The Press Box - The Super Bowl Media-splosion, Trouble at the L.A. Times, and the Journalism Bubble | The Press Box (Ep. 422)

Episode Date: February 6, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker examine the media's coverage of Super Bowl, including the feud between Philly fans and Cris Collinsworth (06:00), the fights on radio row (15:30), and the chaos in Philadelphia (20:30). They then celebrate the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (22:45) before discussing why Lewis D’Vorkin was ousted as L.A. Times editor (27:30) and The New York Times' beef with the publication (37:30). Finally, they wrap up by looking at the news of Felix Salmon's salary at Fusion (42:30) and how every stop in a journalist's career is a bubble (44:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, Chris Ryan here as the NBA season gets more and more interesting every day. The Ringer NBA show feed now has you covered five days a week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Friday show will be focused on the draft, examining the best prospects, rankings, comparing players and fits for possible future teams. It will be with different combinations of our NBA experts like Kevin O'Connor, Danny Chow, Jonathan Sharks, as well as college hoops aficionados, Mark Titus, and Tate Frazier from One Shining Podcast. You will not want to miss that all of these shows, plus a few emergency pods with guests like Bill Simmons, whenever big news in the NBA breaks.

Make the Ringer NBA show a must listen for basketball fans. So subscribe to the Ringer NBA show now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. David, we're going to talk about Super Bowl media today. But first, how would you describe the Philadelphia Eagles fans we've met during our time on the East Coast? It's funny because in New York, the Patriots fans are a huge presence, right? I mean, even outside of football season, there's... Everywhere. It's an army.

The Eagles are a different breed. The Eagles, you know, you don't see Eagles hats walking down the street in New York. But if you go to a sports bar and not even an Eagle specific sports bar, the Eagles fans are a frightening horde. And I say that in the most loving possible way. I don't actually But yes, you're right I think one of the shocks About moving to the East Coast

You know remember you and I We did it about the same time in our 20s And we all we had these kind of like culture shock moments The biggest one to me is that when you sat down at like a middle rung restaurant You didn't get the giant super sized soft drink Just doesn't matter of course you know But just the ferocity of East Coast sports fandom Yeah

And particularly Eagles fandom I mean it was like I don't want to say Dallas Fort Worth sports fans where, you know, didn't care to any less, but they just expressed it in a much more jovial way, a nicer way? Is that the way to put it?

Yeah, I mean, part of that was just the twang, you know, even in the metaphorical sense. I mean, my dad's a preacher. And when we moved to Texas, I remember the first time he preached a sermon on a football Sunday, he was warned with a very saccharine smile to make sure that

everybody got out right at the stroke of 12. so that he'd get home in time to watch the Cowboys. I'm sure if he had run over, he probably would have been a little bit less smiling. I remember the first time, or I don't know if it was the first time, one time you and I, I mean, just right out of college, we're living, we're in D.C.

I don't even know if I was living there at the time and went to the, at a loss for where to go to watch a game or something. We were the NBA draft, right? I don't even know what it was. We ended up at the ESPN zone in D.C. and it must have been the NFL draft or something because there were no sports fans of record there. I mean, ESPN zone is more of a tourist attraction

than it is a sports bar, except for one table of Eagles fans who were so rowdy that I was, I was slightly frightened. I remember one time two, a couple of cowboy buddies and I went to Philly for a game on Monday night football, back when Monday night football still mattered.

And Donovan McNabb, throws a late interception to Roy Williams to lose the game for the Eagles. And I think I'm making this up, but it's true in spirit. We were listening to WIP, the All-Sports Station, on the drive back to New York, that people were like calling in death threats to McNabb. And if they weren't death threats, they were close, you know? And it was just amazing. It was, I just love it.

Congrats, Eagles fans. We will talk more about you on the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box. is the media podcast where you're not allowed to use the phrase, speed is the new accuracy. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. David, I've got three topics for you today. First, we offer our notes on the media explosion that was Super Bowl 52. Second, if having a dodgy parent company and a dud of an editor wasn't enough for the LA Times,

wait till you read the think piece the New York Times published. And finally, David, financial blogger Felix Salmon made how much? and what his salary says about the age of journalism in which we live and work. Plus the overworked Twitter joke of the week returns with a Super Bowl only edition. And trust me, amazing stuff this week. Congrats on everyone who participated. But first, David, let's talk about Super Bowl media and start with a segment called This is why Eagles fans can't have nice things.

Nothing could spoil a Philly fan enjoying his or her first Super Bowl win ever, except for Chris Collinsworth, making a couple of non-controversial. seal remarks about the catch rule and suggesting that a few key eagle touchdowns should have actually been called incomplete. And into the... Now is the Jesse James play with Pittsburgh. Does he complete the process? I don't know.

That ball comes loose. He does catch it. But at what point is it loose on the ground? He has control of it here. Ball pops out. I'm sure in Pittsburgh they're going... Are you kidding me? if they call Jesse James back, what are they going to do with this one?

I think they have to overturn it. I cannot wait for them to change this rule. Hopefully by the end of the game. Oh, my goodness, that is so close. If you were surfing Twitter last night, you saw the anti-Collinsworth sentiment from such unlikely sources as ex-major league catcher Paul Leduca, the guy who played Chuck in the short-lived NBC show, and political journalist Dave Weigel. David, what do you make of the NFL's newest feud? Well, the piece that you wrote about this for Theringer.com was excellent. I fully understand. I can fully sympathize.

