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Tag: media business

  • Adam Moss Is Seeking Inspiration

    Adam Moss Is Seeking Inspiration

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    One of the works of art in Moss’s book is a Times front page from May 2020, which saw the paper memorialize nearly 100,000 COVID deaths by filling A1 with the names of 1,000 people who’d lost their lives to the virus. Moss had wanted to include a public memorial in the book—he’d thought of Maya Lin and the Vietnam Memorial—and then this cover happened. “And I thought, Well, this is the Vietnam Memorial, except it’s in the pages of a newspaper that I used to work in, where something like this was, I mean, really inconceivable,” says Moss. It was “a little atypical for the book, but I was interested in it anyway,” he adds. In his interview for the book, Dean Baquet, then the paper’s executive editor, rewards Moss’s instincts. “I actually thought that page was trying to portray a feeling. Nobody was going to read it name by name. It was like a Rothko,” he tells Moss. “And the longer you look at a Rothko, the sadder you get.”

    Moss’s pages, too, evoke a feeling—the frenzy of the creative process—and provide a tinge of nostalgia. With the book’s layers of small type, arrows directing you through graphics, and annotations and dialogue in footnotes, the reading experience is not unlike the one you’d have with New York in the Moss era. (In fact, one of the designers of this book, Luke Hayman, previously worked as the magazine’s design director.) “Very early on in my career, I developed an interest, which I’m not sure that all editors have,” says Moss, “to continue to use a magazine as a canvas to try new things. I was always interested in new story forms—always. [It] just kind of was a fetish, almost.” This book, says Moss, made use of some of those magazine tools. “A reader comes to a book with different sets of expectations, but can we push it?” asks Moss. “If I had done it as straight text, I think the book would be much less interesting, but also it would not feel as much an expression of me.”

    Courtesy of Penguin Press.

    When I recently met Moss at a downtown restaurant not far from New York’s old office, it had been five years, almost to the day, since he’d stepped down from the magazine. Under his leadership, New York didn’t just navigate the transition from city weekly to digital publisher; it thrived in it, launching a number of online verticals—The Cut, Vulture, The Strategist, Grub Street, Intelligencer—that function as stand-alone properties, with some also serving as sections in the print magazine (which, since 2014, has published every other week). Moss, like the magazine he edited for 15 years, is obsessive and curious, with a twinkle in one eye and knowing skepticism in the other. 

    “I had gotten older,” Moss, now 66, says after I ask why he left New York. “There was more and more that the editors were bringing me that I didn’t relate to, didn’t understand, because they came out of the experience of a younger generation of staff members, which would translate to a younger generation of readers,” he adds. “The only way I know how to edit a magazine is by editing for myself.” And he was sick of the responsibilities that came with being a boss, particularly the one requiring him to spend a lot of time on business strategy. “I was still doing journalism, but I wasn’t doing it enough,” he says. A bicycle accident in 2017 also put things into perspective. “For the first time, I imagined myself being fragile, perishable. So I felt I had another chapter, but not that many more,” he explains.

    Does he miss New York? “I miss the people generally. I miss specific people specifically. I miss the ‘let’s put on a show’ aspect of it,” says Moss. He doesn’t miss the news cycle much, though, and has enjoyed being “liberated from the gerbil world,” as he puts it. Still, his brain remains in editor mode. “It forms everything into stories and almost everything into narrative. And so I don’t turn that off,” he says. “And I’m glad I can—he never listens to me, but I can just write a little note to [New York editor in chief] David Haskell and say, ‘Hey, have you thought of this?’” He’s also been consulting for other journalism operations, including The Washington Post’s Opinions section. (Editorial page editor David Shipley is his friend and former colleague.) “I’m kind of like a constant, relatively well-informed focus group,” Moss says of his role.

    Otherwise, he’s been enjoying his free time. “I go to museums. I go to movies. I hang out with my friends. I go to painting classes,” Moss says. “My quixotic painting thing is really a big part of my life. I don’t want to pretend otherwise, even though I am embarrassed.” (So much so that he has yet to share his work publicly.)

    I ask him if he’s found the answer he set out for. “I’ve gotten one part of the answer, which is that the work of art is the work…. It’s the most banal observation, but that it’s not about the thing you make; it’s about the making. It took me three years to figure out that that was actually true,” he says. “And let me tell you, it has changed my life.”

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • “People Are Disgusted”: Why Washington Post Staff Walked Out

    “People Are Disgusted”: Why Washington Post Staff Walked Out

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    The Guild is asking for 4% raises a year for three years, while the company is offering 2.25% for the first year of the contract, and 2% the next two years. “We deserve a contract that has job security protections and that respects seniority and the value of the employees who have given multiple decades of their lives to this company,” said Kaplan. “We deserve a buyout process that is fair and truly voluntary, and that is not deceptively a worse deal than the company claims it is. And most of all we just deserve to be dealt with fairly by our employer.”

