Archives for July 2018

How will Chance build and compensate his staff? As optimists have noted, Chicagoist has an incredible opportunity to help local writers of color develop their talent. But that means paying viable salaries and freelance fees and not opposing unionization — problems that have bedeviled online media companies over the last decade.

There’s also the looming matter of how Chance’s connection to the site would affect coverage. He has an array of local business and nonprofit partners, as well as personal relationships with prominent figures like Kanye West and the Obamas, who both have ongoing controversies in Chicago related to their work.

Chance, to his credit, has spoken out against those in his orbit. But without a transparent plan to address conflicts, Chicagoist’s editorial independence would regularly be in question.

And finally, when — not if — challenges mount, will Chance continue to support the site? Look no further than The Denver Post, L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice and, most recently, The New York Daily News to see how moguls invested in a media property with a shaky model, then let it hemorrhage journalists before withdrawing from important beats in the name of saving more dollars.

There’s a lot about Chicagoist that Chance should aim to change. The pre-Chance Chicagoist, where I was a contributor from 2010 to 2012, did not pay for freelance stories until 2015. Even then, the rate was below market — usually less than $80 a post — though the site itself was almost entirely reliant on contributors. That’s no way to build up a roster of locally focused journalists.

Fortunately, there are already news sites covering Chicago the right way, which offer Chance a blueprint for moving ahead. Around town, despite hard times, these outlets successfully balance editorial integrity, a full paid staff and robust reporting with organizational solvency.

Block Club Chicago, conceived by ex-DNAinfo staffers, was boosted by a crowdfunded campaign and is now supported through subscriptions and the blockchain-centered platform Civil. The Triibe, which runs a more lightweight operation, also crowdfunded and is banking long-term growth, in part, on grants.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/opinion/culture/chance-the-rapper-chicagoist.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

December 2014: After a worrisome year in movie attendance, AMC grudgingly enters into a partnership with MoviePass, which until then had been swatted away by major theater chains. “It frankly wouldn’t be smart to ignore the success of subscription in other areas of media,” Christina Sternberg, senior vice president for corporate strategy at AMC, said in a Times interview.

August 2017: The alliance breaks when MoviePass drops its price to $9.95 a month. More than 150,000 new users sign up in just two days following the announcement — crashing the service’s website and app — and AMC responds by saying MoviePass users are “not welcome here.” “In AMC’s view, that price level is unsustainable and only sets up consumers for ultimate disappointment down the road,” the company writes in a statement. MoviePass also catches the eye of the data firm Helios and Matheson Analytics, which buys a controlling stake in the company for $27 million.

December 2017: The price drop pays off in the short term, as a million new subscribers sign up within just four months. Mitch Lowe, the company’s C.E.O., tells The Times that the venture will succeed by collecting and selling data about the tastes and habits of consumers, particularly millennials, who make up 75 percent of subscribers.

April 2018: The subscriber base approaches three million people. But cracks begin to emerge, as customers complain about glitches, shifts in service and extensive delays in membership card arrivals. An auditor even expresses “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern,” while Helios, at this point, has lost $20 million a month since September. But if company leaders are fazed, they aren’t showing it: “I’m not worried about the viability of MoviePass at all,” Ted Farnsworth, chief executive of Helios and Matheson, told The Times. “We have plenty of money to get through the next year.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/movies/moviepasss-timeline.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Word of their departure was first published in Business of Fashion on July 13.

Virginia Smith, another longtime Vogue hand, will assume Ms. Goodman’s duties as fashion director. “I’m very happy that Virginia Smith’s promotion to fashion director recognizes her many years of hard work and dedication, and just as thrilled that Tonne Goodman and Phyllis Posnick, two of our longstanding — and outstanding — image makers will continue to work their magic in Vogue,” Ms. Wintour told The Times in a statement.

Everyone knows Ms. Wintour, as recognizable as Santa Claus, whose trademark look — that thickly fringed bob and those windshield sunglasses — is so long-established that it could more or less attend shows in her place. But any publicist with hopes of career longevity must know, too, Ms. Goodman, with her regular uniform of turtlenecks and white jeans, sensibly loafered; Ms. Posnick, dark-haired, never flashily dressed but never without jewelry; and Grace Coddington, the magazine’s creative director at large, who herself moved from a staff position to a freelance one in 2016.

Condé Nast, which owns Vogue as well as magazines like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and GQ, is consolidating staff with fashion and beauty “hubs” that work across several magazines and moving expensive, salaried staff members to freelance positions. Condé Nast expected $100 million dollars less in revenue in 2017 than it enjoyed in 2016.