As can you, I assume, with all of the Eagles fans feeling like Collinsworth was out to get them. I mean, you make the point in your piece, and I think it's dead on, that if you're a diehard fan, you're always going to feel like you were being directly attacked by the people in the booth. It's just the nature of the way the game is called. I think if anything, I don't think there was a conspiracy that Chris Collinsworth was a part of, unless you want to count the NFL's, unless you want to count the NFL's utter inability to find the rules as to what it catches and communicate that to its referees and broadcast partners, a conspiracy. In that case, yes, he was part of a conspiracy.

But, you know, if anything, you know, it would maybe would have made a little bit more sense for Collinsworth to err on the side of siding with the dramatic underdog in this fight. But that's, you know, that's a, that's a judgment call. That's a personal, that's a personal thing. So, you know, it's hard to fault him. In real time, it was very awkward. But I think that the awkwardness was more due to the, to the rules. And if given, you know, 30 extra seconds, he might have bobbled, you know,

babbled the metaphorical ball around coming down on the eagle side. You know, I mean, it was just, he was filling time in a really uncomfortable way. and I'm, you know, as great as he is most other nights, I'm apt to forgive him for this one. Yeah, the bias charge is pretty ridiculous, usually when people make it about sports announcers. There is such a thing as sports announcers pushing a storyline that they think is going on or that they kind of decided they would push before the game.

Mm-hmm. I don't think that's the case here because I think, I don't know Collins worked particularly well, but I think if both of those touchdowns had been Patriots touchdowns that had been then, you know, reviewed and then allowed after the review, I think he would have thought they were, they were both incomplete passes too, right? And then you'd have the absolute opposite, which is Patriots fans getting mad as they

did at Chris Collins were three years ago, by the way, during the Super Bowl. So that's right. It is totally. The catch rule, it messes with announcers. Because I feel what they're trying to do, especially what he was trying to do yesterday, was not say, is this a catch so much as anticipate what the rest were going to do, right? Which is a different thing. Yes.

And so you're trying to kind of, you're trying to predict something that's essentially unpredictable. And all of a sudden, you know, he's out of his wheelhouse, right? He's really good at, you know, breaking down a play, as we saw with that trick play right at the end of the first half, at kind of figuring out very, very quickly what happened on a football plan explaining it in really easy to understand terms. But he's bad and everybody's bad at trying to figure out what refs are going to do when you don't understand the rules that they're working with.

Yeah. And this, I mean, working the Super Bowl booth has got to be one of the most like high wire jobs in the world. So, you know, I don't mean this to like dog on him. It did seem like they, that both he and Al Michaels were unprepared for the gravity of a, of a questionable catch call at a moment like the Super Bowl. this isn't just like a kind of joke about the NFL rulebook anymore. This is going to just destroy the knights of a lot of sports fans, you know?

And it seemed like a much bigger moment. And they were just sort of, I mean, by the time on that, on that, uh, uh, uh, uh, earth's touchdown, by the time that Al Michaels brought up the, you know, the runner rule, it, you, you could tell listening to the show that an intern was waving an index card in his face that just said, say the word runner, you know, and then, and then they kind of figured out the rules from there, you know, this is an NFL rule problem more than it is a problem with the commentary crew. To go backwards really quick, you talked about, you know,

establishing a narrative or whatever, and Collinsworth did do that. You know, he was talking about the Eagles getting tired or whether or not the Eagles defense was going to wear out. And his verdict was usually no, but the Eagles fans took offense to that too, right? Oh, yeah. He was saying this way is like the Eagles defense

isn't going to wear out. Meanwhile, Tom Brady was throwing for a million yards in that game, right? So I don't know. Eagles weren't. I guess they weren't tired, but they weren't actually stopping Tom Brady in any appreciable way. By the way, I totally understand the mad of the announcer thing, as I said in that piece, because I've been that person, you know, whether it's Keith Jackson doing the Texas National Championship game in 2006 or some random Fox Sports Southwest guy. It's weird because you feel, especially during a big game, you feel really helpless as a fan and you're kind of yelling at God in a way. with a lot of things and you transfer so much angst and anger to the announcers because they're

just there, right? And you scrutinize everything they say, not even really for accuracy, because of course, with Michael's and cons where they're almost everything's going to be right, but just for tone, you know, because you're in such a vulnerable place that even any edge or any kind of sense that they don't care. They're not, they're not tending to your feelings. You just lash out.

I completely understand, but just so funny to me, you win your first ever Super Bowl, and you're mad at Chris Collinsworth. And when I published this piece yesterday, all these people in my mentions were like, he was, all he was doing was buttering up Brady the whole game.

This is totally real. You know, and I'm like, no, no, no, you're still doing it, right? Yeah. You won the Super Bowl. It's time to,

it's time to go climb a light pole or something like that, right? Yes. Stop, stop being mad at Chris Collinsworth. Well, once you realize that he's just sort of doing like dad watching TV stick at a much higher level than your dad, then he's much easier to appreciate in these big games. But my favorite tick of his is to, is to come as to have a talking point, but then, uh, give, like put it into the voice of a

quarterback who's on the field. Like, he'll just like, you know, see Tom Brady coming out of a huddle and just continue his own thought by saying like, yeah, what Tom Brady's saying right now is they really got a, the NFL really, really is to work on these catch rules, you know, or whatever. And it's, It's a, what, it's, is that what Tom Brady's thinking area right at that moment? Yeah, it's a great, it's a great tick. I would like, before we get it, before we move on, I feel like it is necessary to point out that the TV show Chuck did last five seasons, which, you know, it, it seems like a much, much shorter period of time in the collective memory, but that show hung on, just like the Eagles did last night. Apologies to the makers and stars of Chuck. I did not mean any, actually I did, but a couple other Super Bowl notes.

