A short dek.
- -In 2005, Justin Stefano and Philippe von Borries started Refinery29 as New York guide that promoted independent brands within the design, music, and fashion industries. As Stefano and von Borries had never worked in fashion, they took a risk by quitting their jobs in law and politics and jumping into the online media market. What evolvolved was a leading example that direct sales on content sites can be a legitimate way to sustain media. Their company has recently undergone significant changes, and functions today as a lifestyle, fashion, and commerce company whose brand is so strong that it is able to survive on ad sales, which is something that other media companies are struggling to do.
- - Over the last ten years, the company has experimented with everything from e-commerce and internally-targeted advertisements to using the data that they collect from their huge email subscriber list (over one and a half million) to sell products. When they created the company, both of them thought e-commerce would be an essential part of their brand. However, after two underwhelming attempts in 2010 and 2011 to center their business ventures around e-commerce, Stefano and von Berries decided to look more towards locking in advertisers and surviving on ad sales. - - That decision paid off big time. Refinery29’s founders could have never imagined the scale at which their company would grow. They have over four million likes on instagram, a 340% yearly increase in Facebook traffic, and a 100% increase in website traffic from last year to this year. They quickly evolved from a struggling company that tried to capitalize on the vast e-commerce market to a global lifestyle publisher that mainly harvests revenue from advertisements, and creates branded content for their users. In April 2015, Refinery29 raised fifty million dollars, which places the value of the company at $290 million. To give you an idea of their financial strength, Buzzfeed raised the same amount of money in their most recent round of funding, while Vox Media raised three million less. - - Stefano spoke about the company’s experience with e-commerce in an interview with WWD, saying that “The e-commerce business wasn’t doing that badly...We saw a bigger opportunity in the media and content side — [it was] more in line with the direction we wanted to take the business. It wasn’t that [e-commerce] didn’t work out.” It seems like they just didn’t have an effective model that could both draw in investors and users to the site yet. - - Right now Refinery29 seems to be focused on growing their brand through global expansion. Refinery29 is set to launch sites in the UK and Germany later this year. While e-commerce is less of Refinery29’s main focus these days, they are still committed to shopping and providing their users with a well curated selection that they can purchase elsewhere. Being a fashion site, it only makes sense to still fill this gap. - - I sat down with Refinery29’s fashion features director, Connie Wang, to discuss this global brand’s dominating leadership in the women’s media market as well as who the everyday woman using Refinery29 is. Before working at Refinery29, Wang was an intern at Teen Vogue and Radar Magazine. She has been with Refinery29 ever since its rebranding project beginning in 2013. As the Fashion Features Director, Connie writes articles on fashion news, style tips, and also manages the website’s content in those categories. We started talking about how Refinery29 got to be where it is today. - - “As Refinery29 grew exponentially from 2009 to now, we took on more verticals, more writers, more staff, and more projects, but I think we lost sense of what makes us, ‘us’,” Connie explained. “Our readers these days, they are millennial women, not necessarily in age but in spirit. The majority of our demographic is 18-25 year old women. We have an overwhelmingly female demographic.Our typical reader cares about the mix: it’s not only fashion content or only shopping content. It’s fashion that lives inside of politics, entertainment, thought pieces, and women’s health issues.” - - Refinery29 knows exactly who their audience is and markets themselves as a women's independent publisher. Wang acknowledged some of her competitors, like BuzzFeed and Elle.com, but stated that she doesn’t see them occupying the same space as Refinery29. They might share the same demographic, but Wang sees Refinery29 as a much more cohesive experience for women that they couldn’t necessarily find elsewhere. The site bridges the gap between BuzzFeed, which aggregates and creates content for millennials, and Elle.com, which hosts high quality fashion and women’s lifestyle articles. - - “I don’t really think there is another site that’s geared towards women and does the stuff that we do. I think the scope of what we do and the limitations that BuzzFeed and Elle.com might have are two different things… it’s very apples to oranges at this point.” - - Refinery29 occupies a niche that is attractive for advertisers. With their brand, global outreach, and established place in the fashion and media world, advertisers feel like their advertisements will be able to capture a specific slice of the market. Advertisers want to sell to those using Refinery29 and those on their website, so what better way to do that than pump ads directly on Refinery29’s website? In doing this, Refinery29 is able to bolster both its catalogue and content output, and once again try to tap into sites that use e-commerce, like Net-a-Porter and ASOS. - - Wang said “We have experimented with e-commerce a bunch of different ways, from hosting on our site ourselves, to being third party vendors, to promoting new e-commerce ventures… whether it’s fashion news posts, or actually promoting it with collaborations and partnerships. We have been deeply imbedded in making sure that the best of what’s offered in fashion and shopping is available to an international audience through their screens. It’s a changing relationship, but I think that nowadays it’s sort of the norm.” - - As more people come to the site, Refinery29 collects more data and information, which bolsters their impressive email list and creates more opportunities for targeted ads that make real money. They do this by persistently requiring either a sign in through Facebook or an email to create an account. - - In fact, Refinery29 makes it impossible to tap into the curated clothing, jewelry, and beauty products in their shopping section without that information, which makes many users surrender their information in exchange for content. While it only may be logging in with Facebook or an email address, this information becomes valuable because it can make effective highly targeted advertisements. This has made Refinery29 has grow at an incredibly fast pace. More investors and advertizing money only increases their need for more users and more information. - - In Wang’s words, Refinery29 wants to be “the best friend chick” for all of its readers. This may be possible, as the future looks bright for Wang and everybody at Refinery29 — they are rapidly becoming the biggest fashion and women’s lifestyle media company. Time will tell if Refinery29 will be the best friend that sticks around. - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/ben-williams.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/ben-williams.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index a1bc521..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/ben-williams.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,94 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "New York State of Mind" - -:markdown - -How New York Magazine expanded beyond the five boroughs and made its voice global.
- -Now more than ever, technology has connected us to one another, but what can go missing as a result is our unique and authentic voice, which is easily drowned out by thousands of others on the internet. New York Magazine is a publication that has managed to have its cake and eat it too — they have maintained their distinctively New York character while growing their readership nationally. New York Magazine’s expansion from a local print publication to a national multimedia entity was seamless enough for Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz to remark that "The nation's best and most-imitated city magazine is often not about the city — at least not in the overcrowded, traffic-clogged, five boroughs sense." This transition was no easy feat. I sat down with Ben Williams, New York Magazine’s online editorial director, who described this by saying “It’s called New York Magazine. It always had the identity of a local publication, but on the internet you don’t want to limit yourself to just the audience in your city.”
- - As Williams has been with New York Magazine for over a decade — first as a senior editor in 2004, and then in his current capacity as the online editorial director — he has been in the front row watching these changes. Born in London, the NYC transplant first worked at CitySearch and then at Slate before joining New York Magazine, where he has proved himself to be instrumental for the website’s transition from a purveyor of magazine content to its own content destination. - - Williams characterizes the new tone that has developed, saying that “The web encourages a conversational tone; it encourages more humor, more playfulness. Trying to be funny is much more of a part of the website’s mission, while it’s more of a subtle thing in the magazine.” - - This tone is consistent in Nymag.com, and in this very interview, as Williams is refreshingly candid and unfailingly witty while talking about the changing media environment that has contributed to their success. His humor is matched by his firsthand knowledge — Williams is a veritable historian for the site’s expansion, as he has overseen the site’s expanding portfolio of blogs, which now includes Daily Intel, The Cut, Grub Street, The Science of Us, and Vulture. In 2014, the magazine branch of New York cut its distribution from a weekly to a bi-weekly magazine — now publishing only 29 issues per year, versus 42. While this happened to their printed publication, the digital empire of New York Magazine only has continued to grow. - - In transitioning to a more national media entity, the publication has expanded its reach beyond the confines of the five boroughs. This is a direct result of Williams’ pioneering efforts to take its signature funny, smart, and irreverent attitude and reproduce it for a larger audience. - - Williams said, “About a third of our audience online is New York based, and the other two thirds are from other places around the country and the world.” It is this demographic that has caused new growth in New York Magazine’s print subscriptions across the country. He then said, “It has actually become more of a national magazine now. 10 years ago almost everything in the magazine had a New York connection.” - -We are trying to represent the New York state of mind, the urban state of mind, and the cosmopolitan state of mind, which come with a set of values and attitudes that resonate beyond New York. It’s about wit and smarts and irony and sophistication, about getting a little crazy sometimes.”
- - The distinctly New York tone is something that Williams strives to maintain, despite how the they are publishing more national features. In transitioning more local stories to national coverage, Williams notes that “What changed is that now we think of it as more of a state of mind — we are trying to represent the New York state of mind, the urban state of mind, and the cosmopolitan state of mind, which come with a set of values and attitudes that resonate beyond New York. It’s about wit and smarts and irony and sophistication, about getting a little crazy sometimes.” - - What native New Yorker would disagree with that? - - ###### The Online Voice - - The consistency of the publication’s intelligent, irreverent tone fostered its ability to retain its identity as a city magazine for New Yorkers, while reaching an audience that exists beyond those five boroughs. Maintaining the dynamic between high-brow and low-brow content is the way that Williams proposes to accomplish this: - - “Our voice is possibly the main thing that people come to us for, and we always try to be smart and funny, which is tricky because it’s easy to be one or the other. There is a lot of policy coverage, a lot of smart, serious political coverage out there that can also be dry and boring. There’s also a lot of funny stuff out there that is entertaining and amusing, but is ultimately kind of trivial. It might amuse you for two seconds. The formula is to take frivolous things seriously and to have fun with serious things. The belief of Vulture is that if we are going to cover opera, let’s write about a fight in the orchestra rather than just doing a staid review of an opera production that people aren’t going to.” - - Williams also believes that this signature tone is enhanced on nymag.com, saying that “The magazine has a sense of humor, but that sense of humor is much more accentuated online. There is a different type of writing that flourishes more online than in print. Due to the intimate relationship readers develop with bloggers, people are coming back to the website all day, hopefully reading multiple items and feeling like they have a relationship with the bloggers.” - - Williams compares these bloggers to radio hosts and describes TV anchors as developed personalities: - - “You’re coming to hear that person and that’s why the conversational tone comes in. For magazine writers who have bi-monthly bylines, readers don’t necessarily think about that writer so much because they’re only seeing that byline every so often.” - - So, even though the overall sensibility is the same, they are expressed in slightly different ways. While this sensibility — to be intelligent and smart and entertaining — is almost commonplace these days, it’s not an easy balance to pull off. This is what makes the successful re-launch of The Cut, which was their online fashion blog, so remarkable. - - In recent years, The Cut experienced an identity overhaul, transitioning from a blog that strictly covered fashion to a women’s lifestyle site. The Cut was a success in a very crowded marketplace; when the site launched there were immediate comparisons drawn to Gawker Media’s Jezebel. The comparisons only grew when Maureen O’Connor was hired away from Gawker to run the features section, Love and War. The Love and War column chronicles the romantic exploits of millennials via first-person personal essays that are reminiscent of the New York Times’ famed Modern Love columns. Williams says that this reflects how interpersonal relationships in 2015 are filtered through the internet and social media, because that’s just how people live now. Our online selves and digital correspondences directly impact physical sex, dating, and relationships. To exclude a seemingly trivial text message from your writing is to diminish its very relevance. - - Williams explains by saying, “If you’re not doing that, you’re not really engaging with what people are doing in the moment. I read a statistic the other day that said 45 percent of people who date in New York meet the other person through a dating website, which is much higher than most other places.” - - In this hyper-connected age, the digital minutiae and debris that collects around our exes lives on long beyond the relationship itself: We see our them on friends’ Facebook pages and they are never more than one Snapchat away. Exes are essentially always within arm’s reach, and oftentimes in our pockets. Maureen O’Connor’s article on this, “[All My Exes Live in Texts: Why the Social Media Generation Never Really Breaks Up](http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/07/texting-exes-social-media-generation.html),” was shared nearly 100,000 times. This cultural examination — from how changing gender roles affects courtship to how Venmo is a useful way of stalking your ex — is the trademark of the publication. - - When asked about competition, Williams said: - - “I think Jezebel has a very clear point of view, or maybe only a singular point of view. They are making their basic mission to look for everyday examples of injustice against women, and they’re looking to expose that in different ways and critique it. That is the heart of what Jezebel is. Obviously, there are a lot of people who love that, and there are some people who can find it a little one-note. Feminism is a part of the Cut’s identity, but it’s not necessarily just about that one thing, like you know, ‘let’s find injustices against women.’” - - Williams points to The Cut’s fashion coverage and fashion photography as a point of differentiation; interestingly there is a borrowed-from-print element in its definition. He cites the beautiful images and layout of women’s fashion magazines, citing in particular Elle, Vogue, and Marie Claire as inspiration for The Cut, saying “One of the things we talked about when we relaunched was that we wanted to have the production values and sophistication of a women’s magazine. We tried to make the design really gorgeous.” - - They accomplished this with high-quality, expandable images in slideshows, making things like the very popular “Look Book” feature, which enables the fashion-minded to scroll through hundreds of looks from a certain celebrities or events. - - Williams says, “We run quite a lot of original photography: we do our own versions of fashion shoots. That kind of visual element is not really present in most other women’s sites. The Cut is the closest thing to an actual woman’s magazine online. We wanted to combine that visual element with the fun scrappiness of blogs — the online destination intended was to be entertaining, but also sophisticated and beautiful.” - - Adam Moss, New York Magazine’s editor-in-chief, echoed this at the time of the re-launch. Smith said, "Our goal was to create a mash-up between a high-end fashion magazine and a blog.” This sparked headlines across the media industry, both from a business perspective: “New York Magazine's Revamped 'The Cut' Blog Will Take On The Fashion Glossies” [Business Insider], as well as fashion one: “The Age of The Blogazine Is Upon Us: Style Blogs Now Aspire to be ‘Part Jezebel, Part Vogue’” [Racked].This combination is pioneering still; Williams says, “I don’t think that anyone else is quite in this space in the same way.” - - ###### The Medium is the Message - - In terms of both content and distribution, writing on the internet has altered dramatically since Williams first started in the industry. When talking about the growing digital world that existed in the 1990s, Williams reflects on his previous employer, saying: - - “You can argue that Slate invented aggregation, with their daily round-ups that explained the day’s papers as one story that linked to loads of other stories. Eventually, people started figuring out ways of writing that were more native to the internet. If you want to go back to Marshall McLuhan, ‘the medium is the message.’ In any media, the medium shapes the content. - With the advent of blogging in the 2000s, writers took one story, and instead of linking it with loads of different stories within one article, they made a different article out of every story. These blogs first were based largely on commentary. Gawker was originally a sarcastic, mean commentary on things in the media industry. After that, people came along and industrialized aggregation.” - - Williams goes on, citing the Huffington Post as a prime example of this type of website: - - “The Huffington Post was almost entirely rewriting other people’s stories on a huge scale. Then, people turned into members of the workday audience. They might come look at lunch, but they might also come back at three to see what’s going on as well. People figured that if you publish a lot of stories on a given day, you’ll get more readers than if you just publish one thing. Then, as the technology changed and people figured out how to write for the medium, the next big thing was social media, which changed things again. People started writing according to what people were going to share on social media. Social media has become a hugely important driver of audiences to websites in the past two years. Especially Facebook, but also Twitter, Pinterest, and other sites.” - -Anybody who’s reading through the lens of social media is inundated with stories from all different sources, and is subject to that mash-up sensibility.
- - This has created a more democratic, albeit chaotic, environment for content. Williams says, “Anybody who’s reading through the lens of social media is inundated with stories from all different sources, and is subject to that mash-up sensibility. I’m not going to say it didn’t exist eight or nine years ago, but it was less common.” Williams returns to the magazine’s mission statement when describing how this relates to the work of New York Magazine, saying “Usually in something that people find popular and entertaining, there’s usually something more going on that you can tease out. Things in the world that people dismiss as being silly could gesture towards some larger interest or insight. The Buzzfeed phenomenon of the white/blue dress for example: ‘Why do we see the dress that way? What’s going on? Let’s explain how color fields work.’” - - This type of work is also seen on their most recently launched blog, The Science of Us, which uses science to explain why humans do things. Williams believes that the blog creates the type of content that performs very well on social media: - - “It was an experiment because it was a little off the beaten track for us, but we thought it would do well on social media. We felt these are the stories that people would want to share. We felt it would play well on social media because you can be like ‘this explains something about me,’ and that has proven to be the case.” Williams notes that “all of our sites get a lot of traffic from social media, but I think Science of Us gets the most — as much as two times the traffic.” - - Williams contends that this sheer volume of online content has different demands upon the writer, saying “We publish about a hundred stories a day, and it’s not possible to edit all of those in the way you would in a print publication.” He compares the process of editing to coaching a team of writers: - - “Players have to go out in the field and do it themselves a lot — they’ve got to write. As a result, you have to be able to write first good draft pieces, because less editing happens online. We probably have more editing happening here than 98 percent of other websites, but it’s still not nearly as much as happens in print. This is the big difference between print and digital writers. There are great print writers whose pieces get a huge amount of editing, and if you saw their first drafts you might be like wow.” - - What is Williams’ advice to younger writers? - - “You have a generation of writers who grew up on blogs. There is a voice that people associate with blogs that is slightly sarcastic, kind of funny, and youthful sounding; it is a voice that writers today have almost automatically because of what they grew up reading. The challenge is to teach them how to write in a more old fashioned sense: to keep the conversational tone and the funny, but also to learn how to develop an argument, how to report, and how to structure a longer piece.” - - So, fellow 20-something writers, perhaps graduate school may not be a complete waste of time. As for whom William considers a media innovator? - - “I think obviously Buzzfeed is doing interesting things. Some of it I like, some of it I’m less interested in, but it’s certainly interesting.” - - Spoken with a measured restraint, one would sooner associate the printed page with the blog post. Though perhaps in another decade, technological advances will further level the playing field and such writing will be indistinguishable. May New York Magazine have readership in Antarctica when that day comes. - - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/bill-wasik.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/bill-wasik.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index d6afe94..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/bill-wasik.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,98 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "New York Times Magazine: The Gray Lady’s Cooler Cousin" - -:markdown - - -It’s always interesting to feature the up-and-comers, the movers, the shakers, the geniuses, and the wunderkinds that are making an indelible mark on an expanding, rapidly transforming media landscape that, not too long ago, belonged to a few storied media institutions. But the big names cannot be forgotten easily; they might not be driving the change, but they certainly need to react to it. What kind of strategies are the legacy institutions developing to still be considered relevant and necessary? Enter New York Times Magazine, a 119-year old institution that just went through a major redesign and is still in the process of diversifying its presence on various platforms while still retaining the print flagship.
