The Press Box - The Death of Journalistic Swagger, Apple Is Crushing It, ‘The Office’ For Newspapers, and "The Revenge of the Homepage" With Julia Turner

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Hello media consumers! On the Final Edition, Bryan is joined by Julia Turner—one of the hosts of Slate's Culture Gabfest! They get into the following topics: Jack Shafer’s story in Politico about “journalistic swagger” (1:20). Ben Smith of Semafor’s interview with New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn regarding the 2024 election (20:26) The Apple ad about the new thin iPad (32:56) An ‘Office’ spinoff, but for a newspaper company (35:26) Reggie Miller has learned something from Bryan and other podcasters (40:00) Kyle Chayka's, of The New Yorker, story: "The Revenge of the Home Page" (42:59) Then, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Julia Turner Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join me, Danny Kelly, along with Danny Hyfitz and Craig Horlebeck every week on the Ringer fantasy football show as we prepare for the 2024 fantasy football season. We'll cover all the biggest news and topics across the league as well as whatever weird topics our listeners email us about. That's the Ringer Fantasy Football Show on Spotify. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up on the pod has journalism lost its swagger? and if so, where do we leave it?

Should the New York Times try to stop Donald Trump from winning the election? Plus, Apple wants to smash your creative tools. A podcast cliche is creeping into broadcasting. There's a journalistic spinoff of the office coming, and homepages are, dare I say, having a moment. All of this with today's guest host. She is Julia Turner, one of the hosts of the Slate Culture Gab Fest, a senior fellow at USC's Annenberg Center.

At Slate, she has been the editor. At the LA Times, she has been many things, including senior vice president for content business strategy. She's also been my pal for 20 plus years. Julia, welcome to the press box. Brian, what a treat to be here. I'm so excited. Such a treat.

Can we start by talking about swagger? Please. Because our old colleague, Jack Schaefer, has a story in Politico about swagger. Journalistic swagger, that is. And he writes, Wounded and limping, doubting its own future, American journalism seems to be losing a quality that carried it through a century and a half of trials. It's swagger. And Julia, Jagd defines swagger this way. Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism,

often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness no matter whom it might offend. Where do you want to start on swagger or lack thereof? Well, all right. First, I feel like we have to both cop to the fact that to the degree that either of us has any journalistic swagger, we learned it in part at Jack Schaefer's knee, right? He was a swaggering lion of the slate office when we were baby journalists there. And one of the best qualities of his swagger was that he encouraged swagger and opinion. opinionatedness in us unschooled youngens. So I think he would appreciate my response to his piece,

which is I have a few thoughts about it. Because I think Jack is lamenting the decline of swagger, but defining swagger in a couple of different ways. And I would say that some forms of journalistic swagger are worthy of preservation, and some I would be happy to see go by the wayside. you want me to walk through a couple of them? Let's start with the ones that we want to throw on the trash can first.

Okay. Well, the swagger to not care who you offend. I think there's the best version of swagger in journalism, right, is a kind of fearlessness, right? So there's fearlessness in who you pursue, what subjects you go after, what stories you decide to tackle, what you have the courage and the bravery to take on. And then there's swagger in the methodology you used to do it. And some of the piece seems to lament an era where journalists used to be unafraid to chase big game. And some of it seems to lament an era when journalists were unafraid to go off half-cocked, even if everyone on the internet and in their newsrooms said, hey, that's really dumb. That's a stupid idea. That's a bad point.

Early on in the piece, just for one example, Jack laments, like, who would even hire Christopher Hitchens if he were alive in writing today? And, you know, Christopher Hitchens famously had a piece in Vanity Fair lamenting women. They're just never funny. And it would be harder to publish that piece today. And that's good. Like, I'm glad about that. Yeah, there's a whole genre of 90s and 2000s column writing, particularly by, dudes that could easily be put in the swagger we no longer need file.

Yes. And I think we could do that. You know, the Hitchens thing is interesting because putting that particular piece aside for a second, what he's also talking about is somebody that just has a bunch of different kinds of political opinions who is pissing off conservatives and liberals at the same time. that person doesn't totally exist in the same way anymore. If they do, they probably write a substack. They're probably Madaglacius.

Madaglacus does indeed get name checked in the piece, yes. Yeah. I mean, and I guess, I guess that's one, you know, one thing I thought about when reading it. It's almost like when we lament that movie studios don't make sophisticated entertainment for adults anymore that just make superhero movies. And yet, if we measured. the amount of sophisticated entertainment for adults in the world, Ripley, Succession,

everything, we'd probably find there's a lot more than there were in the so-called glory days. And I do wonder if we count Twitter, substack, newsletters, anything else that reaches us, that there is quite a lot of journalistic swagger out in the world now, but perhaps from different sources. Well, and I think if you look at the swagger of setting your sights on an important target, and then using the tools of journalism to come correct, which is to me like the best form of swagger, like making a lazy, stupid argument that women aren't funny, no, thank you, don't need that swagger.