    “We respect the rights of our Guild-covered colleagues to engage in this planned one-day strike. We will make sure our readers and customers are as unaffected as possible,” a Post spokesperson said in a statement. “The Post’s goal remains the same as it has from the start of our negotiations: to reach an agreement with the Guild that meets the needs of our employees and the needs of our business.”

    With hundreds of staffers pledging support for the walkout earlier this week, a second Post staffer said “it’s going to be noticeable,” but questioned “whether it’s going to be effective.” In some cases, entire departments, such as the Metro and investigative teams, committed to walking out, Post reporter Marissa Lang said, as did “colleagues on the commercial side, and in the print plant,” who walked off their jobs in the early hours of Thursday morning. “A walkout of 750 people touches every part of the Washington Post organization,” said Lang. Earlier this week, Post Guild released an open letter asking readers to “respect our walkout by not crossing the picket line,” meaning “do not engage with any Washington Post content.” If you did read the Post on Thursday, though, you may have noticed some stories—like one about a new crime center in DC to the paper’s own coverage of its labor protest —had a general byline: “By Washington Post Staff.” Either reporters had their names stripped off stories, or the generically bylined pieces were written by editors.

    Staffers I spoke to had mixed feelings about how much this action will really do. “I think people are genuinely impressed by how this young contention of leaders has revived the union, and doubled its membership,” said a third Post staffer. But “a lot of the same people are disappointed to see that they’re acting out in this way that doesn’t seem to be connected to any real prospect of progress on pay of jobs.” I’m told that there was internal second-guessing on Thursday among reporters who’d agreed to walk out but were now wondering, among other things, what would come next. Some high-profile staffers signed onto the strike out of fear of being publicly called out if they didn’t participate, according to a Post staffer. A piece in Semafor did just that to two top New York Times reporters, Peter Baker and Michael Shear, last year when the two opted out of the Gray Lady union’s walkout—an article, the Post staffer said, that had been circulating in recent days.

    Asked about the Guild’s plan following the strike, Lang said they would “extend another one-day invitation to the company to sit down with us and meaningfully bargain over the terms of our contract. If they refuse and continue to engage in some of the behavior we’ve seen, we’re prepared to continue to pressure them,” she said.

    The Post Guild’s decision to walk off the job amid lagging contract negotiations comes nearly one year to the day that the Times’s unionized staffers rallied outside the newspaper’s headquarters in their own historic act of protest. Several months later, the Times’s bitter labor fight came to an end as the staff union and company agreed to a contract. In August, Axios reported that members of the Times union briefed staffers from the Post union as the Post considered a walkout of its own.

    There are distinctions between the staff appeals at the two papers. Part of the Times union’s rallying call last year was tied to the company having increased compensation for some top officers and increased its dividend payout to shareholders. The Post’s walkout, on the other hand, comes as the company has admitted it’s been operating on faulty financial projections and is buying out—or, potentially, laying off—about 10% of its workforce. While one Post staffer acknowledged its New York–based rival is on firmer financial footing these days, they also pointed out the Times is “not owned by the second richest guy in the world.”

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • How Jessica Lessin’s The Information Has Survived a Decade of Media Tumult

    How Jessica Lessin’s The Information Has Survived a Decade of Media Tumult

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    The OpenAI saga was, in many ways, a perfect story for The Information. Reporters at the influential tech site spent the week of Thanksgiving obsessively chronicling the chaos inside the company behind ChatGPT, after its board of directors abruptly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. Five days later, Altman, the generative AI poster boy, was reinstated. By then, The Information had published 17 exclusive news articles on the company that had been picked up hundreds of times by other news outlets. “His firing was announced, and then everyone on my team was sending me all these tweets, where people were saying, ‘Oh, if The Information gets the scoop on this, I’ll subscribe,’ or ‘I really hope my Information subscription’s worth the money,’” editor in chief Jessica Lessin recalls. “And so it really felt like game on.” Lessin—who has followed Altman from the start, writing the first extensive profile on him back in 2005—supported her team throughout the week by, among other things, “reporting in bathrooms while serving my friendsgiving” and at the ENT doctor with her four-year-old.

    The small-but-mighty Silicon Valley publication, which turns 10 this week, has spent the past decade rolling out ad-free scoops and analysis to a targeted audience willing to cough up $399 a year for total access. Back in 2013, when Lessin left The Wall Street Journal to start her company, it was generally accepted that “legacy media was where serious journalism was. And then there were a couple of upstarts trying to do new things, but trying to fuel it with venture capital and ad dollars,” she says, adding, “Those businesses have evaporated.” But The Information, fueled by subscriptions, has survived and seemingly paved the way for a new cohort of outlets offering niche industry reporting at a premium price, from Puck to Punchbowl News. Today, more outlets, like Axios and Politico, are also offering B2B subscription products along with their free content.

