Move over, Texas Trib; heads up, Texas Monthly and Observer

There's a new player in Texas statewide verbal media. (Verbal replaces "print" as I assume they're online-only.)

The "they"?

The Barbed Wire, per story last week by Semafor.

The players?

The Barbed Wire is a new state digital news outlet that on Monday will begin churning out Texas-focused stories on culture, politics, and entertainment. The project was the result of almost a year and a half of planning by Jeff Rotkoff, the Texas state director of Democratic-aligned super PAC Forward Majority, and Olivia Messer, a former Texas reporter and alumna of the Daily Beast (and a former colleague of this Semafor reporter at the Beast).

Big stuff.

And, they're swinging their weight:

The publication will be a mix of aggregation, essays, columns, and original reporting, including some statehouse coverage and longer-form investigations. The outlet will launch a newsletter called “Wild Texas,” which was influenced by Messer’s time working on the Daily Beast’s news roundup, the Cheat Sheet. The publication is launching with several columnists, editors, and reporters already on board who will cover entertainment, culture, food, and politics. Brian Sweany, the former editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly, and Jamil Smith, the opinion writer and editor-in-chief of The Emancipator, are both signed on as advisors.

There you go.

The timing of of additional interest with the Monthly having just dropped a paywall. The dollar amount for start-up is a lead-in, as with all such paywalls anymore. The intro appears to have been done subtly and ramped up.

The target appears to be primarily the Monthly, secondarily the Trib, and the Observer just getting any blow-by.

==

Update, June 16, 2025: Nine months in, the Barbed Wire is "decent" so far. I don't think the Trib has anything to sweat about. The Monthly, at least for the portion of their audience that wants triangulating on the news first, new BBQ joints second or even third? Maybe a bit of sweating. 

Evan Smith says goodbye to the Texas Tribune

 After 13 years, Evan Smith has decided to leave the online newspaper/website he started Ross Ramsey, and John Thornton's money in the background.

The NYT piece gives Smith the respectful high-gloss spit shine.

In reality?

Some nonprofit new media sites, like the Colorado Sun, have done so without his help. Traditional newspapers that have eyed his model, like Salt Lake City, have sometimes struggled.

And, then there's John Thornton's money. After all, the man worked for McKinsey before going on his own, a black mark right there.

Or rather, his money as symptomatic of all those corporate donors.

As documented here on many an occasion, Ev and the gang have pulled punches on climate change stories, among other things, because of those corporate — and Texas university — donors.

When you have no paywall, and big money donors are your primary money stream (they are for the "events" as well), this:

“We have shown people all over the world that it is possible to do this work with integrity, with revenue diversity,” he said.

Ain't so true, Ev, and it's not just me to say that.

My biggest hot take was on the Trib's 10th anniversary. A few notes from that:

1. The Trib either does in-house advertorial or, like the Snooze until about 2 years ago, blends its digital marketing consultancy and its news writing. That's a diff, between the two, that makes no difference at end.
2. At that time, pre-COVID, Ev's profit margin was 3 percent. So, in the black, but not a robust success model, either. (Maybe, as Omicron threatens more festivals, and people get more used to virtual ones, Ev is seeing some fiscal handwriting on the wall.) 
3. Then there's Ross's suck-up pre-Trib relationship with John Sharp, a ConservaDem so conservative he ought to officially register as Republican.
   

At the five year mark of the Trib, I elsewhere noted that, at that time at least, Ev didn't have that integrity that the Times let him boast about. In there, I started with riffing on Jim Moore (sorry, his website is dead) talking about just who all those donations are from. I also noted that Ev may have been fudging some of his numbers, and that he might be overpaid.

That's not all, and certainly not all COVID related. Maybe Ev was hiring glorified interns even before the virus, but, this wasn't a good look during it.

"Commie" paper's "owners" get sucker-punched, in part by selves

That's my take on what appears to be the definite hiatus and possible death of the Akron Devil Strip, as reported by Laura Hazard Owen at Niemen Lab.

It billed itself as Akron's first "community-owned magazine," hence the "Commie" in scare quotes. More specifically, per a presumed quote from its website by Owen?

It claimed to be the “first community-owned local news cooperative in the United States.”

OK, we'll get to those "owners" being in scare quotes in just a minute.

Whoever runs its Twitter said on Oct. 15: We ain't got money. Oh, and our founder took a self-imposed sabbatical a month ago.

NOW, per Owen, we get to those "owners," who allegedly owned the "means of production," but in reality?