We should run down. Oh, yeah. Were you as amused as I was at the sheer number of media members who went to Minneapolis and thought it would be funny to do an ice fishing stunt? Well, we should say that members of the ringer staff went, went dog sledding while they were there too. But there was, I have spent some time in the summer in the Minneapolis area. I was not even remotely aware that it was such a winter wonderland

this time of year. Yeah. Here's a, can I give you a list of the people who ice-fished? Oh yeah, please do. The Deadspin lads, Al Roker, Katie Nolan and multiple gollics, I believe.

Peter King, USA Today's Dan Wolkin, Boomer Asiacens producers and Dan Patrick's producers. Steve Mariuchi, and Michael Irvin together, kind of a grumpy old men of ice fishing, Lindsey Zarniak, and Barstool's Pat McAfee show, which I'm pretty sure broadcast live from the ice.

Wow. Yeah. So this was a good gimmick. The other one I saw was people go to the Mall of America. That was another fun one. Yeah. Good comedy there. I went to a mall.

Oh, man. That's really fantastic stuff. Again, the Ringer broadcast from the Mall of America, as well they should have. It was, it's interesting whenever you go to a city like Minneapolis, how you're kind of at a loss for what to do to sort of get a feel for, I mean, what the hometown connection is going to be to your material. Obviously, the NFL had to find a, you know,

a Tom Brady grandparent to draw some sort of connection to Minneapolis, to the Minnesota region for their storytelling purposes. I think they were as much at a loss. You know, it's one thing when you go to New York or when you go to L.A. or when you go to Chicago, you know, but when you go, there's some, there's some places where it's not even what they have it offer, what they have to offer. It's what they, it's, you know, what is the place of Minnesota and the popular consciousness? And it's not, you know, an incredibly, there's not a giant vocabulary of like quintessentially

Minnesotan things to do. We treat it like an exotic destination, right? I mean, I don't remember when the Super Bowl was in Glendale, Arizona, people going around I'm trying to get the soul of Phoenix. Sure. And, you know, the soul of the desert are going to Sedona, you know, and communing, you know, with nature or something like that. It was all just like, ah, we're here.

You know, it's sunny and this is nice and let's do it. But I guess the rare Minnesota thing brought that out. Were you also mused by the radio row fights that broke out? Okay. You got it. You try to call me after you here. Oh, I'm Josh. I'm going to win the afternoon.

because they're so often. You can't win the afternoon. You can't win the morning. You can't win anything. This is the only, this is the best ratings you have. This is going to be the best ratings you have for a year. I love that all you need to do to make sports radio people mad at each other is just put them

in the same place. Yeah. Like that is, that's it. Doesn't even have to be about anything. You just put them in the same space for like more than 10 minutes and they just start fighting. Yeah.

I mean, there's always the conceit and, well, pro wrestling, but also in, you know, boxing and MMA and the fighting sports. People are much more interested in a fight if they think that the competitors really don't like each other. You know, it's like, this is going to be more, this is more than just a sporting event. And tonight in the UFC, these guys really just want to beat each other's face in. I guess in the same way, it does sort of,

it gives a little bit of like validation to, you know, all the shit talking that goes on in sports radio about other stations and that sort of thing. When you see that you're, you know, you're, you're, your portly avatars are really willing to stick fingers in each other's faces and defend their station against all comers. Would it be the same with podcasts? Like if you and I were broadcasting from radio podcast row at the Super Bowl,

would we go get in a fight with the slate political gab fest or something like that? We just want to challenge them. You could have gone in so many directions. I'm glad that you picked a political gab fest. One podcast where I'm intimately familiar with all of their, all of their various hosts and subject matter. At least I could get into a deep intellectual argument with them. I'll get you, John Dickerson.

You know, I'm not going to let this stand. Get out of my face. Get out of my face. David Plotz. I love it. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing. I mean, you've done, you've been on radio rows in your life as I'm sure you've been on both sides of the microphone as both, you know, just someone interviewer and

interviewee. They have to be, you know, and this is not a, this is not a, this. This is not a, don't take me as a journalist complaining about his early plane flight here, okay? But this, but, you know, those have to be, for all the great work you can do as a journalist, both as a, you know, radio commentator, as a writer, whatever. I mean, it's got to be one of the most just mind-numbing experiences. Because you're surrounded by content, right?

I mean, you're, it's like everything you ever wanted as a football writer is right there within arm's reach and you're not going to get any. You know, I mean, it's all so contrived and everybody's so, you know, buried in on top of one another. If you got, you know, Wes Welker on one of these avails to say that Tom Brady is actively worshiping Satan in the locker room, somebody would record it on their iPhone and have it on Twitter before you got it out anyway, you know? I mean, it's just, it's got to be just, I mean, for the Super Bowl in 2018, it's just got to be an insanely unfulfilling experience.

And it makes a little bit of sense why you just end up getting into, you know, pissing matches with your, with your regional competitors. Right. And it's also meta too, right? It's all bits. Mm-hmm. You know, no one is,

no one is even like, oh, I'm trying to get Wes Welker because I want his insight on Tom Brady's Satan worship. They're, they're just like, I want to, you know, take West Welker and go ice fishing with him.

I mean, there was so much kind of barstool of content. I know this is a long process with Super Bowl and Radio Row, you know, going, I remember there's an old New York Times article where they went around asking players, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be at Super Bowl Media Day? But I just feel like we went that kind of extra barstool step this year. It was like everybody had a video. Everybody had a bit. Everybody was doing something like that. I don't know. And again, I don't really object to it. I don't. Yeah. No, no. That's probably more entertaining than what normally comes out of the Super Bowl. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a little bit, it's like equal parts barstool and stuttering John, but it's, you're right. I mean, there's nothing to complain about, but it is just sort of an interesting phenomenon to watch. But yeah, I mean, there was also the, there was also the weird fetishization leading up to the Super Bowl and then post Super Bowl of the impending, the imminent looting of Philadelphia. When did you?

