Kelsey Atherton: is journalism actually dying or is it being aggressively murdered by the dullest minds and deepest pockets in business

"Owner Fortress investment group failed to see the embattled publisher" look if you're named "fortress" your one job is to sell embattled publishers, fuck off www.wsj.com/business/med...

WSJ News Exclusive | Vice Media to Stop Publishing on Vice.com, Plans to Cut Hundreds of Jobswww.wsj.com The cuts follow a failed effort by owner Fortress to sell embattled digital publisher and its brands.

"It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously" publishing at a website you own is the cheapest possible publishing, what are you talking about

is journalism actually dying or is it being aggressively murdered by the dullest minds and deepest pockets in business

I understand that there's genuine frustrations in changing business models anywhere, and the long slow swallowing of ad dollars by Google/Facebook is real, but these abrupt purchases and deaths of viable outlets is mostly vultures buying, saddling with debt, stripping for parts, & declaring a corpse

it reminds me of “movie theaters” in that maybe there really was nothing anyone could do to stop the decline but we’ll never know because the people in charge mutilated them with fatal decisions

What I don’t get is - what parts? Like what was salvaged from VICE that was worth enough to justify the purchase?

I would guess whatever they can get from selling off their copyrighted material. Intellectual property.

Do they still have that office building they renovated in Williamsburg?

Really wish more places were founding nonprofit news agencies like the NV Indy that are structurally protected against such pillaging. It’s not creative destruction if we keep building the same models as the destroyed.

As documented in Wall Street, back in the 80s. www.imdb.com/title/tt0094...

Wall Street (1987) ⭐ 7.3 | Crime, Dramawww.imdb.com 2h 6m | R

The fact we allow the continued existence of private capital is a sign we are a failed state.

i'm old enough to remember the industry bloodletting of 2007/2008 - and it's no surprise that many of those execs who were asleep at the wheel landed very similar cushy gigs...

At the risk of being a “both sides” guy I think it’s a bit of everything. There are real difficulties with making financial sense with journalism and the kind of things that get attention (which has several other issues), and we have some of the dumbest and least able to adapt people.

Even as bad as management can and has been, I have a bit of a hard time with every time Journalists are like “if they had just done X or not screwed up Y would have made good” while it happens time and time again. As if otherwise we’d be filled with highly successful magazines and newspapers, etc

An additional related problem is that with how hard it is to “make it” as a journalist, and often involves expensive places to live and many times prestigious degrees or connections. More than ever it’s made up of people from wealthy and well off backgrounds for journalists themselves.

I agree with this person.

Yeah, tl;dr…

nuance in everything, sure. but i've been covering this industry for a long time and working in this industry for a long time. there is a lot of stupidity and decisions made on bad assumptions/greedy incentives (see: ad tech).

Yeah, I can’t imagine the stories of incompetence you have seen, just from Twitter and Podcasts I’ve heard all kinds of wild stuff. But on the other hand it seems like that’s the “story” almost every time, and I start to have a hard time believing there was just 1 weird trick.

To really make it almost paradoxical I would say a major part of the problem is almost certainly schools and journalists doing an incredibly bad job at educating even most basics of economic and financial literacy, made worse by the problem I’ve stated of a lot of journalists being raised well off

To be fair one of the dumbest media execs I've ever met has gotten, like, three major jobs in succession, crashed them, and always seems to get a new one right away because he's trading on some successes and relationships he made in the 00s.

Really smart, talented friends have applied for the same jobs, but he's the one getting them because investment groups would rather hire a former exec with a stained past than someone who hasn't been an exec before.

i know the feeling intimately

This is also a very fair and honest statement. I’m sure some people also exist to basically only to be the ones that have to do the axing and take the stink of failure.

I remember entering the industry 2011, seeing all of the few jobs taken by people who entered in 2009 and not having opportunities and then it turned into musical chairs.

if folks really wanted to know how the business truly works, they'd look at chief revenue officers and their direct reports from that time and see where they are now....

Exactly.....would also be interesting to look into why they bounced from some jobs to others. The amount of dudes that get kicked out of one major title for harassment only to land at a similar job a month later is certainly non-zero.

"Democracy dies in darkness" seems now to be a mission statement rather than a warning.

Indeed. There's plenty of money in journalism to do then news and pay the workers. There isn't enough for investors to get rich.

I keep hearing this over and over; and I certainly believe it is a major part of it, but at some point I have to at least consider the possibility it might be overblown, gets too much focus, and ignores some of the other real problems.

Which "this" are you hearing? I don't quite follow you.

That there is all this money there and it is so easy to pre profitable, but it’s always just a management screw ups and greed. Along with the related claims that it’s because Capitalism demands huge profits and infinite growth every-time.

maybe you keep hearing it because it's true? newspapers can be stable, but don't have the infinite growth potential that finance bros mindlessly seek

Is there some truth to it? Probably Is it anywhere close to all of the problem? No Do some people enjoy that they can act snarky and smarter than everyone else by making the claim, feed into the idea that there is one simple evil that just needs to be defeated for peace on Earth? Yes

Ah, yes agreed.

Absolutely aggressively murdered by billionaires and despots. They don't mind reports of city hall meetings but investigative journalism scares the crap out of them.

Yes

I like how your question transforms the issue from a sad thing we can wring our hands over but do nothing about into an outrageous thing we need to get angry about and fight against.

knowyourmeme.com/memes/people...

People Die If They Are Killedknowyourmeme.com People Die if They are Killed is a memorable quote uttered by the character Shuriy Emiya in the 2006 anime series Fate/Stay Night by studio Deen. The quote is a result of translation issues from Japan...

Murdered, imo

I think if you’re able to make millions of dollars from a company based on others peoples work, you should also be held financially liable for killing it.

Whether you’ve been murdered by an adept serial killer or fallen down the stairs, you’re still dead

More fattened up and slaughtered.

My guess is the latter.

Murdered/brought to heel

“Aggressively” murdered? As opposed to “passively” or “lovingly” murdered?

The laid off staff should regroup, pool resources and relaunch as a new web site ("Voice of Vice"? "MoreVice"?) and become really successful, then sell (again) to the rich idiots, who will shut it down. Rinse and repeat, getting richer every time. If moguls want to throw money at em, take it!

I take it you missed the funeral in 2016.

that was the year I got my first full-time staff job at a publication (after not getting a job I did 10 interviews for at Foxtrot Alpha, interviews starting before the murder of Gawker and continuing in its wake.)

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