- -The last decade has not been easy for the New York Times. The revered Gray Lady of print, used to a slower pace of news where her voice reigned supreme, has been shaken up by the fast-moving, ever-evolving digital revolution. In the past years it’s undergone two abrupt Editor-in-Chief changes (Keller1Farhi, Paul. “Bill Keller to Step down as New York Times Executive Editor.” Washington Post. The Washington Post, 2 June 2011. Web. 17 Mar. 2015.-Abramson2-Baquet3) and has had to buy out or lay off a significant portion of their staff – 21 layoffs and 57 buyouts – as recently as December 2014.
- -Way to go Jill Abramson! #smartgirlshavemorefun RT @Ed2010News The @NYTimes just hired its first female exec editor! http://mbist.ro/lSFdhO
— Sarah Smith (@smisarah) June 2, 2011How feminist online platforms are changing the world right before our eyes.
- -The relationship between feminism and the internet is contentious to say the least. The majority of big news and social media sites like Gawker, Facebook, Twitter, and VICE were all founded and continue to be run by men. When Gawker started their blog Jezebel, in 2007, it was a voice aimed at Gawker’s female readers focused on delivering “celebrity, sex, and fashion for women. Without airbrushing.” Since then, other websites like Slate and The Huffington Post have followed suit and created feminist sites of their own. As is VICE, the edgy news and culture website famous for its unflinchingly honest journalism, and for being a total boy’s club. But all of that is about to change this year with its upcoming vertical site, Broadly, which will feature female writers and provide the gritty, feminist voices that the internet is in desperate need of.
- - VICE has worked hard these past few years to create a website that functions on multiple platforms with diverse content, but the one thing that has been crucially missing is one focused on women and feminism. With the past year being full of debates about reproductive justice and slogans like Emma Watson’s #HeForShe campaign, the moment for a leading feminist voice on the Internet has never been more necessary or relevant. This is especially true considering the rise of the Men’s Rights movement and its associated websites and bloggers, all of which advocate for the silencing of feminists, and some even violence against women. Their main thesis is that (white, heterosexual, cisgender) men are the most oppressed group in society today. They routinely spew their anti-woman vitriol on websites like Return of Kings and online “pick-up artist” forums, as well as advise their fellow activists to undermine women’s safety and rights every chance they get. With misogynists lurking in every corner of Congress and the Internet, the question remains: will the formerly male-dominated VICE be able to successfully create a voice for feminism on their website? - - Callie Beusman is a writer, Vassar graduate, former Jezebel staff member, and in her own words, a “professional feminist with a corporate sponsor.” She is poised to be a senior editor for Broadly, which is set to launch this coming Spring 2015. VICE has done their homework by picking Callie as the senior editor of Broadly: she is the perfect fit to create the feminist voice that VICE is searching for because of her background working at Jezebel, the Hairpin, V, Interview, and IMPOSE. Callie has also written several articles for VICE before, aimed towards a feminist audience about hot-button issues such as rape culture, feminist DIY products on Etsy, and a story about Women in Waves — an activist group that provides safe abortions for women living in areas where abortion is inaccessible by sailing them into international waters to administer safe abortion options. - - When I met up with Callie for coffee, I was expecting her to only talk about VICE Women, but what we ended up talking about was much more than just a small project she will soon become a part of; we talked about writing, feminism and what it means to be a woman working in media today. - - - ###### Chloe Gold: Can you talk a bit about Jezebel and the kind of work that you did with them? - - Callie Beusman: I really think that Jezebel changed the entire way that we process news, the way that we read news, and the way that we respond to news. Someone asked me “why do you think the Bill Cosby thing only got attention now?” I think it’s because of Jezebel and sites like Jezebel that people are starting to not victim blame and take women seriously. I think something like the Monica Lewinsky incident wouldn’t be able to happen again because it’s like there is this voice standing up for women’s interests and teaching women to be hypercritical of media institutions in a way that they weren’t before. - - ###### How did Jezebel get started? - - Jezebel started as a reaction to women’s magazines. [The founders] went through women’s magazines and were like “what do we hate about this?” Women’s magazines were really different when it started, and now I think that they adopted a lot of Jezebel-like stuff. Tracy, who’s my boss at VICE Women, was one of the founders of Jezebel, she said that they were reading a magazine and the headline was “What He Thinks of Your O Face,” How insulting is that? You have to be perfect all the time, even when you’re having an orgasm? So they wanted to interrogate the idea of aspirational women’s lifestyle magazines, and they changed the discourse in general. - - But with that said, I think it’s gotten to the point now where so many blogs are doing that, being really hypercritical of media stuff, and media criticism is becoming synonymous with women’s writing. Women’s blogs now are almost dependent on sexism. If they woke up tomorrow and the patriarchy was gone, what would they write about? It’s this sort of whole reacting to something without providing an alternative solution. It’s like, “Oh, can you believe Rush Limbaugh said this about women?” Instead of having the conversation that’s already been started and having the last word, a better solution seems to be having another entirely different conversation. You don’t have to just battle the sexism: create an alternate model where instead of getting mad at people for saying sexist shit about Hillary Clinton, report on Hillary Clinton yourself. I like op-eds, but I don’t like how women’s writing has become synonymous with op-ed writing about sexism. - - ###### How did you get started? What made you want to do more feminist journalism and feminist media? - - I’ve always been a feminist. It’s the one thing that I actually genuinely care about. I studied Women’s Studies when I was in school, and I continued to do that. When I was graduating high school, my parent’s friends were all like “what are you going to do? What job are you going to have?” and I was like “Oh, i’m going to be a professional feminist with a corporate sponsor.” That’s exactly what I am. I applied for a job at Gawker and they told me “you shouldn’t work at Gawker, you should work for Jezebel.” It’s really fortunate and I think I got lucky. I worked really hard and I did a lot of writing. I think a lot of people had to segway into becoming a feminist writer. You know, you just start writing about pop culture and then something else, and then kind of segway into a career in women’s media and I’m fortunate because I just started doing that right off the bat, by chance. - - ###### How do you think that social media has impacted other sources of media? - - I think it’s tough for people to figure out how to do it, but it gives a platform for people who wouldn’t have a voice otherwise. It’s a lot of women of color, queer women, transwomen who wouldn’t necessarily be propped up in the mainstream media, and now they can have a way to make themselves heard, which is really cool because there’s a way they can now hold mainstream media accountable. - - ###### What do you mean? - - There was this huge controversy at Jezebel when they had hired this man who systematically silenced women of color. He was this gross guy and they had given him this platform to write, and then he had this breakdown and people got mad, like “Jezebel, why did you give him a voice?” They’re right — and around the same time Jezebel had only one woman of color on staff, and everyone was pointing that out, and they were right about that too. When the new editor-in-chief Emma took over, she hired such amazing and brilliant diverse women with amazing and diverse interests and she really responded to that criticism well. The site is infinitely better now because of it. - - ###### Are there any downsides to social media? - - There’s sometimes a policing of other people’s feminism, like “it’s not feminist that you did that,” or if you have an opinion, that’s not the right feminist opinion to have. That can be exhausting and a bit frustrating. Instead of attacking each other, how about we attack sexism? Especially if everyone wants the same thing, which is equal rights for men and women. I think there’s a lot of stuff that’s objectionable, but it is sometimes frustrating. - - ###### What are your thoughts on the popular feminist bloggers and vloggers, like Anita Sarkeesian and Laci Green, and the myriad controversies surrounding their content? What about the stalking, doxing, and the death threats that both women have received? - - It sucks when that happens. It sucks that when you enter women’s media, you have to prepare yourself for it. I have a really weird full name that I’ve never gone by and I was telling my boss about it, and saying to them that I should get it legally changed, and they were like “No, it’s good that you have a weird name. Now no one will be able to get your address.” I know so many women who’ve received personal threats. I know at least three people who had to file police reports because of online harassment. It’s insane. There just needs to be better security. I think there’s this idea that free speech is being able to say whatever you want, but I think that’s not what free speech should be because allowing these anonymous misogynists to say whatever they want makes it so women can’t speak. Whose freedom are we protecting? We’re protecting these misogynists’ right to attack women, and by doing so we are directly contributing to the silencing of women. And this silencing increases exponentially when it’s a woman of color, a transwoman, or a queer woman. You’re protecting this anonymous person on the internet to the direct detriment of women. On Twitter, people can say “you should have your head cut off and get raped.” And Twitter’s like “that’s free speech, they can say whatever they want. They didn’t make a direct threat. They said you SHOULD have your head cut off and get raped. They didn’t actually do it.” You need to have a twitter handle to work, and as a writer, you can’t shut it down. Someone found out my friend’s address because she was tagged in a picture on Instagram and it was geotagged — so you have to remove all of your geotags if you want to be a feminist writer. You have to be really savvy about personal security. At one point I was getting harassing phone calls every night. It was just someone breathing heavily and it got to the point where I called the cops. I don’t know if it was someone from the internet or just some guy, but i think that once you get through your first bad one, you’re less afraid. It is sad that I have to say that. Roosh from Return of Kings directed all these people at me and I was really shook up at first, but it was stupid personal attacks. Who cares if a bunch of internet misogynists are calling me ugly? But 10 people an hour tweeting mean stuff at you does rattle you, and I don’t think its something that you can ever get used to. It doesn’t really happen to me anymore at VICE because I think people have a weird antipathy for Jezebel specifically. VICE has a reputation of being a boy’s club, which is why I think it's really important to have a women’s site on it. We have these big empty conference rooms now, and I’ll walk by a meeting happening that’s just all women. And they also hired a female COO, and I bet that was never there before we got here. It really makes you feel proud. - - ###### What’s your dream for the future of feminist journalism? - - I hope that we can get to a point one day where women’s interest writing isn’t defined as writing about all the awful stuff that happens to women. We don’t want to do only rape stories! We don’t want to do all abortion stories. We want to write about cool stuff that women are doing, and I think that’s another unfilled niche in online feminism that’s well done in magazine feminism, and again this is something that Jezebel’s doing much better now. Basically it got really cool when I left. It’s like cultural stuff, profiles on cool women, articles drawing attention to cool projects that women are working on in arts and music and film, and pieces showing us who we all should admire. That’s something I’d love to see more of. I think Jezebel’s definitely doing a lot more of it. They have amazing interviews now, and wonderful historical pieces. If you read a lot of women’s interest, the takeaway you get is that being a woman sucks and that’s not how I feel. I never want to be a man. Sometimes, the way that the experience of being a woman is written about gives you the message that “who would ever want to be a woman?” I hope we can create this conversation where you realize that there are so many reasons why you would want to be a woman. Being a woman rules. I think it’s really important that the media that we consume and we create reminds us of that, rather than thinking that we’re all going to get raped and no one will let us abort the baby afterwards. I don’t want that to be anyone’s takeaway. - - ###### So no more “Roe v. World” then? (“Roe v. World” is the tag on Jezebel.com that deals with reproductive justice.) - - Abortion is another thing that’s troubling to me, because in the past few years women have really lost their abortion access. It’s crazy because feminism is having this pop culture moment and more women are identifying as feminist, and yet while this is happening, women across the United States are losing control of their own reproductive freedom. How does that happen? How is it that feminism is getting so popular, but politically things are the worst they’ve ever been for women in the past 50 years? I wish that women were as engaged and concerned with their political future as they are with pop culture right now, but I think that women’s engagement with pop culture has changed the world for the better and I hope we can translate that into politics. - - ###### Do you know of any other publications that are trying to do what VICE will be doing this year? - - I mean, Cosmo’s doing their big feminist thing. I don’t subscribe to Cosmo, but I’ve heard that a lot of feminist writing doesn’t make it into the magazine and I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but I think some of it does. I think its interesting to read some of the comments on Cosmo. Some of it is like, “What the fuck is this? This isn’t the Cosmo I know”. I think another thing with online feminism is the pressure to respond when something awful happens. I’ve gotten so many emails like “why hasn’t Jezebel responded to this yet?” You want to respond quickly and you want to respond coherently, and you kind of want to be the first person to respond. I think that’s why it’s easy for stuff to lose its nuance. With print magazines though, you can take more time to thoroughly research something. - - ###### How has it been transitioning from Jezebel to VICE? - - Jezebel is amazing and I get worried because I think some “ex-Jezebel” people think there’s some kind of rivalry. When I left, it was because it was a huge step up. I went from being editorial assistant to senior editor, but when I left, I was sobbing. Working with all women is just phenomenal. I literally haven’t experienced sexism in the workplace since I left college. I was at Vassar when I studied Women’s Studies, and then went right to Jezebel and worked with all women, and now at VICE I basically only work and talk with women. - - ###### Where do you see the future of online feminism going? - - I’m mostly really happy with online feminism. It’s not perfect obviously, but I think it’s great that so many smart talented women are having platforms, and people are listening to them. I think it's really cool. I’m watching the world change right before my eyes. I’m watching women learn how to advocate for themselves and learn what kind of world they want to live in and talk about how they’re going to make that happen. - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/emily-segal.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/emily-segal.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 43097c5..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/emily-segal.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,75 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "Baby Steps: Genius, Youth and Annotation as Knowledge" - -:markdown -A story on contemporary branding and online youth culture.
- -When the internet became a structural part of society, the publishing industry started shaking and moving fast in order to keep up with new forms of communication. In this digital-native, post-internet landscape, data of all kinds is instantaneously collected, shared, remixed, re-uploaded; this is the internet’s production line, constantly redefining itself in a hyper globalized culture.
- - The continuous stream of information and visual stimuli have deeply affected concepts like individuality, aesthetics, and forms of consumption. This also means something new for content producers whose voices can be drowned out in the sea of digital information. Traditional advertising approaches don't seem to work anymore, especially for young consumers; which is why creating a brand today also means overcoming old school marketing dogmas. This is the place where two New York brands, the trend-forecasting group K-Hole and the open source annotation website [Genius](http://genius.com), have come up with new ideas — experimenting with new branding concepts, and decoding and framing youth culture to create its new identity. - - K-Hole, a New York-based trend forecasting collective that was founded in 2010, publishes trend forecasting reports modeled around corporate PowerPoint presentations, stock images, and advertising concepts that explore the aesthetics of today’s young consumer. In their most recent publication, [Youth Mode: a Report on Freedom](http://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/), K-Hole freezes our current cultural moment taking a snapshot of today’s youth culture; the fluid transactions between the virtual and the real, the loss of uniqueness, and new "assertions of individuality." Youth mode replaces its hipster and indie-inspired predecessor with a more self-aware young consumer whose identity is formed through "self-identification rather than the self-differentiation.” This was a part of the popularization of #normcore, a concept turned into a fashion movement that revenged the bearded hipster with monochrome grayscale Bermuda jeans, and made khaki its flag colors. - - Working with the same generation as K-Hole, prefaced by technology and our post-9/11 information age, the annotation website Rap Genius coded new habits for young consumers on the internet. Its founders, newly graduated Yale students, started the project in 2009 with an [early version of the website](http://rapgenius-genesis.herokuapp.com/) annotating rap lyrics. Since then, the website expanded from rap to more lyrics from different genres, legal texts, poetry, and even the Deceleration of Independence. This past summer, Rap Genius quietly shortened its name to Genius, and reinvented its brand into a new web annotation platform using the [Beta](http://genius.com/beta) feature that has the ability to annotate any page on the web. The new technology officially launched at MoMA PS1 on April third, where the Genius crew annotated live — projecting web pages on the huge vault of the VW Dome. - - By extending its annotation feature to the broader web, Genius has created a new overarching knowledge project that mirrors the way today’s youth consume and share media and predicts what its future could look like. Just like #normcore recognizes the structures that shape our consumption (without irony), Genius focuses on the interconnected nature of digital information and the need for unification under a new concept that makes the web even more “world wide.” - - Interestingly enough, Genius has recently hired one of the founders of K-Hole Emily Segal as their new Creative Director. On a rainy Friday morning, I wandered through the halls of Genius’ headquarters and talked with Segal about her perspective on Genius, its innovative annotation feature, and changes in media and the creative industry. - - ###### Cecilia Mezulic: What behaviors have changed in online news and media since you first started with K-Hole? - - Emily Segal: There are a lot more voices represented, things move fast and disappear quickly, there is a hair trigger sense of controversy and public shaming that is kind of new, and things become clickbait and buzzfeed-y in a more extreme way. I am applying part of what I learned and theorized about at K-Hole to the challenges of my work as a Creative Director for Genius, although they are very different projects. Genius is reacting to this scenario by developing a new tool that is an evolution of how we comment on things — attempting to get out of the comment section where people just argue with each other. We are trying to get people to react in a different way; to change the conversation by literally changing the way commenting happens. - -We are a knowledge project about decoding human culture with a varied cultural appetite, more than other companies that are branded online.