Oh. Like, there were more. Yeah. There were more news stories about the material they were going to use to grease the light poles in Philly than there was about, you know, Philly's offensive game plan leading up to the game. So this is another way we talk about how we become old men in this media age. This is another way. I remember when, you know, the kind of post big win or loss, you know, go crazy moment in a city was like, you know, seen as sad or even maybe slightly comic. But in the last couple years, it has really become content.

in a way. Like, I'm going to go out and capture the guy jumping like Jeff Hardy off the light pole. And that's just going to become or people looting a random gas station. And that's going to become and throwing the, I don't know if it was alluding. They were kind of seeing me like picking up food and just kind of throwing it around comically. Like it was like a three stooges pie fight or something like that. But like that's going to become, there's, there's content to be had there, right? That's kind of a moment. Yeah.

I mean, and the weird thing, though, is it was presented as, you know, this sort of delectable chaos. But then if you're paying attention to social media, it was intercut with these uplifting moments of, you know, like the high school band that played from the fifth floor and everybody played the fight song and everybody sang it. Or like the cop that was cheering along with the fans and just kind of ushering them forward.

You know, there were clearly long periods of nonviolence and non-uprising. But just to make the, you know, make all the videos even feasible. You know, I mean, listen, this is not the Middle East war zone or anything. Like, those cameramen wouldn't be out there if it were just utter violence, you know, on the streets. It's very bizarre covering the highs and the lows of the celebration.

But you're right. I mean, we're certainly at a much different place than we were decades ago when I was growing. I remember when the University of Louisville won the basketball championship, and I, like, you would hear rumor of, like, somebody climbing up on a telephone booth and singing born in the USA. You know, I mean, like, that was the level of celebration back at that point in time. We're definitely in a new era now. Yeah.

It's like the way, you know, the day after the NFL season used to be the day that all the coaches got fired. And that was just something that happened. And then it became this thing where Mort and Schaefter were sitting on the set at ESPN reading their Blackberry. And it became Black Monday, right? It was like a content opportunity. Yes. That sort of strikes the same way this is happening.

Exactly. Now it's time, David, for our overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. We have a lot of Super Bowl stuff to get to. But before I run down those, a special press box tip of the cap to Kimberly Cruzy, David, who covers Idaho politics for the Associated Press. Last week, follow me here. An Idaho state senator set out an incredibly boring press release about how he loaned his country. campaign a small sum of money because he wanted to focus on his job instead of focusing on fundraising.

Are you with me so far? Okay. Yes. Kimberly Cruzy, Kimberly Cruze takes a pick of this Nothing Burger press release and tweets, I worked on this story for a year and he just tweeted it out. Well, apparently the Idaho state senator who is not up on Twitter language, approached Cruzee at the Capitol to ask how in the world she had been working on this story for a when he had apparently just made this decision about fundraising himself,

at which point, Cruzey was moved to tweet, to clarify, I am not actually working on a story, but instead using an overworked Twitter joke. Congratulations. Kimberly Cruzy. Very good.

Honorable mention. All right. Super Bowl. I'm just going to list a whole bunch of things. Everybody saw these. They were so magnificent. First of all, photoshopping someone else's face onto the giant curtain

where Prince's outline was shown during the Super Bowl halftime show. Did you see the 100 variations of this? Yes. With Dave Chappelle as Prince may be being the best. Also, Baker Mayfield, that was a fun one. It's just projected behind Justin Timberlake. I enjoyed that.

The Pats, as we know now, were the first team to gain 600 yards in a game and lose in NFL history. So there was, I saw lots of people comparing the game halfway through to the arena football Super Bowl. And then there was this weird turn from that overworked Twitter joke where everybody started saying, no, no, no, it's the Big 12 championship game, right? That's what this is we're seeing.

I thought that was a weird, just weird that everyone decided that at the same time. When Eli Manning won the night with his dirty dancing commercial tweeting, Eli Manning just won his third Super Bowl MVP? Yes. Good stuff. That's a big one. doing the shot of the kid who Justin Timberlake danced with looking at his phone and then doing the funny screenshot of what he was reading.

That was big. I think my favorite example was having him reading the New Yorker's cat person story. That was really, really good stuff. This is more Super Bowl week than game, but anybody, and this includes Adam Schaefter, who tweeted these side-by-side shots of the weather in Minneapolis with the weather in Antarctica. Did you see that? I did not. I somehow missed that.

Comparing the temperatures and as a temporary resident of the southern hemisphere, I can tell you, by the way, it is summer in Antarctica. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. But this week's winner, because it was actually funny,

when that passed to Tom Brady glanced off his fingertips, and everyone recalled Giselle Boonson's line after the Pats lost to the Giants in the Super Bowl in 2012, my husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.

It's funny because it's true. All right, David, before we dive into what's ailing the LA Times, let's take a quick break. Maybe you're a Philadelphia Eagles fan who's just won the Super Bowl. You're going to a party this week, going to the parade. Well, you know more than anybody that finding a dress shirt that fits is hard. Something is always off. Thankfully, ordering a custom fit shirt has never been easier with proper cloth. At propercloth.com, you can easily create a custom-sized shirt in seconds by just answering

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Do it today. Let's move on to a segment I'd like to call the LA Times versus everybody. David, our hometown newspaper has had a tumult. last month, last year, last decade. They unionized. They had an editor and then they didn't. What else has happened? It's hard to make a complete list.