    “There were a number of media start-ups around that moment, and she was very unconventional—that she was doing paid subscriptions and was not that interested in social,” says Ben Smith, a former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, who last year founded Semafor, one of the start-ups in which Lessin has invested. “It kind of pains me to say it, but obviously, she’s been totally vindicated, and most of her competitors are no longer around.” Those former competitors include BuzzFeed News, the Pulitzer Prize–winning online news site that shut down in April. There was also Recode, a brand Vox retired in March; Quartz, which is still around but has changed hands multiple times over the years, most recently to G/O Media; and Vice, which, the Times, while reporting that the company had filed for bankruptcy in May, referred to as a “decayed digital colossus.” Lessin was ahead of her time with the business model she adopted and the story she wanted to own. “She’d come out of The Wall Street Journal, and there was a sense that The Information was applying the kind of East Coast financial reporting rigor to an ecosystem that the East Coast publications didn’t really seem to understand very well,” says Smith. Longtime subscriber Roelof Botha, the head of Sequoia Capital and former CFO of PayPal, agrees, noting that when Lessin started The Information, “The conventional wisdom at the time was, Oh, you’re not going to build a successful subscription-only business at that price point. Who knows if the market is big enough for people who are deeply passionate about technology news of the sorts that they would cover?” He adds, “She was on the right side of history.”

    “There is no CEO of any company of significance that was not paying attention to OpenAI over the past week,” Lessin tells me. “I think that was a fundamental bet we took 10 years ago—that you cannot be ahead or even keep up in business without immersing yourself in what’s happening in these companies and technologies.”

    Today, per Lessin, The Information has 475,000 active readers (i.e., paid subscribers and unpaid newsletter subscribers). According to Lessin, they expect to be profitable this year. The company will grow its overall revenue by 30% year over year in 2023. They’ve been disciplined when it comes to growth, with only 65 full-time employees working across offices in San Francisco, New York, and Hong Kong, as well as remotely. Lessin is focused on growing The Information’s presence in Asia; they currently have three people assigned to the Hong Kong bureau and two hires in the works. Lessin, meanwhile, traveled with US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo to China in August—a trip she later recapped during a special event for subscribers.

    She’s also focused on building out The Information’s finance coverage, especially following their coverage of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis earlier this year. That was a “real eye-opener for me,” says Lessin, both in terms of how they were serving their audience—“a lot of subscribers said we saved them a lot of money,” she notes—and that they could compete on the finance beat, which she says has “led to a host of coverage around the banking sector overall.” Legacy media outlets like the Times, the Journal, and Bloomberg, says Lessin, are “going to be around forever,” but “they’re not as relevant” in “my world, and I think in business,” because of the size of the audience they aim to serve. “That model really limits how indispensable you can be, especially to a certain class of reader,” says Lessin.

    Among that targeted class is Jeff Bezos. “I read it all the time and have been a subscriber for years,” the Amazon founder told me in an email. “Jessica has done a terrific job. Always insightful on tech.” Another longtime subscriber is Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings. “Check it every day,” he tells me, noting that he’s “thrilled from a business-model standpoint that she’s succeeded”—he is, after all, “a subscriber guy”—but “as a reader, what I care about is the thoughtfulness. She curates amazing reporters, and the pieces, from my perspective, are written in-depth, as opposed to clickbaity. Probably subscription is the key to that because then they don’t get paid on clicks,” says Hastings. “People care enough about the stories to continue to renew.”

    Lessin maintains full ownership of the company and says she has no plans to sell. “I’m in this for the long term,” she says, a view that she says has been key to the site’s success. “You need the talent, you need the right business model, and kind of that alignment that we’re not going to go chase the latest fancy revenue thing,” she says. “Over the course of the 10 years, I’ve seen every legacy publication build a Snapchat team, and then a TikTok team, and then a video team. We built none of those teams and instead hired journalists or paid our journalists what they were worth. It’s a different formula, and it takes a lot of patience.”

    It’s worth noting that Lessin used her own money—“less than $1 million,” she previously said—to start The Information. Her father is a partner at the private equity giant TPG, and her husband, the tech entrepreneur Sam Lessin, won big on Facebook stock he received when Harvard pal Mark Zuckerberg bought his start-up in 2010. And there’s a perception that Lessin has worked to distance herself from—that she’s too close to the people she covers. Her personal relationship with Zuckerberg, for one, has come under scrutiny. “You learn to have dinner with people one night and then edit a tough but true piece about them the next day,” Lessin says, when I asked about the dynamic. “That’s what we do time and time again.”