- - ###### What is your vision as the Creative Director for Genius? - - My ambition here is to build a cultural brand. We are a knowledge project about decoding human culture with a varied cultural appetite, more than other companies that are branded online. We are from New York and we want to show that we have this intercultural, interdisciplinary sensibility. - - ###### Does that have to do with the unbranded "Annotate" billboard on Canal Street? - - Yes, our strategy is not conventional. Genius is not only friendly — it is also irreverent, although it is something that is intended to be built by everybody. We want to express that. In the first issue of K-Hole, Fragmentation, we talked about how to have campaigns and branding strategies that don’t necessarily show the brand at first, but connect to them later in a different way. Freed from any sense of twentieth century traditional marketing, brands connect to people through culture. It is not about proving marketing metrics, but about making advertising a self-aware gesture of how you would think of your own brand. That’s what advertising is supposed to do. I don't think that the number of people who see the billboard should literally translate into the number of people that click our website. We want to raise awareness in general. I don’t view that as a direct conversion, and because of K-Hole I don’t feel like I have to. Something like #normcore never would have tested well if you used traditional marketing analytics, but it became a blockbuster concept that also applied to a lot of marketing strategies. We have experienced this asymmetry. - - ###### Was it meant to be that way? - - No. A big part of K-Hole was creating neologisms; using language in new and experimental ways to provide a vocabulary for people to talk about their experience — as consumers, and with marketing companies and brands. We played a lot with language. We didn’t invent #normcore as a word, but we used it as a neologism. It wasn’t set out to be a meme. - - ###### I think of K-Hole as social phenomenon, a reflection of the work of young creators and artists who are setting the tone for new social and marketing behaviors, finding new ways to create and promote identities through branding. - - Yes, all of this is my art practice, as well as the creative direction of Genius. There is this quote that "all design decisions are artistic decisions," and K-Hole has talked about how all marketing decisions are artistic decisions, and how all artistic decisions are also marketing decisions. This is a constellation I think about a lot when I think about my work, whether it’s trying to express the spirit of a big brand like Genius, consulting for companies, K-Hole, or stuff that I do personally. K-Hole started as a conceptual art project dealing with marketing that mimicked a lot of the publications that are passed around in the corporate world, but using a different, personal tone personal. It was a new format for the art world. - - ###### What corporations where you thinking about while making that project? - - We have gotten our hands on a lot of corporate trend forecasting reports from friends that work at agencies or companies that paid for them, and we were really into them. We thought that they were really funny and weird and interesting. They provided a different format for us to express interests and concerns that we had about how consumption works, things we were experiencing as young consumers. We thought it would be fun to make one ourselves because they were something strange and new to us. We were looking for objects that were not expensive, so that`s why we chose not to print. People in the art world at that time were really obsessed with print and we thought that it was time to explore different formats. - - ###### Is this also what you were thinking when you explored different formats for the Annotate campaign? - - There is a connection between street art, skate brands, and startups in terms of their values and their textures, so I wanted to draw that line aesthetically, although not explicitly. It is also connected to the empowerment of the new tool to explain things and not being limited by traditional commenting platforms. - -The idea of annotating the internet has been a dream. A lot of startups and companies have tried to do it, it just hasn’t worked for various reasons, either there were technological or adoption problems. We are the people who are doing it now in this particular media landscape, but not the first ones.
- - ###### Where does this idea come from? - - A lot of people have tried to do this before. Since the very first internet browser, the idea of annotating the internet has been a dream. A lot of startups and companies have tried to do it, it just hasn’t worked for various reasons, either there were technological or adoption problems. We are the people who are doing it now in this particular media landscape, but not the first ones. It`s also connected to a big knowledge project like Rap Genius. We are learning from that, applying the same principle to the whole internet. There are some things that are different about the new tool. The annotations on Rap Genius are collectively edited to try and get a sense of the official word on something whereas in the tool now there is more personal commenting, so it’s not like you have to come to a consensus with other people. You can just say what you think, on your own name, and stand for that. It is a collective cultural process where people are adding their thoughts and annotations on the internet. - - ###### Do you envision any way that this could be of use in the journalism or news industry? - - It is a good fact-checking tool. The tool is still in a very early beta version. Some people have been using it that way. We still have to wait and see. - - ###### Can you tell me more about the baby in the promotional campaign? What is its connection with Genius? - - The baby mascot is not our logo, it`s just a piece of imagery for our brand. I was talking to Tom, one of the founders, about the journey of his personal style. He showed me a Bape hoodie that he was wearing the day they raised the first significant round of funding for the company, and I thought it would be fun and cool to redesign the hoodie that he wore on this momentous day for the company, and re-release it as a piece of merchandise. I had a friend of mine, Quique, who is an amazing men’s wear designer of these crazy patterns, so I asked him to redesign the hoodie. He made this camouflage pattern with the baby in it as the idea for the sweatshirt. We started talking about how babies are really a universal symbol of affection and care, that they are the smartest creatures that can learn anything, and that startups are like baby companies. Babies crawl over like our brand is going to crawl over the internet. There are all these amazing connections and we thought it would be cool and really unexpected for us to use it as part of our branding. I don't think it’s what people expected from us and it doesn’t look like anything anyone else is doing on the internet. - - ###### And the #babycore on Twitter? - - I saw that on the internet and I thought it was funny. I am more interested in the suffixes of words. I didn’t really know what #babycore was. Unlike #normcore, it is more like a concept that came from a lot of places, mostly #babycore is a project of Matt Starr, but I consider these words something like public property. The word “core” denotes subcultural genres. The word “normcore” denotes subcultural genres but was applied to "norm," which is the most non-subcultural thing. There is for example the word “mumblecore,” which is applied to film, just like #normcore was applied to fashion and culture. Part of my affection to the suffix is that it is part of the language of the internet and can be remixed in this way. - - ###### What would your advice be for young creators, based on your experience with K-Hole and Genius? - - Find your collaborators and don’t be too strict about trying to do everything independently or by your own rules. It`s good to work with other people in a team. For some artists who have a strong independent vision it is the right thing for them to do their own things, but my experience has been hyper-collaborative — working with a lot of other people, companies, and projects, and that has been the best thing for me. When I look at the team at K-Hole, my closest friends who are really smart thinkers and artists — they are all independently motivated researchers. They learn everything about things they are interested in, and actively use the internet in that way. They empower themselves to get at the bottom of things, do the best research, and share knowledge. Figuring out your personal research practice is fundamental because it touches on everything you do. Find a method. And travel. - - - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/guga-chacra.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/guga-chacra.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 9f47473..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/guga-chacra.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,76 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "From São Paulo to New York" - -:markdown -Juliana Bechara met Brazilian foreign correspondent, Guga Chacra, in New York and quickly realized, that he had too much to say, for he to be a journalist, she just had to listen.
- -At some point on a cold March evening, CPCJ decided that our publication would interview people making a difference in our contemporary media landscape. I quickly realized who I wanted to meet with. I wanted someone I could connect with, over more than the media industry. Someone who I could talk about sports and culture, origins and family. It didn't take me long to reach out to Guga Chacra, the Brazilian journalist based (for more than 10 years) in New York City, whose Twitter had already been chosen as one of the most influential in Latin America by Foreign Policy Magazine in 2011.
- - I emailed him on a Sunday evening, feeling a little nervous. If he accepted, I would be talking to one of the biggest names shaping Brazil’s news industry. Chacra holds a masters degree from Columbia University in International Affairs, has Lebanese roots, and is considered an expert on conflicts in the Middle East. We met in the Upper West Side, after Chacra’s swimming training. He talked fast, he knew names, and he talked politics like he was relaying a sports match. He manages three different worlds at one time — which is common amongst foreign correspondents. After talking with him more, I discovered that we actually went to the same school back in São Paulo. After figuring this out, we quickly hit it off and talked in-depth about his work in New York after he went to school. - After Chacra graduated from Columbia University, he decided to travel for nine months throughout Middle Eastern countries back in 2007/2008. His intention was to continue the work he had already been doing — commenting foreign politics and Middle East — although this time, locally, on field. He wanted to be closer to these people, to their day-to-day activities, and he wanted to understand how they live and how they react to the breaking news he was used to broadcasting. This, to him, was the best way to understand and even predict reactions to distinct situations in foreign nations. - - This was the beginning of his long affair with Estadão — the number one Brazilian newspaper founded in 1875. When travelling in the Middle East, Guga worked for Estadão as an International Correspondent, whose work was published in print. When he returned to the US after those nine months, he had one request: stop being published in print and start publishing on online platforms. "No one reads print anymore, my friends wouldn't read it, and online I have much more freedom to speak," he said. He continued explaining that on his blog he can make use of different styles and play more with words and formats as well. This is how his award-winning blog on Estadão's web portal From Beirut to New York was created. - - When settling back in New York, Chacra, who always dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent, received a call from Globo News, the biggest Brazilian news broadcaster — with offices in different parts of the world and one studio in New York City — who asked him to become their correspondent. It happened. They liked his way of talking. He had charisma, he knew what he was doing. So, the Brazilian-Lebanese-Columbia-graduate never returned home. - - Chacra loves the city. “I like it because I live the whole city. Its restaurants are my kitchen. The Central Park is my yard. The subway is my car. And friends’ houses are my house’s extension,” he once said when interviewed by a fellow Brazilian journalist. - - When asked if he has ever considered working for local publications, he was direct. “I’m a journalist and I write. Unless you are a native speaker or have been to English speaking schools, it is very hard to add “the special flavor” to your written work. It is different from writing papers for school.” - At this point I started what I’m calling the Q&A, but he had so much to say that I quickly realized I had to put down my interview questions and just listen. - J. You moved to NYC 10 years ago to attend Columbia. How do you describe your trajectory and what brought you this far in NYC? - - G. My father went to medical school in the US, and living here was a dream for me. After living in Buenos Aires as a foreign correspondent for Folha de São Paulo, one of the leading local newspapers, I decided to apply for a masters program. Between Washington, Beirut, and NY, I decided to come to NY. - J. Do you have a daily routine for consuming media? - G. Yes. I wake up and I read the NY Times briefing. Then I take my dog for a walk, get breakfast, and I read the NY Times — the whole thing. - - On his smartphone Chacra showed me all the apps he uses. I go over: Aljazeera, Associated Press, BBC, Business Insider, Huffington Post, the most read from NY Times, Reuters and Washington Post. He also gets some briefings from Brazilian newspapers. - - G. On the internet I look into Vox for its dynamism, The Atlantic, daily essays from The New Yorker, and then I check the happenings in Brazil. Aljazeera America is always on in my TV; I really enjoy the way they cover different regions of the world. It’s also a good thermometer for me to talk about Yemen, Syria, and Iraq — they have great correspondents and a very accurate journalistic coverage. - - J. You cover issues of great relevance worldwide. Some readers and spectators are extremists and seem to always be ready to critique what you say. Others simply listen — after all, you facilitate their understanding of complex political situations. Who are the people consuming and following your work? - G. I have two profiles of people watching and reading me: those with a deep interest in international politics and those who see me on television — they are completely different. The first group will read me and eventually see me on television. The second will know me from television, but won't read me. - - I use Facebook as a tool as well. I don’t have a page (by the time you read this interview, though, he will already have migrated to a professional page). I accepted everyone who wanted to be friends with me until I reached the maximum of 5,000 friends. It’s a tremendously valid platform to engage with the broader public. I learned how to make my comments become trend topics and I also got invited for a new project that Facebook and Estadão are developing together, but I can’t speak of it yet. - - Although Chacra wouldn’t go into detail, my guess is that Facebook is in talks with Estadão to publish their news in-site on the Facebook platform. This is part of a new effort by Facebook to get all web traffic and data from publications directly on Facebook. Facebook’s rumored push for control over digital content production also follows similar features like Snapchat’s Discover platform, which also hosts news publications inside its app. I'll keep an eye on it, because it means a huge shift for any publication that share content on Facebook. To learn more, read this article released by New York Times last March 23rd. - - J. The interaction between the writer and reader that is made possible through social media: how do you oversee and approach it? - G. What bothers me most is people “putting words in my mouth.” For instance: if there’s a terrorist act such as the one in Paris, against Charlie Hebdo, I will strongly condemn such terrorist act, I think that is monstrous. Nevertheless, I would never generalize or condemn Muslims. I’m Brazilian, but I don’t respond for all Brazilians. This is what diversity is. - - There are extremists everywhere: fellow writers and columnists, readers and spectators. Once you are a public figure and you express your opinion, you will certainly find people arguing against something. I have always been guided through, by Globo News and Estadão, not to confront these people because all they want is to get attention. - - J. What about sensationalist journalism during breaking news? I often get annoyed with such long coverage on issues like the Germanwings crash, where you see a network covering, non-stop, a tragedy, even when there’s nothing new to be said. - G. There’s something called fringe, which Fox News does a lot. It’s a mix of science fiction and storytelling that investigates a series of unexplained facts. There, they really need to be cautious. Journalists have to be objective so not to generate the wrong buzz around happenings. - - On the other hand we have the Breaking News — CNN is an expert — that is perhaps when you noticed the Germanwings coverage. They have to be there talking over the crash. It generates audience. They invite specialists from different areas to talk about the matter and the host has to be there, even though there’s nothing to be done. Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer are serious and respected journalists. Still, they have to cover breaking news. When the Boston Marathon bombing happened in 2013, I had to stay on air for seven hours. It was a breaking news, and Globo News needed to keep track minute by minute. - - J. In your perception, what does a publication have to be able to do in order to captivate people’s attention? How do you apply it in your own work? - G. You have to be didactic and dynamic. Vox is a good example of this. It’s important to state how different written publications are from television. The first one you have to contextualize the reader: you have to write as if it was the first time the person was reading about the subject matter. For the latter, you have more time to explain and go through some topics. In my blog I often use a Q&A style that works as a storytelling device when approaching subjects for stories on Yemen, Syria, or ISIS. - - J. How do you describe the American media landscape? - - G. First of all, printed journalism is at its end. Some will succeed migrating to the web — publications like NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, because they are national mediums that people will continue to read in whatever platform they find. - - Platforms migrating to online versions will have to come up with a good plan for advertising, as a print page generates much more revenue than a banner. This is one of the reasons that they are using different medias such as videos, which are produced to bridge proximity between reader and communicator. - - What else? I believe that social media will face big shifts. Facebook has already overtaken Twitter and it will become even stronger. In this sense, social media is changing parameters of media consumption; it is changing the way that people see news. The consumers only want to read what interest them — and I feel sorry for these people — it is a shame that with so much interesting stuff to be read, people are sharing, more and more, the same old and sometimes false information. - - Worldwide, people are looking at niche news. This is something I learned: it is all a behavioral attitude towards the way we look at and search for information. In 1984, everybody knew who the big figures were: Michael Jackson, Ayrton Senna, Mike Tyson. Today, for instance, my father doesn’t know who Jay-Z is. Many people don’t know who Floyd Mayweather is. - - Chacra went further on explaining to me his ideas and understanding of hybrid people, of time and technology, of how we are seen as an extremely technological society. He tells me how what we are in 2015 is not even close to what we once were back in time. However, at the same time, whatever we do now in such high-tech era will eventually build our future selves. Social media works as a form of trademark. Once you feed it you will always be that person that posted such-and-such a thing. - - After an amazing conversation in the restaurant The Red Farm, we walked up the rainy streets of the Upper West Side while Chacra started describing his curiosities and possible artificial intelligence scenarios that we may encounter in a near future. Then he realized he had forgotten his backpack and coat at the restaurant. With a finished interview but an unfinished conversation, I was just as lost in thought. I continued my way back home. I devoted the rest of the day to reflect and digest all this whirlwind of energy he left me with me, while thinking about the implications of my meeting with Chacra. We are at a unique time where the internet and social media gives people like Chacra the ability to connect with huge audiences and shed light on important issues. - - - - - - - - - - - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/john-herrman.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/john-herrman.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index ffa5952..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/john-herrman.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,144 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "The Future of the Media Beat" - -:markdown -A short dek.
- -Predicting the future of technology and the media industry always has been notoriously difficult. But, just maybe the pieces are beginning to fall into place. Snapchat’s Discover. Facebook hosting media content. The slow death of websites. The future is already here; John Herman saw it before all of us.
- - John Herrman has been covering the technology and media beat as a reporter at various web and print publications, and as the co-founder of Buzzfeed’s tech vertical, FWD. - - He defined the [hot take](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hot+take). He foresaw that the battle between social networks would make them [Web 1.0 portals](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/facebook-is-the-new-aol.html). He also essentially predicted (#GamerGate will return under different names in multiple venues) the [biggest controversy in science-fiction](http://www.vox.com/2015/4/26/8495415/hugos-sad-puppies-controversy) since… Jar-Jar Binks? - - Now, Herrman works as an editor at The Awl, along with Matt Buchanan, the other co-founder of FWD. Founded by the current NY Times writer and former Gawker editor-in-chief Choire Sicha, the Brooklyn-based blog’s coverage eclectically ranges from media, culture, technology, and [bears](http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/bears-are-all-its-too-hot-to-sleep). Its near-trademarked tone alternates between lighthearted and serious. Since coming on board in 2014, Herrman has maintained a regular column, The Content Wars, which takes notes on the awkward, slow-motion entanglement of media and tech companies. - - We met at The Awl’s office in downtown Brooklyn and spoke about Facebook’s recent partnering with publishers, websites as legacy projects, the future of media, and the potential pitfalls of media and technology’s convergence. And what it all means... - - ###### Tell me about the content wars, how did it get started? - - The content wars was just an offhand comment. We did [this interview](http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/07/8549591/60-second-interview-matt-buchanan-and-john-herrman-awl-co-editors) when Matt and I started at The Awl. One of these quick interviews about what we were going to do, and we didn't really have anything to say. So we wrote back a bunch of jokes, and one of them was some dumb joke whose kicker was “The content wars have been hard on everyone.” Then I started tagging posts with that as a joke, and ended up just tagging a bunch of stuff I'd already written with it, and calling it a column. - - If I go back and look at them and try to figure out what I was actually getting at, it would be clear that they are all just really similar stories about platforms; a lot of them read as if i’m this cranky old guy yelling at the new kids. I think it’s good to have a healthy skepticism about non-journalistic platforms kind of stumbling into huge positions of power. I don't know anything about their intentions. I tend to assume that they are as good as they can be, but they're also sort of... - - ###### I mean their intention is to make money right? At the end of the day. - - It should be very interesting to people that right now we now have these enormous middlemen companies whose interests are definitely currently aligned with some large media companies.There's a powerful mutually beneficial relationship there. - - The problem is that will not always be true, and the ones who will change are Facebook, not their partners. The stakes are much lower for Facebook. - - So it's this super classic tech story where a company comes in, creates this product or platform that everyone uses, and then from that position of power semi-intentionally absorbs the things around it, but inadvertently changes everything around it. Then it's replaced because something new comes along because it's technology, especially when it's software. This kind of thing happens so quickly. - - We were talking about Snapchat as a joke two years ago. Now it's having meetings with ESPN boardrooms and maybe they're going to be it for 10 years. But according to the world that Snapchat came up in, it doesn't seem to be slowing down, that's not what happens. - - ###### Yeah, the web is littered with dead sites, like Livejournal and Myspace. - - That isn’t a reason not to do these things. It is just the kind of the thing that you would hope people know about and maybe acknowledge as they're doing it. But maybe there's no benefit in acknowledging it. Maybe you just do these things and hope that they work out. - - ###### You just jump from wave to wave... - - Yeah, and maybe you build your whole operation around an ability to do that. The best model for this kind of thing is a really nimble and fast-moving advertising agency. That's the model I think that some newer media companies are going to have to adopt. And that is complicated. - - So you're an ad-agency in the sense that your goal is to gather attention from as many different channels and places as possible. Your reason to exist and your priorities are relatively clear: you're serving your clients interest. You want your company to grow, and maybe you want to take over some particular type of the market. - - ###### I guess that’s when you get like Pierre Omidyar (the billionaire founder of eBay, who founded the media venture, First Look Media). A billionaire who just says 'go'. - - That was such a funny fantasy for people, because it actually seems like a great model going forward, if someone gives you money and you can do what you were doing before. It was the [biggest fucking disaster for the weirdest reasons](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/30/inside-story-matt-taibbis-departure-first-look-media/), but honestly they were reasons that people should have foreseen. I guess? - - You could probably make a lot of similar arguments about old business models that kept publications going. Maybe an organization gets to be big enough that they just elect to do things that they see as necessary or important or interesting but not necessarily successful. - -I guess the transition to the web for a lot of media companies never really happened. Or if it did, it just wasn't successful.