I just finished reading Marty Barron's book and the kind of gruff, methodical swagger of his description of the Washington Post conduct during Donald Trump's first administration is a better kind of swagger. if you think about, you know, there were this period that we're lamenting is a period when Harvey Weinstein came to prominence and was much touted and lauded and the investigative work done in the last 10 years to broaden the lens of what kinds of stories are worth telling,

broaden the lens of what kinds of legal risks you would take to, you know, as Ronan Farrow did in New Yorker include the account of Azia Argento, who was not a perfect victim of Harvey Weinstein, not someone who newsrooms past would have taken the risk of including as part of the narrative of his predation. That's some swagger. That's some serious swagger there. And it's, you know, the swagger of when journalists are cautious, but in order to make the work that they do absolutely bulletproof and undeniable, like there's a, there's a tension in the piece where Jack opposes sort of the sad, cautious, couched, crabbed language of modern. in journalism that seems to anticipate every potential offense at my cause and laments a more freewheeling

style. And I, look, I love a freewheeling provocation if it's smartly done. But carefulness, I don't think, has to be in opposition to swagger because I think the way to really show the impact of journalism is to do it right, you know, to do it to do it carefully and to anticipate the rebuttals and then shut them down. I do think what he's talking about, though, the couch language. I do see that. I see it in sports writing. You know, we can't criticize a player without, you know, while this player has done great work here, while he was so great and this, you know, there's a lot more. And again, part of that is ridding the system of the way things ought to be done, right? I feel like so much you and I grew up in this generation where it's

like, do not be that person from the 90s newspaper world, right? Old deadspin, old Gawker, don't be that old style journalist. And so sometimes in the flushing of the system, you get too cautious. You get to be too crabbed and too defensive in writing anything. And I felt maybe I'm just generalizing for my own experience here, but sometimes I feel myself doing that. Don't be that person. I'm wait,

wait, no, no, just do a better version of the thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I,

I, I mean, there's a, there's risk in publishing anything, right? There's risk in the response. But I also think, you know, this sense of like,

oh, don't be afraid of who you. you offend in the audience or don't be afraid of whether you ruffle the feathers in your newsroom. You know, there's another point in the piece that I would push back on a bit, which is that, you know, newsroom uprisings over what places should or shouldn't publish, don't count as swagger. I don't know. I think I think journalists just have an obligation to be fundamentally pro-information people and we have a lot more input than we used to about what the general public thinks of the work we produce and what, you know, newsroom cultures, thankfully, have progressed to the place where

people feel comfortable saying when they think something's not great. And that does not mean that the people who run newsrooms should, you know, cower in the face of every objection. The job is not to let every objection stand, but hearing out the points raised and then using them to inform the ultimate decision about what to publish, like, that's good. It makes the work stronger. Not every objection is wrong either. Right, right. You can make the work better by having more voices in the room. So I don't know.

I mean, I will say there is a kind of swagger that I love when, and he gets to this when he talks about spy magazine as an example of swagger. But the swagger of mischief, like well-deployed mischief, I think there's a mischievousness drought. journalism because things are so bleak and the world is so tough and the swagger of mischief is a swagger that i miss yeah when we started doing our headlines as SEO headlines instead of mischievous funny headlines there was a decline there when homepages which we're going to talk about in a second were replaced by tweets there was probably a mischievousness drop i missed that one one swagger example that i was thinking of reading the piece was a great piece that lucas quond Peterson, who was a food columnist at the LA Times, did on April Fool's Day a bunch of years

ago that was kind of making fun of the New York Times' approach to covering Los Angeles and was like in cramped New York hellscape, green shoots of a dining Renaissance bloom, or, you know, that's not a direct quote, but the, you know, it was just like a grenade, lobbed and done dexterously. I think I read there's a piece check sites in here from Max Taney about. about the tough, the difficulty of getting a tough piece published in 2024, partly because of Gawker style legal threats, partly because just the general lack of power of journalism versus what it was 20, 30 years ago.

The Times and the Post are exceptions to that in a certain sense, right? Look at our local papers that you and I grew up reading, which are just much, much diminished in terms of subscribers and power they once be. I think if we're talking about tough pieces or even swagger, we should probably have just a carve out for the Trump beat. Because if Woodward and Bernstein were swaggering heroes of the 70s, we got a lot of Woodsteins from 2017 to 2021, people that published a lot of unbelievable stuff out of the White House and seemed to have no lack of swagger to both their copy and the general figure

they cut in newsrooms. And that to me should be a part of any of this if we're talking about what's happened in journalism. You're like, you just covered the president of the United States like that. That's not nothing. Well, and that's part of the swagger deficit

that Schaefer's describing too, right? Because the thing that is so mystifying to so many in the press corps is that, you know, Nouveau-Woodstein after Nouveau-Wood's deed can reveal, like, wild allegation after,

