Or so it seemed, as the Texas Democracy Foundation, which runs the Observer, had announced it was going to pull the plug. However, as for now, it's survived the executioner's ax. See below for details.
That said, as I've said at my main blog in the past, editorially, while they've had some great stuff in recent years, more than once, they've made me say that once again, Bernard Rapoport is turning over in his grave.
He might be turning over about non-editorial issues, either.
When you're giving away the store online, you can't afford to not take ads as a purity symbol. Dunno about the true lefties of Counterpunch, but I do know the left-liberals of The Nation take ads. And, because it's relevant to the Observer perhaps spouting purity test language, I'm going to quote from The Nation's advertising policy:
We accept it not to further the views of The Nation but to help pay the costs of publishing. We start, therefore, with the presumption that we will accept advertising even if the views expressed are repugnant to those of the editors. The only limits are those that grow out of our interest in assuring that the advertising does not impede our use of the editorial columns of The Nation to say what we want.
There you go. Period and end of story.
(Update, March 29, 2024: In fact, The Nation now has a Javascript screen, like many newspapers, saying: We see you have an ad-blocker on. Please disable it to continue reading our articles.)
Well, no, not end of story. Counterpunch paywalls its bigger self-produced stories, and it's to the left of the Observer (which The Nation may not be). Are you going to out-purity it, too?
With that, it should be no surprise, per the Trib's story, that the shuttering itself is also being mismanaged. Kudos to Robert Frump for standing up for doing things right. BS on Laura Hernandez Holmes for her PR shtick; that said, given her Beto connections, she'll make a Peter Principle upward fail.
And, if things were this bad, why were they advertising open position(s) less than a year ago?
Because turmoil?
Boy, that's discussed in the Trib piece. A magazine devoted to racial justice issues, among other things, running off multiple American Indian staffers has got problems. Andrea Grimes has a bit more on that, as part of a much longer piece that chides the mag for looking backward, not forward.
(Update, Aug. 10, 2024: Grimes has now killed not only that Substack piece, but her entire account. Grimes still is with the Observer, as she was at that time. Scratch that. That's bad returns in part on my web search plus Grimes being too lazy to update her LinkedIn for three full years now. She hasn't done a piece there since 2021 and is NOT listed on current staff. I don't know if the Wayback Machine indexes Substack or not, but to go Shakespearean, methinks thee didst bitch too much, and with perhaps less than full accuracy.)
Are they? Bernard's granddaughter Abby is reported as clashing with Tristan Ahtone before resigning herself as board chair.
The Observer's editorial staff is reportedly fighting back. But, from the story there, I don't think this will work. And, it's probably time to pull the plug.
Former (resigned as part of all the turmoil of the last couple years) fundraising head James Canup has started a GoFundMe. But, as i said on Twitter? Unless they either start accepting ads, or paywalling at least some online content (even if that meant I couldn't read it), I'm not pounding sand down a rathole.
That said, enough other people DID pound sand, or else ignored that they were trying to fill in a rathole. In a new story, the Trib says they got over $300K. (They were at just over $200K Tuesday evening.)
Back to the rathole, though.
The closure announcement was handled badly both for its suddenness and for the "ONE WEEK LEFT" angle as well. Given everything else noted up above, though, that bad handling, while sad, is not surprising in any way.
As for the GoFundMe raising enough to more than double the mag's reserves?
Yes, but.
That's a one-off.
Why couldn't Canup get these types of donations before he became the "former" head of fundraising? And, can a GoFundMe be set up to allow "exit interview" type comments? As in "here's why I'm donating," or even more, "why didn't I donate before"? If not, why isn't the website set up for polling or other feedback? I mean, I had no idea things were this bad. I'm sure people who are more inside baseball on Texas Politics than me may have known something, and certainly knew the general turmoil but .... (The Trib's update story lists him as "former," still, and also notes Hernandez Holmes is still leaving the board Friday.)
If you don't have these "exit interviews" or website feedback? I'm not a development director, but I know a lot of this will be one-off donations, otherwise.