- - And at the same time, I guess the transition to the web for a lot of media companies never really happened. Or if it did, it just wasn't successful. What magazine's really pulled it off without either becoming something completely different or without dependence on a still successful print product? - - ###### VICE? - - That's an interesting question. I mean Vice has never gotten good traffic. People read and watch Vice, but they were always so much more of a powerful brand. Their deal with HBO now is an enormous business triumph, and if it works out it will result in people thinking of Vice in a totally different way. But it's the result of years of savvy business and marketing decisions. You get the sense now that their eyes were always on a much a bigger prize than just becoming the next great publication. - - They’ve been like: We are going to be this huge advertising agency. We are going to be this huge journalistic operation. We are going to be a TV channel. And we're going to be this globally recognizable youth brand. And they seem to be pulling it off. - - People that aimed a little lower created a huge site or a huge network of sites, and now they are faced with finding the next thing before they ever got to the point of feeling like they had time to breathe. I'm sure it's terrifying for a lot of people. But it's also fun. - -I think that’s where a lot of people's anxieties about social stuff comes from. They're like "We're not done with the web yet; we didn't even figure this out yet." There's this assumption that it's going to be the next thing and then it's going to be permanent.
- - I think that’s where a lot of people's anxieties about social stuff comes from. They're like "We're not done with the web yet; we didn't even figure this out yet." There's this assumption that it's going to be the next thing and then it's going to be permanent. So you put yourself in a position where you're dependent on these platforms that had just arrived very quickly. There is an implicit assumption that they are going to stick around for a long time, and that what they did to other people won't happen to you. Which doesn't seem right. - - I was joking with [Jonah Peretti](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Peretti) today about this. He did an [interview about the LA Times](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/print-newspapers-are-for-rich-people/388757/), saying, "It's a challenge to have a legacy product, I think they should charge more and more for their print product. And treat it as sort of like a product for their biggest fans.” - - Then he said something to the effect of “It's our big luxury not to have a legacy product.” I was kidding with him, saying “Isn't your website the legacy product at this point?” If things really do move in this direction, and all successful media companies become multi-channel networks, then the website's just sort of there... and it takes a lot of employees to keep websites going. - - And that's when you have to start making decisions about what you keep and what you scrap. People tend to keep things, but really ruthless, successful and ambitious companies have to make hard decisions. A few years down the line everyone will be like “This website thing... Why are we even bothering, what was the point of this?” - - ###### Well now, what website feels fresh and new? - - Yeah, none. - - It's not like newspapers at the height of their profitability felt fresh. It's not like the Times had a huge teen readership in the 90s. It's like they are teenagers, of course they didn't give a shit about you, but now there is this whole idea that teenagers are really engaged in the world and they want to know about everything. If only you can get where they already are, they will talk to you. But you can't trick them. I mean, they're teenagers. You can sort of trick them, but not with that. Or if you're going to do that, you are doing something totally different. - - ###### You see that with companies trying to get into the Youtube game. - - Youtube's got a funny platform thing too, because for years it was just people uploading their own stuff that no one watched. And then stuff would unexpectedly get big. Then people developed their own individual followings, but it was all really low budget and it was never stuff that YouTube could anticipate becoming huge. - - And then they spent all of this money three years ago on partners, and some of those deals worked out, but the ones that worked out were all native YouTubers who understood that world. [All the big media partners that went in really fizzled out in the end](http://adage.com/article/digital/advertisers-brand-camp-youtube-stars/292766/). They would take a billion dollars or whatever and make shittier versions of TV shows and put them on YouTube, and YouTube people were like "What is this, why is this here? What does this have to do with this whole world I've been living in for five years?" - - Someone made a comment yesterday about [this whole Facebook video thing](http://marketingland.com/youtube-vs-facebook-video-two-titans-face-off-123419), he was trying to straight talk and be like, ‘Well, you know, Youtube was never about video discovery and that's an opportunity for Facebook video,” but that doesn't seem to be true at all. - - The best thing about YouTube is that there are thousands and thousands of things going viral all the time. How do you turn that into the big movie and TV business that you want? - - ###### How do you predict what is going to spike and become viral? - - Right, and the answer is to interfere with it and kind of fuck it up. Which is I'm sure a struggle for YouTube partners, but they figured it out. They just end up being really different from what anyone expected. I'm sure YouTube wasn't having big discussions early on about how one day if they were lucky they could have millions of people watching people play video games. It turns out that our big thing is going to be weird video game themed cooking tutorials that are four minutes long and have sound effects. It's just that you don't know know these things happen. - - The coolest thing is when you find someone on Youtube who is 18 and feels totally comfortable using their phone as a camera, who has a really natural relationship with that camera. That comes through in the videos and you're just like “these people are from a different time, they are really not that far away in age." I grew up with Internet forums and whatever, and they grew up with this. This is their thing, and they're going to get better at this. - - ###### So about Facebook Publishing, I guess no one knows, but what will that look like? Will you go to a New York Times page, will you go to facebook.com/newyorktimes? - - I'm sure it'll be really good. Facebook has the best tech talent in the world. - The little stuff is kind of fun to think about too… What will the typography and articles look like? I think it has to exist somewhat in the newsfeed. If you have multiple types of media, and they are really being published and not just posted to the brand page, that will make those pages look a lot more like websites. - - But that won't really matter, that's not how people are going to consume it. People are still going to be in their feeds, or passing things around on Messenger or somewhere else. I'm sure you'll be able to see these things on the outside too. They'll just be like websites. From the rest of the internet they won’t be any faster or better than a good web page, but within Facebook they'll be better. - - ###### The [AOL comment](http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/4/7488495/facebook-is-the-new-aol) that you hear kind of jokingly used... - - The crazy thing about that is that you couldn't get into AOL from the outside. - - ###### Right, if you weren't an AOL member. - - It's not that different. The web part of Facebook is huge and it's interesting that it is still around, but eventually it doesn't need to be there if everything is in apps. If they just shut down the website and were like “you have to use your phone for everything,” there would be no reason to be able to get in from the outside. Their mobile version of everything is a really enclosed system. - - - ###### In China there is an app called WeChat, which is like the Chinese version of WhatsApp. There you can follow people. So celebrities publish to WeChat. It's like you have a celebrity and you get messages from them through the day. - - Snapchat's a little like that — your relationship to people that you actually talk with and that you just follow is kind of similar. Everyone I think is moving that direction. What's weird about this is that most of our big services have roots on the web. I don't think WeChat does — I assume it was just always mobile. So they were like “We have all these people chatting to each other, let's build an internet around this." That's the model for a lot of different places. You have people using apps for very basic things and you can build giant portals on top of them. For example, Messenger will become more of a portal, [as have recently showed](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/25/facebook-launches-messenger-platform-with-content-tools-and-chat-with-businesses/#.a2ysel:FFtn). There will be apps in messenger, where you can install different things. You might install something like ESPN. It's not like a full publication, but it is the latest gifs that you can share with your friends. It’s a real integration. - - ###### How do you think the content wars will affect the creation of content? - - I do think it'll have the funny effect of keeping media kind of young. It will also have an interesting effect on — this depends on whether or not money keeps flowing and the economy stays okay — the state of constant hiring and people then moving on to different things. That's great for bringing people from diverse backgrounds in. On the other hand, it doesn't really guarantee any kind of future. So it's like people are coming in, but they're not sure where they're going next. - - ###### Do journalists just kind of move into the industry they cover? - - Yeah, that's what you would do when you had your second kid and got tired of working at the newspaper, and you're like ”You know what, I'm going to go work for that PR firm. I'm tired of covering pharmaceuticals.” But you can't make plans like that now. You kind of have to wait and see. - - If you got the most coveted new media job right now, you were straight out of school and you just threw yourself into it, then things will probably work out, but you don't know how. It's not like you just landed some super-coveted slot at the Times 20 years ago and you're like, “You know what, if I just stick with this, in 10 years I'm going to be there.” - - ###### Right, if you're an intern at Buzzfeed right now. - - Yeah, like, “Congratulations, you're in a good position to do...something.” Who knows what you're going to be doing? People who are working in establishment media companies now have no idea what they're going to be doing in five years. No one does. It's really weird. People have different titles but they don't mean anything. - - People in media companies are paid weirdly disparate amounts working for the same company but doing very different things and serving totally different audiences. It's a big huge confusing mess, which probably means that it's an enormous opportunity. - - So, thinking ahead to what the next set of problems are going to be for people who want to share ideas for a living is an optimistic thing to do. On one hand, I would definitely say to someone going into journalism school right now to think about it really hard, but on the other hand, I have to blindly assume that things will be really interesting and that the next five years are going to be really weird, and that they will probably be the most interesting for people who are the newest. And that's cool, I guess. - - ###### Okay, before I have to go, what’s been the reaction to your content war stuff? - - I've been trying to do a bit of self-justification with this content wars stuff because the pushback that you get is kind of funny. It's inside baseball kind of fun stuff for some people, but when you're part of this larger shift, you become defensive about it. If you're defensive about something that is just really exciting and you understand that it is the future, your defensiveness is like optimism. But when your defensiveness is for a partnership with a social network, these things aren't so clear. Any partnership between two companies must be a negotiation. There are power dynamics at play — something's being gained, something's being given up. - -Any partnership between two companies must be a negotiation. There are power dynamics at play — something's being gained, something's being given up.
- - I think people lose a little bit of that reflexive skepticism when the powerful outsiders are also the companies that are changing the world. It's fun and kind of easy now to puncture that a little bit because people still ascribe magical qualities to tech companies that are truly crazy and new. - - Anyways, I keep coming back to this: The tech and media story is the media story. It has been for a few years, and it will be for a number of years. Media reporters were very fixated for a long time on newspaper ownership, newsroom politics, celebrity journalists, and journalistic fuck-ups. I think part of that was because the modes of distribution faded into the background. - - If any of them survive, and I suspect a lot of them certainly will, they will just become part of life and people will settle around them in superficial ways, and then start to take them more seriously. I hope this kind of thing becomes a constant low-level story in media. I hope that this becomes the media beat. diff --git a/source-old/interviews/keenan-duffey.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/keenan-duffey.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 2af868d..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/keenan-duffey.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,76 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "Foreign Correspondence in Syria Is Over" - -:markdown -It’s too dangerous to be a journalist in Syria right now so Syria Direct is training young Syrian Journalists in Jordan to be objective when interviewing witnesses via social media.
- -The war in Syria has been raging on for four years now, and the ongoing violence and suppression under President Bashar al Assad’s regime has made it incredibly difficult for reporters to establish contacts in the area or provide objective reporting. Syria Direct, a non-profit journalism organization, was founded in 2013 as a means of reporting on the war in Syria. Originally conceptualized as a means of training Syrian journalists, Syria Direct is creating “a new, young press corps having Western values of neutrality and objectivity,” who would then carry on their reporting inside Syria once the war subsided. But as the war have continued, they’ve by now established themselves as the primary source for news out of Syria. And they are now looking into establishing themselves in other countries, through the design of an app, that would enable aspiring journalists to report objectively from war-zones all over the world.
- - I spoke with Keenan Duffey, the executive editor and a Mid West to Middle East to transplant — from Milwaukee to Amman. He has been in Jordan since July 2014, after completing his Masters degree in Middle East studies. We discussed Middle Eastern media innovation, including the difficulty of establishing trustworthy contacts in war zones, teaching journalistic objectivity when primarily dealing with sources through social media, and about the surreal [Instagram account of Asma al-Assad](http://abcnews.go.com/International/syrian-president-assads-wife-star-glamorous-instagram-shots/story?id=20164569), Bashar al-Assad’s wife; from looking at it one would have no idea a war is raging while she’s tickling the arm of a child. - - The longevity of the war, and the endurance of Assad’s regime, was something the founders of Syria Direct did not predict — according to Duffey, they expected Assad’s regime to fall “about a year ago.” The war in Syria continues, however, and the obstacles facing journalists are not only those of safety for the individual journalists, they’re about objectivity as well. The only safe method of entering Syria is through the regime, whose propaganda Duffey drily summarizes as *“everything’s fine, look at those terrorists.”* - - Despite the grim reality Duffey is fundamentally optimistic, thanks to technological globalization and social media. Facebook is the most integral tool in reporting on war zones and communicating with refugee activists. Social media has been vital for the organization, not only as a means of disseminating news from Syria, but also for obtaining information and communicating with contacts in conflict zones. We talked about the role of media and its technological innovations in the Levant section (consisting of Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan), of the Middle East. - - ###### What are the new developments in media in Syria? - - It’s funny, I’ll tell you about our journalists first because they’re in Jordan but they’re Syrian. The way that a lot of our journalists built their networks, and the way we get most of our news now is over social media. A lot of our reporters used to run Facebook pages inside Syria. There were a lot of little local coordination committee Facebook pages. That was how information was shared and disseminated. If you were an admin on one of these pages, that was a very big deal. You were a very well-known person; you have a lot of contacts. At least four of our 12 journalists were admins on 10,000 plus Facebook pages. So they tap into those networks when they come here. They were very well-known so when they call people, or when they’re trying to get an interview, that’s a credential to get people to talk to them. Besides that, Twitter is huge for us in terms of getting information out of Syria. We get so much information via Twitter. - - ###### What are some examples of those political Facebook groups? - - Revolutionary would be one. They’re called local coordination committees and it was the way young people organized themselves: planned protests, shared news, warning people about whatever was going on. Every town had them, that’s where we go to for interviews. - - Especially, and this might be interesting, in Raqqa or Deir el-Zor, which are Islamic state provinces dominated by the Islamic State. Each has an activist organization. One is called “Raqqa Being Slaughtered Silently,” the other one is called “Deir el-Zor Under Fire” and they’re an organization but it’s mostly a Facebook page and this is how news gets out of these provinces. The Islamic state would love to catch whoever’s posting on these pages but they can’t. - - ###### That’s really interesting. Social media has been very helpful then in circumventing the Islamic State in those provinces. How would you have been able to contact these activists in the past? - - Exactly. You wouldn’t have. We would have had no way. And they can do it on their terms. They’re not always in a place where Skype is feasible. They’re moving a lot so they don’t have solid internet connection. When they find time, they can answer our emails or send out information or post to the Facebook and it’s an effective and safe way for them to get the information out. - - ###### In America, the social media landscape is becoming increasingly fractured: there are more competing platforms and the audience is splintering. Has that affected Facebook usage in Syria at all? Or has it remained just as popular and important? - - Instagram is taking off but, again, Twitter and Facebook are very dominant here. You don’t hear about Pinterest or other stuff that I hear about in the U.S. - - ###### So people are really getting their news via social media? - - Yes, and especially among the Syrian activity community, especially anyone who is young. And that’s who most of the revolutionaries were — they were all 18 to 22, so now it all continues on Twitter and it all continues on Facebook, that’s how they’re staying in touch with people back home and staying in touch with people here. - - ###### What do you think about the way Queen Rania of Jordan uses social media to connect with people? Do you think that’s an example of propaganda? - - Yes, I’m sure you’re right. Jordan gets a free pass because Jordan is not in chaos: like, *yeah we have some government suppression here and there, that’s okay — that keeps things going.* They’re very good at maintaining the Queen’s image and she actually came from Kuwait working for Apple, so she’s very tech-savvy. I met a guy who dated her. - - ###### Really? - - So weird, “Like, I dated the Queen before Abdullah.” But anyway, it’s like any other government media account. It’s just a very cheery view of what’s going on. Just a lot of photo-ops. I follow the King, or the King’s office, on Twitter, and it’s the same thing. It’s just nice photos and if there’s Americans in town — Fox News interviewed the King last Friday — they are just all over social media. - - ###### So that’s the flip-side: social media is the platform both for activism and propaganda. - - Right, it’s available to everybody. So even Assad’s wife is on Instagram and it’s creepy and terrifying. It’s just a lot of nice photo-ops. For a long time she was just whitewashing like the war wasn’t even happening. I think she does a lot of photos with fallen soldier mothers now and things like this. But yes she’s on Instagram. - - ###### Some of your editors are based in America. What’s your experience being in Jordan and being closer to the action — what are the benefits? - - The thing that ties us here is just the access to our Syrian trainees and reporters, because they’re here so we need to train them here. But honestly, we could set up a newsroom here and do it remotely if they were fully formed professional reporters. Our executive editor is in Philadelphia and she’s here a month every year. She used to live here full time but now she does it remotely. We get the news ready all morning and then at two o’clock she comes on and then she starts editing. And she does that until six pm which is 11 pm on the East Coast. You could do it remotely if you didn’t need to be here training and helping, if you just had somehow found a bunch of good reporters. We use Dropbox and she edits and then we go back in and then it’s ready to go and we put it on the site. So it’s actually pretty easy. It sounds crazy when we tell people that our editor is not here but it’s not a big deal. - - ###### So, despite the help afforded by this technological globalization, what have been the biggest roadblocks for your reporting on the War? What are the biggest challenges you are working to overcome in getting this information? - - Well the biggest challenge — and it’s hard to know how well we’re doing on this — is interviewing people remotely. We want to find good people and we use our networks and we go, *this person is who he says he is*, but we’re not there on the ground to vet them in any real way. So we have to rely on our eyewitnesses and people who are talking to us. We try to use people we trust, or get recommendations from people we trust, but you’re taking a risk because it’s very difficult to verify the information. So we end up publishing a lot of interviews with people and go, *here’s what they said, here’s what they saw — take this for what it is*. We’ll get a lot of criticism from the other side on Twitter. They say, *there they go again just publishing some random person*. But we throw out a lot of potential interviews. There is a pretty high bar. But, even then, we can’t know for sure what they saw and it’s very difficult to find other witnesses because it’s very dangerous everywhere. So to find two people, that’s really difficult. That’s the downside of the remote dealing that we do. We never get to see the people. - - ###### How did you use social media to get contacts and information from people you want to interview? Do you use social media to track people down, to get in touch with people? - - We tap into Facebook. We check into the local coordination committee Facebook pages and then all the interviews are done over Skype. Sometimes they’re done on Facebook, if somebody can’t talk and we need to wait for them to get an internet connection — we’ll send those questions on Facebook chat and they’ll send responses on Facebook chat. - - ###### What do you think the future of media looks like in Syria? - - It’s really difficult. When we started, the whole idea was to train Syrian journalists who would go back inside Syria once Assad fell, once the war was over — which we thought would be about a year ago. And they would go back in and form a new, young press corps having Western values of neutrality and objectivity instilled in them. But now that seems really unrealistic so what we’re trying to do is keep these networks alive. In the short term it looks like the future of Syrian reporting is going to be remote reporting tapping into activists who remain behind in the war zones. - - For Western journalists, you can’t go into Syria anymore: the only place you can go and be safe would be with the regime. But you’re only going to see regime stuff, so you’re not even going to see anything. They’ll take you in but they’re only going to take you to Damascus and say *everything’s fine, look at those terrorists*. But if you go into Syria in any other way, no matter which side, there’ll always be the risk of being kidnapped, as long as there’s money in kidnapping western journalists, anyway, and that’s even the best motive your kidnappers can have. So foreign correspondence in Syria is really over, it seems. No one is willing to sponsor any correspondents to go in there. So this remote method that we’re using seems like the future. And we’re actually trying to start Iraq Direct. That’s our next thing because there’s a million Iraqis in Jordan too, from the war in the last two decades. So we’re trying to do that and it will be the same model. - - Going forward, the thing that ties us to Amman is the training. We actually have Syrian journalists here in this office, so we train them here. But in the future, the plan is to build an app or some kind of web program so that we can iterate this to other warzones. It will be like Coursera, where you get lectures and homework and someone on the other side would be vetting their progress and story writing. And you can do something like Yemen Direct, where right now it would be very hard. There’s no town like Amman where a bunch of Yemenese could really do this. Jordan’s kind of a special case. But to cover Yemen you need to do it online. - - We’re working on what that would look like and if it’s feasible. We are trying to grow as a web app for training young people in very basic skills. That’s what’s missing — people can learn the technical skills; how to work a camera or how to do video editing is rudimentary, you can learn that. But how to be objective and how to interview and how to do things like this — they seem really basic but they’re much harder to teach. - - So that’s what I think as it gets crazier around here and more dangerous for journalists to work. There are still people who want to report but if you want to professionalize journalism in this way, a web app is something you have to do. In spite of all the chaos, their cell network is still running because there’s money to be made in it so they’re still running cell networks inside Syria. It’s crazy. - - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/mark-lotto.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/mark-lotto.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 1203d18..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/mark-lotto.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,150 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "The Age of Engagement" - -:markdown -An interview with Matter’s Editor-in-chief, Mark Lotto, on being in the intersection of user generated content and old school journalism, and being more like The Clash than the symphony.