In becoming a co-op in 2019, The Devil Strip said its “vested co-owners” (each of whom had donated at least $330) would be able to “vote on important issues” about the magazine, following “the ‘one person, one share, one vote’ principle.” But those co-owners — there were 94 of them — weren’t told The Devil Strip was in financial trouble, much less consulted on a path forward.

Oops.

I put out a trio of Tweets when reading this. First:

"Get it in writing" is a mandate in both law and journalism and it sounds like the Akron Devil Strip, and its alleged "co-owners," failed on both counts 1/x thread .@akrondevilstrip .@NiemanLab .@laurahazardowen .@mediagazer https://t.co/BRF6hpIdKX

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 19, 2021

Many of the "owners" were whining, per Owen:

In the comments of The Devil Strip’s Facebook page, readers expressed confusion: “What’s the point of a co-op if the people have no say?” one wrote. Another: “What? Not even a chance for us owners to help raise additional funds?” 

“No indication at the annual meeting over the summer of 2021 that there was concern, but no financial recap despite my request before the meeting,” another co-owner recalled.

Gee, if you'd thought of something like my first Tweet, in advance?

The three remaining Devil Strip board members launched a Go Fund Me. (Of course they did.) And, despite many people saying "Fool me once ..." 60 suckers ponied up nearly $5K in the first six hours.

Tweet 2 gets to that and that sabbatical by Chris Horne.

Why would these "alleged co-owners" invest more? That said, if they DO invest more, and without contractual paperwork, alert P.T. Barnum. And who let Chris Horne get to this point in the first place? Did Knight Foundation, Lenfest, etc. have no paperwork-based accountability? 2/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 19, 2021

But wait, it gets better, per Owen:

In addition to revenue from its members, The Devil Strip had received a total of $589,652 in philanthropic funding as of the end of 2020, according to its Donors page. Some of the larger contributors to that pool of funds included the Knight Foundation, which gave a total of $225,000 as of the end of 2020, and the Lenfest Foundation on behalf of the Facebook Journalism Project, which gave $100,000. Any 2021 donations are not listed on The Devil Strip’s site.

Gee, I'd like some of that, I said.

.@knightfdn .@lenfestinst Will you send me money to start a co-op newspaper? I'll give you the details later. 3/x

— Crushes Xi Jinping Thought Kool-Aid peddlers 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 19, 2021

So, Knight, Lenfest etc. got suckered by someone who probably has bipolar disorder as part of what's behind him, and at the same time, were apparently suckers themselves with their seed money? Got it.

Meanwhile, who would trust the three remaining members of the board of directors, the ones who organized the Go Fund Me? Presumably, they had a hand in persuading Hodge to escort himself out the door and said nothing. Presumably, they had at least a glimpse of the financial problems and said nothing. (Or else they knew nothing, troubling itself.) They talk about recovering access to emails. Had Hodge locked them out? They say nothing. They promised the 60 new suckers nothing new in terms of legal language, AFAIK.

And, was there a need for it? Sure, the Beacon Journal is Gannett, but there's some sort of weekly, an alt-weekly, I guess, and a monthly lifestyles mag, per Wiki. Well, no, the Journal was a Black paper, not an alt-weekly, Google says, but it may have folded. There's also a non-alt-weekly which looks pretty decent on its website, AND a university paper.

That's a crowded journalism environment to be entering in today's world.

And, speaking of that apparently now shuttered Black paper? In the second menu bar, the black-stripped one, the Devil Strip has a link to "Black-owned businesses in Akron." But, on the "About" page? The staff you're invited to meet are all White. And, judging by them mainly having humanities degrees if not journalism ones? Upper-middle class parents. City-Data says Blacks are 30 percent of Akron itself and 15 percent of Summit County. People of other races or identifying as multiracial are another 12 percent of the city and 10 percent of the county. (There are no Hispanics or Asians on the Devil Strip staff, either.)

The "mag"? Its content at its website? From what I saw, it was written for exactly their own community, not the Akron community.

That would lead to the final question, and one purely rhetorical: What community were you expecting or wanting to "own" this paper? Back at Nieman, Joshua Benton has your number.

Seriously. Sounds like a whole lot of suckerdom out there.

I'm White myself, and have a professional graduate degree, but by money, economic class? My parents were nowhere near upper middle class. And, I don't identify with those people.

"We're digital first!" No you're not

This is the most irritating bullshit slogan from today's newspaper world after the ever-ongoing "We're learning to do more with less."

The New York Times may be "digital first." But you, small newspaper chain owners of some five-day and six-day dailies, are not.

