Greenwald illustrates a Gnu Media problem

Unless you've been dead for 10 days, if you follow media issues, you're aware of Glenn Greenwald's temper-tantrum departure from The Intercept and his decamp to freelance journalism at Substack.

Temper-tantrum it was, and lie-based it also was. Those who know Greenwald should be shocked by neither.

This whole Greenwald claim of "but my contractual rights say no editing" is a lie. The Intercept, per this great NY Mag story, says that was ONLY true of his columns. His news stories were, are and always have been subject to editing, and mentioned previous examples. Details of that in re the proposed Hunter Biden story.

Greenwald’s main editor on the nonpolitical pieces was Peter Maass, a veteran journalist who joined The Intercept shortly after its founding in 2014. In light of the high-profile, controversial nature of Greenwald’s planned column on Hunter Biden, Reed told Greenwald that Maass would edit the column. 

On Tuesday, Maass sent a lengthy memo to Greenwald, outlining what he said were the draft’s strengths and weaknesses and suggesting that he adopt a sharper focus on media criticism rather than litigate questionable evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption based on purported documents from his son Hunter that had been published by the New York Post.

Shock me.

(At The Guardian, he was billed as a columnist, and I don't know if he wrote any straight news stories. I can't remember back to his Salon days.)

But, in any case, Glenn's belief that he was above editing, as well as above the need for editing, illustrates a problem with Gnu Media related to problems I've noted before. (And, to add to that, on YouTube with video or SoundCloud with podcasts, one can claim that anything one is throwing against the wall is a column, and I think that's the basic stance.

As an Old Media person, as managing editor of several weekly and semi-weekly papers, I've edited staff writers. And, contra this gotcha bullshit, even by his standards, from Max Blumenthal, 

The Intercept’s Betsy Reed, who earns $427,419 a year & produces zero journalism of her own, mocks independent journalists who rely on Substack & Patreon to get by. Not everyone has a reclusive billionaire to pay them huge sums to edit stuff no one reads. https://t.co/TdnjrDdinw pic.twitter.com/83FMDhpRgQ

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 30, 2020

expected to be paid more than them. 

My response, which included Max, Reed, and the person who retweeted:

Sully has said he expects to get more on Substack than at New Yorker & what he made there was more than Betsy does.
2nd, in traditional media as well as Gnu Media, editors make more than many of the reporters they supervise.
This is "gotcha" even from you Max. More #twosiderism

— Flim Flam 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) October 31, 2020

Beyond that, conveniently omitted by Max, the retweeting Aaron Maté and the re-retweeting Mona Holland, is that Reed is not just editor, but editor-in-chief. And had 16 years of various editorial experience at The Nation before that

I've also, when possible, subjected myself to some degree of at least "proofreading-plus" myself. That's both on stories AND columns, on the writing, and on layout. At my current pair of weeklies, my former office manager now ad salesperson and more looks at stories I write, my columns, obits, and a semi-regular column from a school district superintendent. She primarily looks for grammar (actually good on commas and even knows subjunctive usage!) and formatting, but will make occasional editorial suggestions.

I don't always accept them. BUT, I do normally give them due consideration.

I have joked at times that, like Pontius Pilate, "What I have written, I have written," but that's not totally true. And not just in Old Media.

At this and various other blogs in Gnu Media, I sometimes start a post a week or more in advance to give it time to percolate. Now, here, my normal schedule is once a week plus other occasionals, so, I may write in advance by several days anyway. But, at other sites, where I may blog daily, at least on weekdays, this is indeed true. I'll jot out a rough draft of a blog days, weeks, even a full month or so in advance on serious items that I think need blogging but also need an extended thought process.

Per the NY Mag piece, I think that, on some of his news stories, Glenn doesn't like to let things percolate, and he definitely doesn't like parts of the editorial process that force him to percolate.

I'll venture nobody regularly proofreads, edits or fact-checks Blumenthal, either. And, I KNOW that at least one other Gnu Media maven in his general orbit, Jordan Chariton, has refused to correct major errors on claiming many black men's deaths this summer were murders when they were indeed suicides, and at a rate not significantly different than statistical averages.

Top blogging of 2019

Whether it's boredom, shock at the continuing decline of newspapers or other things, 2019 was my heaviest year blogging here. As a result, most of this year's Top 10 blog posts were from 2019.

No. 1? Skepticism about the SLC Tribune becoming a nonprofit, and discussing that skepticism in detail.

No. 2? Wondering if the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, aka the StarleGram, could survive much longer without entering a JOA with the Snooze. (This was one of several advertising-related, or rather, lack of advertising-related, hot takes about the StartleGram last year.)

No. 3? Looking at the Gannett-Gatehouse, rather the Mehness (can't even think of a good bad pun) - Craphouse merger.

No. 4? Calling out wingnut lawyer Ty Clevenger, as well as several small newspapers in central Texas.