And, per the top link? You need more than that.
The Trib notes that last year's Molly awards dinner only raked half of what it used to. And, the Emerson Collective of Laurene Powell Jobs cutting off the pipeline in 2021? In terms of both proactive budget cutting and proactive searches for major replacements, what was or was not done? We KNOW that no website paywalls, no pay charges on email newsletters, and no advertising sales were done.
And, the Observer wasn't the only media site where Jobs either cut back on, or else eliminated totally, her benefice. But, if I remember rightly, there were warning signs before that, and in general, indications that she saw her money as incubator or seed money as much as anything.
More seeming evidence of bad management:
Also that month [October 2022], the Observer received what seemed like a lifeline: a $1 million pledge by the Tejemos Foundation, set up by Greg Wooldridge, a retired investor, and Lynne Dobson, a philanthropist and photojournalist whose family started Whataburger. The couple disbursed $400,000 of the gift soon after, and later asked the magazine for documentation of matching funds and other efforts in order to receive the remaining $600,000, some of which would have gone to cover public relations, marketing and other vital business operations that had been long neglected.
Seriously. It's pounding money down a rathole to give them money right now. They probably need a few new board members, too. But, this is probably all going to be too late.
In the "we're still alive for now" story, the Trib cites Canup:
“The long-standing issues at the Observer, regardless of the personalities who fill the org chart, are structural,” Canup said in an interview before the board reversed its decision. “The board of the Texas Observer has always been informal in its operations. It’s easy for a sense of distrust to develop between the board and the staff, and similarly between the small business and editorial sides of the publication.”
There you go.
And, if it's not? If the GoFundMe staves off destruction for a few months, per everything above, that's not necessarily a good thing.
Further bad management? Hernandez Holmes said significant money had been spent in the past few months without board authorization. Frump "pled guilty," both of these in the update story.
And also there? If she's claiming this:
“My intent in voting for layoffs and hiatus was never about closing down the publication,” she said. “The actions I took as board president were intended to allow space for the Observer to be reconstituted, and reimagined in a more sustainable form, so as to develop a strong business model that could adapt to an ever-evolving media landscape.”
She needs to stay gone. That's either a lie or hugely bad management.
Rapoport notes the one-off issue of the GoFundMe:
“Can those thousands of people sustain support — not just this one big push, but over and over again, because that’s what it’s going to need?” she said. “That’s the million-dollar question.”
I agree.
And, again, nobody's talking about running paid advertising. Nobody's talking about paywalling the website.
Rathole.
==
I very much don't want it to die. But, I want it to REALLY fix itself. It's kind of like the Green Party in that way. It represents, overall, some good ideas (though voter registration and third-party issues is one thing I have NEVER seen the Observer discussed), but it's been run horribly for a decade or more.
Speaking of "Green," the Observer needs to emulate Counterpunch, not The Nation, in that way, and when it writes about specifically political issues, not go down the road of duopoly tribalism.
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Update: Shock me that other than a block-quote from Molly Ivins, John Nichols at the advertising-accepting The Nation doesn't mention the Texas Observer shooting itself in the foot with no-ads purity test.
Also shock me that Gabe Arana, in HIS Nation piece referencing Nichols, ALSO doesn't mention it. And that he gets hypocritical with this:
For those of us at the helm of progressive media, the question now is the same as it has been since Google and Facebook came along and stole all of our advertising money: How do we sustain a fiercely independent press in the age of the Internet?
Dood, if you chose not to sell ads, Facebook and Google stole nothing.
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Update, March 19, 2024: Did they get their requested $317K by the end of last year, per my one comment? They got enough to stay open, but not a lot more, I will gather. More later.
Meanwhile, editorially? They continue to shoot themselves in the foot at times, at least from this leftist-of-sorts perspective.
And, at the one-year mark, the turmoil and the financial struggles are ongoing.
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Update, Aug. 10, 2024: I don't even get their Javascript "please become a
member" screen now. That's after clicking to read more than half a
dozen stories. Instead, there's a "plea box" down at the bottom of each story.
