The Press Box - Covering a War, Reinventing the Newspaper, and NFL Press Conference Questions With The New Yorker’s Clare Malone

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Covering a War, Reinventing the Newspaper, and NFL Press Conference Questions With The New Yorker’s Clare Malone On the Final Edition, The New Yorker’s Clare Malone joins Bryan. First she talks about her piece that discusses Clarissa Ward’s coverage of the war in Gaza (2:00). Then they get into Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles’s response to questions about the upcoming weather in Detroit even though the game will be played in a dome (12:39). Then they discuss what newspapers will look like in 2024 (19:30), Mark Thompson's reinvention of CNN (32:22), and a journalist's thoughts when someone calls their work a “great write-up” (51:50) Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Clare Malone Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Final Edition. Brian Curtis of the ringer here along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up on today's podcast, we'll talk about how one reporter covered the war in Gaza. We'll talk about reinventing newspapers for 2024. As even Washington Post reporters are asking, what does our outlet want to be? Plus, a question was asked to Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles that lit up sports Twitter. Should campaign reporters still be? embedding with candidates like it's 2004, and CNN reinvents itself by announcing something.

Let us bring in our guest host. She writes stories for the New Yorker under the Annals of Communications banner. Recently, she has covered everything from the aforementioned CNN reinvention to stand-up comedy, and she hosted a podcast about tabloids here at The Ringer. We are bringing her back to the so-called podcast space. Claire Malone, welcome back to the press box. It's great to be here, Brian. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us. Remember, we measure success on this podcast by how many apologetic notes you have to write afterwards to people in the industry. I'm here to scorch the earth. There we go. I have so many things I want to talk to you about. But let us start with your new piece, which is up at the New Yorker's website. It's called the deadly challenges of war coverage in Gaza. you told it through the eyes of Clarissa Ward,

who is the chief international correspondent at CNN. For people who are not glued to cable news day to day, can you tell us a little bit about what kind of credentials Ward brings to the table here? Yeah, Ward basically replaced Christian Amunpour as CNN's chief international correspondent. So she's been covering foreign wars for basically 20 years, She's relatively young, I would say. She's in her early 40s. So she's, you know, I think the piece that I wrote about her, I mean, and I should say up at the top, we as Americans and people around the world are getting most of our news, if not all of our news from Gaza, from the people on the ground, both like mostly Arab language reporters and people who are either citizen journalists or sort of journalists who use social.

media as their medium to spread the message. But we kind of wanted to use Ward as a way to talk about Western media's challenges of reporting a war on the ground. And we can get into that a little bit more. But Clarissa Ward is sort of, I mean, if you had heard about her prior to her going into Gaza, being the first Western reporter to enter Gaza without an IDF escort, but, you know, entering with an Emirati medical team in December. If that wasn't the first time you heard of her, it was probably, you know, she was on the ground interviewing like Taliban fighters when the U.S. was obviously pulling out of Afghanistan. And she's she's kind of like in this, honestly, she's in the Christian Amunpur role. You know, she is, and I think it's particularly notable for a woman, you know, often covering places where women are not figures of authority and sort of navigating.

it in a very interesting way. So Clarissa Ward, I think, has gotten, is very well known by U.S. audiences, and I think part of that celebrity made her a bit of a lightning boat for controversy when she covered Gaza because everything that has to do with this war becomes much debated and controversial. You mentioned the challenges that Ward has faced is one of the biggest ones getting into Gaza and how have war and other reporters navigated that? Yeah, I mean,

for Western reporters, there is basically no way to get into Gaza without going, or it's very challenging to go in without going in with the IDF.

So, you know, other CNN reporters have gone in these sort of IDF, essentially guided tours where, you know, the downside is,

and this is not unique to Gaza's war. It's something that you have to do when you embed with the military as a reporter often. but they have to run often their tape by the IDF. There are certain things they aren't allowed to disclose.

And I think Ward generated a lot of attention for getting into Gaza by, you know, independent means because it meant that she actually talked to civilians. If you go into Gaza as a Western or foreign reporter with the IDF, you are not interacting with civilians. You are getting a very, you know, you're going to. getting the IDF official view of it. And I think, you know, that's, Western outlets have had, have been able to find some ways to get news on the ground via, you know, their own producers who are still in Gaza, but a lot of these, these Western news outlets have used their power to get those people out. And I think, you know, the other sort of tricky thing that all of this

raises is, you know, I did, I did get push back on the piece from people who said, essentially, like, I mean, who gives a shit about Western reporters, you know, right? Like, this is a war that's being covered very well, live streamed, you know, by the people of Gaza. But I think there is this, because the war is controversial in the U.S., because, you know, opinion is so strong about it, I think there's a desire for American news outlets, Western news outlets, to sort of independently verify everything that they see, right? You know, you see the thing, the Hamas run, Gaza Health Ministry, Clarissa Ward told me that CNN tries to independently verify all videos that they get. And there's also a sense that with, let's say, an older television audience, and that's who watches television now, right?

They will take more seriously, for better or for worse, probably for worse, you know, if I'm being more straightforward about it. they will take more seriously a Western reporter who they know, Clarissa Ward, than a clip that they see from Al Jazeera, which is on the ground covering everything. But Al Jazeera is not what they watch on the regular. Al Jazeera specifically has a lot of, I think, freighted meetings with American viewers going back to the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq and Osama bin Laden. And I think for Western news outlets, they basically are sort of an uncomfortable position. where they say, like, we know that the bulk of the coverage is coming from Arab language news outlets and citizens, but we feel the need to verify these things for our audience and to tell our audiences, our Western audiences, with our own words and our own anchors.