Should we maybe start with the reasons that Lewis DeVorkin is no longer the editor of the LA Times? Yeah, go ahead with that. There's a lot of stuff going on it. And by the way, for the record, my vote for the name of this segment was junk in the trunk, but it was overruled. Junk in the trunk. That is fabulous. All right. Here's why DeVorkins no longer the editor. A Columbia journalism review piece by Liz Lenz described his post-journalism approach to journalism,

summed up by the quote, speed is the new accuracy, which is almost worthy of Professor Jeff Jarvis on Twitter. Furthermore, DeVorkan's taped remarks from two private staff meetings actually wound up in the hands of outside journalists. He suspended business editor Kimby Yoshino, apparently after scouring her phone records and finding she'd taken a call from one of those outside journalists at the New York Times. And that doesn't count his tepid defense of the LA Times after Disney tossed its reporters out of movie screenings. David, besides Jonathan Gold defecting to eater, what is the next indignity the LA Times could possibly suffer at this point? I don't know, man.

I mean, listen, if anybody, I assume that there's probably some people listening this that are dimly aware of everything that's a boil at the LA Times, but not, you know, don't know the details. And it's sort of a cop-out to suggest that, you know, listeners go Google something to get a backstory. But I highly recommend you Google it if only to see just the list of headlines if you Google LA Times Tronk, which is the hilarious, hilarious relatively recent vintage name of the, of the corporate, of the, you know, the parent company.

Just a quick glance down. What went wrong at the LA Times? That's seen in money. Next is Tronk, a corporate media monstrosity at Alternet. screaming for adult supervision. That's the Washington Post. The Huffington Post comes out as with Tronk is building a shadow newsroom full of scabs. I mean, this is a really, just a real, and that, I mean, there's more.

I could keep going. This is just a very bizarre moment in, I mean, specific instance in modern journalism. But I think more than anything, it's, it's, the LA Times has, is being. put up on a pedestal as emblematic of everything going wrong with the sort of corporatization of journalism. And certainly all of the people that have

been forced to step down. I mean, there's a lot of legitimate problems with the LA Times. But it's, you know, and all of these minute problems are, you know, deeply significant the lives of, you know, the journalists who are working there and the audience for the paper. By the way, just a couple

of things. One is the legitimate problems, the L.A. Times, when you read those headlines, it's also when a media company has problems, you are tossing yourself into the piranha tank for other media companies? Because what's more fun to report on than one of your nominal competitors, you know, completely cracking up and having terrible leadership in this case? Anyway, go ahead. No, and I think that's exactly right. I mean, I think that's why it's getting the, you know, the spotlight to the degree that it is. I mean, you can make the case as, you know, as has been made to me.

that the LA Times, you know, abdicated its, its opportunity to become a major international newspaper, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, that they were sort of ripe for the picking for the sort of corporate takeover that, you know, what is now known as Trunk, did to them. Michael Farrow, who's the chairman of the parent company, you know, of late is a, you know, was a wealthy person who bought his way in and sort of, in some telling,

staged a sort of corporate takeover of the company and has proceeded to make a lot of the questionable decisions that that are bearing fruit or whatever the negative version of that is right now. But I think for me there's this really interesting question of like what is the perceived value of you know, I mean I understand like I guess I guess the point is made that Michael Farrow sees himself as a Jeff Bezos

type character who is doing this great deed to the world by subsidizing the Washington Post. And yet he's maybe fighting a union. He's definitely like cutting salaries. Meanwhile, they're, you know, is seemingly paying himself $5 million a year by, you know, rerouting money to his own, to his own, you know, separate corporate entity. There's a lot of very bizarre stuff going on. You know, I get the LA Times back home on paper.

And when I read it, it's interesting. It's still in many, many ways, a really good newspaper. In some ways, a really great newspaper. It just feels thin in not just in page count, but, you know, in the number of people on particular beats. And, you know, you look at the book review section on Sunday. And it's very nice, except it only has a couple of book reviews. and you wish it had two or three times as many. You know, I think in a way,

their sports section is probably their sturdiest section. Yeah. Just because, and I'm sure they would, I'm sure they want more manpower and more research than all those things too. But, you know, it's like when it comes to like covering the Dodgers and, you know, covering football and all I and stuff and having a column when you need to have a column from Bill Plashky,

it just, it feels like that is still operating at a really high level. But, you know, and also their opinion section is weirdly good. And I think less trolly than the New York Times opinion section. Yes. Publishes lots and lots of interesting, provocative stuff. I just, yeah, I just feel that, you know, when you say they forfeited their chance to become, you know, or forfeited their status as a great American newspaper and international newspaper, you know, it's like their parent company is the one obviously that forfeited that status.

Sure. And decided. And, you know, it's funny. With all these, with all these newspapers now, it's just a matter of ambition, right? That's the question is what are we going to do in this new media thing? As you said, the Washington Post seemed for a while when they were just getting rated by the New York Times pre Bezos, when the Grams are still, we still own them to scale down massively. And I think, you know, if we looked at the, you know, we've looked at that a couple of years ago, we'd see some of the same shades of what's happened to the LA Times. Then Bezos comes in and now all of a sudden they're just trying to take on the world, right?

And they're trying to go one to one with the times as much as is humanly possible for any paper. So, you know, there's been this fantasy in L.A. right? That David Giffin's going to buy the paper or somebody else is going to buy the paper and, you know, really throw money at it and start hiring people and buff it up. And I don't know. I hope that happens. I really do because this is this is not a tenable or happy way to go down the path. Oh, I totally agree. And I think that, I mean, I saw a tweet.

by Robin Upcarian, who's a California columnist for the Times, the LA Times. I thought it was really poignant where she says, you know, dear media experts, the LA Times newsroom is not, quote, resistant to change. We've undergone more disruption than anyone and we still kick ass. I mean, obviously there's a little bit of rah-rah to that, but there is, it's funny because being a media entity does make other media institutions pay attention and to turn your story of plight or success into something more emblematic that, you know, that can be used for their own purposes.