    “Finding the truth and telling people why it matters is a fabulous business. It’s just really hard.” That’s why, she suggests, others haven’t been able to figure it out in the same way. “They don’t want to sit in a closet during Thanksgiving taking source calls,” she tells me.

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • How the New York Times Union Finally Got a Pay Raise

    How the New York Times Union Finally Got a Pay Raise

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    Tuesday night, after protracted negotiations and public disputes, the bitter labor fight within The New York Times came to an end: The staff union, which represents more than 1,400 employees, and the company agreed to a tentative contract. Since the Times Guild’s last contract expired in March 2021, but particularly over the past year, outrage has spilled out into public view, with journalists appealing to senior leaders to get more involved back in September and more than 1,100 staffers walking off the job a few months later, a historic act of protest not seen at the paper in more than 40 years. And only a few months ago, in March, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger argued for bringing in a neutral third party to help reach a deal, citing the “troubling lack of progress,” according to an email reported by The Wall Street Journal. Strike chatter was reaching a fever pitch, as were divisions within the newsroom. Now the Guild Slack was full of celebratory messages and solidarity emojis. What changed? 

    I’m told that a major breakthrough was a tiered wage proposal floated by the Guild in March. “The notion of trying to find some path through this, that maybe didn’t look like everybody getting the same raise, is one that had bubbled up in a couple of places over the past six months,” says one reporter. As negotiations dragged on, the Guild—which, before the tiered proposal, was proposing across-the-board raises—decided to take the idea more seriously. Under the new proposal, members earning less than $100,000 will receive raises of 12.5%; members earning $100,000 to $119,999 will receive raises of 11.6%; members earning $120,000 to $159,999 will receive raises of 11.2%; and members earning $160,000 or more will receive raises of 10.6%. In other words, everyone gets raises, with the biggest for the lowest earners—who tended to also be those most in support of aggressive union action, like striking—and slightly smaller ones for the higher-paid members. “This approach seemed like a way of satisfying both groups: getting a deal done and lowering the overall cost of it in a way that maybe the company could go with, and at the same time getting the raises for the lower-paid folks who really needed them,” says the reporter. “The tenor of negotiations changed pretty significantly after that,” they add. “The gambit worked on some level.” 

    Multiple Guild members were involved in developing the tiered idea and working out the mechanics. But people I spoke to specifically shouted out Times economics reporter Ben Casselman as someone who advocated for the proposal within the bargaining committee—and advocated particularly well among higher-earning members who stood to get smaller raises. “He read the room really well on who was willing to strike and who was not willing to strike,” one reporter says of Casselman. “It’s a very decent deal for the higher-paid reporters, because the deal won actual raises on salaries, as opposed to a class minimum,” that reporter says. In the past, raises were based on scale minimums, not actual salaries, which disproportionately hurt higher earners; raises on actual salaries, which the company agreed to last fall, disproportionately helped them. The tiered structure helped offset that a bit by disproportionately benefitting lower earners. Many of the high performers at the Times, a senior Times reporter tells me, saw the tiered proposal as “an essential compromise at this moment.” 

    The tiered proposal was, of course, not the only thing that moved the ball forward. There’d also been continued collective action—like with a petition that over 1,000 people signed about six weeks ago—as well as the looming possibility of a strike. Earlier this spring, the Times Guild canvassed membership as to whether they were willing to authorize such an act. “They mobilized dozens of us to go around and just talk to the members about whether they wanted to do it,” says one Times reporter. A large majority of the membership was willing to strike, and wanted to proceed with a vote to authorize one, but “there were some key pockets of skepticism,” the reporter says, particularly among the top tiers of the newsroom. 

    And management had been having conversations with members on their own, during which “they heard pretty consistently that people are really unhappy, morale is low, and people blame the company for not getting it done,” says one reporter, noting this was coming “in some cases from people who were pretty skeptical of the Guild.”

    “We’re pleased we have reached a tentative agreement that ensures The New York Times will continue to be a place that provides a best-in-class mix of pay and benefits for our journalists and that rewards our NewsGuild-represented colleagues for their contributions to the Times’ success,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement to Vanity Fair.

    The union will vote to ratify the contract in the coming days. However, it’s clear, in conversations with Times employees following the news, that, as happy as people are to have reached a deal, the contentious fight between the company and its staff—and at times within the staff union—has left a mark on the newsroom. “There’s a big sense of relief that the deal is done because it’s been going on for so long, and a real sense of relief among a contingent of reporters that we didn’t go on strike,” one Times reporter tells me. But “it was just pretty awful how the whole thing went down, and it left a lot of scorched earth in the newsroom.” 