- -In his introduction to Matter, editor-in-chief Mark Lotto calls it a magazine for a generation that grew up not caring about magazines. With that statement, Medium/Matter is excused from following the traditional “make it look like it could be published on print” line of thinking that most publications still hold onto. This allows for new ideas and creative ways of publishing, but it also can create setbacks as publications test new waters. Medium, a highly-navigable platform, and Matter, a publisher of long-form journalism, are still struggling to solve what might be the biggest running question in the media industry: how to be new and innovative while at the same time building trust with a generation of Internet users who are sick of having too much useless information thrown in their face on a daily basis. On Medium/Matter, in-depth journalism and clickbait articles blend in a classic web 2.0 fashion, and it can be difficult to know if you are indeed on Medium or on Matter. Yet, there is something about this online publication that makes it stand out from the crowd.
- - Ev Williams, co-creator of Twitter, meant for Medium to be “new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends.” He says it is meant to be used by everyone from professional journalists to amateur cooks, and he also boldly states that “It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world.” This can come off as a bit overwhelming. Is this not simply a description of the Internet itself? I can, however, tell you that after having tried it out for a little while, it really feels like a long-form Twitter for people who miss blogging. I mean this as a complement. If you have something to say and want to be heard, this is the place for you. One big question is still left unanswered though: can such platform also be a space for serious, investigative journalism? - - Williams must have thought so, since he bought the newly founded publication Matter in 2013. All of a sudden, Medium was no longer just a platform for the everyday people, but a serious publisher as well. I sat down with Mark Lotto to hear his vision for Medium/Matter. We met at Everyman Espresso over a small, regular coffee and a latte. Luckily for me, he was immensely interested in sharing his vision and advice, and only took short breaks to eat his blueberry muffin. - - ###### Silje Kristine Andersen: When you’re navigating through Medium/Matter, it is difficult to know whether you are reading on Matter or Medium. - - Mark Lotto: It's hard. - - ###### Is it supposed to be difficult to distinguish them? - - No, but the platform is still new and young, and the distinction between the publication and the platform is a lot more distinct than when I first started out. It is only going to get more distinct. - - ###### Are you comfortable with Matter being called a publication? - - Yeah. - - ###### Because there has been some talk whether it really is a publication or a platform. - - Well, Medium itself is a platform in the sense that any single person can go on right now. But Matter is a magazine that is built on Medium. The great thing about Medium is that it is more than just a CMS (content management system). It's not just a publishing platform, but an actual network. It’s about connectivity. It's about getting the right pieces and the right writers to the right reader at the right time. Matter is very different. We've been doing this about eight months, and I think it feels distinct; my hope is that it feels even more distinct eight months from now, but yeah, I think of it as an actual magazine. - - ###### You are the editor-in-chief, right? What exactly does that entail? - - What it entails is setting the vision for what the publication is going to be. What our direction is going to be. And then helping everyone on staff, all the editors, the writers below me, to fulfill that vision. Matter is a little complicated in the sense that Matter started out originally as a long-form science publication founded by Bobby Johnson and Jim Giles. Bobby continues to work for me, but Jim is no longer there. It was acquired by Medium not long after it raised its money on Kickstarter. They spend about a year putting about essentially one piece every month on Medium, and they did a lot of tremendous work at that time, work we still often highlight, but there was a sense that there was a limit to what you can do with just one piece a month. There's also a limit to what you can do if you are that science focused. And science is a field that is actually relatively empty when they started, and has become incredibly crowded since then, with Mosaic, Aeon, even to a lesser degree or a specific standard, it's just becoming a very busy field, in a way that it wasn't when Medium started out. - - ###### What is your background? How did you come to Matter? - - So I've come to Medium from GQ, I was there for two and a half years. Before that I was at the Times for five and a half years, where I was the editor of the op-ed page. Medium has always had an editorial team from its very early days, whose original mission was to seal the platform with original and diverse content. When Medium first started it was basically just technical writing about entrepreneurship, but they wanted it to be a place for all kinds of stories. The next stage of that was about how to, if we were going to pay for work, have real impact, a real heft to it. We couldn't exist in that weird twilight area anymore, where people were like "Hey, what's paid for on Medium, what's not paid for? Or what's user, what's professional?" So if we were going to do professional work, it had to do more about impact, value, and meaning. That was what I originally started working on. It became increasingly clear the best way to do this was to actually build a publication, so that was when we got the idea to take Matter and turn it into what it is now, which is a place for big, ambitious stories about culture and current events. Science remains part of it, but it is a much broader area of social issues in the world we all live in. - - ###### The people at Matter, are they mostly freelancers? - - We have three editors aside from me, two staff writers, and two art directors. All of them work full time. Then we largely run on freelance writing. I think in the near future it will be a little less freelance and a little more regular voices. I don't really think you can build something entirely on freelance. - - ###### From what I've read, Matter is all about long-form journalism. However, there are many short articles on your page. - - Yeah, I would say that long-form journalism is sort of one tool on our belt. In the sense that I think of what we do as big journalism, we don't do the bullshit story if it’s dead. We don't give a fuck, or I try not to give a fuck about whatever every other media outlet is working on that day. We take a step back and try to do something a little bigger, a little bolder, a little broader. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the best way to do that is 10,000 words. Sometimes it's going to be a ten part series. Sometimes it's just the right 500 words or sometimes it's a purely visual thing, or a video. So it's like, of the things that we do best, long-form is at the top of the list. We've been nominated for two National Magazine Awards, one for public interest on a piece we did on [pedophilia](https://medium.com/matter/youre-16-youre-a-pedophile-you-dont-want-to-hurt-anyone-what-do-you-do-now-e11ce4b88bdb) and one for Feature Photography for [a story on Syria](https://medium.com/matter/whoever-saves-a-life-1aaea20b782). I think that we've gone furthest with long-form, but I also think that long-form is a crazy crowded field right now. Everyone is all of a sudden doing it. It seems like everyone is publishing 4,000 word pieces everyday, and most of it is garbage. Readers relate to stories based on what they feel is new to them, whether they care about them. They don't care that much about craft or beautiful sentences. - -Yeah, I would say that long-form journalism is sort of one tool on our belt. In the sense that I think of what we do as big journalism, we don't do the bullshit story if it’s dead. We don't give a fuck, or I try not to give a fuck about whatever every other media outlet is working on that day. We take a step back and try to do something a little bigger, a little bolder, a little broader.
- - ###### What is Matter's position when it comes to traditional journalistic ethics? - - There are some rules of old school journalism that we hold on to. All of our features are edited, top edited, fact checked, and copy edited. When we close a big story, the process by which it closes is virtually indistinguishable from the work that I used to do at GQ. Things get legal checked if they need to. We are pretty hardcore about that stuff. I was never that wild about fake objectivity to being with, so we don't pretend to do it. I think that, the thing about Matter in particular, but Medium too, is that you can build something on quality. You know what I mean? You can sell stuff that's good, and people respond to it. You can build things with seriousness, intention, and purpose, and people will respond to it. - - ###### Yeah, my first instinct when I started reading articles on Matter was “I can trust this”. - - That's good to know. What is interesting is that we recently did this experiment, because I was just sort of curious, with clickbait. We spent a week just doing super clickbait-y things, with super clickbait-y headlines. The traffic went up, but people read less of the story, and they shared it less than when we did something that was really meaningful. - - ###### About clickbait. You have a system where you focus more on reading time instead — how long the reader spends on the article. In what way is that connected to how you pay your writers? - - Right now, we pay very traditional, competitive rates. Whether or not we might consider different payment models later is an open question. - But at the same time, what is important about read time and engagement is that it gives you a different way to judge the success or failure of a piece. It's not just about how many views a piece gets. Maybe a piece was read by fewer people, but they read the entire thing. Ultimately, this is a much more satisfying metric. If you are a traditional publication with ok metrics, then all you know is 300,000 people or a million people clicked on your story. You don't actually know anything about whether or not they actually liked it or read it. We track reading more than we track liking. - - ###### What about ads. There are no advertisements at Matter, are there? - - No, but there will be ways of paying for ourselves soon enough. - - ###### So staying away from ads is a goal? - - I think ultimately that is a question for my boss more than for me. I think there are a lot of revenue opportunities out there and I think we are going to explore a bunch of them. - - ###### I've noticed Matter has published fiction too. - - We did it once with the vaccine piece. We did it just to try it. It was a short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, called [Olikoye](http://https//medium.com/matter/olikoye-b027d7c0a680). Someone is going to reinvent short fiction for the Internet age, I just don’t think it's going to be us. - - ###### So Matter won't continue publishing fiction? - - No. You'll probably see more of it on Medium, but not on Matter. If the right story came to me again, I would do it, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time searching. - - ###### We have seen a trend of people in the publishing industry going from well-established traditional jobs like the New York Times to new places such as Fusion, Matter, or Upworthy. What do you think the reason for that is? - - I think everyone has his or her own reasons, so I can only speak to my own. I wanted to be young when I was young. I'm just about to turn 37, and I moved to Medium just after I turned 35. I didn't want to spend my time at institutions that had been around for seven years, or 150 years. I loved those institutions, I grew up reading them, and I'm incredibly proud of the work that I did there. The comparison I always use is that I'd like to play in the philharmonic, but I *always* wanted to play in The Clash. I hope that if I was in London in 1977, I'd be going to Clash shows and I wouldn't be going out to listen to classical music. I would want to feel like I have something to contribute to something that is new. - - ###### Do you feel like there is more room to be creative at Matter, compared to The New York Times? - - I think creativity is the wrong term. I can do the work that I want to do in a less mediated way. I don't have to speak through the voice of the institution. Now, there are advantages you know, if you are at the Times op-ed page you can pass a law, save people from genocide, and change lives. You have direct influence on world events. The President reads the Times every morning. Whatever I've done since then has not, by far, had the same influence. So those were both incredible opportunities that were incredibly satisfying, challenging, and interesting. It’s that there is a type of work, especially for younger readers, but also for young writers and editors. There is a type of authenticity, or feeling, in this work where you feel like you have a real stake in it. That is probably going to happen outside of those kinds of institutions right now. I'm sure people feel that it happens everyday at places like Buzzfeed and Vice, and those are massive institutions. - - ###### Do you think that power dynamics will change? Will newer and smaller publications have more of the kind of power that the Times has? - - I think that newer publications will have that level of influence. Buzzfeed, which was founded in 2006, and Vice, which is kind of old at 20 — those places are new compared to the Times, which was founded in the 1850s. I'm not convinced that a publication like The New Inquiry can have the same influence as a publication the size of the New York Times. But a *story* in The New Inquiry can compete with a story in the New York Times. - -News and stories are not delivered through a vertical hierarchy anymore, the information age draws its power from a horizontal structure. Smart journalism is what is produced when citizen journalists and professional journalists work together. This is exactly what Matter has realized.