But I think this is a separate argument, but I think that resistant to change notion, we see that a lot. And I think that there's a, I mean, in other stories too, I think to imbue too much of your own, of your own assumptions onto these, you know,

very human people working somewhere is misdirection. You know, I mean, I think anybody, specific to this case, you know, no one listening to this podcast could have, could have happened to them what's happened to the, you know, rank and file at the LA Times and not react the same way. You know, I mean, of course you're going to be seen as resistant to change. I'm, you know, as my, as my house catches on fire, I do feel very resistant to change. I do not want it to burn down, you know, but that's not, that's not the, that's not really

the core of the situation. The court, the most important thing is the house is on fire. And part of the resistance to change, I think, was quote unquote resistance to change was increased by Dvorkin coming in with all this kind of new age gobbledy gook saying, oh, I want more gifts,

you know, stuff like that. That's just not, that's not saying, you know, we need to build a newsroom for the 21st century. It's just saying we need little,

weird little widgets and things on our, on our homepage and stuff like that. Like, that doesn't have anything to do with journalism at all, as far as I could tell in Lenz's piece. And he came from a place. at Forbes, which was really a branded content farm. Yeah.

Right. You had all these writers kind of writing random pieces. If you have ever tried to research a subject and you come upon a Forbes piece, you now have no idea what that is and whether that's valuable or anything. And, you know, I can understand how being a report at the other times, I'd be really, really scary that that guy is all of a sudden the guy who's going to drag you into the future. Should we say, by the way, a bit about their strange, or the New York Times is strange beef with the LA Times.

Go ahead. Yeah. That piece that everybody was, there's a piece on Twitter that got a lot of Twitter attention by Tim Orango and Adam Nagorny, kind of tying the decline of the LA Times into this idea of L.A. Not being a real city, as they put it, the decline of the Times is symptomatic of something that this community has struggled

with for nearly half a century. The absence of strong institutions. that bind it together. What did you make of that piece? I wish I had prepared a joke for this, when you ask me this question. Yeah, I mean, it would be like, it would be like if there were problems

in the New York Times newsroom, which there are frequently, you know, this is a semi-annual event that there is some like Soulsberger family drama. If the LA Times did a big think piece about that and made it about the gangs of news, New York, like the Dead Rabbits Club or whatever. Like, it's sort of mind-boggling that you would just draw some bizarre parallel.

By the way, every L.A. resident that, you know, I've not been living here that long, every L.A. resident that I know just was either laughing or offended by the, by the, just the headline of the Times piece. It seemed like a weird, at a very, at a, at a moment where, you know, there are, there are greater forces of work in this country and this world, which bind us together. or tear us apart. It was a really bizarre moment of seeming, you know, editorial provincialism. I don't know. What was your takeaway? Yeah, I think part of it was, I think if somebody had written that as a straight opinion piece, people might have been mad, but wouldn't have been as

mad as they would as it was put into passive-aggressive, you know, newspaper reporting speak, because then it just seems weirder. I also think it kind of overstates by implication the way the New York Times binds the city of New York together, right? I mean, it certainly binds a certain cut of people in New York that read it and refer to it and, you know, kind of read on Sunday and all that kind of things. But I just think our experience of living in New York for 10 plus years was that lots of people don't read the Times and basically have no idea what's in it and don't really care. I mean, the Times is a wonderful civic institution, New York. But it's like, you know, when you're riding around and talking to people and stuff, people aren't like, hey, did you read, did you see what that piece in the New York Times the other day? like that. People just don't think like that. And I'm not sure the LA Times, you know, other than maybe in sports, ever played that particular, you know, highfalut in a role or ever really even could in Los Angeles. I just don't know the newspapers. I think that's just saying a lot about newspapers that maybe overstating it a bit.

Yeah. I definitely think that there's an aspect to the, this story being so noteworthy that it comes at a time when, you know, L.A. is just, L.A. weekly. seems to be, you know, in a position to, I mean, in a position to go in a different direction, if not, you know, fully die out. You know, local news on a national level is trying to find its way. You know, I mean, I guess that that would be the most generous way to put it. And, you know, for a city like Los Angeles that, you know, has, that does have a lot of communal pride despite being its own sort of melting pot. It does, you know, I think that L.A. Times, any knock to the L.A. Times, certainly, it feels like, it feels like a situation of great significance. And it is. But I feel like, but it's, it's

certainly a more emotionally raw moment for this to be happening than maybe a different year. Yeah. I mean, L.A. journalism culture is just a discussion for another segment, but L.A. journalism culture is really strange, right? You know, the journalists are not regarded in the same way that they are in New York. You know, they're not, they don't have the, I don't think they have the esteem in Los Angeles they have in New York, right? Unless they've written stories that can be translated immediately into movies. Yeah. And you just don't, you just don't have it, you know, you don't have this sort of, I don't know, I mean, you know, maybe the day with the daily news and the post go away. Maybe that won't be the case in New York anymore, but you just

don't have the media concentration in quite the same way that you have in New York. And I So I do think you're right. I think when when something like LA Weekly, you know, gets bought out or and all the people let go or you have somebody take a shot at the times, people do feel it in a different way because there's just not this excess of media stuff and websites and bloggers and stuff that you have in, you know, Brooklyn where we used to live. Yeah, absolutely true. Let us move on, David, to our third segment, which we can call everything's a bubble. the final article on the all, whose legacy we talked about a few weeks ago was a characteristically allie piece by Sylvia Killingsworth

about how much Felix Salmon made at Fusion. Salmon, you remember, was part of Fusion's great 2014-15 free agent binge, the one that sparked Dave Weigel's old Twitter joke. Congrats on your new job at Fusion. I remember during this period, by the way, just having bar conversations with people saying, should I take this job at Fusion?