    “I’m delighted with the contract we’ve won, but irate about the intensity with which we had to fight for every single syllable of this deal,” says finance reporter Stacy Cowley, the unit secretary and a member of the bargaining committee. “It’s infuriating, and insulting, to see this company spending hundreds of millions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends while making its own employees fight for years for living wages and fair raises.” (Rhoades Ha noted that while the company has authorized stock buybacks and dividends, “the company hasn’t spent most of what was authorized.”)

    The contract agreement, says one of the Times reporters I spoke to, “is a step towards redressing major pay inequities that have really afflicted the most loyal and longest serving reporters in the last decade. But it’s only a start.”

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • “How Do We Get Every Second of Your Day?”: The New York Times Goes All In on a New Podcast App

    “How Do We Get Every Second of Your Day?”: The New York Times Goes All In on a New Podcast App

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    The average New York Times reader, as the Times sees it, checks their push notifications first thing in the morning, scrolls through the internet while making coffee, then puts in their headphones to listen to something as they cook, clean, commute, or walk the dog. Stephanie Preiss, a Times executive in charge of the paper’s audio business, has thought about this routine a lot. She keeps a chart of it—the day in the life of a “smart, curious person”—above her desk at home. The paper has long had the news alerts covered, and it’s all over social media and news aggregators, but “what does it look like for the Times to have embedded itself deeply into every single moment?” asked Preiss. “How do we get every second of your day?” The Times is betting on a new app, New York Times Audio, launching Wednesday, after nearly a year and a half in a private beta. 

    The app is a home for the Times’ growing audio empire, from new shows across the news and opinion sections, to Serial, which the company acquired in 2020, to its purchase of Audm, the service that turns news articles into audio, to establishing a strategic partnership with This American Life. The Times intends to maintain its audience at the top of the podcast publisher charts as well as its wide distribution and the advertising business that it runs on the backs of all of that. “But we believe that—kind of similar to what we’ve done in text journalism, if you will—we can start to move our most engaged users into our own apps and platforms,” Preiss said.  

    Courtesy of The New York Times.

    Still, it’s a weird time to get into a podcast app business. The age of “There’s an App for That” feels squarely a bygone of the aughts. And this one has debuted to the public at a precarious time for the audio industry. “Podcast Companies, Once Walking on Air, Feel the Strain of Gravity,” read a recent headline in the Times. “The dumb money is gone, the easy money has slowed down, and the smart money has seen some pullback,” podcast guru Eric Nuzum told Vanity Fair. NPR and Spotify both laid off staff and canceled shows. 

    “Obviously we’re not immune to macroeconomic trends and headwinds affecting the digital media landscape broadly,” said Preiss, “but we do experience that differently.” She cites the Times’ success at the top of the charts with “a fraction of the number of shows” of competitors, and its dual advertising and subscription business. Even now, the Times is seeing “increased demand for new ad products,” Preiss said, and “historic new audience heights,” with many Times shows, including The Daily, seeing “their highest audience ever, including during the insane peaks of early COVID,” in Q1. The only way to access the app is if you subscribe to the Times in some way (either for news or in a bundle with its other features). For now, the Times is not selling the New York Times Audio app as a standalone subscription, though it is sunsetting the Audm app and folding it into the new program.

    Though not everyone is buying into this rosy picture. “I am very suspicious of the claim that the Times is seeing increased demand for new ad products on the audio side, when the evidence is clear that’s not the case,” one veteran podcast producer told me, noting that “many of their ad spots are empty, or only filled with New York Times ads.” Advertising for podcasts is dropping across the industry significantly, they said. Semafor recently pointed out that The Daily has been running without a full slate of paid ads in recent months. Preiss rejected the notion, noting that for years it has been running “consumer messaging” related to the Times’ other offerings.

    The NYT Audio app will have exclusives, including a new daily news show called The Headlines, hosted by veteran journalist Annie Correal; it’s a roughly eight-minute sister program to The Daily—though with less “handholding,” as Correal put it—spotlighting about three items, and the reporters behind them, per episode. Unsurprisingly, research has shown that shorts are consistently among the most popular content, pushing the Times to go even smaller than its breakout 20- to 25-minute morning show, which inspired copycats at outlets like Vox and The Washington Post—and which the paper has been interested in building off of for years, kicking around ideas like an afternoon show that hasn’t come to fruition. Headlines, says director of audio Paula Szuchman, “is really the first, I would say, expansion of the Daily universe.” The app will also be home to sub-10-minute stories about what to cook, read, watch, and more; a recent one featured Times Food reporter Priya Krishna sharing her secret to making perfectly cooked rice in the microwave. 