So it's kind of this interesting, delicate dance. And I think Ward and CNNPR and all the reporters when they tweeted out Ward's report in Gaza sort of went out of their way to say, Palestinian journalists are dying for this. I mean, I haven't checked since late last week, but I think 82 journalists have died in this conflict. So it's a huge number of people. Al Jazeera has said that their journalists are being targeted. I mean, so I think the delicate way that CNN framed her report was also kind of an interesting and telling thing. Given everything you just said, when you were talking to Ward,

did she find that this was more complicated than other very dangerous assignment she's taken on in the past? Yeah, I mean, I think she's beyond the complication of the very logistical complication of getting into Gaza, which is one thing. So to get into Gaza through the Rafa border crossing, through the Egyptian border crossing, which is the only way to get in right now. Actually, I think they might have opened up a second of one. But basically, you need the Egyptians and you need the Israelis to sign off on it. And that's a bit hard. So she got in with an Emirati medical team. I think she had she and other news organizations had spent months lobbying the Israelis. really is to say you should let journalists in independently. So there's logistical challenge of it. And then there's the misinformation challenge of it. One of the reasons why I wanted to write about Ward in particular is because I think a day or two after October 7th, she was on the ground right where some of the killings had happened sort of on a road. And she and her team, there's rocket fire nearby. They have to lie in a ditch. You know, they kind of, you get the sort of classic CNN, scrambling to lie in the ditch, the reporters lying prone, kind of breathing heavily,

but giving the kind of calm like newswoman's take on things. And fine, straightforward television segment. But it went viral for a, there's a right-wing website called The Quartering, and they basically laid over this fake, of a producer supposedly, you know, saying in towards ear. That's right. Essentially that she's faking it. That's right. Like play it up, breathe heavily, act like you're doing this.

And that went viral pretty quickly. Elon Musk played a little part in that, you know, sort of adding, adding reply on Twitter. And it basically got people in the region thinking that, you know, people are already inclined to dislike and distrust Western media, CNN. most prominently because they were, they felt that they were promulgating the Israeli point of view. And I think, you know, you can, you can watch some pretty fair criticisms about, like, embedded reporting during wars like this. But Ward kind of became the face of this. And she, you know, so people said she was faking it. And then she had an in-person confrontation when she

was at the Rafa border crossing on the Egyptian side with an Egyptian podcast host, a young woman who basically, you know, was calling Ward. an actress, the mouthpiece of the West. And I think it's basically, you know, Ward is this telegenic blonde woman who represents to people, the corporate media, the West, right? She sort of became this canvas onto which people poured all their perceptions about Americans. And I should stop here and say, I think Larissa Ward is a good reporter. You know, she found a way in.

I thought the actual report that she did was, I mean, you know, I think we've all seen probably more awful and gruesome things on social media, but it was pretty awful. I mean, you see a, you know, a 13-year-old kid with his leg blown off coming into the hospital. You see, like, babies with scars and bandages and just, like, truly awful stuff. And, you know, it was hard to get in. So I think she's sort of become this symbol of Western bias against the Palestinian cause to people in the region or to people who are sympathetic to the Palestinians and sympathetic to the idea, which I think is growing in power, that like the Israelis are committing some atrocities that maybe should be labeled with the label of genocide, right? There's so much stuff that's going on here that I think Ward just became this at the center of. this maelstrom of criticism and misinformation and then actual just like straightforward war reporting. It's a really interesting piece called the deadly challenges of war coverage in

Gaza. You can read on the New Yorker right now. All right, Claire, next topic. And on a very different note, I would love to get your take on something that sports Twitter has talked about this week. I'll set it up here. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are going to Detroit on Sunday to play the Lions, and Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles was doing weekly press conference, taking questions from reporters when he was asked this. The weather has been a factor in some of the playoff games, even for the most prepared teams. Today, it's 13 in Detroit, which doesn't compare to some of the temperatures in the temperature to the top to.

Any special plans to acclimate the team to not only endure, but perform in those kind of frigid temperatures should you face them in Detroit? you do know we play indoors right in the other dome all right how do you react to that exchange and then this bigger idea of sports writers asking all of their questions to their subjects on television oh man my first reaction to it is just like the secondhand embarrassment of it and then the inevitable

like people love to dunk on twitter so that's just just like the dunking is rough. I think my second question was, yeah, like, who is this person? And I don't know if we know that. And maybe we don't want to expose them to anything more. But, like, I'm of two minds here. One is, listen, I should state for the audience.

Though I used to work for an ESPN property, I am by no means on sports Twitter anymore, or if I ever was. So I would not have known, despite being to Detroit, a decent number of times, I would not know that they play under a dome. Makes sense. But I'm of two minds because I do think you have to be prepared.

Like, you know, I want to be empathetic here because the closest experience I have to this is asking questions of political candidates in, like, press gaggles on the campaign trail or sort of like, you know, these mini press conferences. And you want to ask a good question because you want to elicit an interesting answer from a politician, which is rare. So like, you know, whatever. But you also don't want to make an ass of yourself in front of your colleagues, right? So part of it is also kind of like this inside game. And like you have to, you know, you think about what you want to ask people beforehand and often there's news of the day.

