopping traffic on the streets of cities across the US, holding up signs questioning the need for a continued quarantine with slogans like “Land of the Free!” and “Fake Crisis!” But are these genuine protests organized by random concerned citizens with strong opinions about the lengths to which the quarantine effort has gone, or is there more going on here? And if it’s the latter, then shouldn’t the press be thinking long and hard before playing into the hands of the organizers of those protests by giving them free publicity?

According to a number of media reports, anti-lockdown rallies have been seen in a number of states over the past week, including Colorado, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio, California and Minnesota. Trump even appeared to encourage protesters to take to the streets in a series of tweets, advising residents to “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!” and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Not surprisingly, Fox News has given these rallies a lot of air time, complete with maps that make it look as though a grassroots movement has taken over and is growing larger by the day — something the network also did during the days of the Tea Party in 2009. The network has even used the term that organizers came up with for the protests, in an attempt to portray them as democracy in action: namely, “Freedom Rallies.” And the footage used often gives the impression that there are large throngs of demonstrators, even though in at least one case, a video from a alternate vantage point told a different story.

Over the past several days, evidence has emerged that these may not be grassroots protests at all, but “astroturf” — in other words, a carefully planned simulation of grassroots action. According to a report in the Washington Post, some of the largest Facebook groups used to organize many of these protests are run by a family of far-right, pro-gun activists: Ben Dorr, political director of a gun-rights group in Minnesota and his brothers, Christopher and Aaron. The Facebook groups have become sources of the same kinds of misinformation about the coronavirus that have been seen at a number of the protests — that the virus is no worse than the flu, that the scientists working on a vaccine have ulterior motives, and so on. By Sunday, the groups had more than 200,000 members. According to the Post, other demonstrations have been promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is headed by a longtime adviser to Dick DeVos, husband of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Continue reading “Giving coronavirus protests the oxygen of amplification”

Note: This was written originally for the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

It’s hard to imagine an industry being more poorly prepared for the arrival of a global pandemic than the media business. Even before “coronavirus” became a household word, the industry was already reeling from a series of body blows, most of them delivered by Google and Facebook and their dominance of the advertising market. Since 2008, nearly half of US newspaper journalism jobs have disappeared, according to the LA Times, leaving fewer than 38,000 reporters, photographers and editors. Waves of layoffs have become the norm, not just for large chains like Gannett and McClatchy but for smaller papers, and even for digital giants like BuzzFeed and Vox, who at one time were seen as the future of online media. Then along came COVID-19, and with it the unprecedented shutdown of entire cities, and the erasure of huge swaths of the advertising business. For many outlets, it will likely become what media analyst Ken Doctor calls “an extinction event.” For some, it already is.

The LA Times profiled one example of this sad trend. Jeff VonKaenel, 69, owner of the Sacramento News & Review and sister publications in Chico and Reno, has been running weekly newspapers for almost 50 years, and has survived wildfires, recessions, and being sued by a mayor. But the extinguishing of almost all his advertising in the wake of COVID-19 left him no other choice: four days after the virus was defined as a pandemic, VonKaenel shut down his presses for the last time and laid off all 40 members of his staff. “This could be the death knell, not only for us but for the dailies that we compete with,” he said. VonKaenel told the Times he is still trying to come up with a way to continue serving the community, possibly by partnering with a non-profit. But he could no longer cover the $45,000 a week it took to run the paper (last year, he and his wife borrowed against their home to keep it afloat).

A similar story has played out across big and small publications over the past month. The Jewish Chronicle, first published in 1841, and Jewish News in the UK recently shut down and liquidated all of their assets. Alternative weeklies across the US and Canada have cut back on printing and laid off staff. Meanwhile, a broad range of large and medium-sized publishers and news outlets have implemented cost-saving plans that consist of both paid and unpaid leave for significant numbers of staff and reduced salaries for others. According to a recent estimate by the New York Times, roughly 33,000 workers at news companies in the US have been laid off, been furloughed or had their pay reduced in the past month. Schneps Media, for example, a local news publisher that recently acquired the free newspapers amNewYork and Metro New York, has laid off or given paid leave to about 30 employees at its roughly 50 community publications, or about 20 percent of its work force.

Continue reading “Coronavirus continues to take its toll on the media industry”

If you are a Neil Young fan at all, you probably knew about his Neil Young Archives website already — he started it a few years ago, and it is an impressive and extremely well-designed archive of virtually every song and album he has ever played, going back to the early days when he played R&B in Winnipeg. There’s a virtual file cabinet you can flip back through, each entry has photos and videos and news articles you can look at while you are listening to the song — in high fidelity of course. All of that is fantastic and clearly took a lot of work and thought, but that’s not the most amazing thing about the site. The most amazing thing is what Neil and his relatively new wife, actress Daryl Hannah — have been doing with what they call the “Fireside Sessions.”

These are videos, some of them half an hour long or more, filmed by Daryl, in which Neil sits and plays his guitar by the outdoor fire-pit — in one case, playing while snow is falling all around him — or plays his old upright piano in what appears to be the rustic living room of his cabin, with a fire going in the fireplace and dogs wandering around. In between songs like “Four Strong Winds” and “Out on the Weekend,” he talks to the dogs, or says he hopes his fans are staying healthy, or chats with Daryl about the homemade harmonica stand the two put together out of wood-working clamps and old fireplace tools, because they didn’t have a real stand.