    I’ve been playing around on the app the past few days, and it does, at risk of sounding too woo-woo, feel like diving into the Times universe. On Tuesday, I hit play on the playlist curated each weekday morning and was taken from the day’s Headlines, on bank collapses and the war in Ukraine, to The Daily, where Mexico bureau chief Natalie Kitroeff was reporting from the southern border on the day Title 42 ended, to a “reporter reads,” in which publishing reporter Alexandra Alter read a piece she cowrote with Elizabeth Harris about an author who was asked by Scholastic to delete references to racism from her book, to a short by This American Life. “We hope that this will expand the universe of subscribers, but I think that we are very interested in making sure that Times subscribers have a better experience of audio, and one that is an introduction to Times journalism, than they would if they were just to start searching online for news podcasts or culture podcasts,” said Preiss. 

    At the very least, the NYT Audio app felt like a smoother experience than Apple’s much-derided podcast app. It felt, too, like a huge investment incongruous with the state of the audio industry—one perhaps only the Times is in the position to make right now. 

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • Inside the Very Tough Business of Trying to Disrupt Media

    Inside the Very Tough Business of Trying to Disrupt Media

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    On Monday, Grid News, a one-year-old online news start-up, went dark; its articles and teal branding disappeared, and its web address redirected to a navy blue page with bright yellow text that read: “Grid has been acquired by The Messenger.”

    It all happened suddenly. Last Wednesday, Grid staff got on a Zoom meeting for what some expected to be an announcement of new hires. Perhaps executives from IMI, the Abu Dhabi–based majority investor, had found a new chairman to replace Grid CEO and cofounder Mark Bauman, who departed back in November. Instead, they would learn, IMI had found a new owner: the yet-to-be launched news site by media entrepreneur Jimmy Finkelstein.

    Finkelstein joined the meeting, as did his politics editor Marty Kady, but they didn’t take questions. IMI would make a minority investment in The Messenger, which is set to launch in May, as part of the deal. The acquisition came as a surprise to Grid staffers, who said they had been told their start-up, which had roughly 50 employees, had a two- to three-year runway. One staffer I spoke to hadn’t yet heard of The Messenger, the latest media start-up pitching itself as a nonpartisan alternative to what’s currently out there in a glowing announcement in The New York Times. The Gray Lady gave Grid a similar treatment when it launched last January, when the cofounders said they wanted to give readers a “fuller” picture of the news than mainstream media offered. 

    By the time staffers signed off the Zoom, the acquisition had already been announced to the public; Semafor’s Max Tani tweeted the press release of the deal minutes into the 10 a.m. staff call. Thus commenced roughly 72 hours of chaos: Some in the Grid newsroom left the meeting unclear whether they’d have jobs at The Messenger, or when to stop publishing, or why the acquisition was happening. Grid cofounder and executive editor Laura McGann was on the Wednesday call, but she didn’t say anything, according to two staffers. She made no public statements after the announcement, either—no one from Grid’s management did—raising some eyebrows in the industry. “My priority is figuring this out for the staff,” McGann told me. “I am not up to speed on every detail of this merger, and certainly wasn’t when it was announced, and I’m not going to put myself out there as an authoritative voice when I don’t have all the answers. Certainly the business side was taking the lead.”

    Finkelstein and Kady came to Grid’s DC offices the following day to take questions; Grid staff said new leadership emphasized that their idea of a successful news model was one that’s scoopy and fast—neither of which, staffers noted, were consistent with Grid’s focus and intended mission. Some writers spent Friday downloading their articles, not knowing when they’d become inaccessible. By this week, some Grid staffers were still unclear on what they should be doing, with little to no communication from leadership at The Messenger. 

    Come Monday, the weekend’s episode of Succession—in which the Roy kids plan to launch a “high-visibility, execution-dependent disrupter news brand” and “bespoke information hub” called The Hundred, only to promptly abandon their start-up at the opportunity to buy a legacy media brand—felt all too poignant. (You’ve probably heard Kendall’s description by now: “Substack meets MasterClass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.”) Grid’s end feels like a critical point in today’s venture capital–funded media landscape. There’s no shortage of media start-ups claiming to shake up the industry, getting tens of millions in funding, and building full-fledged teams. Now, the snake is starting to eat itself; left unclear is what happens to the journalism, and the writers who produce it. 

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • Stephen A. Smith Thinks You, Too, Could Be Stephen A. Smith

    Stephen A. Smith Thinks You, Too, Could Be Stephen A. Smith

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    Less than a minute into discussing his upcoming memoir, Stephen A. Smith set out the facts: no ghostwriter, no help, did it himself. The boisterous ESPN personality got his start at newspapers, so Straight Shooter, which will be published on Tuesday, marks a return to writing, as well as an occasion to revisit the sometimes-jagged path that led to his current status as one of the most prominent faces in sports media.