- - - As I took a sip of my coffee and looked around I noticed 10 people with their laptops, no one was reading a newspaper. For a brief second I was tempted to ask if we really need more publications desperately fighting for our attention. If every publication has the same level of power, what distinguishes one from the other? How will they influence the future of publishing and journalism? There is no hiding from the fact that the Internet has become a messy and undefinable place. Is there an inflation in the publishing industry? Do we really need hundreds of new publishing institutions if they will go by unnoticed? These are questions Medium/Matter have tackled, their response is this ‘platisher’ (platform-publisher), a meeting place for writers, publishers, readers, and editors. Ideally, Medium and Matter should be the only place you need. Together, this community can actively shape the future of publishing and online journalism, not by revolutionizing content, but through form. News and stories are not delivered through a vertical hierarchy anymore, the information age draws its power from a horizontal structure. [Smart journalism](https://medium.com/@stephenkhan/move-over-citizen-journalism-here-comes-smart-journalism-ace72f97a389) is what is produced when citizen journalists and professional journalists work together. This is exactly what Matter has realized. - - - ###### Will Matter revolutionize the way people read online? - - I would be an idiot if I answered yes to that, but we are in the social media age. Every publication is fundamentally playing the same game of social spread: how do you get readers to see your content on Facebook and Twitter? Maybe it's content that is exclusive to that platform, maybe it's content that is meant to draw people back to your publication, but fundamentally the game that everyone is playing is the game of social spread. I believe, and a lot of people smarter than me have predicted that there is an age of engagement coming up next. Read time is just the tip of the iceberg on what engagement means if you take it seriously. I think the question becomes, how do you create a publication that is built for engagement rather than a publication built just to get people to share your stories on social media. I think Medium is particularly well suited to answer that question. It's an open platform where anyone can write, anyone can respond, and they can all talk to each other. I think people are going to have to stop using engagement as buzzword and start taking super seriously. - - ###### Yeah, something I found intriguing about Medium/Matter is that you can comment all the time, wherever in the text. You can highlight bits of the text that you like and share. I'm almost surprised this isn't a common feature on more online publications. - - We first did it for an old piece by Michael Paterniti, who is a GQ writer and was an Esquire writer before that, he just had a new collection of essays come out, and he wrote this piece called "[Eating Jack Hooker's Cow](https://medium.com/matter/eating-jack-hooker-s-cow-759583a9caf1)," which is a piece about race in America that is difficult in many different ways. Difficult then, but I think especially difficult now. We had two young writers actually interview him in the notes, like in the comments, where they had a conversation about the issues at stake in the piece. I think that was the beginning of some cool things we should be able to do. - - ###### Where those notes edited or did the notes display the exact conversation? - - It's pretty much displayed exactly the way it went down. We sort of mediated the conversation, but it's pretty pure between all of them. - - ###### How do you think other publications are looking at Matter? - - I have no idea! I'd be afraid to even guess. I mean, I know what our numbers are, and our numbers are good. Other than that I only ever hear from my friends and my parents. My friends seem to like it. My parents are mixed. - - ###### What if you had to pinpoint one goal for Matter? What would you see in the future for Matter, say five years from now? - - I think right now, there is a type of reader, an audience of which you and I are both a part of, sort of a young, globally minded, creative people. People who are incredibly emerged in the Internet, but feel pretty exhausted by it. There's just all this shit coming at you every single day. It's not only that you don't know which of it you need to read or not, but you also don’t know where to talk about it. I want Matter to become the publication where people can not only read work that is big, ambitious, relevant, imaginative, and fun, about the world around them and the lives that we are all living, but work that is a place where you can actually talk about those ideas and issues. That to me is success. That it is not only a place for us to tell great stories but for people to share their own ideas and stories, and points of view in a way that feels really different and meaningful. - - ###### I like that Matter believes in their readers and thinks that they are smart enough to be a part of the conversation. I feel that so many of the more old fashioned publications still operate by the idea that we are the ones to tell our readers what to think, whereas Matter says, "let's talk about this." - - Yeah, I also think that this challenges us. I mean, it would be much easier if we were just saying "Alright, we are going to cut off a slice of the New York Times readership.” I think there is an audience out there, for whom a columnist is more talked about than read, for whom the Guardian feels like a newspaper, and for whom Buzzfeed is an increasingly dominant news-force. This is a magazine for them. - - As Mark throws away our coffee cups, I wonder if this doesn’t also apply to people for whom the world is not limited by national borders and language. The “generation who grew up not caring about magazines” did not do so because they lacked an interest in world events. They grew up not caring about magazines because they were in print and this generation were the first to spend their childhood and adolescent in front of the computer screen. The fact that the web brought globalization to a whole new level is already old news in 2015, so why is it that so many publishers only look for readers on a national scale? If this new audience grew up online, they also learned to see the world from a more international perspective than the generations before them. Is there any use for the distinction between national and international news anymore? Goethe’s ‘Weltliteratur’ might benefit from a Web 2.0 definition update. Mr. Lotto seems to agree, as he grasps the opportunity to do some research himself: - - - What does your generation in Norway read? Did you read English publications growing up? - - ###### Well, growing up we only read news in Norwegian, but now from my personal experience, I think most news savvy people in their 20's read Buzzfeed and Vice just as much as traditional Norwegian newspapers. - - Right, I do think that there is an opening in that audience. People share a certain kind of global, progressive, and cosmopolitan values. There is a real opening in that readership. This gives us more opportunities than if I were only trying to break into the New York and San Francisco readership. - - ###### Just this morning I saw a [Norwegian online publication](http://http//www.tv2.no/a/6713261) referring to Matter in their article. They had basically just translated the main concepts of Elmo Keep's article “[Mars One Finalist Explains Exactly How It‘s Ripping Off Supporters](http://https//medium.com/matter/mars-one-insider-quits-dangerously-flawed-project-2dfef95217d3)”. - - Really? That one's been pretty big for us. What's funny is that we actually did [a giant piece](http://https//medium.com/matter/all-dressed-up-for-mars-and-nowhere-to-go-7e76df527ca0) about it back in November, which basically said everything that's in this latest story, but in the latest story, because we had an actual Mars One finalist who's kind of disclosing his experiences, it has really blown up in a different way. We are actually doing another piece today, a further investigation. It has the value of a good news scoop. - - ###### So global readership is a goal for Matter? - - Definitely! We actually do, our audience is about 40% international. Medium in general has very high international readership, and Matter is a pretty strong reflection of that. It's not just that it frees us to do stories from Sierra Leone, Syria, Sweden, Australia, or Hong Kong, it is also that we don't have to write those pieces so that they are just explaining international affairs back to American audiences. We can find people who want to read those stories elsewhere. - - ###### What would you say to those in my generation who are getting into publishing? Do you have any advice? - - I'm one of those people who believe that this is the greatest possible time to be a journalist. I don't want my daughter to do it. I’d like her to go be a scientist or something, but I still think that this is an amazing time, because there are almost too many outlets out there. A lot of them are doing exceptional work, And all of them feed off of the energy and creativity of young people. But getting that first job is hard. Getting all the subsequent jobs is easier than it ever was. - - ###### How did you get your first job? - - It took me a long time. I graduated in 2000 and started looking for work the as the dot com media bubble was blowing up. Then 9/11 happened, and it was a really awful time to try and become a journalist. I did better the second time I came to New York, when I tried to do it again in 2004. Back then it was very simple, I didn't want to go to journalism school, but there were some very good internships here in New York. Harper, The Nation, N+1, The New Yorker, were the best for making certain kinds of connections, but I don't know if that is still true anymore. You should look for the places that are really expanding and investing in new voices. I would always go for the new place. Especially right now. There are literally more jobs right now than people know how to hire for. - - ###### Even in journalism and publishing? - - Definitely. It doesn't necessarily feel like it if you are an applicant, but there are a lot of people hiring all the time. - - It feels natural to finish with a quote from the late David Carr’s [The New York Times’ column about Medium](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/business/media/a-platform-and-blogging-tool-medium-charms-writers.html), as it still rings true one year further into the site’s development: “Although he did not say so, Mr. Williams is putting good tools out into the world and letting the users decide what the product is. That strategy worked out O.K. for Twitter.” Despite its elusiveness, there is no denying the possibilities of Medium/Matter. If you are worried about the future of journalism and publishing, I advise you to seek out Medium/Matter; it allows you to create, shape, and map the future of our media landscape. diff --git a/source-old/interviews/mitra-kaboli.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/mitra-kaboli.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 04d5b09..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/mitra-kaboli.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,168 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "Let’s Talk about Sex" - -:markdown -A talk with The Heart’s Mitra Kaboli on sex on and off the air, the whiteness of public radio, being a freelancer and the rising podcast optimism.
- -“Let’s talk about sex, baby. Let’s talk about you and me.” So sang the three women of Salt-N-Pepa in 1990. It could also be a tagline for The Heart.
- - The Heart is a podcast that shows why radio is so important. Radio brings things up close and personal; headphones plugs you into another person’s voice, telling their story as if it is coming from inside your own head, and in turn possibly making the ear the most empathetic organ. The Heart also follows the radio revolution that is being carried forward by technological developments that make radio programs easier to produce and distribute. Not that it could, should, or ever would replace the news, but shows like The Heart provide an alternate narrative to corporate media’s twenty-four hour news cycle. It’s also fun. And sexy. - - But let’s back up a little bit. The Heart is part of the independent radio network [Radiotopia](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1748303376/radiotopia-a-storytelling-revolution) that started in 2014 when Roman Mars, already a kickstarter guru for his own show 99% Invisible, set out to raise money for Radiotopia. On November 14, 2014, they reached $620,412 with a total of 21,808 backers, proving that what Mars and his fellow showrunners were doing something right. - - The Heart isn’t even a totally new show; it used to be a monthly college radio show called *Audio Smut*. The Heart’s first episode actually unfurled on the air in Montreal back in 2008. Since then a lot has happened. The radio show has not only grown up, so have the people making it — or if they haven’t, at least they have grown to be more honest about their insecurities and feelings of inadequacy. The Heart is all about that honesty. Queerness, kinks, and emotions — they tell their listeners about all of it on their show, and they’re audibly excited about it. It’s the same excitement they inspire in their interview subjects: whether their story is about taking a shit on another man’s chest, having an orgasm while giving birth, or just meeting someone on the subway and falling in love for the afternoon. In short, The Heart shares stories that haven’t had a place to be told before. Case and point, the name change: even though smut is not a dirty word, it still can’t be uttered on PRX (Public Radio International), so they changed it... - -“Someone from a radio station in Seattle said that if we made some news hole drop-ins, which are four or five minute segments that they could drop in where the news would go, instead of the news they would play that. We were like, “hell yeah,” so we made a bunch of them. They played one or two of them, and then they said: “actually you can't say Audio Smut on the air.” Essentially they gave us an ultimatum. We thought, if it means that we can get paid a little bit to do what we want to do and have a wider reach, what's the problem?”
- - *In other words; sex is still not kosher on national public radio. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me do it like they do on the radio and let Mitra introduce herself:* - - Mitra Kaboli: My name is Mitra Kaboli. I am a senior producer, *the* senior producer, for The Heart, which is a podcast about love and intimacy and bodies and desire and things like that. I live in New York. I'm Canadian but I've lived most of my life in the US. I'm an aquarius. [Laughs] Sorry. - - ###### Andreas Eckhardt-Læssøe: Do you believe in astrology? - - A little bit. It's pretty fun to believe in it. I'm gonna be honest, but I'm not die hard. - - ###### You dabble? - - I dabble. - - *Mitra has long brown hair with a blond colored bit around her right ear; she’s wearing a zebra print shirt. We’re sitting at a table in a café in Brooklyn not far from where Mitra works. Before I started recording the interview she told me that she drives by this place all the time, but she thought it was a kitchenware shop. I can’t figure out why she would think that, so I just laugh nervously. My recorder fumbles out of my bag along with its blue wind-hat, that looks like a smurf’s wig and is an easy ice-breaker in every interview I’ve ever been in. It goes over well — when Mitra says she likes it, I’m close to giving it to her as a gift right then and there.* - - ###### Could you tell me how you got into The Heart? - - When Kaitlin (ed. Kaitlin Prest, host and creative director of The Heart) and I met, we were both in Montreal going to school there, we were both working at this restaurant called Roomy. I worked in the kitchen and Kaitlin was a waitress, that's how we met. I always knew that she worked for this show called Audio Smut, even though I didn't know much about it. One day, I think, I sort of outed myself as being a fellow weirdo... even though at the restaurant it was a secret. I was a secret weirdo. - - ###### How are you a secret weirdo? - - I was volunteering for a publication that was a smut zine. It was art porn, artsy porn, the fact that I was queer and my own personal beliefs... I had to keep all of that a secret. The restaurant was pretty traditional ideologically. It was run by Sufis, the guy that was my boss was pretty devout. I couldn't really be myself. I never talked, I was always very quiet. Then Kaitlin and I ran into each other on the street one day and had a candid conversation. She invited me down to the station one day. I sat in on the show and I was like “Yeah this is awesome, I wanna do this!” - - ###### So the show already existed? Audio Smut already existed? - - It already existed, it was on college radio at six pm once a month. So when we moved to New York, we kept calling ourselves Audio Smut, but just the podcast, and we slowly cut off our ties with the radio station back in Montreal. Eventually, two maybe three years later, we changed the name, set ourselves apart, rebranded, and cut that tie for good. - - ###### How many people are you working at The Heart now? - - Me, Kaitlin, Samara, who's our associate producer and makes the shorts, the inbetweens, this woman Jen who does our web design, and this woman Megan does our social media posts along with Samara — so five. Then a bunch of other people, producers, and freelancers. - - *The sun is shining through the big picture window making it feel more and more like a greenhouse. Meanwhile what looks like a band is waiting, noisily, for their lunch next to us. My water glass is empty, leaving me to drink the half cold cup of coffee, so that my left hand has something to do as my right hand is getting more and more clammy, and my arm more and more cramped from holding the recorder up to Mitra’s mouth. Mitra, however, looks completely unfazed by the warmth. The kitchen smells and the four guys are wearing black leather jackets. She doesn’t even break eye contact when the drummer bumps against her.* - - *When I meet someone who’s work I admire, I always figure that they have their life together. Even if the work is about the exact opposite, I always think that they’re exaggerating and are in fact living swanky lives without anxieties and feelings of inadequacy. I thought that when I met Mitra. The Heart exudes confidence, even when it covers insecurity or fragility, the honesty with which it’s told, to me is a form of confidence. So when Mitra started letting out some of the frustrations and worries about the life of a freelance radio producer, I was both relieved to hear I’m not the only one and also I was scared, because if she can’t make it, how will I ever?* - - Producing The Heart is a constant struggle with myself. I constantly ask myself, “Can I really do this? Am I going to able to provide for myself and maybe someone else? Can I buy a house one day?” You know? Every time I go visit my parents they're like, “when are you gonna get your shit together,” they haven't taken care of me or provided for me for many years, but still they're like, “you need to buy a house.” I just visited my parents and the last day I was there my dad convinced me to get a mutual fund. I don't even know what that means. Sure dad, I'll do that. But I don't have any security or any stability. I've learned to trust the freelance game that something will always come, but god it is stressful. Only until very recently have I been successful at freelancing. For a while I was struggling. Which is why I will not quit that fish job until I know for sure that I definitely do not need to work there. Then will I quit. - - ###### You always hear the stories about the ones who made it, never the one about those who quit, because they quit, you know? - - Do you listen to Death, Sex and Money? (The WNYC show). There's this one episode with this woman Heidi on it. I only know because I mixed the episode. But the story is this woman, she's in her fifties, she's this filmmaker and producer, and she has this great deal on an apartment in Park Slope but finally gets priced out and is forced to move. She's in her fifties, she's single, she doesn't have any money, she never saved, she never accumulated any capital. So this episode just follows her as she has nowhere else to go and nothing to do, and no option but to move back home. I don't want that to be me. I would much rather cut my losses at 30, 32, even 35 and just start over with something else, then I'd be fifty and broke. - - But also I wonder. If I was to get a full time job, would I want a radio job? I don't know. I've never had a full time job. - - ###### Are there freelance producer jobs out there? - - Yes. Definitely. I'm just really bad at getting jobs. I don't know how to look for them, so I've stopped looking. People ask me to do stuff for them and it works a lot better that way. Every time I try and put myself out there it's the worst. People are like what's wrong with her? Being a producer for The Heart has no caché. Occasionally people say that I'm way over qualified for this, and all I can say is, that's what you think. - - I spend a lot of time working for WNYC and I feel like they really killed my buzz. It's like, way to make someone feel like a piece of shit. I don't know. I was just feeling so disposable and dispensable every time I was there. The thing about being a freelancer is you can't have a bad day. Not everything I make is my best work. And it just so happened that the one time there was something riding on it at WNYC that could've turned permanent, I didn't do a good job on it. - - ###### But that's kind of the dark side of the DIY thing that's driving radio now. A lot of people will have their own podcast. How do you tell the difference between someone having their own podcast in their bedroom, and someone doing a show like The Heart in their own bedroom? It takes a really good ear from people listening, and maybe it's not something that everyone has. - - Yeah some people might not know the difference. They'll just be like, “What's all this stuff happening here? I don't wanna listen to that. I just wanna listen to people talk.” A lot of people like that. Not me though. If I’m going to make radio it can’t sound like that. - - *And The Heart doesn’t sound like that. The Heart is one of those shows that when you listen to it, you get out of breath; when you are walking around the kitchen, doing dishes or cooking, you suddenly laugh out loud, that is if you don’t stop everything and sit down on a couch listening with a gaping mouth. They push the envelope every time they do a new show, if not in content, then in production value. They’re always coming up with a new way of making a voice come from a completely new place.* - - *Part of their excellence comes from building relationships with their interview subjects. As I’m sitting here beside Mitra Kaboli it’s not hard imagining how she gets people to open up on precarious subjects. She’s just one of those people that you want to confide in.* - - ###### Do you think that The Heart is doing journalism? - - That's such a hard question. Depending on who asks me, I might tell them that I'm a journalist, even though that's not really true. Some of what we do is definitely journalism, some of it isn't. Everything we do is true to somebody, even if it's not necessarily THE truth. There's a lot of journalism, with a capital J, practices that we don't use because that's not what we do. - - I think it allows us to be sensitive and intimate and to actually build a relationship with our subjects. There's a lot of ethical issues involved, so whatever I can do to make sure that the process of this documentary is as collaborative as possible with my subject, I wanna do that. I think rules of journalism are kind of outdated, I don't think it needs to be like that, I don't think those things are fair. To even be after some sort of objective anything, yeah right, let's admit that that's not a real thing unless we're talking about the news. You can not erase your perspective ever, so why even pretend like you are. I have a relationship with many of my subjects, and I wanna keep a relationship and I want it to be good and I want them to be happy about what I make. I don't want them to feel embarrassed. I want them to feel good even if it's not a nice happy story. I want them to feel like I did them some justice. - - ###### How do you go about interviewing people when the subject matter is tricky? - - Number one is you have to find someone who's excited about doing it. If someone is on the fence about speaking candidly on intimate subjects, they are probably not gonna be a good fit. They are probably gonna be really unhappy with the result and then there is gonna be this awkward thing where they will be like, “I don't really wanna put this thing out in the world,” and I'll have worked on it for months. You can't do that to me. That's not fair to anyone. - - ###### How do you find you stories? How do you approach people? - - On the street. Just kidding. It's mostly word of mouth. You know you're at a bar with a friend and they're telling you this story about their cousin, and you're like, “wait, what?” So that's one way. But that usually lends itself to not having a very diverse range of contact. So that's a bit of a trap that we're conscious of and definitely work to get out of. We're working on partnering ourselves with, or just be in align with, other organizations that do similar kind of work or have the same goal or mandate. Sometimes you have to just put yourself out there and reach to the nether parts of your network and poke around. - - ###### Part of what I really like is that The Heart really embraces different experiences with gender, homosexuality and transsexuality. Was that part of the reason why you did this show to begin with? - - Yes. From when it started that was actually on the forefront. We both feel like it's kind of taken a back seat, like is the show too straight now? The mandate for the show has always been to represent sexual minorities whatever that means. And that's really important to us. But it's also important to bring the lense back on straightness, that can't be ignored either, that has its own pitfalls. Just to examine one side is kind of weird. - - ###### Did anyone inspire you to do that, did you have idols in that way? Or was it more of a protest reaction to the lack of representation out there? - - Yeah, the latter one probably. Sex shows exist. Howard Stern exists. Dan Savage exists. Sex columns exist. These are all real things. But are there shows that are truly honest about these matters? Let's not include Dan Savage in this comparison, he's doing a pretty good job. But you know where is sex for all the other people, the queer people and the weirdos and the kinksters, where is their sex? - - ###### Old people. - - Yeah where is *that?