But also some of it's a little bit on the fly and like what people have asked them. about. And so I am sympathetic to her on that front. On the other hand, I'm kind of like, if she does cover sports as a beat, I mean, you know, I don't know how to feel. It's like human fallibility and like, I saw that I can't remember the, the reporter's name, but someone who called out, okay, this is like sexism. And I'm not sure if she was referring to the coach's reply or the Twitter replies, but like, yeah, I will say that. Twitter replies. Yeah, I will say like my, the second reaction on a human level I had before my professional responses was like, oh, it's a woman. What are they going to be saying

about her? Because inevitably, that's just like, I'm sure it's, it's freighted in general when you're a female reporter, but man, sports, sports media, it's like, it's rough stuff. Yeah, and it's a dynamic you're talking about where you wander into a gaggle with all these political reporters who've been asking questions to these people who've been around. And some people pointed out on Twitter, a lot of times these press conferences are populated by people from local news stations

who may not even be from the sports department. Because the sports department, as was pointed out, has been gutted. So you just get, hey, go down there, ask a question so we can get some tape from this because we want to put this on the nightly news tonight. Yeah, that's why the nuance of it feels important, but like the least nuanced place ever.

is Twitter, particularly in the last, like, year or so. When all the, when all the mildly rational actors have decamped for, I don't know where. I know. And I just, I mean, I, and I retweeted this clip, and I'm now I feel guilty about having retweeted this clip, having read lots of tweets about the reaction to this. But I'm, I'm with, you know, I'm with you where it's like, on the one hand, I want to think about the questions that reporters, and in this case, sports writers, ask coaches and athletes and thinking about how they can be better and how we can handle those

interactions. And on the other, I have a great sympathy for reporters on this beat. Yeah. You unlike just about any beat in journalism are doing their interviews on TV. And also athlete, like, you don't have to be on sports Twitter to see like the, you know, every couple weeks, it's like, ooh, athlete roast idiot reporter. And they're like, and just like, yeah, they don't want to be at the press conference. They don't want to pay the fine. So they're like, they're an asshole to the reporter.

And I will say like, yeah, you're sympathetic to that reporter because it's like, this person's being a dick to them. On the other hand, there's lots of other hands here. I am kind of like, people are so critical of us as reporters broadly that giving them more ammunition also feels like, oh, man, this like, you know, we're now just sort of caricatured as like a profession of either like idiots or like, you know, my mom. mind is on pitchfork because of the unfortunate closure of pitchfork. But like always the reaction to like critics or people who cover sports is like, well, you couldn't do it. And it's like, that's

correct. Like this is, you know, this is not like, you know, I failed a basketball so I'll, I'll be nasty about it professionally. You know, like there's just a sort of vitriol for all kinds of reporters. And so part of you also has this reaction of like, yes, empathy, but also like, oh, man, like, we got to, we got to keep it, keep it 100. No, we're setting it a world record for a number of on the other hands here. On the other hands. And the sports version you're talking about with the athlete sort of snapping back at the reporter. And as you say, it's almost always places so-and-so roasts a stupid reporter on Twitter.

In that case, you get all the athlete super fans, just like you would get fans of any famous person. Right. And they are going to come out and be like, ha-ha, you had no right to ask a question, even a mild question to the person I love. and I'm so happy that the person I love is getting back at shooting. You're like, no, no, no, actually we do have that right. That's in all the collective bargaining agreements of all of these leagues. They actually do have to talk to us unlike any other part of American society after the game. And the questions we're asking are to help you ideally understand this person better

and figure out with this person, how they play tonight, et cetera, et cetera. Unless they bring their kid on, in which case you can't ask them anything. You can just talk to the kid. That's the ultimate deflector shield. All right, another topic for you. I read two different paragraphs in two different Charlotte Klein Vanity Fair stories about the Washington Post. And my eyebrows went up both times because in both cases, you had post reporters standing up in staff meetings, asking a form of the question, what does the Washington Post want to be? I'll read you a little clip of the most recent Klein story.

She writes, congressional reporter Paul Kane got the room's attention when he questioned the paper's editorial strategy by reading the top headlines on the post homepage off his phone, a hodgepodge about everything from national security to how to stop worrying about FOMO. No offense, he said, per two staffers, but there was great journalism being buried on the homepage. Veteran political reporter Dan Ball has also chimed in to ask about the paper's sensibility and character. What message was the post trying to send about what it stands for? so what do you think about this idea of newspapers and what they ought to want to be in 2024 yeah i mean the the post in particular is just in a real bind and have been for i mean i think i did a piece on on fred ryan's sort of disastrous tenure at the post last january and um people kind of had the same you know they've been singing the same tune for at least i would say

over a year now, which is the Post essentially leaned so hard into Trump that when Trump left, we all know across the industry we lost traffic, but the Post just like hasn't. You know, the kind of classic analysis is the New York Times you can visit for cooking or for games and the Post doesn't have any of that. And like, you know, can't you also, if you're really into politics, can't you go to Politico, right? There's another argument that I saw on Ross Barr can make on his substack that was basically like, I mean, has Politico really just, like, won the politics coverage of it? But more broadly, the question of newspapers and identity is really hard right now. I mean, you know, we're taping this a few hours after I saw the news that the L.A. Times Union is sort of, you know, girding its loins for very, very big layoffs, which we kind of knew we're coming.

but these newspapers that are historically, serving these big cities are facing this crisis because the Times has eaten everyone's, you know, affluent, college-educated, people who are willing to still pay for a newspaper subscription. And the Times has all the lifestyle stuff. And if you are, you know, a person who wants to read the business news, you read the Wall Street Journal.