    “What I want you to remember is the internships at the Winston-Salem Journal, at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, at the Greensboro News & Record,” Smith said, tracing his career arc in a recent interview at his New Jersey home. “From Temple basketball and football to a backup NBA writer, from a backup NBA writer to a beat writer…”

    And so on, including being let go from ESPN in 2009 and returning in 2011 for what has been a lucrative second stint with the network. Over the last several years, Smith has become more than a TV fixture, as his monologues, arguments, and missteps often play out as sports stories unto themselves, especially on social media. We spoke in his home movie theater, just past the Lamborghini and Range Rover in the garage.

    Nonetheless, Smith refuted any suggestion that he’s taking a victory lap with the book. He writes at length about his mother’s influence on him and what he learned about sports and talking during his childhood in Hollis, Queens. He recounts how he and his mother, when he was about 10 years old, learned that his father had another family a short walk away from his own. He tends to speak of his career in the same terms he applies to athletes—only as good as the last result.

    The memoir is a distillation of that competitive ethos. He renders ESPN auditions and politics as game-seven material. He describes himself and his former sparring partner Skip Bayless as “unlikeable characters,” and recalls how the duo rose to new heights as they stoked each others’ provocations while cohosting First Take on ESPN from 2012 to 2016. Bayless then moved to Fox Sports 1, where he now cohosts a morning show with former NFL player Shannon Sharpe. Conflict is the baseline in this arena, but Sharpe’s objections to Bayless’s widely criticized tweet last week in the wake of Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s on-field collapse have seemed more serious, and Sharpe missed an episode during the immediate aftermath. 

    “To be candid,” Smith writes in Straight Shooter, “we capitalize on the kind of polarization people supposedly abhor.” Surrounded by a Sugar Ray Robinson poster and a popcorn machine, he reclined in one of his theater seats as he discussed the nature of that gift among other questions that his book raises. These are edited and condensed excerpts from the conversation.

    Vanity Fair: You start the book, and you say that people have been asking you about doing a memoir for a while, but it wasn’t until your mother died in 2017 that you would consider doing it. Can you walk me through the series of events then?

    Stephen A. Smith: I was so depressed. I was really, really going through it from the standpoint of, my mom and I were pretty close. And she’s the greatest woman that I’ve ever known. And for her to be gone. I had lost my brother in 1992 to a car accident and that was devastating enough, but I didn’t have any idea how I would feel. And when my mother passed away, it was just a pall, it was like a death sentence. I never felt as miserable as I felt. And I had to hide it every day. Because I was on TV. For at least the first year, I cried every day. I just really didn’t care that much. I would go through moments during the day where I didn’t care about life at all. The only thing that kept me going was my daughters, my family, my loved ones. After about a year in, I finally caved and I went to therapy. I was having to sit down, me of all people. Demonstrative, outspoken, talkative. And suddenly, I’m in a place where I’m mellow, and I’m just sad. The therapist had to get me to talk because I was just out of it. So it was almost like I had to be revived.

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    Dan Adler

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  • What Happened to The New York Times’ Media Column?

    What Happened to The New York Times’ Media Column?

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    It was this time last year that New York Times media columnist Ben Smith announced he’d be giving up one of the most coveted jobs in journalism. The former BuzzFeed editor’s abrupt departure quickly sparked a guessing game among media-watchers and members of the newsroom as to who would take his place. While Smith went on to build and launch Semafor, his new media start-up with cofounder Justin Smith, the Times has yet to fill his old slot. 

    I’m told people involved with hiring have solicited beat memos from journalists both inside and outside the paper, though it’s unclear what, if anything, has come of them. A few names outside have emerged as contenders, including the Washington Post media writer (and former Vanity Fair special correspondent) Sarah Ellison, former CNN anchor Brian Stelter, and Puck media columnist Dylan Byers; all three had conversations with newsroom leaders, according to sources. (Semafor’s Max Tani reported earlier on potential candidates in Smith’s new media newsletter, which is now blasted out on Sunday nights around the same time his old Times column used to appear online.) I’m told that Byers was in talks with management about the job but took himself out of the running late last year. Stelter, meanwhile, has had additional meetings with the Times in recent weeks. 

    It’s surprising for such a high-profile perch—one that Smith made a weekly destination for media junkies not seen since the David Carr era—to be dormant for this long. A Times insider last year told me that Smith’s departure presented an opportunity “for rethinking the focus” of its signature column. And yet, one person who talked to the Times for the gig told me they got the impression that the Times was still trying to figure out what they were doing with the column—and looking for a columnist to come to them with a clear vision for it. “We continue to seek to fill the position,” a Times spokesperson told me, “but don’t have anything further to share on our personnel processes.”

    Meanwhile, the paper’s media coverage is without a permanent media editor ever since editor Jim Windolf moved to a new role in Styles about a year ago. Joe Plambeck, an editor on the Business desk, has been editing a lot of the section’s copy in the interim. The Times approached Financial Times US business editor Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson about the media editor job, according to a source familiar with the information. (Edgecliffe-Johnson declined to comment.)

