Over at Defector, Justin Ellis wrote about the latest round of media layoffs, most notably at outlets backed by big money. Dollar Shave Club is shuttering MEL Magazine, while Medium is commencing mass layoffs. Ellis' post is behind a paywall because Defector rose from the ashes of the original Deadspin due to its own financial/editorial tensions, so you'll need a subscription to read it, but one part resonated with me.
The problem is that words like “viability” and “success” mean different things to different people. Tallying up 700,000 subscribers and $35 million in annual revenue would be clear markers of success to a person who just wants to run a viable, mid-sized business that pays people good wages to write interesting things. But those numbers mean something wholly different to an unfathomably rich person like Williams, who is always in search of the next billion-dollar idea. MEL succeeded in publishing work that people wanted to read, but perhaps not in providing whatever it is a razor company was looking for when it decided to launch a publication.
It’s tiring to keep living in cycles where headcount at some point becomes bodycount for editorial operations, either through incompetence, negligence, or hubris of would-be media barons. And these notions of what a successful media company actually looks like will only become more distorted as more of them are placed in the hands of rich people who suffer from a terminal disconnect from reality. The last several years in media has brought breakneck deals between former media upstarts that mirror the legacy newspaper mergers they thought they were innovating beyond. Vox Media gobbled New York magazine, Vice handcuffed Refinery29, BuzzFeed grabbed HuffPost at the end of last year. When these mergers happen, employees always get the same gaslit song about how cuts won’t be made. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti told The New York Times last fall that everyone should feel good about his company’s merger with HuffPost. A few months later, he went about gutting HuffPost’s newsroom.
Last month marked my 15th anniversary of launching the original Sox Machine, and I've seen and been subject to a bunch of editorial whims and reversals of course. The challenges are so immense that swings and misses are unavoidable, but the ones that drive me nuts are the ones that take readership and community for granted. If you're lucky enough to have considerable, thoughtful readers and listeners show up every day, and even luckier that they want to contribute to the discussion and make the whole enterprise better, why would you make it harder for them to do so?
I could get more navel-gazey and inside-non-baseball here, but my larger point is that it's a relief to be insulated from that whiplash thanks to the support of a great community. But that reminds me that we shouldn't go on autopilot either.
Usually the first post of the work week is the Sox Machine Podcast, but this week's episode is delayed because Josh is finishing setting up his new house. In its stead, let's do an open house. Have questions? Shoot, and I'll answer the ones I can. Have suggestions for the upcoming season? Let 'em rip. Want to introduce yourself? Please do. Want to bring something to the attention of everybody? Go for it. If you've been lurking and don't know when to jump in, here's a great time to do so.