No. 5? From 2018, advising fellow print journos not to work for Wick Communications. First time I've done a by-name callout. It started with critically examining their idiocy and "work harder AND better" vulture capitalism idea of cutting the AP wire at daily pages but not cutting the page count.

No. 6? Turning a skeptical eye to  the huzzahs and handstands on the Texas Tribune's 10th anniversary.

No. 7? In the era of conspiracy theories, "deep state" buzz, etc., calling out alleged Gnu Media for some of their pretentions.

No. 8? Saluting one vulture capitalism in the journalism biz for honesty in its rapaciousness.

No. 9? Based on some longform writing, looking at just how much the lies of Facebook, Google, et al about targeted digital advertising really were lies and how many people should have known better.

No. 10? Related to No. 3, wondering if the new Craphouse was going to inflict some godawful ginormous programmatic ad nightmare on us.

Journalists "less morally developed" than 13 years ago: Is it wingnuts, Gnu Media, some of both?

A new piece at Psy Post says that, compared with 13 years ago, journalists are less moral today.

Background:
1. Priming, namely by reminding them they are journalists, was used to see if that induced more morality. The results were compared to a study 13 years ago.
2. The priming was found to make NO morality inducement this time.
3. It's a fairly small sample size, just 171.
4. Interestingly, all subjects self-identified as digital journalists.

That, in turn, leads me back to a post just a few days ago about how having a YouTube channel and a couple of social media feeds may make you — MAY make you, they don't guarantee you to be — a journalist in the eye of the court system sub specie Primo Amendmento, but they DON'T AT ALL guarantee you're a journalist, let alone a "publisher" in the media world sub specie scribendo atrimento.

I wonder how much of this is winger media. The Project Veritas type stuff is basically all winger-side stuff. No liberals let alone lefties do that.

Light at end of tunnel for papers, and more new ideas for smart paywalls

Earlier this week, I blogged about how Matthew Ingram at GigaOm appears to have a Jeff Jarvis/Clay Shirky/Jay Rosen paywall-hating burr up his ass.

Well, per Ken Doctor at Nieman Labs, that’s a good description, because Ingram, a blind follower of the Three Musketeers of Gnu Journalism (deliberately ripped off, with same snarky intent, from Gnu Atheism) details several specific ways in which he and they are wrong.

First, especially at non-daily papers, the light is not only apparently at the end of the tunnel, but profits may actually pick up next year. As a result of that, newspaper stock prices (albeit from in-the-toilet lows) are soaring.

And, yes, even some non-dailies have paywalls. The light for dailies, definitely for smaller ones, and possibly for mid-sized ones, is at least probably getting near to a flattening out point.

Second, and directly related, Doctor details the economics of paywalls. There’s a variety of ways to skin the paywall cat. Most new adopters are going with fewer freebie reads than, say, the New York Times, and also a lot less leakiness. That includes not just small companies but as big a boy as Gannett. Doctor says opt-out provisions, in which hardcopy subscribers are automatically charged at least a nominal fee for digital access, are also growing. (I hate opt-out provisions in general, including this one, but … the idea is, nonetheless, growing.)

Third, the truth is what the Three Musketeers and hangers-on won’t tell you: paywalls are growing internationally, too.

But, even there, Doctor starts with the US side of the equation:

By the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid (in March), more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites.

But, that’s his takeoff point to note that (as of March) more than a dozen European dailies also had paywalls.

That, then, leads to the more significant issue. Doctor notes most paywalls are neither flaming successes nor flaming failures. So, why?

So if charging for digital access — a too long phrase, but one that’s most accurate than paywall — is neither a panacea nor a tombstone on the way to the inevitable, what is it? It’s a building block, and it’s a way to re-envision the business.

And, that’s a good point. 

Isn’t that type of creative thinking and re-envisioning what the Three Musketeers laud?

Short answer? Yes, as long as it’s done for free online.

That’s because they deliberately practice a selective quoting of only one of two sentences from Stewart Brand’s famous “Information wants to be free” comment:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Note carefully that first sentence.

Then, also per Wiki, and partially reflected on its original link, there’s the question about whether Brand meant free in terms of cost, or free in terms of access.

That, then, gets back to many critics of the Three Musketeers noting that two (Jarvis and Rosen) are paid academics, and at public, taxpayer-funded universities, no less, and therefore can easily afford to tell newspapers to let people be online leeches. Until 2010, Shirky was at the public Hunter University, so ditto on him. Let’s also not forget Shirky’s consulting for Libya’s former strongman Moammar Gadhafi, and his naivete about how autocrats could use social media to their own ends when queried about that consulting.

Update, May 3, 2013: I probably spoke too soon. 1Q 2013 numbers for most major papers show that hardcopy advertising continues to slump, and that digital advertising isn't (yet? ever?) offsetting it. Paywalls are adding some money, but they may be not much more than digital dimes, until (ever?) AP (and Reuters, and AFP) up their rates to Google et al, enough to force wire service news to be paywalled, too. And, Saint Warren of Omaha expects newspaper revenues to continue to decline, even though he became a buyer last year.