So, you know, it's like from my, own personal consumption. Yes, I have a subscription to the Washington Post. I get their newsletters. But the newspapers I read most often in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal because they have, you know, the Times has a great foreign desk. I should say, by the way, just to give a shout out, like the post-visual investigations during Gaza have actually been quite interesting and good. But like, you know, you know the New York Times has a robust Jerusalem Bureau, that they have huge visual investigations teams, that they have, you know, the New York. New York Times Magazine and the arts section. All the kind of stuff we know is like lifestyle about the New York Times. The journal has a very clear identity whether you like it or not and that they are, you know, covering the street. They're covering things in a more straightforward way and you

don't have to read the editorial page if you don't want to. But I think these big newspapers like the LA Times and the Washington Post are kind of grasping around. I mean, L.A., you know, they can cover L.A. because East Coast media often forgets that the West Coast exists. But the Post is just, I mean, democracy, I don't know if you read any of Marty Barron's memoir, Brian. I made it through a couple of chapters. I'll be honest. He had a, I would say, he was, the sneer was just holding back during the section where he talked about the way democracy dies and darkness came to be. And it was basically like, they had done a lot of like A, B.

testing and they were really trying to consider it. And then Jeff Bezos was like, that sounds good. Let's do that one. And thus it was launched. Someday we're going to have one of those vulture rankings of, you know, embarrassing things that happened during the resistance ranked. And democracy dies in darkness will place fairly high on that list, despite all the good, you know, democracy adjacent reporting the Post did during that period.

Your point about newspapers is so right because it's not just lifestyle covers the New York Times as the New York Times has the New York Times has become a lifestyle brand, right? And so has the Wall Street Journal to an extent. And none of these other papers have managed to do that. You know, there's not, you don't identify with the Washington Post. You don't say I go in and live inside the Washington Post all day and listen, read their stuff, listen their podcast and go to this app and that app. It just hasn't happened in the same way. I mean, it's funny. I'm thinking about lifestyle. And you're so right. Like, to go back to the journal, I mean, like, the journal's weekend magazine has become this funny destination for like, oh, a Lauren Sanchez profile. Oh, like Travis Kelsey, like, sure. And, you know, obviously the Times is the Times. And in part it's because, like, you know, the Wall Street Journal doesn't feel ashamed of wealth, right? They're like, wealth culture, thumbs up. And frankly, as a reader, I enjoy peering over the hedges. So, like, it kind of makes sense and they're unableness. fashioned about it. I mean, again, to use the Post, I lived in Washington, Washington, D.C. for a time. And it is not a stylish city famously, earnest, filled with earnest, crunchy people. And it's like not, like, what sort of lifestyle do they, do they, you know, would kind of iterate from the Washington Post? These have date lab. Do you know our date lab, Brian? I don't.

Oh my gosh. Maybe this is totally regional. The best thing I thought the Washington Post cultural section used to do was essentially like they set people up on blind dates and then like readers would weigh in on their dating. And it was like, it was kind of a great thing. But other than that, I'm struggling to find what sort of like organic non-local newspaper stuff that the Washington Post did. And I think you could argue that Date Lab was like pretty local. So I think it's just, you know, another argument, I'm not sure if I, if this was in,

the Charlotte Klein piece, but I think there's been a huge criticism of the fact that the Washington Post doesn't have particularly robust, like, you know, Wall Street coverage. There's this idea of like, okay, well, if we're trying to be this international, like, national newspaper, then why don't we have anyone who knows how to cover Wall Street or like these, you know, we're just, we're kind of, we're policy focused, we're politics focused, but like, that's, that national newspaper does not make. You have to be able to cover everything. So I think there are some, some holes. And I, and I, and, business-wise, you know, the post tried to lean into health as a lifestyle vertical. They tried to, it wasn't lifestyle vertical, but they tried to lean into environmental coverage. And while the world is burning, people don't want to read about it. So I think that is sort of not a particularly successful business venture. But I mean, I'm also sympathetic because, you know, everyone's seeing traffic, everyone's seeing their traffic go down on news sites because people don't want to read about the news because the news is just, has been depressing, is polarized, and so it's much more, you know, yes, they know they need lifestyle to bring readers back, but it's like, are they going to go to a news site to read

lifestyle stuff? Or are they going to go to like Instagram or TikTok, depending on how old you are? And when you mentioned there, the lack of Wall Street coverage, one thing that just pops out to me about these post internal staff meetings we're reading about is people sort of wondering, should we be the same kind of newspaper, should we aspire to be the same kind of newspaper that newspapers like The Post used to be. Like they used to be the Walmart of news. Like here is everything.

Here is sports. Here is international. Here is Metro. Here is the funny pages. We got it all. Here's Ann Landers. We got it all here, baby. And it just strikes me as we got one Walmart now,

the New York Times. It's wiped out all the mini Walmarts and mom and pop businesses for the reasons you say. And I just wonder if there is not a big rethinking, whether it's the Post or the LA Times, of this we should just approach this differently. And I don't mean cutting tons of staff members here, but I just mean the things we really cover

and the things we sink our teeth into, shouldn't it be something else? Because I look, I read the LA Times out here, I read the post online. I look at it. I'm like, this just looks still to me like smaller Walmart. This is, you know, this, this looks, except the prices are higher now. This is where you go in.

You're like, you're trying to cover everything and you're kind of doing it. But I'm not sure that's actually what people want or will pay for right now. Yeah. And I, and it's, I mean, you know, there have been people who have said the post should just become a good local paper again. Because if you are a person who's reading the political news, in addition to Politico, you've got Punch Bowl or any number of other, like, you know, subs. stacks, whatever, that have replaced opinion page writers. So there are pretty, I think, compelling arguments to say, like, listen, you're not going to beat the Times.