you know, wild behavior. And it does not seem to necessarily move the needle of voter perception of the candidates. So I think the sense that the influence that journalists have to shape opinion is less reduces the swagger is real and is part of the dynamic as well. You mentioned us growing up working for Jack in the Slate newsroom, Captain Swagger himself, who I started calling coach on one of my first days in the office. because he seemed to be like a guy standing on the sideline with a whistle in the best way. But, you know, when I talk to young sports writers now, so many of them, because there are no jobs, they start working for New England Patriots.com as their first job, Dallas Cowboys.com, or something connected to a network, which is paying sports leagues to show their stuff,

or some advertorial hellscape that you and I never quite had to contemplate. and I do think, you know, not, you know, starting out in a swagger-free environment as a young journalist. That scares me. I don't want to be, you know, semi-old person looking at the youngs and being like, I'm worried about you. But when you start there and then have to acquire swagger, if at all, at a later date, rather than the very first moments you have in journalism, you know, would we be surprised, right? If it's harder to get? doesn't mean those people are going to become bad journalists or, you know, swagger-free journalists.

But I do think there is something different about that as opposed to the old methods of matriculating through the business. Yeah, I've definitely worked with folks who got their start in more of a like influencer advertorial space and whose sense of kind of where the lines and boundaries are were different than my own coming up. Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that so many people, get started in environments that look like newsrooms, but that are structurally toothless for various economic reasons is part of the problem. You know, in addition to the overall

potential lack of influence that journalism may have to shape opinion these days, there's also just the deficit of jobs. Like, it's harder to stick to your guns and say, I'm going to write this piece or else I quit and go work for the other guy. It's like, where's the other guy? Other guy went out of business. Just the kind of standing any individual journalist has to fight their bosses or editors to get something over the line that they think

is important is lessened as well. But I don't know. I think the way back to Swagger is more through rigor than through recklessness, which is maybe just the way I'm

wired. And yes, we can put Trump to the side, I guess, but also why? That was a huge story that brought out a lot of bravery and strength and swagger and directness and kind of questions about and resurrection of first principles of journalism. Like, you know, we can put it to the side, but you could also put it back in the middle of the table and say, swagger prevails, swagger reigns. I mean, I think it's harder in the lifestyle spaces. One of the pieces that Max Tani mentioned in that piece about the difficulty of getting things over the line legally these days is the incident with Road and Track where they commissioned a piece

about F1 and it just talked about how dripping in money that world is. And the editor of Road and Track just took the piece down because it was out of keeping with the tone. And there, I think it's maybe harder to have editorial independence and swagger on some of the softer subjects like sports or culture or places where you're not, you know, speaking truth to power, qua power in the form of the Oval Office and you're instead speaking truth to power of like, eh, how powerful are the guys who drive cars around anyway? But they are, you know, and the editor of Rodentrak would have just been. like run out of journalism for taking a piece down just because it was, you know, like it,

we're a self-policing tribe and the fact that someone can just do that and still have their job. And that's a change in our more is for sure. Brian, before we, uh, cool it with our swagger, I got to ask you, who are the journalists who have swagger today? Who's swaggering around out there on the landscape? I got a few in mind, but curious if you've got any. Okay, why don't you start with your list while I gin up my swagger all-stars? I feel like the cock of the walk, swagger-wise, these days is Kara Swisher. Okay. Just walks around in her sunglasses, acting like CEOs are afraid of her.

Some of them aren't, but her confidence that they are is a kind of swagger, I think. I got to respect that swagger. You know, I do think, I think the puck brand voice is going for a kind of swashbuckle vibe, like the knowing insider who's going to give it to you straight and say, you know, say what they're saying in the back, dark corners, the powerful people. And, you know, sometimes it feels more accurate than others, but there's definitely a swagger. There's some spurs on the cowboy boots of the puck house tone as it's developing, I think. Yeah, definitely like a couple that came to mind. A grand nephew of Curtin, Graydon at Spy Magazine. Definitely what they're going for.

The Isaac Chotner. Oh. Scalpel. If that phone call comes your way, a little bit of sly swagger there. That's a good one. I forgot about Isaac. Yeah. I would, Olivia Nutsi was mentioned in Jack's piece.

definitely, I think, as swaggering magazine writers go, you know, we could, we could pick a bunch that have, like, tied down swagger, like a Patrick Raddenkief or, you know, we could throw those names out there, but one that is just writing, writing and swaggering, you know, old school Rolling Stone style prose. And Olivia, who was just on the podcast, would be right up there at the top of mine. In the entertainment realm, because I just saw that he has a second piece about Paul Schrader out today, Stephen Roderick would definitely be in my my slagger all-stars. But this is a good

team to put together in future press box episodes, the swaggering journalistic all-stars. Well, right. And another piece this week we're not talking about is the piece about Joanna Coles' takeover of the Daily Beast, but there's I would say there's a little bit more than the bad kind of swagger in insisting that her journalists publish a piece they can't

confirm about where Barron Trump is going to college. And then once published says, as the piece reports, hope it's true. That's a, that's some swagger, not the good kind. She has swag, definitely. She edited a piece of mind one time and she said, Brian, your reporting was was really good, but your writing wasn't nearly good enough. So next time, just make the writing better. I was like, okay. And she was right. Good note. New topic for you, the New York Times and the 2024 election. speaking of journalists saying one thing and not producing the results that maybe the reporting indicated. Ben Smith of Semaphore had an interview with Times executive editor Joe Kahn, and he asked a question that has been on the lips of liberal media critics everywhere.

