All that’s old is new again
Hello Rolling Stone, goodbye Bulletin (Newsletter S2 E1)
Happy Thursday. We’re a little over 75% of the way through the year. Halloween approaches. Before you know it, the holidays will be upon us. The vibes out there are frothy, to say the least.
Links
“It’s Gotta Grow to Stay Alive”: Inside Noah Shachtmans’ Raucous Reinvention of Rolling Stone (Vanity Fair) A very real portrait of a publication trying to do two hard things simultaneously: Reinvent a storied brand, and elbow its way into the daily digital news chumstream. I loved this paragraph for its accurate depiction of life in the content mines:
Shachtman is very hands-on when it comes to day-to-day coverage, debating everything from headlines to aggregation ideas in public Slack channels. “Traffic is kinda scary bad for the first time all year. Let’s be a little extra aggressive today, ok?” he wrote, tagging two editors, in one message reviewed by Vanity Fair, chiming in 35 minutes later with a link to a Daily Mail story about a famed rock photographer harassing a Jewish bakery: “Hmmmm maybe?” (They ended up doing an item on it.) The message has been made clear to staffers, with an editor giving a presentation in January on “THE KEYS to a KILLER ROLLING STONE HEADLINE.” One bullet point read, “Get emotional”; another, “Feel free to be a dirtbag.” There have been some hiccups. Being immediate is “the ticket to get on the bus these days,” Shachtman said, and “perfect is not on the menu at any place.” Staff realize they can’t be operating at the pace of a print magazine if they want to be in the daily conversation, but they’re also painfully aware of just how damaging it can be to get a story wrong. It’s taken the magazine time to build back its reputation after the infamous implosion, and subsequent retraction, of a 2014 report on the alleged rape at the University of Virginia. There is only so much wiggle room.
Why Does a Librarian Own a Social Media Site That’s Been Around for Longer Than Facebook? (Public Infrastructure) Metfilter is one of the great remnants of an earlier era of the web that is still good and meaningful to a small, devoted community. Excited and curious to see where it goes from here.
BackScoop’s Amanda Cua on what makes a creator different from a journalist (Splice) A newsletter creator in the Phillippines talks about the key differences, and there are many.
“One big focus I have is distribution. And I don’t think that most journalists have that in their job description. How do I get this to more people? What kind of platform should I be using?”
Japan struggles to give up floppy disks and fax machines for the digital age (Rest of World) The past is still here, it’s just unevenly distributed!
Europe’s biggest media group holds its breath for M&A approval (FT) As you go up the foodchain in media, the companies get wilder and wilder. $20b in projected revenue for Bertelsmann this year.
Facebook will shut down Bulletin, its newsletter service, by early 2023 (Nieman Lab) I never saw a single Bulletin newsletter in the wild. Makes me wonder, what’s happening with Revue?
Top 50 most popular news sites in the world: NYT and Mail Online only top ten sites to grow in August (Press Gazette) If you click through, you will no doubt be surprised by the continued prominence of Yahoo in this list.
A good Tik Tok about where your internet comes from
That’s it! See you in a few weeks for episode 2.