You should just almost become, like, a very good local paper. I actually don't, I don't know what the right answer is. But I think from, you know, just speaking from, like, the journalism side of it, like, the job market side of it, it's become a sort of like, not even a joke anymore, but, like, the board and joke was, like, there's four places left that you can get a job. and it's like, you know, if you're in magazines, it's like the New York Times, I mean, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and then just like the Times in general. Because everywhere else is, I mean, doing really badly. Like just like a true, I saw some, gosh, I'm blanking on his name, but like a news, someone who writes like an ad-centric newsletter called it like the coming.

media extinction event of 2024, maybe 2025. And it's like, I mean, like, yeah, maybe. It's just like, it's kind of rough. The consolidation is coming for us all. And like, I recently had someone who I was supposed to, you know, do a, let's talk about like, you know,

jobs and journalism thing. And they canceled the call and they were like, I've officially decided not to become a journalist. And it was such a like final, like. Oh my God. Yeah. And I kind of couldn't say anything. I was like, well, it actually might be a logical choice.

Is this too depressing for the press box? Should we be hyping things out more? I wish we had some happier media news to talk about. Shoemaker and I've been talking about. How should we hand us like a thoughts and prayer segment every week? I mean, you look at this. You mentioned the LA Times thing. The Guild sent out this memo to their members.

And they called this coming round of layoffs, quote unquote, the big one, which strikes that same apocalyptic note. And I just, you know, when we're talking about like newspapers figuring things out, I think about the LA Times out here. Bill Addison is their food critic. He's one of the food critics that replaced Jonathan Gold. So here are two problems, right? How do we replace a legendary food critic who died?

And two, what are the kind of things we focus on in a newspaper today? And they actually solved the problem well. They got a really good food critic that everybody loves. L.A. is just a great restaurant city and you want to know, and it's all spread out, and you want to know where everything is and it's great. But what happens is, I go to Bill Adler. Addison's Instagram page and I see all my friends, all my ringer friends are following him on there. And they're all liking these beautiful plates of food that he photographs and puts out.

And then I wonder, how many of my ringer friends are subscribing to the LA Times? Yeah. To read Bill Addison and all the other stuff in the paper. I don't know. And I don't think very many. And these are journalists we're talking about. I'm like, how do you solve that problem? How do you cross that barrier and getting people to pay for news, a newspaper?

24. That's not the New York Times. Yeah. All right. Segway to Mark Thompson. Segway to Mark Thompson. Mark Thompson is the CEO of CNN. He is rebooting CNN, you might say Claire, which has been rebooted a couple of times already. He announced something yesterday in a Wall Street Journal interview and in a memo to CNN staff. Can you help me understand what he was announcing?

because I'm a little confused. He was announcing intentions. It was like his promise ring to CNN. He was like, we're going to get married real soon, but not yet. We're going to figure out this cable bundle problem. Yeah, I mean, it was, by the way, I just need to sidebar and say, my favorite detail about Mark Thompson is that when he was at the BBC, he bit someone once. What?

Which I, wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Let's do responsible fact checking. Let him alone, Mark Thompson, because I actually got their response on this when I wrote about him. Hold on. This is not in the CV. I want you to know every media. Reportedly bit. Here, I'll just read.

Reportedly bit. As a careful New Yorker right now, I will just read straight from my text. In 1988, Thompson reportedly bit a fellow BBC staffer, quote, leaving marks through the shirt but not drawing blood, close quote. An incident Thompson did not deny when it was made public in 2012. a network spokesperson issued an explanation. Quote, Mark did bite him, but it wasn't intended to hurt him.

He thought he was doing something funny. Anyway. How wonderful was it to send that question of CNN in the fact-checking process? Any response on the bite, a recorded bite? There was not. I will say, to temper this a little.

Mark Thompson also, it seems like actually quite, thoughtful adult, if perhaps in 1988 a bit of an imp. I don't know. But he's like, I actually, for that piece, watched like a pretty long interview he did about his Catholicism with this British podcaster who has some thing about, who does some podcast about religion out of Oxford. Anyway, so like, let me, let me complicate the listener's view of Mark Thompson. But to his memo, I think the memo was So first I think like

What's interesting that Mark Thompson is to start with his title Which is he's CEO and editor-in-chief Which there basically is like he's in charge of the business side But also he's like a news guy But I think the memo was basically A placeholder where it was like I think it was like a hundred days in I've done my fact-finding mission

I've just recently rehired the woman who will kind of be my deputy about all this, you know, all the changes here. This woman named Alex McCallum, I should know that name. That's right. I've been at the Washington Post. McCallum. Yeah. Yeah. And basically what Thompson says is like, and he says it nicely, but he says, TV is dying. We have a quite well-trafficked website. I think it's like the first or second most traffic news website in the world, this most visited news website in the world. We should probably take advantage of that. We're not currently differentiating ourselves, like the website's boring, the website should have more video stuff. But it didn't quite say what that meant.

And I, you know, and to me, like, the questions I think of are like, so does that mean, like, you're going to have an app where you open it up and like, it's like five minute videos of like, instead of the podcast, it's, you know, it's, I don't know, Caitlin Collins or whomever Jake Tapp are reading you the morning headlines. He didn't tell you anything about how he was planning I'm bringing in a younger audience, which is a huge thing in television. So it was a little bit of like a statement of intentions and seemed long. I thought it was funny that CNN's media newsletter noted how many words it was. There was 2,300 words.