Why don't you see your job as we've got to stop Trump? What about your job doesn't let you think that way? Joe Kahn, Julia, responds like this. To say that the threats to democracy are so great that the media is going to ban it its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote. That's essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate because we prefer that candidate's agenda. And Joe Kahn continues, there are people out there in the world who may decide based on

their democratic rights to elect Donald Trump as president. It's not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It's the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening. What do you make of Kahn's answer? I'm so curious to hear what you make of it, too. I he cannot say anything like the only answer for him to give as the person running the New York Times is of course it's not our job to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't get reelected like it is not the job of the New York Times to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't get reelected and if it if he said it were that he would not be the right person to have that job whatever various quarters of Twitter would say about it but the particular way in which he gave that answer and delivered. it was interesting to me because he didn't say what a lot of editors in his position sometimes say, which is our job is to report the truth and to tell the story of which

candidates have the best relationship with truth. Like there's a way to signal that the journalistic pursuit of truth, honesty, accuracy, in service of strengthening democracy suggests a set of values that also might lead you to prefer Joe Biden's candidacy, which is more fact-based than Donald Trump's candidacy.

And so there's a way to almost like dog whistle that you are not truly just looking at like Avis and Hertz in your evaluation of these two candidates as like basically neutral alternatives. And he really, did not do that. I mean, what did you think of his response? Yeah, I mean, I just, I just think when you say, we use a word propaganda arm. And I'm, I'm repeating the critiques of liberal media

critics about this interview, but you're, you're straw manning this thing a lot, right? There's, I don't, I don't know how many people have called on the times to, you know, become Joe Biden's campaign staff. I really don't. Also, like you, I am not surprised at this answer at all because Joe Conn is a New York Times lifer who has become executive editor. He works for A.G. Solsberger who comes from a family of New York Times lifers. And I just don't believe for either of them, there was anything they would do to change the essential qualities of the New York Times. You know, I don't know. Maybe there is, maybe you and I could come up with some, you know, Alex Garland style scenario. But from this, from the 2024 election, Joe Biden versus Donald

Trump, they're not going to change at all. No, and I don't know that they need to change the practice of their journalism that much. But one thing that I thought was really interesting about his response, much of which was sticking to the guns, old school journalistic values 101, was, did you notice the moment where he said, ah, well, yeah, democracy is important. But it's not the number one issue for our audience. Our audience also cares about immigration and the economy. And so that there was this funny, you know, that's another of the things that old-timers and newspapers debate, right? Do we let the audience tell us what's important? Or do we use our reporting to determine what's important and then use that to shape our report?

And I think the best newsrooms do a mix of those things. But it was interesting in this kind of bland, bland. assertion of neutrality to have tucked into it this like, well, but, you know, the audience says the fate of our democracy is only its third most pressing issue. It's like, well, you are the other, like, you do get to decide what issues the New York Times should focus on and cover. So I thought that was a funny little future speak in the middle of the old speak. I think whenever I hear newspaper editors talk, I'm just always seeing flashbacks from 2016. where the story of Trump was that he was so obviously unqualified to be president of the United States.

And then he wins. And it's like, well, we ignored what people were interested in, which was, you know, NAFTA and, you know, list off 10 things. So then what he's saying here's, oh, well, immigration keeps coming up as a number one issue. So, you know, why wouldn't we be covering immigration? Like, well, you know, okay. But again, I feel I feel there's like this balancing of the past and the present in that issue, too, in addition to what you say about letting the audience decide. it's I mean, what he also says is he says it's the line in there. We are a pillar of democracy. We the press and particularly the New York Times. So, but it's very hard to then kind of read that answer and follow the through line to, well,

one candidate is loudly anti-democratic, not quietly, but loudly anti-democratic, according to your own papers reporting. But then you feel that your job as a pillar of democracy is always the same job. Yeah. It was a little, it was the answer he had to give, but it was given in an aggressively bland fashion that I think is part of why it's brokered the response. Here's my question to you, Brian. You're running a major American newsroom. Ben Smith, a journalist with some swagger himself, calls you and says, can we just do a one-on-one sit-down?

How's your newsroom doing? What are your priorities? Do you say yes? I say, is this going to be a wide-ranging interview? Mr. Smith? Welcome to my office. I mean, I think given the complexity of everything I'd be trying to balance in this hypothetical newsroom, I would absolutely not want to talk to Ben Smith or anybody else.