You're not digital first if you don't have a separate subscription plan for online only readers, rather than a single forced buy combo of print and Net.

You're not digital first if you cut the AP wire to save money, but then invoke that "more with less" BS by refusing to cut pages even with the Trump paper tariffs.

You're not digital first if most of your online advertising is nothing other than your print section classifieds.

You're not digital first if you haven't done the paperwork to figure out if you're close to digital first on revenue vs overhead.

You're not digital first if you're part of a chain and you don't train your ad salespeople on selling digital ads.

You're not digital first if your graphics person(s) at a daily paper have no real experience or training in building quality digital ads.

You're not digital first just because you post a podcast and video on your website, if you're not getting anybody to sponsor that.

You're not digital first if you see being online as a way to fill print gaps.

Saying "we're digital first" as a self-hypnotic mantra doesn't make it so.

To be successfully digital first takes thought and strategy.

Beyond the advertising and circulation side I mentioned, that includes issues of whether you want to post every story online first, at least in full story format. Even with word-count delimited paywalls, if I can read a header and 50 words of text, that might be enough for me to not need to read more.

Journalist naivete 101

I pity every under-35 journalist, even more, under-30 journalist, like this one, who thinks he, as compared to all the others now on his own, actually WILL "make it" as a-Net based freelancer.

Sheelah Kolhatkar tells a great story of the descent of all the Paul Smaleras:

You can tell when a print journalist has lost his full-time job because of the digital markings that suddenly appear, like the tail of a fading comet. First, he joins Facebook. A Gmail address is promptly obtained. The Twitter account comes next, followed by the inevitable blog. Throw in a LinkedIn profile for good measure. This online coming-out is the first step in a daunting, and economically discouraging,

transformation: from a member of a large institution to a would-be Internet “brand.”
Beyond that, writing a blog that amounts to little more than a search engine optimization tool?

Just as Google Ads is killing a lot of online advertising, the fragmentation of news/content/analysis and whatnot online is going to kill salaries, too.

Keep dreaming, Paul Smalera. Until you wake up. Or, until you OD on the Kool-Aid of the Jay Rosen types who keep hawking the Net, including the free-range, unpaywalled Net, as the salvation of media.

Read like this one to get more of a sense of how he's scraping and scrimping by. Paul, half the job dumps and revenue losses may be recession-related, but the other half? As long as print media keep repeating the same non-charging-for-online-content insanity, the other half is gone for good.

Time vs Time on Sotomayor

Does Time magazine not have a managing editor anymore? Or has the Internet basically castrated the powers of such a person at what is theoretically a weekly newsmagazine?

At Time, Karen Tumulty says Sotomayor WILL get a tough Senate fight: “Indeed, a fight is a political inevitability.”

(Sidebar nutbarrery: Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network calling the current SCOTUS “liberal activist.”)

Anyway, in contradistinction to Tumulty, Time’s Mark Halperin predicts smooth sailing for Sotomayor.

So, which is it?

And, in a broader, more philosophical question, are more magazines of news and opinion going to become more like this – little more than quasi-freelancers under one roof?

Clay Shirky on the ‘whys’ of newspaper demise

Clay Shirky has three great posts on why the online newspaper world, as a business model, is basically vaporizing. I’m going to look at all three.

First, Shirky gives us the big picture of where we’re at today and why, including why the TV-radio model, the “digital garden” model of pay circulation, the micropayment model like iTunes and others, won’t work.

Here’s his nut graf, about one-quarter the way down:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

He next looks at the details of why some proposed alternative models won’t work, and have already been proven that way, at least to some degree:

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Shirky then pronounces his judgment, and it’s a somber one:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Shirky goes on to like how the Internet is doing some form of what (we hope) Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” to print media is the biggest such change since Gutenberg and the printing press.

I insert the link multiple times because this is a LONG blog post; twice as long as many a newspaper column, and because it’s WELL worth reading. So read it.

But, as I said, this is only one of three posts.

Shirky also tackles the details of the micropayments model and why it won’t work. First, we relisten to the same songs, but don’t re-read the same newspaper story. Second, Napster and its kin have been declared illegal; blogging and hyperlinks have done something different in media.

He then takes a more general look at the micropayments model. He says part of the problem is that the various micropayments models under discussion are entirely publisher-driven and don’t take the reader into account.

If that’s not enough for you, back in 2003, Shirky listed out the multitude of failed micropayment programs.

Read all four, not three, links I’ve provided, and accept that the mass-audience newspaper of today is probably doomed.

That all said, Shirky is light on prescriptions for the future.