Which is, you know, so it's a short feature. And I think it's basically like probably there was some internal sense of like, okay, we're making, you know, we've talked to people. We have to like say something to the troops. but we're not quite sure what to say. So let's pack them on the head and also say we've hired some smart people. And in the Wall Street Journal interview, there was a vague gesture toward getting people to pay for CNN on their phones, which I didn't totally understand.

So right now people pay for CNN in the old withering cable bundle. They pay for it indirectly through Max or a kind of CNN-like substance so that they can access through Max. And this was going to be a third way to pay for CNN. But then he also said he wasn't even sure that subscription. were the right answer for CNN. Okay. So, I mean, like, I don't, if you're trying to get a younger audience, younger audiences

aren't accustomed to paying for subscriptions. So I assume that that is them maybe thinking about the, like, how to draw your older, your older CNN devotees to a new app. I don't know. It was basically a lot of, it kind of felt like any conversation with anyone in media, where it was basically like, we don't know what works. So let's throw some spaghetti at the wall. I mean, what's, subscription models do work in some cases.

Like, you know, like take the New Yorker, right? We have a particular audience. They are people who are typically willing to pay for news. But CNN, their smaller audience, more segmented. But CNN, their whole thing is most visited news website in the world. So I think some of their challenges, how do you monetize that? Do you pay wallet? Like is it a, okay, six articles and then you have to pay a buck a month. I can't imagine CNN ever having like $7 a month just to read the news. But maybe, you know,

maybe you'll have to do something if you want to see the video component. But I have no idea what Mark Thompson wants to do with CNN except change it. I was reading the headlines off CNN's homepage the other day. And they are basically identical to the New York Post headlines with a little more international coverage. And it sneakily has become America's leading tabloid. Because if you look, it's like news, news, lottery winner, weird lifestyle thing. You know, news you can use. Yeah, I mean, it's it has become this strange hybrid.

And it's almost like we now have one homepage in America that is the New York Post, CNN, the messenger. There's just like, it's all kind of one thing. And it's all just a little tabloidy, just a little. Fortsy, just a little newsy? Which I'm in favor of, actually. Maybe that's a bad thing to say. But if it brings people to news sites,

I think maybe we can't be too snobby about it. I should also say I'm a daily New York Post reader, so maybe it's a grain of salt. I don't know. But I mean, like, I actually always thought the messenger, I thought the messenger was failing for many reasons. But when it actually launched, I was like, I thought this was going to be the American version of the Daily Mail,

which I think there's still time. but like yeah i mean what is like you know if your mom logs into the internet via her yahoo homepage sure there's some articles about joe biden but like you know kate middleton's abdominal surgery is probably just as prominently placed and it's sort of like you got a you got to you got to have the stuff that people click on absolutely that's the thing it's one homepage it's just whether it's yahoo news or whether it's the messenger or whether it's CNN we just kind of got one mix, as they say. Yeah, and I think there's,

and I can't, this is, you know, I'm not sure if Thompson said this exactly, or if this was in the coverage of his memo and his interview, but the idea that, like, journalists have to be less precious about tradition, you know, the tradition of tradition, to steal Notre Dame isms, but this idea that, like, when I started in journalism, it was, like, hammered into me that the editorial side,

should never have to interact with or know that much about the publisher business side of things. And boy, has that changed in the years I've been in journalism. And I think that's fine. Like, are we some, like, protected class of priest druids or something that shouldn't know how the business works? Like, I think, you know, as all of us get more and more laid off, it's sort of, it's like, well, maybe we should be giving the people a little bit of what they want while also, like, not feeding them massive misinformation. I love as all of us get more and more laid off.

Yeah, that came out wrong, but it's like the great extinction event of 2024 media. Yeah. One more topic for you, which is the campaign trail blues in Iowa. Michael Grinbaum of the New York Times had a story about reporters who were covering the Iowa caucuses this week, one, of course, in a blowout by Donald Trump. Grinbaum notes the number of credential journalists fell to 1,200 from 2,600 four years ago. He also points out that cable news stars stayed away from Iowa. The lobby bar of the Des Moines Marriott downtown.

Doesn't that sound romantic? Wasn't Rick's bar in Casablanca as it had been in previous campaign cycles? What do you make of this report of Campaign Trail Malays? I've been to that lobby bar. I don't think it's ever been good. I thought it was a good piece of not just media journalism, but like sort of said a lot about politics right now. Obviously the number of reporters has dwindled,

but I thought the best quote in that piece was from Jonathan Martin of Politico, who was basically like, I left. I didn't stick around for the caucus, because in some ways that's the logical thing, right? Like I know the Times and other newspapers have this tradition of like, we're sending people to live out there for a couple months. Like we're going to in bed. We're going to send the whole cavalry out there. And it is important to have people, as we all know, it is important to have people on the ground, like actually witnessing the events.

But I was kind of like, I mean, do you need more than like a couple people per outlet? Like it also felt, I think there was a reaction I had where it's sort of like, well, in a time of like scarcity of resources. Why are you paying for someone to embed and live in Iowa for however many months? Like, I'm not saying they shouldn't do it necessarily, but I'm curious about the conversation behind the scenes because I think we all know Trump's going to win the primaries. And it's a pretty slim chance that DeSantis or Haley will win. Now, I think the other side of it that the powers that be at these newspapers and outlets would say is basically like, well, people read those people. We're trying to get people to, like, get excited about the campaign, to read political stories. We're trying to figure out what works right now.