Continue reading “Neil Young playing live from his cabin is an amazing experience”

Note: This is a post I wrote originally for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

One of the overwhelming trends of the last several years has been the growing dominance of a handful of giant digital platforms, including Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Each one has a market value of half a trillion dollars or more, and that value stems from their almost total control over some of the key levers in the digital economy: Search, online advertising, retail sales, and social networking. That in turn has had a ripple effect on a number of industries, including the media business, where the lion’s share of ad revenue has been siphoned away by Google and Facebook. How did these companies get as big and as powerful as they have? What responsibilities do they have when it comes to things like disinformation, and are they following through on them? And what if anything should we do about their dominance? Should they be broken up, or prevented from acquiring other startups? Should they be forced to help fund the industries they have helped to cripple, like the media industry?

To answer these and other related questions, CJR spoke with Alex Kantrowitz, a technology writer with BuzzFeed and the author of a new book: Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever. And we held a series of roundtable conversations on CJR”s Galley discussion platform with Alex and other technology writers and reporters from a number of outlets, including Casey Newton from The Verge, Priya Anand from The Information, Ina Fried from Axios and Mark Bergen from Bloomberg. The central thesis of Kantrowitz’s book is that all of the companies he researched — Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft — believe they have to continually reinvent their business or they will die. In other words, it’s “always day one,” a term that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is credited with. When asked during an all-hands meeting in 2017 what day two would look like, Bezos said “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline.”

Kantrowitz says when he first heard the term “always day one,” he thought it just meant that Amazon staffers worked really hard — which is definitely true (so hard that the company has come under repeated fire for poor working conditions and what some allege amounts to mistreatment). But as he did more research, he realized it actually was about continual reinvention, which is how Amazon has gone from being just an online bookstore to one of the world’s largest retailers, with a cloud computing business, an entertainment business, a grocery store that has no checkout clerks, and so on. One interesting conclusion suggested by his research, he says, is that Apple — which has a market capitalization of $1.2 trillion — may not be able to extend its dominance because it doesn’t take the “always day one” approach. “Apple is in danger of missing the next computing shift, similar to how Microsoft missed mobile,” he says.

Continue reading “How did the digital giants get so big, and what if anything should we do about it?”

When I first started learning how to play the acoustic guitar, way back in about 1978 or so, one of the first artists whose songs I learned was John Prine (the other was Neil Young, and later on Leon Redbone, who passed away last year). One of the things I liked about John Prine was that he only ever used about four chords, and they were really easy to play — G, D, C, maybe an A minor now and then. But as I got to know him and his songs, it became increasingly clear that he was a genius — not a musical genius perhaps, but definitely a songwriting genius. A true poet, in the same vein as Dylan or Springsteen, but his songs are arguably a lot less cryptic than the former’s and a lot less mythical than the latter’s.

Prine songs are deceptively simple: They are about normal people named Donald or Lydia or Linda or Rudy, people with simple lives that consist of being in the army, working in factories, growing old, walking down the railway tracks in the winter, etc. But there is magic in the way John Prine writes about them — he lulls you into a false sense of security in some songs, with some light-hearted, feel-good banter, and then he hits you with a line that cuts like a knife. Something so artfully stated that it reveals an insight about human nature with only a few well-chosen words. Springsteen told Rolling Stone: “He was never anything but the loveliest guy in the world. He wrote music of towering compassion with an almost unheard-of precision and creativity when it came to observing the fine details of ordinary lives.”

“There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes. Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose” Sam Stone

In a remembrance that he sent to music writer Bob Lefsetz for his Lefsetz Letter, musician Tom Rush mentioned what he called “the sideways, sometimes upside-down takes on life that had us smiling and singing along. Ways of looking at things that were new to the world but were expressed so forcefully and engagingly that you could not turn away — there was no choice in the matter, you had to love him. No movie-star looks, no soaring tenor or dazzling guitar licks. He didn’t need them. He saw truths that had never before occurred to us, and offered them up in a brand-new, loving way that could not be denied.”

Continue reading “John Prine 1946-2020 — death of a legendary singer/songwriter/poet”

Note: This is a post I wrote originally for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Both Google and Facebook have acted surprisingly quickly to remove disinformation related to the COVID-19 virus over the past few weeks, considering their somewhat mixed track record when it comes to removing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and trolls related to political campaigns. But experts there is still a lot more that they and other digital platforms could be doing. CJR spoke this week with Karen Kornbluh and Ellen Goodman, co-authors of a new paper published by the German Marshall Fund entitled “Safeguarding Digital Democracy,” which includes a series of steps they say the major digital platforms need to take in order to deal with the problem. Kornbluh is a former US Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a senior fellow at the GMF and director of the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, and Goodman is a professor at Rutgers Law School and co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Information Policy & Law.

In addition to Kornbluh and Goodman, CJR also held two roundtables with other experts using our Galley discussion platform, one of which included Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University; Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of the Digital Platforms & Democracy Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Mark MacCarthy, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown Law school, and Victor Pickard, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. The second roundtable with Goodman and Kornbluh also included Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center; Kate Klonick from St. John’s University law school; Enrique Armijo, a law professor at Elon University; Gus Hurwitz from the Nebraska College of Law; and Evelyn Douek, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School.

“The policy debate on disinformation has been hobbled by a false choice between allowing platforms or the government to censor. We propose instead empowering citizens through updating offline protections and rights (consumer protection, civil rights, privacy, campaign finance), supporting journalism and increasing accountability of platforms,” said Kornbluh. One of the things that would improve the overall information environment and counter-balance some of the worst of what the platforms do, she and Goodman suggest, is the creation of a PBS-style funding and distribution structure for digital journalism — an entity that they argue should be funded by a tax on the advertising revenues of Facebook and Google.

Continue reading “What Google and Facebook should do to fight disinformation”