But it would be very hard for me when I had my own media reporters, you know, biting hands across the universe for me to say no. You just left the masthead of a major newspaper. How do you feel about this? I mean, I think that the honorable and correct position for anybody who's running a team of reporters who are they are sending out day by day to hound people into having on-the-record conversations

about what they do in the world and how they prosecute it, the correct moral position is you talk to the reporter, right? And I feel like I had a couple bosses that's late, including Jack to some degree, who lived by that principle, picked up the phone, just, you know, off the cuff, said whatever was on their mind. Perhaps in keeping with my advocacy of bulletproof cautiousness in our prior segment, I'm not a let's just pick up the phone girl myself. I feel like I'd rather have the work speak for itself. And there are occasions when you need to tell the story of your place or certainly, whenever you need to defend your people or their work, that's not a time to be shy.

But there's the general, how's it going? How's the newsroom ethos? I've got several third rails here. I've got three, four, five, six, and seven want to touch any of them? No, thank you. So I can't say I'm proud of that, but that's definitely my instinct. Oh, my gosh. Especially given that the New York Times has been hounding Joe Biden to sit down with real journalists

instead of only talking to softball podcast peeps, perhaps that's an additional reason to say yes to your former colleague, Ben Smith. Yeah, instead of just the smartless podcast, though. I'd kind of like to hear Joe Kahn go on that one as well as is just doing an interview with Ben. Now, there's some. I want to ask you about this too, because something comes up and it's in the course of the liberal critiques of the times, but it's about headlines. Because you and I both know, if you want to criticize a newspaper, you can criticize the story, but you can really get your merit badge on Twitter by poking at a headline that is written sloppily. And Joe Kahn says this, the amount of time and energy that we put on the nuances of the story, the nut graph, compared to the amount that spent at the end of the process on the headline is still probably disproportionate. some huge number of people only interact with a headline.

Again, coming fresh off a newspaper stint, what do you think of the whole practice of getting headlines right, especially on stories like this? I agree with the philosophy that you can't spend too much time on the headlines, and also that not every newsroom has the culture that is built around perfecting headlines. I think there's lots of reasons for that. And, you know, having grown up at Slate where headline writing was art conducted in a particular way, it was interesting to get to a newspaper that was making headlines for both digital and print and the kind of logistics of that, just that process of having, even online, you have multiple sets of headlines of like, oh, it's the Twitter field and it's the SEO. You know, you're often writing three or four headlines for a piece, but shifting to a newsroom that has.

headprint. There were sometimes multiple teams working on multiple headlines for multiple different things and that can contribute to it, I think, although I don't know much about the New York Times process and how it works. But yeah, I think it's also hard at a newspaper versus a magazine where the tone, the particulars of the neutral headline tone, how do you, how are you neutral and yet also alluring and enticing and interesting? How can you be sizzily without being too saucy. It's a tight rope walk. Sam Stein had what he found was the perfect New York Times headline.

I'm talking about Sam Stein of Politico here. After the Trump trial this week, Stormy Daniels, comma, who told of sex with Trump, comma, returns to stand on Thursday. Little Chef's Kiss. New York Times headline there. That's a good one. That's a good one. It really made me laugh so much.

And I do love our practice just as a lover of journalism of having the print headline and the web headline, especially when I see like the New Yorker. I'll read a New Yorker story, some big, beautiful profile. And the headline is like SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO, when I'm reading online, and then I get to the very end of the story, it says, this appeared in the print issue as the contrarian. aggressively, stately, New Yorker headline. Yeah, the divergence is getting stronger, I think, on some of those. One thing I will say in partial defense in the New York Times, and of everybody, New York Times has done tons of great reporting on Donald Trump's autocratic tendencies. There's a story from December that Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman wrote,

but it's still like the first reference in here is how Trump would be even more of an autocrat if he gets reelected full of hard information about how laws have been weakened about what Trump and his assistance, if that's the right word, want to do. So, you know, they've done lots of great

reporting on this. They're not pulling their punches on that one bit. Another thing that came up on Twitter this week, Julia, did you see the Apple ad that CEO Tim Cook tweeted out? I'm such a contrarian at heart that I saw the angry

tweets about it first and was like, this ad can't possibly be that bad. Come on. Quit your whining. And then I watch the ad and it's worse. It's worse than Twitter said. People haven't seen it. It's like a Star Wars trash compactor. And what is being compacted, tell me if I'm leaving stuff out here is musical instruments, a camera, a video game machine, like an old school arcade machine, TVs. some Rodan looking busts some busts one of those one of those little figures that you you know use for life drawing the little bendy wooden men he gets like plaintively bent over backwards into a sad limbo till he's squashed to death by by Apple I guess it's just like all of the detritus of human creativity yes getting steamrolled before you

smushed yeah it's and the idea is that they've made a thinner iPad, which sounds fine. But the way we're showing that the iPad is so thin is that we're going to smush creativity in front of your eyes. Did you see the comment on Twitter from someone who said they could have fixed this ad by just running it backwards? Like same concept. Oh, this beautiful thin iPad.