And there is inherent drama in primary events. So, like, we'll see it all hyped up for New Hampshire's on Tuesday. You know, could it be the, you know, make or break moment for Nikki Haley? Like, that stuff is classic campaign diaries. You know, it's not boys on the bus anymore, but they're trying to, like, grasp, I think, at anything that might drive. traffic and, you know, in some ways, almost like, get people in the mindset that news organizations want them to be throughout the year, which is like a little edge of their seats, right?

Like, what's going to happen next? The CNN countdown clock for all of us at all time. Something is about to start, as Wolf Blitzer has always reminded us. I wondered if the Calvary thing was a sort of reaction to news outlets, learning and overlearning the lessons of 2016. And maybe we could also throw a 2020 and 2020 in there, which is we can never be surprised again. Like we miss something. And not only do we miss something, we miss something that was happening on the ground. Now we can both you and I can both now look at it. By the way, nothing was happening on the ground with regards to Ron DeSantis.

That was particularly interesting. Or Nikki Haley, probably in retrospect. But I just wonder if they're just so scared, you know, at getting caught with their pants down again and missing this huge story. I think that's fair. And I think it's, you know, I'm sure there's a sense of like, you know, if the times can afford it, great, do it. Right. Like, you know, let's just, let's just do the fundamentals. Let's make sure we, you know, I guess you could also make the argument that it's like, if this is a new reporter that's starting on the beat, this is a good way to ease them in to, like, get them to be able to, you know, really get to know the campaign people. I think the overlearning of the lessons of 2016 and 2020

will in 2024 be like a little more complicated because in some ways what people really have to be worried about is the general election and Trump. Like that's really who we have to be thinking about and deliberate about. I mean, I was just talking with a coworker about, you know, they said that like CNN, had had cut away from Trump's Iowa speech, which is, you know, fine. That's, you know, they don't have to play the full thing.

But, you know, this person was like, well, people should know what he's saying, you know. Like, and I think that's what's odd about this election year is because Trump isn't really posting on, I think he's back, he's back on Twitter, but he's not really posting there. Mostly what we hear from him is like, you know, these reports, it means you're media at least these reports of what he's doing in court, which is like sort of, sort of, you know, of awful but funny, which is like, you know, like kind of getting an argument to the judge. And so we're not really like getting the full Trump that we did four years ago. In our face.

And in our face. And I think like news organizations have to think about how they'll convey to their readers and listeners and viewers what Trump is actually saying and doing, some of which might be. not might be, will be, un-democratic and probably dangerous. And that's the thing that people kind of have to figure out. I mean, I think, you know,

you might hear the Biden people say like, great, the more he's on TV, the more, you know, swing voters or independent voters will be like, oh, yeah, this guy. Like, this guy was pretty crazy and chaotic and I don't want to vote for him again. So, you know, maybe you'd get an argument from the Biden campaign where they'd say, put him on the tube. Like, let him talk.

But I think to me, those are the tricky lessons of, from a civic point of view, how does the media think through those questions? And then from a business point of view, how does the media think through those questions? Because what was the, what was the, I think it was Les Moonvez who said, Trump isn't good for democracy, but he's great for CBS. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm assigning the wrong network and the wrong, you know, disgraced executive. But that's right. It's like, Trump is good, Trump is generally good for traffic. a thing which the media is lacking. So to me, that that's like the real, have we learned a lesson and have we gotten any savvy about like how to responsibly cover him, but also get people to read us? I was watching that moment on CNN, you mentioned, because I was not one of the 10 people watching the Emmys at the same time. And it was funny. They took the beginning of the Trump remarks where he's talking about Doug Bergram,

who was kind of absurdly stating on stage behind him. And then as soon as he started talking about immigrants, and it became insulting Trump. They were like, okay, that's it. And Jake Tapper was like, whoop, we're over now and we're out of here. But it was a big show of we show you Trump, but we don't show you this Trump, the mean Trump, which goes to the point you're talking about, I think. And it's also, I mean, again, this is something I think that we, anytime you write about

a conservative figure for a mainstream publication with a readership that I think we all know, skews left. You get people saying, why are you platforming this person? Why are you giving voice to their ideas? And my response is, yes, we should be thoughtful about how much space you give people. But these are the thoughts and ideas that are out there in the bloodstream of American society. Like, there's a lot of really nasty stuff going on. And I think that's, we're not just nasty stuff, but like things that are not, yeah, that aren't politically correct, that people are

debating and that, I mean, I think it's notable that Trump has made inroads with certain demographic groups that might surprise people if they were looking into the future in 2016, right? Like, Trump's doing really well with Latino voters. She's doing surprisingly well with younger voters. I mean, like, there's a lot of stuff happening that I think you kind of can't turn a blind eye to. And it's, I mean, you know, CNN's kind of easy to pick on.

But I think everyone sort of has their own version. of that like yeah how much how much crazy do you give voice to particularly when things sort of seem slightly teetering if you pay attention this campaign has been a drag i think it's also because the candidates have not been talking to reporters nicky haley sort of famously doesn't take questions a lot and has basically confined all of her interviews almost all of them to fox news about topics that are happy topics for her ron desantis we heard denounce the corporate media quote unquote when he was first on the trail. But I thought it was very funny that with Hugh Hewitt recently,

he has been rethinking his approach to us in the corporate media. Well, maybe he's the earned media is finally getting to him as his campaign runs out of money. And he also realizes that running to Trump's right was maybe harder than he thought and that you have to reach, you know, audiences that are not just like conservative social media influencers. Because if people will remember.