That was like a thing. Yep. It turns out, according to sources close to the process, that Salmon's alleged salary was $400,000, which Killingsworth says caused, quote, growing resentment within the Gizmodo Media Group Newsroom when the conversation turned to upgrades he'd made on his rental property on Slack.

Yeah. There is no more perfect, I mean, I'll let you continue. but like the it's just such a I mean I don't even know what to compare it to the story of a journalist really dumbly humble bragging about spending thousands and thousands of dollars to put a new kitchen in a rented apartment on slack I mean this is like this is like an ironic talk of the town piece or something I don't I don't quite understand what it is but it's there's it's it's one of the great. It's just an incredible, it's, it's just an incredible story in of itself. Absolutely. Here's why I'd like to take this. What if Fusion we now look back at,

or I guess it's still, it's still a thing, but we looked back at that crazy hiring period, right, as a bubble, right? Inflated lots of people's salaries. It was, you know, if you were at the right place, the right time and had some talent, as obviously Samma does, you, you were, you know, all of a sudden found your financial prospects to be changed. immensely. And it's sort of what we'd call a bubble. And what I'd like to say or I think argue maybe is that the moment of journalism in which you and I live in work is just a series of bubbles, right? Everything is a bubble. And that doesn't mean that things like unions, which we talked about a second ago that are erected to support journalists and, you know, stave off, you know, mass

firings and those kinds of things are bad because they're not. But I just feel that, a journalist's career now is kind of moving from bubble to bubble every couple of years. And taking the money, hopefully there's money. And if you can get slightly larger money, that's great. And then you move on to the next bubble. What do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, you said it was like a, you know, character, the piece in the all,

you said it was the last piece. It was characteristic of a certain aesthetic of the all. In so much as the point of the piece was the sort of thumb, it's nose. at the establishment. It was successful on that count, right? To kind of say, you know, and this is a tradition in blogging

that even predates the all, but it had a very all point of view. You know, I mean, you could draw a direct line to its, you know, Gawker roots for sure, but to sort of say, you know, the point, I'm going to, I'm going to make a bigger argument about, you know, the state of modern journalism,

but I'm going to get people's attention by just printing a shocking fact that maybe doesn't need to see the light of day in general. I mean, wage transparency is a great thing. Don't get me wrong. But in so much as it was, I mean, I don't think there was much more of national interest or, you know, of like public interest to this story in particular. Because I think you're right.

Felix, Sam, or fusion or whatever, this isn't the only instance in our relatively short lives in the journalism world where you hear about a new startup, be it a very modern, you know, the modern definition of a startup or something even 10 years ago when a new magazine was taken. When Tina Brown found a talk, you know, I mean, when there's a new endeavor that's trying to get people's attention, it's not at all unusual to overpaid talent to populate the, you know, to populate the Mastead. Certainly we've seen this in, you know, the sports world and in the news world over just over the past few years where, you know, the big, you know, without naming any names, it won't be too

are to figure it out where big, you know, aggregators will try to get that sort of air of legitimacy by overpaying a handful of established writers, you know, to come to come aboard and to break their news on the site. And it's not, I don't know that it really says anything about the state of publishing other than there's a new place who's off, who wants to get a foothold, you know, I mean, if you come with, if you, if you have a big, a major corporation backing you, a $400,000 salary is not nothing, but, you know, and it's a big, it's a big difference from what you're paying like the entry level bloggers, but it's not like this is going to, you know, it's not like this is going to get a CEO fired to pay Felix Salmon or anybody else that kind of money. It's not, it's not just 90s magazines either, I think, right? It's like I was looking up a few examples from memory this yesterday. In 2007, Jeffrey Goldberg, is now the editor of the Atlantic, was lured to the Atlantic from the New York. worker with salaries that the Washington Post said were as high as $350,000, right?

And when the Atlantic's owner attempted to flatter Goldberg and Goldberg kept telling him no, he finally sent ponies to Goldberg's kids parties in order to entice him to come to the Atlantic. And this was a line from the Post. The big salaries have stirred some jealousy among the rank and file at the Atlantic, tempered by the gratitude that the owner isn't cutting back during a tough time for the news business, which is exactly what we're talking about with Gizmodo. The other one I remembered was 25-year-old Ezra Klein going to the Washington Post, and here I'm quoting a Politico piece by Dylan Byers and Hadass Gold.

He was, quote, allowed to have a contributor deal with MSNBC, a column with Bloomberg View, a column somewhere else, and write long form for the New Yorker. And the post provided him with eight staffers to work on Wonk Blog, remember that. And Klein left the post when he unsuccessfully asked for a budget, of $10 million for his group. $10 million, right? So, you know, and you and I have both known writers who got giant book contracts, right,

whose names are not Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell. And that's not a sustainable model. And those books, I would say, probably on balance, did not make their money back. But it's just, I just feel there's this weird quality where we would all like, and I'm, count me among them for journalism to work in this way. there's just some sort of sense to it where you can go and you can get a living wage and a good wage and stay at the same place for a long time. But what we're left with is just things that pop up and pay a lot of money and then maybe go away and then new thing pops up and there's this mad race to get to them

in every case. Yeah, I mean, I think that the other thing that people, the aspiration, when people dream of a perfect journalism world, they also, I mean, they're thinking about fairness, right? So, I mean, when you say that there's this legacy journalist, not that Felix Salmon is an old man or a gray beard or anything, but there's someone who's being paid a lot of money and you perceive that you're doing, that you're of more value to the company than them, or close to the same amount of value.