And, as I blogged last week, online advertising is becoming the junk mail of the Internet world.

If various versions of charge-for-content aren’t going to work, and, with Shirky’s acknowledgement that the Gutenberg Revolution 2.0 will throw out lot of experimental models, at the least, I’d like to see Shirky throw out some ideas, and handicap some of the more promising models out there.

Ted Rall on the future of online news, Part II

Having blogged about Part I of Rall’s three-part series last week, I wanted to tackle Part II now, to see how he would describe more of the problem, and if he saw any answers.

Would you pay for Mapquest? I’d pay a quarter or a dollar for reliable directions from the airport to my hotel in a new city. Sometimes, while researching this column, I encounter a link to an archived newspaper article that I could use, but it charges a $2 or $3 download fee. The cost isn’t the problem — it’s a miniscule, and in my case tax deductible, expense to make my work better. But I don’t bother. I don’t pay for Mapquest, either.

I don’t care about the money. I just can’t stand filling out all those fields.

Each website requires you to enter personal data — your name, address, credit card number, expiration date, that stupid security code next to the signature on your card, and the billing address (as opposed to the shipping address). Frequently, website interfaces are buggy; make a mistake and you have to start all over again. I’ll suffer through the ordeal if it's a site, like Amazon or Expedia, that I’ll use repeatedly. But an archived article? Ain’t worth my time to figure out how to get them my two bucks.

There is a solution to the online payment problem, says Simson Garfinkel, a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Research on Computation and Society and the author of “Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century.” (Disclosure: We’re friends.)

“If content is appropriately priced, of an appropriately high quality, and easy to access, people will pay for it,” asserts Garfinkel. “What is required is a system that is easy to use and licensing terms that are not onerous.”

A universal single-click payment system won't work, he says, because it would be vulnerable to hackers. We could overlay a national ID card or credit card system over the existing Internet. One of several competing micropayment systems may become dominant, creating a market-based solution. You'd register your debit or credit card info at one place. Then, when you wanted to download a song or read an electronic book or order shoes, you’d go to the vendor's website and click one button: “Buy.”

Amazon sort of does this. After you’ve registered, you can buy a book by clicking one button. Just like that, it’s on its way. We need something similar for vendors we’ve never dealt with before.

That said, Rall is still optimistic newspapers will muddle through, if not more. Now, that said, as should be evident by the title of Garfinkel’s book, he thinks notions of online privacy will have to change for that to happen.

Newspaper editors and publishers could reverse their decline by agreeing, en masse, to charge a substantial fee for their online editions — at least as much as for print. But I wouldn't hold my breath. Avoidance of long-term thinking is what’s gotten the news biz where it is today.

In the long run, despite their suicidal tendencies, I suspect newspapers will survive, and even thrive, after the current shakeout. When radio was introduced in the 1930s, many analysts predicted the death of the record industry. Instead, radio promotion increased record sales. When television became popular in the 1950s, people said radio was doomed. The radio business is bigger than ever. The Internet was supposed to kill TV.

The newspaper business will change. Three major trends ensure that. They will also make it bigger than ever.

Next Week: The bright (sic!) future of newspapers.

Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I'll add a few observations about the industry.

Weeklies and semiweeklies, especially, not being AP members, have suffered less from the Internet. Their news is available from that newspaper, or that newspaper’s website, if it has one, and that’s it. That said, too many weeklies launched websites in the last five years or so without thinking about charging for subscriptions. They believed what the major dailies were already trying to brainwash themselves into believing, that an ad-based model would pay the bills.

For small-town dailies, the situation is somewhat the same.

That said, these papers tend to be even more conservative than the seven-day daily MSM. They are conservative in the Main Street/Chamber of Commerce, good-for-business sense, in one respect of conservativism. And, in much of the South and Midwest, it’s going to be small-town Babbitt-type religious conservativism, too.

There is one option, in larger cities: the alt-weekly. These papers are usually progressive to some, if not a fairly large degree, especially in a libertarian sense on social issues. They’re still weeklies, and especially with their long-form journalism as well, wouldn’t have a big desire to be AP members anyway.

But, they’re being affected by the Internet, too.

Alt-weeklies, like Internet sites, generally run on an ad-only model. And, personal ads of the sort that don’t appear in traditional daily papers make up a fair chunk of both classified and display ads there.

But, Craigslist is gutting alt-weekly classifieds in these areas. Personals websites are doing some of the damage, too.

Anyway, Rall is always thought-provoking to me, even when I disagree with him. I’m interested in what Part III will say.