Funny how that works, right, when you get down the polls. Funny how that works. Yeah. I mean, like, it's amazing how there was a period in, I guess it was 2021, early 2022, when all these stories were about how, like, Ron DeSantis had essentially, like, invited all these media personalities to move to Florida, which I thought was a great, like, I mean, it's kind of an amazing gambit and, like, did actually create a lot of content. And now he's essentially doing, like, he's moving more towards the Pete Buttigieg thing of, like, well, I'll talk to anyone, right?

I'll debate an empty, an empty lectern if Nikki Haley and Donald Trump won't show. That was great this week. By the way, the one thing I'll object to in the Grinbaum piece we mentioned was using Jonathan Martin, who was a columnist at Politico as a data point. Because he might not have been in Iowa, but I was reading his Twitter feed on caucus night. And he was quoting Alice Roosevelt Longworth talking about Wendell Wilkie. That seems like the same J-Mart to me. I don't detect a lot of malaise. dredging up that stuff.

All right, Claire, I got two surprises for you before we go. I did not prepare you for those things. Okay. I need you as a journalist to weigh in on this. How do you feel when you write a well-turned column or a deeply reported New Yorker feature and someone on Twitter replies, great write-up? Had that become a weirdly ubiquitous compliment? Well, it's funny.

I actually think there's just like a lot of confusion among the public about what to call things. Like the funniest thing I think is like when you see someone do like a short Q&A with someone and then people are like what a great profile. And it's like they called them up and had a 30 minute conversation. Like what do you think what do you think a profile is? They also read the word peace like 10 years ago and you started seeing people in the non-journalist community saying great peace. And I was like, how do you know what that means? I didn't know what that means. Great right up.

I became a journalist. Great piece. I feel right up like you and I have both been assigned stories where basically it's like something happens and we've been told give me 800 words of exactly what happens and turn like three sentences. Yeah. And turn, you know, turn a phrase right here and there. Yeah.

That to me is a great write up. Yeah. Any more effort expanded. That's not a write up, folks. It's a piece. It's a piece. It's a considered essay. all right number two for you new york times did a gimmick the other day where they asked their

niki haley and ron de santis beat writers to switch spots think you have a fresh perspective i didn't see i didn't see this is this is how you know we don't have a campaign because you know let's let's try something new um if you could temporarily switch jobs with one person at the new yorker who would it be such a hard question can i interest you in a week at the theater subbing for vinson cunningham uh maybe some Thick books to review arriving at your apartment, subbing for Adam Godnick. What do you think?

I kind of think I want Michael Schulman's job. Okay. He just like do some profiles of, you know, directors, travel the world with, you know, create controversy about succession actors. I think it would be kind of fun. I've never read a Michael Schillman piece long short where he does not seem to be having fun.

They're fun, yeah. There's a lot of fun. I know it's hard work. I know it's a great piece, quote, but it's fun. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, it's, you know, or I mean, maybe, maybe for just a single piece only, was it Ed Caesar who wrote this car piece? Wait, I don't want to get this wrong. We just had an amazing piece about like hypercars.

Did you read this? I haven't read it. The world's fastest. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, Ed Caesar. I was right. Ed Caesar wrote this piece about just like, I think the hook was like Bugatti has some new crazy cars. And there's all these like boutique Swedish brands of cars that cost like $500,000. And he like got to drive some and hang out with the people who did.

And I love that like, you know, spend a week in fill in the blank European mountain town where there's like an implicit agreement with the police that like they won't they won't pull anyone over and just like be among those people. Yeah. Yeah, glamour. What you're getting at is any fun beat in the New Yorker sounds even more fun than it would outside the New Yorker? Travel. I think mostly what I'm coming to is like, I'd like to go on an international trip paid for it by my employer. Sorry, Claire, I'm getting a memo here. More layoffs in the media for you.

Yeah. Claire Malone, read her at The New Yorker, including her latest piece on Clarissa Award. Claire, thank you so much for coming out the press box. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, that's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic. Brian Waters. For my letter from the editor this week, let me announce next week's guest host. He is a great journalist and a great friend of mine. He is Chris Sullen Trump, the politics

editor for opinions at the Washington Post. Before that, Chris was an editor at Politico Mag at The New York Times Magazine at Yahoo News. He is, for my money, the best story editor in the business. Somebody who can look at a piece and instantly, diagnose what it needs to be better, like taking your car to the dealership when the light comes on on the dashboard, that's Chris. It's also an excellent writer who has covered everything from a presidential campaign for Slate to video games to the New York Times, where he was the video game critic. He also looms very large in my life because my first real job in journalism, which is to say my first job with a living wage in journalism, was at Slate. And Chris

was my newsroom big brother. He was the guy who literally took me aside when I started there and said, this is when you show up for this job. This is how you do this job. This is how you be a pro in journalism. And he would have advice about writing too. I remember turning in a piece once to him that said,

so and so famously said. And Chris came back to me and said, you know, if somebody famously said something, you probably don't need to mention that it's famous. Anyway, everybody should be so lucky to have a big brother like that. And me as someone who never had brothers or sisters in real life, I realize, like, oh, this is what a big brother does. Chris is also a big brother that would give you nuggies, which, you know, I probably deserve. Anyway, next Thursday, Chris Solentrop on the press box talking about the presidential campaign and many other things. And then Monday, David Chewaker and I return with more lukewarm takes about the media.

Have a fantastic weekend.