Look what blooms out of it. Ooh, a gorgeous statue. Boxes of paint. A whole arcade game. You know, you could just flip the order. I love that note. Good note. That's cool.

It's like those Mother's Day cards. I used to love to give my mom when I was a kid. Like, look, it opens up and a whole thing pops right out. Sort of feel like maybe some ad executive kind of had a lot of swagger and was like, never mind everyone in the room who's saying this is going to go over badly. It's don't worry. This is really going to grab their attention, which it did. I mean, the counter theory of this ad is that nobody watches or talks about television ads anymore.

and it's very hard to make a memorable ad that anybody cares about. So here we are talking about Apple and it's thin new iPad. Pressbox listeners, thin new iPad coming from Apple. Like maybe mission accomplished. I feel like an unswaggering journalist for letting that ad creep its way into this podcast. I really do. Karen Swisher wouldn't have let this happen. You're so right.

All right. Let's put our sunglasses back down. But sunglasses back on CEOs. You better fear us. Another thing I saw on Twitter, this is from Variety's, Joe Otterson, who reports there's a spinoff of the office coming. Not exactly a spinoff, but something Joe Otterson says that it happens in the same universe as the office, which is really a sentence that makes my head ache.

Here's the squib. The documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch is in search of a new subject when they discover a dying historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it with volunteer reporters. Not a business model I've heard a ton about yet. So kudos to them for trying something new. Yeah. Do you like the TV has finally embraced the newspaper as the stand-in for professional hopelessness?

Yeah. I had a couple thoughts about that because the dynamic within both of the original offices, the American one and the British one, is that working at an office, like a paper supply company, makes literal the concept of paper pushing. as a stupid pointless job, right? They are literally pushing paper, empty paper, blank paper, paper that is not filled with labor and journalism of varying levels of swagger. And the thing about a newsroom is that newsrooms are convinced of their own value. You know, whether or not anybody's reading the journalism is changing anybody's mind, like part of why you become a journalist is because

you think the work is important. And it's one of those jobs where you can pursue both gratification of having a job that maybe helps you make the world a better place in some quite indirect way. And you also get to pursue a little bit of ego gratification. Like, people out there in the world know who you, Brian Curtis are here with your podcast and your bylines. And, you know, you're not Julia Roberts, but you're Brian Curtis. Like, journalism offers a lot of rewards that based on the depictions of work. working at a paper supply company in previous versions of the office, that profession does not seem to offer. So what I can't decide is whether the show is going to tangle with that concept of like what makes work have value or whether they're just going to kind of smush journalism down like the Apple Crusher and assume that journalism has no value.

I hadn't thought about that. That is something that will have to be worked out. I guess I thought about it more in the terms of imagining the cast of the office, the Michael Scots and the Dwight's and trying to superimpose them over newsroom figures I had met along the way, not at the rigorous slate, of course, but elsewhere. And I was like, yeah, you know, vain, glorious person running the thing that doesn't totally know what to do. Yeah, yeah.

It all kind of tracks. Yep. You know, Angela Kinsey could be a copy editor. No offense to copy editors. Or Angela Kinsey fans. No, dude. But like the newsroom version of an accountant is the cop, you know, the nuts and bolts person. Totally.

I could see the editor assigning you to write a little aggregation blog on something that was happening Twitter in Twitter that day. And you do the Jim Halpert eyebrow raised take. I don't have to do that. Really? Right now? I believe the quote from the head of NBC Universal was that newsrooms are, quote, ripe for comedic storytelling. And yes, I would agree that newsrooms are quote ripe for comedic storytelling. I think there's plenty of terrain. It's just, you know, the original office had had actual deep

sense of futility in all that labor. And where journalism is right now, there is like a war between a deep sense of purpose and mission and a little bit of ego glory and the possible. that it's all just as futile as selling empty pieces of paper. So maybe it's going to be very sophisticated exploration of all of that. One more thing for you in short form here. I was watching the NBA playoffs, Nuggets, Timberwolves, game one. And usually, Julia, when I think of sports announcers, I think of them as a much higher form of talker than a podcast. We're just talking.

We're just talking. Disagree, but we can save that for another time. Okay, that'll be our next session. We're talking and they are broadcasting in some exalted sense. But I'm watching TNT's Reggie Miller explain a replay. They were coming out of a commercial on TNT. And I thought, oh, my goodness, Reg has learned something from me. Listen to the phrase he uses here as he explains a replay.

Jamal, a lot to unpack here. Here's the non-call on Carl Anthony Towns. There's one contact and then goes right through the chest. Nothing called. A lot to unpack here. How did this phrase leap from every podcast to national television and the broadcast booth? Well, to me, the difference between podcasting and talking on television is that in podcasting, you actually can usually take the time to unpack something and, you know, put all the stuff

from inside the thing somewhere else and look at it all. And TV talking is, yeah, carry on only, you know, there's not just a lot of density of information there. So I'm surprised. Your roller suitcase only. Yeah, you know, or like a fanny pack. I mean, it's, they're traveling light with the sort information density to minute of speaking ratio in my view, although I should say that is a view that has caused me to not watch that much television news or sports commentary. So you are much more informed than I about these matters than I will happily accept your view instead. But I don't know, do you think it's a trend really or was it a slip? And did he actually successfully unpack? Did he have time and space to really unpack whatever it was he proposed to unpack?