* Or taboo relationships. A lot of the things we talk about is taboo, I think it's pretty important to represent them or write them down. You know, why not? - - ###### Maybe we can go back to talking a little bit around radio, and how you view the current state of radio? Are you optimistic about radio? - - I am optimistic, but I think radio in general is very boring. Not because I think that the content itself is boring, because that's not true. It's just so bland and white sometimes! Even if the subject matter is not white and the person talking is not white, radio at large still manages to make it sound white. For example, I was so excited about this Malcolm X special that was an hour long and when I started listening to it, I had to turn it off. How did they turn such a charismatic interesting man into the most boring subject ever. How did they do that? And all the people they were talking to...I'm sure some of them were black, but they didn't really sound like it. - - I was listening to something on the radio the other day about how last year's projections for how much money podcasts would make was like nothing, but unexpectedly there was a tipping point with Serial, and all of a sudden people are like, “No, there's serious money in this.” As technology advances it's very easy to download podcasts to your phone. You can now listen to it in your car, and now you can probably download them straight to you car, so why would you then listen to the radio, when you can just listen to whatever you want to listen to? - - ###### 25 percent of all cars are made with wifi built into them. - - Exactly. And I think that by 2020 it's gonna be 100 percent and so that makes me feel optimistic, and it also makes me feel optimistic that in podcasting in general there isn't a status quo in the way that public radio has a status quo and they don't take risks. Everything has to sound the same and you can't say the word smut, even though it's not a bad word, on the radio. - - ###### Do you think of podcasts as a subversive thing to the blandness of radio? - - It's very upsetting the way people get payed. Producers at WNYC do not make a lot of money, but the people who are bosses make huge salaries. I know that one of the host’s Christmas bonus was larger than some of the producer's salaries. - - I think they're just gonna shoot themselves in the foot. The demographic that's listening to the radio is dwindling and I don't think foundation support alone is gonna keep those stations running. I think their model is unsustainable. Especially since Radiotopia is moderately sustainable and Gimlet also seems to be doing pretty well. Networks are popping up and I think it would behoove the stations to maybe try and retain their content a bit more, otherwise people are just gonna leave. - - ###### So maybe let’s talk about why you guys think it's interesting to talk about sex and love? - - My God! It's the most interesting thing. My favorite thing is, it's saturday morning, we're having breakfast together, and someone is telling a juicy story. Or it can be like a lovesick story where X is being shitty towards Y or it can be like, “Oh, I got laid last night, let me tell you what happened.” Nothing will hold my attention better than that. For example, the other day I hooked up with someone and all day long I was like: “You guys, last night I stuck my finger in somebody's buuuut.” Everyone was like, “urgh, Mitra!” And I was like, “I have been waiting for this day.” Somebody asked me to do that! I just wanted to shout it off the rooftop. - - Mitra doesn’t look self conscious or embarrassed at having said this out loud in a somewhat crowded café or about it being on tape and on the record. I, however, have flushed cheeks and try and steer the conversation in a new direction. - - ###### Tell me who you like? Who's producing good stuff out there right now? - - 99% Invisible is one of my favorite shows and I don't have to say that, I just feel it a lot. The Kitchen Sisters are the shit! They're just so masterful in everything that they do. How did they find those stories? They've been doing it for so long and on their own, you wonder who are they? And I know everyone talks about it, but Serial. Some people were like it's annoying how she put her story in there, but that's what I liked about it; her back and forth and doubts. - - ###### That mirroring kept me going too even when the whole murder mystery might have escaped my interest towards the end it became a question about, how does she feel? How do I feel? And how can we even talk about these things? - - I'm not the best podcast listener. But for the last two episodes of This American Life, the one about the cops and the one called, “Three Miles,” I know everyone raved about the, “Cops See It Differently,” but I think “Three Miles” nailed something that I don't know if anyone else ever really talked about before, which is the emotional and mental damages of growing up poor and [talking about] class in a way that [shows] how people are manifest and living their lives and why people can't get out of the hood when they should be able to. It really hit for me, really hard. It was so well done, it was great. Even though I was kind of on the fence about it. What else? Have you listened to Björks new album? - - ###### I have. I am Scandinavian after all. - - It's so great. I was listening to that while going through a breakup. It was so great. - - What else? D'Angelo's album. The new Kendrick Lamar is also really good. Also, not a new song, but Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover." I want everything I do to sound like that song. - - ###### Hey, if you think of more stuff email me and I'll put together a playlist to go along with this interview. - - Oh my god, really? I would love to do that. Can I send you a playlist? A radio playlist. That's the best idea, that's the best idea you've ever had. - - ###### So maybe the last thing is if you want to end this on a good anecdote, what would that be? - - Well, the last thing you made is always your favorite. So this is something that we cut from the final story, but eight months after the situation. - - *The story here is the one called "[The Hurricane](http://www.theheartradio.org/episodes/thehurricane)," which features a personal experience of Mitra's where, to keep it short, she hooked up with a guy during hurricane Sandy.* - - He lives maybe like eight blocks from me. It was insane that it took that long. I had been waiting for this day, running into him. When it finally happened he apologized as the first thing and gave me some context about his situation at the time. Since then I've run into him frequently, we go to the same coffee shop quite frequently, and we're both freelancers so I see him a around a lot. So we got friendlier and friendlier and finally we decided we were gonna do the story and I needed him to come over for an interview. And I think he was like, “I have been waiting for you to ask me this.” But then it happened and the first interview didn't actually take, so I had him over again and I was a bit more pointed about the things I wanted him to say and I got him to make the wind sound effects. So it was a bit contrived, but ultimately I'm really happy with the way it turned out. Somebody said it sounded like a radio cartoon, which I'm pretty sure means I can retire right now. And so anyway, now we have this pseudo sexually tense relationship. Every time he would come over for an interview it took everything inside me to not try and have sex with him. And actually the day that the episode released I met him at a bar, and I got drunk very fast, and a bit too drunk. So I made out with him and felt his dick in his pants. Then I was like, “I have to go home now,” [and] it was pouring rain. He said, “let me walk you home,” but I said no. On my way home I went to the grocery store and bought these tea cookies and then I also bought a box of brownie mix, which of course I couldn't eat, and I was certainly not gonna start baking drunk. - - ###### Did you ever make the brownies? - - No. Not since then. I feel like I should save them for some occasion. I can't just make brownies. - - *Sure, some people say don’t mix business and pleasure, but I say why not? At least if you can tell a story about it after that is as moving and funny as “The Hurricane.”* - - *Maybe that’s just how it is hanging out with women from The Heart. Personal and professional life becomes so intertwined they can’t again be separated, that’s part of the reason why they’re so good at what they do. As I’m writing this, I’m still nursing a little crush on Mitra Kaboli. I’m wondering when I should write her and remind her about that playlist.* - - #### RADIO PLAYLIST - - 1. Sweet Touch By Blue Hawaii (This song inspired one of my pieces, which I actually ended up using for the piece because it was stuck in my head) - 2. Alana By Wiretap - 3. I get so lonely By Janet Jackson (Actually the whole Velvet Rope album) - 4. Afternoon Delight By Kaitlin Prest (Kaitlin is my one true inspiration) - 5. 50 Ways to Leave your Lover By Paul Simon (I have one goal in life: to make a story that makes me feel the way this song makes me feel) - 6. Danza Kuduro By Don Omar (Please don't ask me why because I won't have an answer other than this song makes me feel very crunk) - - - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/nathan-jurgenson.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/nathan-jurgenson.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index e6408bc..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/nathan-jurgenson.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,110 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "Anti-viral: Snapchat’s Discover: Virality, Ephemerality, and the New Magazine Form." - -:markdown -Everyone in the media industry is right to be scared by Snapchat’s new Discover feature. Discover, a news publishing utility that was released late this past January, is gaining momentum as a new way to produce and distribute content, threatening to dramatically change the way news is consumed. With an estimated 200 million monthly users, Snapchat’s immense popularity means that the Discover feature could be a holy grail for advertisers and small publications alike, because they can promise unique connectivity with younger audiences.
- - The Discover feature presents magazines and websites that independently curate their own multimedia content, which disappears after twenty four hours. Dependent on where you live, your options would include Fusion, Cosmopolitan, Vice, The Daily Mail, Yahoo, Vice, CNN, Comedy Central, People Magazine, ESPN, and others. Media on the app varies from videos, interactive multimedia articles, and quizzes, but are all mobile-native and designed to be read like pages in a book or magazine. Each content generator on Discover also features advertising, which marks one of the first attempts that Snapchat has made to generate revenue for the company. - - If taken seriously, Discover’s break from the viral news cycle of publications like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed spells something new for the way that news is consumed. Suddenly, news stories are not something to be quickly shared, but read for their own sake. Unconstrained from this type of length and form, Vice is able to publish long articles on Mitt Romney’s charity boxing match and the Daily Mail can publish essays on human encounters with dead relatives. This content is different from its competitors because every article is designed in conversation with Snapchat’s ephemeral medium. Hence, in Snapchat, the medium is not only the message; the medium works in tandem with the experienced reality of the consumer in a way that points to the future of our digitally mediated relationship with technology. - - This relationship is marked by a constant conversation with digital content; instead of being passive consumers of media on their newsfeed or homepage, users interact with media without the pretense that it will exist indefinitely. In this sense, the radical thing about Discover is not its ephemerality, but the larger digital economy that it creates. Discover’s media content isn’t meant to be shared — all of the content is housed in the app, and doesn’t include any links to outside material. Its ephemerality means that it doesn’t allow the snowballing effect of viral media. This means content on Discover will never be irrelevant like its Buzzfeed counterpart because its value doesn’t change in reference to the amount of clicks it has or how old it is. *It simply exists until it disappears forever.* - - What does this mean for the future of the digital media industry? I sat down with Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist and researcher for Snapchat, in a cafe near his home in Bushwick to find out. Jurgenson began working with Snapchat in 2013 after publishing work on social media ephemerality in [The New Inquiry](http://thenewinquiry.com), where he is a contributing editor. As both an academic and a member of Snapchat’s team, Jurgenson has enough critical distance to both recognize this and see how Discover has already changed the way that we think about news media. Jurgenson’s past work has revolved around social media photography and the digitally mediated experience of reality; he has written about the [IRL Fetish](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/), the [Facebook Eye](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-facebook-eye/251377/), and [Online Privacy](http://www.wired.com/2014/03/privacy-is-dead/). He is currently a graduate student in sociology at The University of Maryland and is also finishing a book on social media and photography with Penguin Press. - - Once he started talking, his calm demeanor gave way to genuine excitement: he truly believes that Snapchat has the ability to dramatically change how digital media is produced and shared. In a world where conversations online and offline run seamlessly, and digital personas are just as important as physical ones, Jurgenson believes that our everyday experiences are intrinsically connected to the digital technologies that we use. In the context of Discover, this means that, for the first time, news media is being produced with an understanding of its relationship to its own form and consumption. When I asked about current trends in the media and publishing industry, Jurgenson identified recent changes to news media companies like Upworthy as something to look out for in 2015. - - ###### Troy O’Neill: Can you tell me about your upcoming book? - - Nathan Jurgenson: I haven’t announced it yet, but it’s a book from Penguin Press, it’s a book on photography and social media. - - In most books on photography, you pick them up and they are all about art. Art in galleries and museums, or by journalists, or more professional photography. This is only a sliver of a sliver of the types of photos taken today. While, the majority of pictures taken today are things like if I take a picture of my coffee and send it to a friend. The photo world has nothing to say about that. They might do art readings of that photo, but it’s like… you guys missed it. - -The majority of pictures taken today are things like if I take a picture of my coffee and send it to a friend. The photo world has nothing to say about that. They might do art readings of that photo, but it’s like… you guys missed it.
- - It’s not about the object, we will throw it away. That is not the point. The point is the way that it is communicated. I am treating photography more linguistically, more like a speech act, rather than the ends of the photographic process, rather than the object or thing that we can frame or hang in a gallery or dissect in a book. - - ###### Would you say that social media photography is not a product? - - I mean, there is an object, there is a product, but I think that the means have switched. Traditionally, the end of the photograph is the photo object. What it contains, the communicative property or action, the meaning being expressed, are the means. I think that we could flip that today, where the object is the means, and the end is what is being communicated. I think that we see that in the disposability of photographs. Not just on Snapchat, but on any network. - - The difference between any of these networks is that they have minimal senses of ephemerality. [For Snapchat,] the photo really does disappear most of the time, unless it is screenshotted or something like that — but de facto things on your Instagram disappear. People aren’t really looking at the things that you are posting yesterday, right? It just goes right down the stream. I think that Snapchat is just a more honest reflection on what social photography had already become. Which already is largely ephemeral. For example, nobody is paying attention to that photo that you posted on May 14, 2007 on Facebook. It might as well have been ephemeral. Yet we have a piling up of images. It makes more sense to treat them as they are, for no other reason than so the important photos can be special. Instead of keeping everything, if you choose to keep them, then I think that those photos can be important and special in a way that social photos rarely are. - - ###### Like photos on Facebook? - - Yeah, like if there are a few that you think are important and you want to keep, right now those are just in the pile of all of the other photos. We all know the burden of trying to find one specific photo when there are so many, and you have these albums that scroll on forever. What we need is a process to make some of them more important, instead of permanent by default. I think that if we made things ephemeral by default, the photos that we think are really important could be made more important. - - It’s like money. If you print too much money in abundance, you have inflation. I think that we have an inflation of visual imagery. I think that we need a little bit more scarcity for our own identity and our records of our everyday lives. I think that it will be like a pendulum, in that it moves from abundance to scarcity, so images can become more valuable again. I think that collectively we are dealing with this back and forth. - - ###### It also seems more fragmentary. In terms of the way that data is structured, what kind of difference in model do you see for Snapchat versus Facebook? - - Obviously with the news last year, with Facebook’s [emotional manipulation study](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full)… people didn’t think that their newsfeeds were being reorganized, or that they were collecting data on them. It’s assumed it’s some sort of natural process. People think the same thing with Google — like it is this natural or essential thing, like that is the way it “must be ordered.” It is nice in this moment to say no, this information that is ordered by algorithms isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon. They are built by specific people with specific politics, interests, and goals. You take your Facebook newsfeed or your Google search — they all reflect human politics, nothing “natural.” - - - For example, Snapchat’s ads aren’t targeted, and advertisers love targeted ads. It is pitched as the holy grail of advertising — that you can pitch your product to 18-year-old guys who live in Bushwick — but there is none of that on the Snapchat network; everybody gets the same ad. There is no algorithmically sorted content with the exception of friend groups and Discover, which changes with where you live. For example, if you are in Argentina, you will have a different Discover than if you lived in the UK. - - As far as differences between the way that Snapchat uses data, it’s not really a part of Snapchat right now, but it is the foundation of Facebook. Facebook’s newsfeed is ordered by algorithms, which is based on many things. [Facebook] would say it is based on what you want to see, which is operationalized by your time on the site. With the emotional manipulation study, they found that if you see a lot of positive words or a lot of negative words, then you are more likely to spend more time on the site and you would post more as well. So it’s better for them to take emotionally charged words and give that more weight in the algorithm, because everything that shows up on your newsfeed works as a likelihood. Some of the variables get more ability to influence and others get less, and they all hit this piece of content that gets a likelihood score. That is all part of their business model; be it that you more likely to spend more time on a site, if you more likely to post more things, or if you hit like more often — that information is for sale. - - So you can spend money to bump up that likelihood score even up to 100 percent, so that every 19 year old in Bushwick sees that post. That is something that is for sale. So that is mostly [Facebook’s] business model. And for journalism that is really an interesting thing because they have at the bottom right of the screen little trending news stories. They don’t really seem to know what they are doing with it yet, but the newsfeed reflects promoted posts, and what news stories show in that bottom reflects the newsfeed. Therefore, the way that they sorted the news stories is for sale to some degree. - - ###### How does Snapchat’s structure affect its users? - - I think that there are a lot of things built into the app that have more of a tactile or intimate feel, and the fact that things disappear really heightens the intimacy of the moment. In that New Inquiry essay, I said that you have to look fast and look hard. Because it’s a ticking tock, there is a countdown, the moment becomes special. When everything is safe forever, any particular moment isn’t special. The moment can just happen later. So there isn’t any newness; that is really the problem that I have with a lot of social media. It is kind of nostalgic, in that the present never just gets to be the present. It’s kind of like having a tape recorder on during the conversation, for a future-past. Like, in the future this is going to be the past, and that is what the present is for. But if we were just friends hanging out in a coffee shop chatting, it would be really weird if one of us just put a tape recorder down. All of social media is designed to say, “Let’s just do that!” - - People have called Snapchat radical for deleting everything, but that’s not radical, that’s just familiar. It was everything else that was radical. This is the way that social interaction has always been. It has always been ephemeral. In social media we started with the idea of “let’s put everything that we see down and share it with everyone for all time.” I think that it leads to many things, when we talk about privacy, or a transparent society, but to me it’s more mundane than that — things like the nostalgia that we are collectively looking at the world with, that we see the world always as a potential future-past. I think that it is kind a of a conservative view of the world, because it’s all about freezing the world and putting it into categories, which are then ranked by things like likes and retweets. - - [Social media] needs to be less about the self: putting the self into categories, saving it, or preserving it. Facebook is the model of preserving the museum of the self. I think that there is room for some of that, but it shouldn’t be by default. I think that Snapchat isn’t anti-nostalgic — the present just stays in the present. It does a better job getting at the everyday. Maybe Instagram does better with the life trophies, those special moments, but in between those special moments, if you are posting all time, you are just going to be oversharing. I think that ephemerality gets at the everydayness, which, as a sociologist, we kind of know that that is the fabric of existence. I think that it is healthy for social media to encompass that in addition to the special moments. - -When we focus on ephemerality, we understand that the internet is real too. I think that the psyche of social media is built on the idea that we have real life, and then you create a document of it and put it somewhere separate, somewhere virtual. To me, Facebook is modeling a second life.