    Perhaps, one contributing factor to the delay is the number of cooks in the kitchen—among those involved in the columnist hiring process is business editor Ellen Pollock, deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick, and, of course, executive editor Joe Kahn—and the fact that the Times doesn’t seem to know what it even wants the column to be. That’s in stark contrast to Smith’s appointment, which famously came together after then executive editor Dean Baquet, knowing exactly what he wanted, took Smith out to a midwinter Lambs Club lunch. 

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • “The Sulzbergers Must Hate This”: Scenes From The New York Times Picket Line

    “The Sulzbergers Must Hate This”: Scenes From The New York Times Picket Line

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    A sea of red shirts filled the half block outside The New York Times headquarters in Manhattan, spilling out onto the street; Scabby, the 12-foot inflatable rat with bloodshot eyes and a festering underbelly sat next to a cardboard box of extra signs: “NEW YORK TIMES WALKS OUT.” On Thursday, after months of building newsroom frustrations over stalled contract negotiations, the Times Guild walked off the job, a historic act of protest not seen at the paper in more than 40 years. Workers in the union told their readers to keep off the Times website, forgo the crossword, and break their Wordle streaks. Reporters clarified that any articles published today with their names on it were written in advance. Outside the office, photographers and cameramen hung from the scaffolding with eyes over the crowd; union members shouted for a $65,000 salary floor and improved health care benefits, erupting into cheers any time a truck honked in solidarity. Taking in the scene, a reporter from another magazine muttered, “The Sulzbergers must hate this.” 

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    The union, which represents about 1,450 employees, threatened a work stoppage last week if they could not come to a contract agreement with management before December 8. The Guild said some progress was made during a 12-hour session Tuesday: Management agreed to keep pensions (a key concession to the union after executives attempted to move members to the company’s 401(k) plan) and to expand fertility benefits, but “there was negligible movement” on wages, said finance reporter and bargaining committee member Stacy Cowley, “the issue every single one of our members considers a priority.” On Wednesday, management agreed to meet for a sidebar, a less formal session without observers, but failed to come to an agreement. Their next scheduled session is this coming Tuesday. “We stand ready to bargain sooner if they will,” said Cowley.

    “Hey, AG, I’ve got a hunch, give us raises, not a lunch box” ralliers chanted Thursday, referencing the branded lunch boxes the Times gave out in an attempt to get people back to the office. “Hey, Gray Lady, time to pay me.” It’s a “bittersweet day,” Bill Baker, unit chair of the Times guild, told the crowd. “We are not happy to be here, but we are here. We are here nonetheless in solidarity—that is the sweet of the bittersweet.” Guild members said more than 1,100 staffers had signed the pledge to withhold labor for 24 hours. “We organized a small town,” said sports reporter Jenny Vrentas. 

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    As I reported earlier this week, the company’s top brass began executing a contingency plan for the walkout after receiving the Guild’s threatened action; managers had asked writers to file stories early, and looked into how to pull more stories off the wires to fill in anticipated gaps in coverage. “We will produce a robust report on Thursday. But it will be harder than usual,” executive editor Joe Kahn wrote in an email Wednesday evening, as the walkout became official. To an outside observer, the Times’ digital product may have appeared to be humming along on Thursday. But there were some signs of disruption; stories were authored “By The New York Times”—including the paper’s own story about its one-day strike. The liveblog posts were primarily written by international staffers, who are not part of the Guild. Though two prominent journalists in the paper’s DC bureau, chief White House reporter Peter Baker and White House correspondent Michael Shear, refused to participate in the one-day work stoppage, as Semafor reported, and contributed to Thursday’s report.

    During Thursday’s rally, several speakers talked about the financial health of the Times, while remembering sacrifices that staffers made in the past for the company, like furloughs and pay cuts during the financial crisis, to help the Times get through. “When this paper struggled, all of us had to share in its austerity. So when the paper is doing well, the people who work here everywhere to make this place a global phenomenon deserve to share in its success,” said 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones. “If you compare the cost of our proposal to the $150 million approved for stock buybacks this year, then we know that we have the money to do this for our lowest paid employees.” The company has also increased compensation for some top officers and increased its dividend payout to shareholders this year. “We don’t begrudge them that—at least I don’t,” said longtime staff editor Tom Coffey. “We are just asking the company merely to give us what we deserve and what we have earned over the years.”

    Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in a statement to Vanity Fair that the Guild’s proposal “would add more than $100 million in additional costs over the life of the contract” and “make it difficult to sustain our investment in journalism.” Cowley said the company “spent $3.4 million increasing the total compensation of four top executives” in 2021, money that “would cover 2% raises for a year—for our entire membership. Our chief executive’s 2021 raise alone would fully cover the cost of the $65,000 salary floor we are seeking.”

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    Charlotte Klein

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