So outside of the WSJ, there are only 2 really prestigious newspapers in America (3 if you count the LA Times.)
If your competitor bans Twitter, and their Felicia Sonmezes depart, while you let the good times roll, you are going to become known as “the newspaper that lets whiny ideologues write there.”
So outside of the WSJ, there are only 2 really prestigious newspapers in America (3 if you count the LA Times.)
If your competitor bans Twitter, and their Felicia Sonmezes depart, while you let the good times roll, you are going to become known as “the newspaper that lets whiny ideologues write there.”
Inasmuch as people distinguish among media outlets (presumably publishers believe they do), it’s worth being known as the more disciplined outlet.
Are you saying a potential subscriber would make a purchasing decision based on newsroom twitter policy? Seems unlikely.
But regardless, why limit consideration to those places? There are plenty of other outlets. Josh went back and forth from Insider, NYT, NYMag for example. Plenty of writers go from Wapo or NYT to the Atlantic--like Elaina Plott or Elizabeth Bruenig. Maybe if you tell Douthat not to tweet about movies because AO Scott is doing that for money at the paper he'll just go full time to substack? (Probably not an accurate specific example but you get the point.)
Also, it's not just the Sonmezes of the world who benefit from brand building on twitter. Far from it. Josh admitted he did in the piece. Maggie Haberman benefitted a great deal from twitter, so did Ben Smith and Kara Swisher, for example. The next Haberman, Smith, Barro, Sullivan, Yglesias, Weiss etc. doubtlessly see twitter as part of their immediate strategy for moving up the ladder. And their twitter following, for the time being, in enough cases to be frustrating to management, is very valuable to them.
That’s a good point, but it’s worth distinguishing between ordinary journalists and pundits like Yglesias, Douthat, Sullivan, etc.
The latter are notably opinionated, benefit from having personal brands, and don’t necessarily reflect poorly on their newspapers (inasmuch as people distinguish between an op-ed page and the rest of the newspaper, which is a whole different question.)
Investigative journalists are in a different category though. Who was the author of the last in-depth reportage you read? Maybe you know. Probably you do, but the point is that I don’t, and a lot of other readers don’t; all I know is that I read it in the New York Times. It was a fascinating article, and maybe I’ll talk to my friends about it, but I can’t remember who wrote it.
And if that reporter (whoever he or she is) moves to the Post or the Atlantic, or Substack, they’re not going to carry much traffic with them. Their bargaining power is less than they think!
I wonder if the viewership trends of Left Right and Center after Mr. Barro migrated tell us anything about the bargaining power of personalities because:
1. Mr. Barro was with KCRW for a long time, and was the host of two high profile shows
2. This place has no preexisting user base to convolute, and he made a pretty sharp break, so there's no crosstalk
Personally I stopped listening to LRC a few episodes after he left. I respect the folks running it, and if anything I'm biased towards keeping my subscriptions for free, high quality content vs cancelling them and paying. But it's not the same with new personalities
That is an important distinction but it doesn't map neatly onto the twitter problem Josh describes because:
1. Many reporters like the ones you describe in your third paragraph eventually want to do the jobs you describe in your second paragraph (Ben Smith, John Heilemann, Kara Swisher--the list is endless--all were category A before they were category B) and see twitter as a platform to establish a voice and an audience. Or maybe they want to write a book or become a screenwriter or start a podcast and see twitter as a way to help pitch/sell that endeavor. And:
2. Good luck setting different rules for different types of employees--that would be even more managerially difficult and likely to become a complete mess.
While you're right that an individual reporter may not have much bargaining power, making many of your reporters want leave at once might be too costly for an individual decision maker to decide to take the leap. All I am suggesting is that this problem continues even though the solution is obvious for understandable reasons, and it's not clear to me that Elon being a dick to journalists right now changes that calculus all that much.
So outside of the WSJ, there are only 2 really prestigious newspapers in America (3 if you count the LA Times.)
If your competitor bans Twitter, and their Felicia Sonmezes depart, while you let the good times roll, you are going to become known as “the newspaper that lets whiny ideologues write there.”
Inasmuch as people distinguish among media outlets (presumably publishers believe they do), it’s worth being known as the more disciplined outlet.
Are you saying a potential subscriber would make a purchasing decision based on newsroom twitter policy? Seems unlikely.
But regardless, why limit consideration to those places? There are plenty of other outlets. Josh went back and forth from Insider, NYT, NYMag for example. Plenty of writers go from Wapo or NYT to the Atlantic--like Elaina Plott or Elizabeth Bruenig. Maybe if you tell Douthat not to tweet about movies because AO Scott is doing that for money at the paper he'll just go full time to substack? (Probably not an accurate specific example but you get the point.)
Also, it's not just the Sonmezes of the world who benefit from brand building on twitter. Far from it. Josh admitted he did in the piece. Maggie Haberman benefitted a great deal from twitter, so did Ben Smith and Kara Swisher, for example. The next Haberman, Smith, Barro, Sullivan, Yglesias, Weiss etc. doubtlessly see twitter as part of their immediate strategy for moving up the ladder. And their twitter following, for the time being, in enough cases to be frustrating to management, is very valuable to them.
That’s a good point, but it’s worth distinguishing between ordinary journalists and pundits like Yglesias, Douthat, Sullivan, etc.
The latter are notably opinionated, benefit from having personal brands, and don’t necessarily reflect poorly on their newspapers (inasmuch as people distinguish between an op-ed page and the rest of the newspaper, which is a whole different question.)
Investigative journalists are in a different category though. Who was the author of the last in-depth reportage you read? Maybe you know. Probably you do, but the point is that I don’t, and a lot of other readers don’t; all I know is that I read it in the New York Times. It was a fascinating article, and maybe I’ll talk to my friends about it, but I can’t remember who wrote it.
And if that reporter (whoever he or she is) moves to the Post or the Atlantic, or Substack, they’re not going to carry much traffic with them. Their bargaining power is less than they think!
I wonder if the viewership trends of Left Right and Center after Mr. Barro migrated tell us anything about the bargaining power of personalities because:
1. Mr. Barro was with KCRW for a long time, and was the host of two high profile shows
2. This place has no preexisting user base to convolute, and he made a pretty sharp break, so there's no crosstalk
Personally I stopped listening to LRC a few episodes after he left. I respect the folks running it, and if anything I'm biased towards keeping my subscriptions for free, high quality content vs cancelling them and paying. But it's not the same with new personalities
That is an important distinction but it doesn't map neatly onto the twitter problem Josh describes because:
1. Many reporters like the ones you describe in your third paragraph eventually want to do the jobs you describe in your second paragraph (Ben Smith, John Heilemann, Kara Swisher--the list is endless--all were category A before they were category B) and see twitter as a platform to establish a voice and an audience. Or maybe they want to write a book or become a screenwriter or start a podcast and see twitter as a way to help pitch/sell that endeavor. And:
2. Good luck setting different rules for different types of employees--that would be even more managerially difficult and likely to become a complete mess.
While you're right that an individual reporter may not have much bargaining power, making many of your reporters want leave at once might be too costly for an individual decision maker to decide to take the leap. All I am suggesting is that this problem continues even though the solution is obvious for understandable reasons, and it's not clear to me that Elon being a dick to journalists right now changes that calculus all that much.