There was some unpacking. It wasn't the level of podcast unpacking. But I would counter to you that while the glory of podcasts is time to truly, you know, consider the nuances of issues, the downside of podcasting is over unpacking. Yes. Like there's too much unpacking. Right. And too much is unpacked at one time. Like suitcases are emptied, you know.

Yeah. Don't need a whole steamer trunk. No. Like, you know, you, Julie, ask me, Brian, an innocent question. What did you think of that piece in the New York Times? And I'm like, here are six things I think about it in a row. And you look at me like through the Zoom going, whoa, what? You know, and then you're like, well, I'm never going to get the mic back.

So I'm going to have to just tell you six other things that I think about it. And pretty soon we're exchanging academic papers instead of having a conversation. That's podcasting. Can be. Sure can be. All right. last topic for you. Revenge of the homepage. Kyle Cheika has this new story in the New Yorker called Revenge of the Homepage. Homepages were once passei. Social media was where readers were

going to find our stuff. Then Twitter goes to hell with misinformation and Elon and misinformation from Elon. There's AI created junk throughout the universe. And so readers, Cheika writes, turn back to the homepage, their early 2000s friend, to get news. You buy that proposition? I do, although I think it is maybe more a smattering of instances than like a flooding tide of people going to homepages. And I also would date the initiation of the trend a little bit further back because I would date it more to the rise of the subscription model after the scale model. So if the early 20 teens was

Chase Facebook and pivot to video and all the rest. I would actually date it a little bit further back, though, to the rise of the subscription business model in the mid to late 20 teens. So I think the first half of that decade was really when everyone was like, there are no home pages. The article is the ambassador of any publication. We're sending it to Facebook. We're sending it to. We're sending it to Twitter. And, you know, I went and looked back actually at something I wrote when I was at Slate and we did a redesign about, oh, we've put a lot of, we've really revamped the homepage in 2018 because of the rise of our subscription business.

Like, this move toward a place where you reemphasize curation and voice and trustworthiness for the people who are subscribing to you is, you know, I think longer standing than just post the death of Twitter. But the thing that's different posts the death of Twitter, or at least Twitter as we knew it, is like, where is everyone going to figure out what's happening? Like that question was not as a parent in 2018 as it is now. But I don't know, Brian, are you a, are you a homepage goer these days? Not as much as I probably should be, though I do like when we're doing things like putting together the pod or something i'll just be like n y times dot com what's what's what's the top of the what's the top of the front page thing i'm just not thinking about that should be a part of this podcast

in some way or did something just happen that we should be talking about um i tried with print newspapers for a while to try to become the youngest seven day a week subscriber to print newspapers in america you may have been challenging me for that honor and that's didn't work. I gave up. How long did it last that experiment? Several hundred dollars worth and several years worth of, of my life. Of heavy recycling bins? Heavy recycling bins. It was, it was, you know, and I, but I still, you know what I loved about it was like, oh, this is not an algorithm feeding me what it

thinks I want to read. These are smart people telling me what they think I should read. And, you know, a homepage still does the same thing, right? Like, you're not, you're not, you know, it's not like, hey, Brian, here's a cool new t-shirt that has a sports stadium that got torn down 20 years ago on it. Here's not some, here's some Star Wars news or whatever. It's like, no, no, here's the latest from Gaza and Ukraine and Biden and this and that. And I just felt like, like, that's what I was missing from Twitter. Yeah.

I mean, having better. homepages seems like part of the way that journalism can rise to our moment, but it does not seem like a fully outfitted solution to the problem that I feel in my own reading and that I feel like whenever I talk to people about their own reading habits they feel, which is like it's so easy to open 20,000 tabs and so hard to come back and actually read them all. It's so easy to kind of keep an eye on what the news is and where it is, but the sort of in-depth browsing exploration of both the things you and various algorithms think you're interested in and stuff you didn't even know you were interested in in the way that kind of an old newspaper magazine experience could nudge

you toward. It's harder to come by. I mean, I, you know, one thing that I've been interested in, you know, the Calchaca piece mentions that the verge, the text site, did a homepage redesign a couple years ago that almost intended to make it a little bit like a self-contained Twitter with little bits and Bob updates about the tech news of the day alongside links to their big reported pieces. The thing I've noticed on the New York Times app, and I'm curious if you've noticed these are these new vertical videos that they're doing or newish vertical videos they're doing where various reporters kind of explain real style what's going on at the Trump trial or, you know, this or that.

fact. And it's interesting because I think I think a lot of news organizations feel burned by chasing the platforms in the 20 teens and the kind of collapses of entire businesses that happen when too many resources were put towards chasing Snapchat or pivoting to video a la Facebook according to phony metrics, etc. But I actually think the news media has been kind of slow to pivot to TikTok and reels.