Historically the company was known for free spending and the lavish, chauffeured lifestyles it allowed its top editors — providing clothing budgets and securing mortgages. Even the imperious Vogue has seen its budgets cut and its fortunes shift.

“One of the things that I quickly became aware of when I left Condé Nast,” said Tom Florio, the former publisher of Vogue who departed the company in 2010 and who is now the chief executive of the company that owns Paper, “is the pay scale at Condé Nast was easily double or three times what the market is.” (One former Condé Nast top executive, who was granted anonymity because he was not allowed to speak for the company, said he expected that Ms. Goodman and Ms. Posnick’s total compensation combined would be about a million-dollar expense.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/style/anna-wintour-vogue-editors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Since his firing, “Guardians” fans have circulated petitions online calling for Disney to reinstate him. By Monday evening, one such petition on Change.org had more than 345,000 signatures.

The letter released by Mr. Pratt and his co-stars did not join the fan petitions in demanding that Mr. Gunn be rehired as director of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” which is set to begin shooting in the coming months. None of the actors threatened to quit. (The other signees were Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Pom Klementieff, Karen Gillan and Sean Gunn, who is Mr. Gunn’s brother.)

But the actors did say in the letter that Mr. Gunn had their “full support” and that they were “shocked” by his abrupt ouster by Disney, especially since the offending tweets were written “many years ago.” “Each of us looks forward to working with James in the future,” the letter said. “His story isn’t over — not by a long shot.”

Disney declined to comment.

Disney is unlikely to reverse its decision to fire Mr. Gunn. Doing so would force the company to explain why Mr. Gunn’s tweets — written years ago, yes, although the director was also in his 40s at the time — were less offensive than the racist tweet that prompted Disney to fire Roseanne Barr from “Roseanne” in May. (Ms. Barr wrote on Twitter on July 24, “I’m disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn’s pedophile jokes.”)

Working for Disney, which primarily focuses on family entertainment, is also not the same as working for another Hollywood studio.

Still, the movie industry has long tolerated vulgar comments and behavior — particularly from its creative ranks. As the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have taken hold over the past year, and as studios have moved to an aggressive zero-tolerance behavioral policy as a result, some people are starting to contemplate what constitutes a proper response.

Over the weekend, for instance, Terry Press, the president of CBS Films, ruminated on the topic on her Facebook page after The New Yorker published an article in which several women accused Leslie Moonves, CBS’s chief executive, of sexual misconduct in decades past.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/business/media/guardians-of-the-galaxy-support-james-gunn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The crisis in the news media has been acutely felt in New Jersey, where the press corps covering the state government in Trenton has withered and larger newspapers in the region have reduced their staffs and their coverage.

“We need to do something,” said Joe Amditis, an associate director for the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, one of the schools involved in the effort. “We just can’t sit around and expect it to get better.”

Under the bill establishing the journalism consortium, grants will be handed out by a board of directors made up of appointees by the governor and Legislature, as well as representatives from state universities, community groups, the news media and the technology industry. Prospective projects would require collaboration with one of several state universities, and applicants would have to show how their work would benefit a community. The consortium will place an emphasis on projects aimed at low-income or minority communities, or areas that have been especially undercovered by news organizations.

Proponents initially sought $100 million from the more than $330 million that New Jersey made from auctioning the licenses of two public broadcasting stations last year. But that figure was eventually whittled down to $5 million. Some have questioned whether that will be enough to make a difference, given the costs of reporting as well as staffing the consortium, which will also seek grants and donations.

The closest model is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports television and radio outlets at a national level, but the initiative in New Jersey has a more expansive mandate.“We saw this as a reimagining of what public-interest media looks like,” Mr. Rispoli said, adding that effort also seeks to improve media literacy and counter the influence of social media in disseminating unreliable or false information.

Proponents hope that the initiative can serve as a model to other states, but Ms. McBride and others have cautioned that it was a political feat that will likely be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Public broadcasting has been a frequent target of conservatives who have sought to cut taxpayer funding and leveled accusations of liberal bias. (Both houses of the State Legislature are controlled by Democrats, and the legislation to create the consortium, whose funding was already approved in the recently passed budget, is awaiting the signature of the governor, Philip D. Murphy, also a Democrat.)

Some say one journalistic bright spot in New Jersey is an emerging ecosystem of smaller organizations spread across the state, covering communities at a granular level. Many of them grew out of Patch, an ambitious investment by AOL several years ago in hyperlocal news, starting websites in hundreds of communities across the country and in dozens in New Jersey. (AOL has since handed over its majority stake in Patch, which has been scaled back considerably.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/nyregion/nj-legislature-community-journalism.html?partner=rss&emc=rss