But, you know, we've tried that too. You know, there's a lot of blogs that are paying by the click. And we've seen the articles from many, many. That was seen as terrible at the time. Yeah, it was horrible, right? How can you judge somebody's worth by the number of clicks they accrue. Yeah.

So, I mean, I don't think that that's a, that's not a, a solution either, not that that was stated specifically. I think in general, it's, this is not a subject that is unique to the journalism world, but in a line of work that is in a perpetual state of decline, it always strikes me as odd, and this is something we've talked about before off the air. It always strikes me as odd that the spirit of some of these pieces seems to be that, that, like you're not happy that journalists are getting paid good money, right? I mean, it's, it, it, I understand that, I understand, like, wanting better for yourself and for your, for your, for your colleagues and thinking that

there's an imbalance. Um, but, you know, we've seen people write about, about various, you know, about Grantland and the ringer that way that, like, you know, how was Bill Simmons, I can't, Bill Simmons shouldn't be paying these people this kind of money. I always found that incredibly odd. I found that so, so strange that it was like, I know when we would never get mad at a baseball player or a football player for earning everything that he could, right? Yeah. But we're going to be mad at a journalist for doing the same thing. Right.

We're going to, we're going to slide a journalist. And by the way, those salaries we're talking about were not $400,000 a year or even anywhere close to that. But that whole thing of, you know, where you were happily, and it's not, I'm not talking about killings with peace here, which is handled a much more interesting and subtle level. But those swipes, you know, where it's like you're happy to call journalists overpaid all the time, especially people that are roughly your peers in a lot of ways. I just found that very, very strange. Anyway, speaking of bubbles and speaking of rich patrons keeping things alive, Lorraine Powell Jobs, who bought the Atlantic from David Bradley, the aforementioned guy who attracted Jeffrey Goldberg over there is talking about a potential investment in BuzzFeed News. Story is still unclear as we record this, right, whether BuzzFeed News was told to go get more. money, whether they potentially

spend it off. But, you know, that's another one. I think that just again, as we kind of muck our way through these times, right? BuzzFeed was, is, was a success story of the 20th, of 21st century news, right? Yes. Yeah, for sure.

But, but now they need or want a woman who's kind of floating all these organizations and is kind of the Bezos-like savior of journalism to invest in them. I don't know. We don't have enough information, but it certainly seems of a piece of what we're talking about here. Yeah, I mean, it's a little, it's disappointing, you know, just from this chair that it did seem like everything you'd heard up to this point was that BuzzFeed saw the,

saw the value in having a, like, a serious news wing with a relatively deep bench. And that the, the sort of old school credit that they would get for subsidizing such a thing would help would be a boon for the entire company. You know, no matter what you think about BuzzFeed, we're doing this one serious thing really well. And that's a, that's an entryway for a lot of advertisers that wouldn't necessarily come their way.

You know, when Jonah Peretti put out his memo not too long ago, we discussed this on the show about the sort of like, when they were, when they had, you know, announced that they didn't meet their target goals, their profit goals.

There was that really bizarre, not bizarre, but really kind of odd graph or chart where he outlined the different parts of the BuzzFeed Empire and the different means for each of them to make money. And the fact that BuzzFeed News was just like lumped in with all the rest, I think probably should have been probably should have been an alarm, you know,

that's that's the, that was the warning siren, right? That it wasn't just sort of a separate, you know, if not fully non-profit, then, you know, non-combative arm of the company. But yeah, I mean, it'll, you know, having a literal nonprofit help, you know, or help subsidize the product isn't necessarily a bad thing. I just, it's just a little bit disappointing that BuzzFeed isn't interested in doing that for itself. One more note before we leave, one of the many delights of Killingsworth's Peace was revealing

that the salary information had leaked when it was accidentally attached to an email within the company. Yeah. Yeah. We had, and speaking of bubbles over at the Daily Beast, a similar incident where the salary list was attached accidentally to an otherwise benign email, which then was, of course, eagerly devoured by the staff over there. So, boy, was that an eye-opener. So I guess the takeaway here is, you know, bosses, if you don't want confidential financial information to fall into the hands of journalists, who will then use it for their own purposes, don't just randomly attach it to an email.

I think that's really good advice. Don't really attach anything to an email. That's probably the thing. Just use a Google Docs from now on. All right, David. Before you encourage everyone to use Google Docs, I'm sure it was the brilliance of like the Outlook program that could have possibly saved the day then.

Now that we're all like on corporate Google Gmail accounts, you remember when something like that used to happen and you would like get back to your desk and see the evidence that an email had been like sucked back to it. it cinder and you're just like, wait, what the hell just have? Recalled? Yeah, Rick, sorry, recalled. And then you had to kind of go cubicle to cubicle to find out what drama you had just missed. Sometimes it was just, sometimes it was just, you know, the yoga appointment or whatever, but then sometimes it was something as dramatic as revealing what

everyone on staff was making. So, yeah. Ah, the fun of two bubbles ago. All right, David, that's it for the press box. We're back next week with more hot takes. See you later. See you, David. See you later, man. I'll get you, John Dickerson. You know, I'm not going to let this stand. Get out of my face. Get out of my face. David Plotz. I love it. This episode of the Pressbox is brought to you by ProperClaught, the leader in men's custom shirts. At ProperClaught.com, ordering custom shirts has never been easier. Create your custom-sized shirt by answering just 10 easy questions. Shirts start at 80 bucks and are delivered in just two weeks. For premium quality and perfect fitting shirts, visit ProperClaught.com and use gift code press box to get 20 bucks off

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