And I, as a consumer, did not pivot to video in the 20 teens. And as a consumer now, I watch like three different reels about cupcake frosting this morning because the algorithm right now thinks I'm interested in specialty cupcake frosting. And guess what? I guess I am, you know? And I watch those videos instead of, you know, reading whatever stormy told of sex with president. I love that that's a real credo for the algorithm-driven world we live in. I guess I'm interested in this.

I mean, I must be. Here it is. Ceramics. Apparently, I'm also really interested in ceramics. It goes through different phases. I actually, for the purpose of chatting with you today, I was like, huh, do I, what news? If I am looking at reels a lot, like, what news do I follow on meals and not that much? And I went and clicked up the old New York Times and gave it a follow.

which apparently I hadn't been following it on Instagram. So we'll see if Jonathan Swan swans his way in between the cupcake frosting and how that changes my news diet. Stidbride remind me a little bit of when we got rid of the cable bundle and we were all so happy like, ah, that dinosaur the cable bundle. And then we got really mad because we couldn't find the shows we wanted. And we were paying eight bills instead of one bill. The homepage is a little bit like that, kind of dinosauric in its way,

but also extraordinarily useful in its way. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's too many. I mean, I would say that right now I'm using newsletters as my homebages, more so than homepages. Same. You know, they come in. They got a range of links. There's a voice curating them. Some are very state and institutional. Some are very quirky and voicy. And it works okay. But it's also kind of random because you, for whatever reason right now, I have, I, I'm set up to read the Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal summaries of the news every day, but not the New York Times because I sort of feel like I'll get to the New York Times myself, but the business news I want more pushed at me. But then that's, you know, it's like so much about the labor, the jobs report. I don't need that much jobs report in the mix of stuff I'm consuming. I got to get a tinker with the dials on your algorithm out. You got to tinker with the dials on your algorithm, I think is the move these days.

at a little bit of a mortality moment when I read this New Yorker story because there were a few sentences in there. They were almost written like kids, this is what a homepage is. Oh, yeah. Well, has it been that long? Have we been in, have we been haunting newsroom for that many decades that we need to have a sentence in there just to tell people what's going on here? Okay. It's a famous hallmark of the New Yorker style that you've got to always be very direct and explain what everything is that you're introducing into your story.

So maybe, maybe, yeah, they couldn't introduce facts, not in evidence. What is a homepage? All right, Julia Turner. You find her at Julia Turner on Twitter X. You can find her shingle at the Annanburg Center. Is that a fair approximation of? Sure. While we're talking about old technologies, great.

Find her in academia. So much fun talking to you. Julia, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me, Brian. All right. Second, weekly edition of David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Thanks for letting me out.

You know, Julia so well, David. She's been to parties at our house and you didn't say a word for 45 minutes. I'm a little surprised at you. I'm protesting. Sorry, Julia. David's just not feeling it. Monday's headline about a group of birds of prey enthusiasts who were exploring a mountain top was rapture.

Rapture. Today's headline comes from Luke B. It's from the Chicago Sun Times. Chicago White Sox, David, absolutely suck. They are 8 and 26, and that's after going 500 in their last 10 games.

Losing doesn't quite get you as much in MLB as it did before they had a draft, the institute a draft lottery. But the White Sox have an opportunity to be bad. It's all there if they want to be bad. What was the Chicago Sun Times as strained pun headline?

Sox to be you. Sox to be us. Yeah. What is a good one though? Wait, what am I going to do? We're losing games on purpose, so we are tanking. And the opportunity is there for us. It's opportunity is presented in.

itself, it is there, therefore. Opportunity has presented itself. Yes. Opportunity knocks, David. It's there for. Oh, there for the tanking? There for the tanking. Yeah. Thank you very, very much. That is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Brian Waters. Great to have you back, Brian. Let's do a little preview of our May press box guest hosts. Coming up next Thursday, that is May 16th, we have Max Taney, the excellent media writer

from Semaphore. We have cited so many Max Tanny stories that I want to create a Google AI tool that just starts every segment with, as Max Tanny reported in Semaphore, so I don't have to keep typing it out in my press box script. I cannot wait to talk to him about New Yorker succession and many other topics. Then coming up May 23rd, that is two weeks from today, Shield Capadia of the ringer talking about everything under the sun, including I hope, some stuff about his career.

And then we've got a big treat coming for you on May 30th. Some T's need to be crossed. Some eyes need to be dotted. Some Harry Potter references need to be sharpened here. But I believe Mallory Rubin will be the guest host on this podcast. podcast. That could go 7,000 different ways, all of them delightful. Max Taney, Sheelko Patti, of Mallory Rubin, you're going to want to list to all of those shows, and you're going to especially want to listen on Monday when David Shoemaker returns with more

lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.