- - - ###### Is that ephemerality more real? - - No, I have read people say that and I cringe every time. I think that the difference is that it is all real. When we focus on ephemerality, we understand that the internet is real too. I think that the psyche of social media is built on the idea that we have real life, and then you create a document of it and put it somewhere separate, somewhere virtual. To me, Facebook is modeling a second life. - - It’s a document double of existence, which then we can rank, put a score on everything, it is all categorized, and searchable, kind of how Google treats information, like “let’s go index it all, put it in a database in order to show that it is searchable.” That is the underpinnings of social life. They are trying to make information equivalent to everything that we do, to put it in various variables in a database and make it searchable, like the Facebook graph search. [But] it’s not how humans understand their own lives. [Facebook] built that search and nobody used it, and I think it made complete sense on their end, like, “social life is a database, and now we can search it,” but that’s not how people use it. That’s not how Facebook works. - - We get our complexity from how contradictory we are all of the time; we don’t fit into the databases as nicely and easily as I think the data scientists that build that social media think. They are always ranking our moods. Anybody who studies happiness studies knows that we don’t work like that, like some people are happy to be sad. It doesn’t fit that way, like maybe Russia scores really low on happiness, but they might enjoy being sad. It doesn’t make sense that happiness sits on a linear scale of one to ten. - - ###### Is that what you mean about augmented reality? - - It’s a term I don’t use a ton. I want to get at the idea that there is one reality, and that this is opposed to what I call digital dualism. - - ###### Which is a term that you came up with. - - Yeah, it’s a term that I coined. I was originally looking for a word that described a mixed reality where we have just one reality. I ended up coming up with that term for the fallacy that there is some cyber reality, like the Matrix, like there is some virtual cyber world. I never did come up with a term that I love, because it’s just reality. - - I think that it is so funny that when it comes to the digital, we talk in spatial terms, like online or offline, cyberspace or virtual world. We don’t do that for text, we don’t do that for oral information. If you open up a book, you don’t go, “Oh alright, I’m going to jack into the text space and log into the word world.” We leave that for the digital. I think that we have one reality and the digital is just one flavor of information in this reality. The digital is just one more type of information that we have. That’s what I mean by augmented reality; this perspective means that reality has always been augmented. Now we just have one more form of mediation to talk about. Really, it’s been a preoccupation for all of modernity. When we think about what the enlightenment was, saying that we have to figure out what the world “is,” that we have to put light upon it and learn it, this presupposes that you don’t know everything, while before it was clear that you knew a lot. For example, if you were religious you knew the world; you knew when it started and you knew when it ended. Today, for a very long time now, we have been living in a state of an unknowable world. That creates a lot of anxiety, and our history of social theory has been grappling with that. It used to be that your self, your identity, was something that was presupposed — you didn’t have to choose it. In fact, there was no question about it. - - ###### And in social media now, you are carefully constructing the self. - - Now you are constantly doing that. That is an obsession all of the time. And what is funny about social media is that we have come up with this little trick to solve that problem that we have been obsessed with for a very long time: What is true, what is an authentic person, you know an authentic self. I think that we really like the idea that “people aren’t communicating in real life anymore, they are just tweeting virtually.” What that does is it makes those person’s everyday conversation even more real. Now, people will talk, “oh I’m going to leave my phone at home or on the weekends,” and it really makes them feel that “this” is more real. I am more true and authentic because I don’t have my phone or computer. And I love to disconnect and unplug, I just don’t think that its right to call it more real or true or authentic. - - ###### How does Discover differ from something that you would see on your Facebook newsfeed? - - It is not in the viral cycle. When I say viral, I don’t mean it just as a metric of popularity, but as a genre of content. The thing about viral things is that we love them for a moment and then we hate them. In fact, if you care about it too late you look out of touch. You only want to share something at the beginning, which is partly why things go viral, because we are all rushing to share it before our friends do. Discover’s news comes out once a day, so it has much more of a magazine feel than viral news does. It’s not a platform for breaking news, it’s not meant to be that kind of thing. - - That is how Discover is designed. When you put the like button on everything, without a dislike button, you are encouraging people to post likable content. So for that like button, the affordances of the network produce some kind of behavior. That is the best way of thinking about how these sites structure behavior. Sometimes it’s very subtle, just as Facebook’s emotional manipulation study highlighted. We don’t know how we are necessarily being manipulated, but that is all a part of the affordances of the network. And that is not new to social media. If you go into the grocery store, and if you go to the checkout line, there is a rack of impulse buys, and you will notice things that kids will like are closer to their eye level, while the things that you will like are closer to your eye level. Our whole world is constructed in this way; we are being manipulated in subtle ways. - - ###### What are the affordances of the Discover section? - - Every design feature leads to different affordances. In Discover, it’s that you can’t scroll up or down. There are these flat circles. You get these cards and you have to swipe left or right, or up or down. Those are all the affordances of the network. - - And this is what created that feature in the first place. We thought about what affordances were current. We thought that most young people were getting news from their social feeds that are algorithmically curated. Discover is very much editorially curated — there are no algorithms, that is not what is popular. So, somebody at CNN is deciding [the news] rather than the algorithm on Facebook’s newsfeed. Those are radically different affordances and you are going to get radically different news — when it’s what is likable versus what an editor would pick. I’m not saying that one is necessarily better or worse, as we have had editors selecting news for a very long time. We have also had this viral news competitor sitting next to it and I think that they both have pluses and minuses. - - ###### Does that give us a new way to think about media in the future? - - Yeah. We had that moment where everyone was going to design a beautiful magazine for an iPad. That was going to save magazines, which obviously didn’t come to pass. People aren’t waking up and firing up the Cosmo app on their iPad. That was something that people envisioned when the iPad first came out. I think that Discover is the next take on what a digital magazine might look like. I, personally, think that it has a magazine feel. To me it has a glossy feel, the full screen ads feel like a full page advertisement that would be in a magazine. - - If you would have asked me a year ago, I would have said that virality, this sort of viral nature to everything, sorted by likes and clicks was not going to be the future. Now it seems a little bit redundant because Snapchat has made something that isn’t based on likes or clicks. There are no likes or shares within the platform. Since that is what has been built it doesn’t actually sound like the future anymore. I think that this viral cycling will happen for virality itself; I feel like we are going to be sick of that genre in the same way that we are going to be sick of individual things within that genre. So I wonder, what happens after viral goes viral? We will see if attention and clicks are something that can be saved as a legit currency. If I’m right, I feel like clicks are going to become an increasingly unimportant metric and advertisers are going to start not being willing to pay by the click. I see it declining, which might mean a decline in viral as a culture to begin with. - - *Nathan Jurgenson tweets at [@nathanjurgenson](https://www.twitter.com/nathanjurgenson).* - - *Troy O’Neill tweets at [@atrojan_horse](https://www.twitter.com/atrojan_horse).* - - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/reihan-salam.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/reihan-salam.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 2631965..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/reihan-salam.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,530 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "My Lunch wth Reihan" - -%span.monospaced - :markdown - -A play by Shea Sweeney, based on an interview with Reihan Salam.
- - - CAST OF CHARACTERS - - \* **REIHAN SALAM:** 35-year-old man in a gray suit, very animated and engaged, political commentator, Executive Editor of National Review, columnist for Slate, interviewer for VICE podcast, makes appearances on CNN and The Colbert Report among others. - - \* **SHEA SWEENEY:** 22-year-old woman in black jeans and leather jacket, New School student. - - \* **UPSCALE HOTEL PATRON** - **RESTAURANT GOER** - **WAITER** - - \* **DOORMAN** - **HOST 1** - **IMAGINARY DAUGHTER 1** - - \* **CONCIERGE** - **HOST 2** - **IMAGINARY DAUGHTER 2** - - \* **SLURPING MAN** - **HOST 3** - **IMAGINARY DAUGHTER 3** - - \* **HILLARY CLINTON** - **IMAGINARY WIFE** - **UNCLE DREW** - - \* **JEB BUSH** - **IMAGINARY REIHAN** - **SEAWEED SNACK SALESMAN** - - ### SCENE I ACT I - - *Cavernous lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel (The same hotel where one of Reihan’s VICE interviewees, Molly Crabapple, once locked herself in a room for a week of non-stop drawing). DOORMAN stands near the entrance, CONCIERGE sits at back desk. SLURPING MAN - a person in slightly tattered clothes - occupies a plush chair and slurps beige liquid from a plastic cup. Hesitant to say it’s coffee.* - - **Enter SHEA.** - - #### SHEA - Hi, is that the restaurant? Maialino? (Points to another door.) - - #### DOORMAN - Yes, it is. - - #### SHEA - Great, thank you. - - *SHEA glances at the clock on her phone. She’s early. Looks up again and DOORMAN has a disgusted expression on his face. She is confused. Is she doing something weird? She turns. SLURPING MAN smiles at her. She smiles back. She goes to sit in a chair across the room facing SLURPING MAN. UPSCALE PATRON with British accent approaches CONCIERGE.* - - #### UPSCALE PATRON - Can you recommend massage therapy in the neighborhood? Can someone come here? - - #### CONCIERGE - Yes, we can contact someone for you who can come to your room. - - #### UPSCALE PATRON - Oh good. I’ll come by again later. - - #### CONCIERGE - Have a nice day. - - *UPSCALE PATRON exists. SLURPING MAN stands and slowly walks to the door. DOORMAN, SHEA, and CONCIERGE watch him leave (The subtle epicness should draw a tear). After a pause SHEA walks through door to Maialino.* - - *End Scene I.* - - - - ### SCENE II ACT I - - *Entryway of Maialino. Three HOSTS stand behind a desk. A RESTAURANT GOER with an American flag pin on his suit lapel stands by the desk. SHEA walks to the desk.* - - #### HOST 1 - Hi, how are you? - - #### SHEA - Good, thank you. I have a reservation for one pm. I’m a little early. - - #### HOST 1 - What’s the name? - - #### SHEA - Shea Sweeney. - - #### HOST 1 - I can seat you now, or you can wait here for the other member of your party. - - #### SHEA - I’ll go ahead and go to the table. - - #### HOST 1 - Okay, great — - - #### SHEA - I mean, um, actually, he doesn’t know what I look like, so I’ll wait here...sorry. - - #### HOST 1 - Oh okay...That’s okay. We’ll seat you when he gets here. - - *SHEA walks away from the desk and waits. RESTAURANT GOER turns to the HOST.* - - #### RESTAURANT GOER - My daughter is meeting me here today. She runs a non-profit organization. - - *HOST 1 sees something that needs attending and walks away. HOST 2 does the same. HOST 3 is left alone. She smiles politely.* - - #### RESTAURANT GOER - Are you on social media? - - #### HOST 3 - Yes, I am. - - #### RESTAURANT GOER - Here, take her card. (Hands HOST 3 a business card) See there? Tell your friends about it. My daughter is an angel. - - #### HOST 3 - Thank you, I will. - - *HOST 1 and HOST 2 return. RESTAURANT GOER hands them business cards.* - - #### RESTAURANT GOER - Are you on social media? This is my daughter’s organization. Tell your friends. - - *REIHAN enters from another door and goes to desk. SHEA walks over and taps him on the shoulder which startles him a little.* - - #### SHEA - Hi Reihan, I’m Shea. Nice to meet you. (They shake hands. RESTAURANT GOER stands right beside them watching with a big smile.) - - #### REIHAN - Hi Shea, so nice to meet you! Thanks for meeting me here. Tell me more about this class, what are you studying? - - #### SHEA - Yeah, its a class on 21st Century publishing, and for the project we are interviewing people in media about the ‘contemporary media landscape.’ - - #### REIHAN - Did you grow up in a family that consumed a lot of media? Were your parents really into the news? - - #### SHEA - Well... I guess... My mom has always been an avid reader so I don’t know how much we focused on stories in the media, but stories in books were important. What about in your family? - - *REIHAN ponders this as he and SHEA follow HOST 1 off stage. He starts to answer as they walk off.* - - End Act I. - - ### SCENE I ACT II - - *HOST 1, REIHAN, and SHEA enter main area of restaurant. There’s one table with four chairs and menus. Two are empty and the other two are occupied by HILLARY CLINTON and JEB BUSH who look like they’ve been anticipating REIHAN and SHEA’s arrival. SHEA see’s them and is terrified. HOST 1 and REIHAN don’t see them. HOST 1 pulls out chairs and then exits. SHEA and REIHAN sit.* - - #### REIHAN - Yeah, I have older sisters so I was interested in what they were into. - - *Enter WAITER. He also doesn’t seem to see HILLARY CLINTON and JEB BUSH.* - - #### WAITER - Hi, how are you today? Welcome to Maialino. Can I get you started with a drink? - - #### SHEA - Just water is good, thanks. - - #### REIHAN - I’ll have some green tea, thank you. - - #### WAITER - Will anyone else be joining you today? (HILLARY CLINTON and JEB BUSH looks at SHEA with puppy eyes.) - - #### SHEA - (Responds quickly) No! I mean...no...nope, just the two of us...thank you. - - #### WAITER - Great, I’ll be back with your green tea. - - *WAITER takes the menus in front of HILLARY CLINTON and JEB BUSH. They frown and slouch over then get up and follow the WAITER off stage.* - - #### REIHAN - I just want to make sure I know so that you can get the information you want for your project, what would you like to talk about? - - #### SHEA - Well, we’re interviewing key people in media, but we haven’t interviewed anyone involved in conservative media. I felt that would be an important perspective to include. It would just be really great to hear about how you got into media. I also listened to your Longform Podcast interview and I thought it was really interesting how much you talked about being interested in people’s inner lives. So I guess we could begin with, how did you get started in media? - - #### REIHAN - These things tend to be driven by your networks. When I was in college I didn't really think about pursuing a career in journalism. I was exposed to a lot of it, however. I read a lot of magazines even when I was very young. I read comic books when I was a kid. - - *WAITER returns with tea, water, and a bread basket. Exists.* - - #### REIHAN - When I was a senior in college it was 2001, and the dot com bubble had burst. Everyone goes through this recruiting process to find jobs, and I didn’t go through the process. I basically spent my undergraduate career just doing theater stuff and writing. - - #### SHEA - Theater? That’s cool. - - #### REIHAN - A friend of mine was going to work at The New Republic, and I thought okay I’ll do that too, that seems interesting. Then when I did it for a year, I thought okay well I can do this, I’m in this world, I’m in the flow of things, I might as well just keep doing it. There’s this Microsoft research study which found that only four percent of browser users over a three month period will have read ten news articles and two opinion pieces. For someone like me who writes opinion pieces, that’s kind of my living. - - #### SHEA - That’s not a lot of people. - - #### REIHAN - It is and it isn't. That’s as many people as who follow ice hockey very closely. And the NHL is pretty popular. In New York and being in media, there are a lot of people who come to believe that this is really important and this person who did this thing is really important. It’s really about as important as the guy who does the third most popular hockey podcast. - - #### SHEA - So, why do you write columns? Why do you go on the news and talk shows? - - #### REIHAN - One layer is you started doing a certain kind of job at a certain point in your life. You just do it and it makes sense and you continue to do it in order to make money. With the second part of your question there are a few different components to it. One is that I think of myself as an activist and an advocate, and I also think of myself as a writer. Those things align. A lot of my work brings those things together, but they’re kind of different jobs. Similarly, who reads the things I write? Some people might read them because they’re like-- - - *HOST 1 pops in from off stage angrily typing on her phone.* - - #### HOST 1 - I want to look at the headline and get really mad and then vent to this person and write a nasty comment on their Facebook! - - *HOST 1 quickly exists.* - - #### REIHAN - Other people hire me to get readers to think — - - *HOST 2 pops in from off stage looking at her phone contemplatively.* - - #### HOST 2 - I want to be surprised. I want to learn something from a different perspective! Maybe I’ll agree and maybe I won’t agree… - - *HOST 2 quickly exists.* - - #### REIHAN - Another group of readers is — - - *HOST 3 pops in from off stage staring at her phone and looking smug.* - - #### HOST 3 - I know this person thinks roughly what I think and I can’t articulate why I think these things all the time, but I’ll hire this person metaphorically in choosing to read this article. - - *HOST 3 quickly exits.* - - #### REIHAN - This is a moment in media when a lot of people are thinking in a ground-up kind of what. Like, what are we actually doing? There was a time when the technology was limited and you could imagine what people wanted to read. Now we can get a better sense, what do people like to read? Do we decide, well people ought to be reading this and we ought to get them to read that? Maybe that’s right. Or do we think, well, we just go to where the audience is. - - *Enter WAITER.* - - #### WAITER - Are you ready to order? What can I get for you? - - #### SHEA - What’s your favorite vegetarian pasta? - - #### WAITER - Well, the new one... rumps are in season and it’s only going to be around for like a month. I’m not a big vegetarian fan, but it’s absolutely delicious. - - #### SHEA - Rumps, huh. - - #### WAITER - Yeah... - - #### SHEA - Great, I’ll go with that, thank you. - - #### REIHAN - Do you mind if I have a starter? - - #### SHEA - Go for it. - - #### REIHAN - I’ll have the prosciutto and mozzarella, and I’ll have the chicken cutlet. Thank you. - - *Exit WAITER.* - - #### SHEA - Can you talk about the VICE Podcast? - - #### REIHAN - I just love interviewing people. Demystifying a complicated subject. Just getting a real sense of, who do you think you are? And how does that related to the things you do everyday? I care about that because I do care about this bigger puzzle of how does anyone change their life. Or maybe there are people who don’t change their life and don’t want to, and that’s kind of interesting it itself, but then who do they think they are? What kind of animal do they think they are? That’s just amazing that let’s say even in New York City, among people who come from my background, they are really different. - - #### SHEA - How’s it going with National Review? - - #### REIHAN - I’m very proud to be associated with National Review. It has played a very important role in my life and I’m proud of my colleagues. Small opinion magazines are tricky animals, particularly those that have existed for a long time. - - *While REIHAN is talking the song “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge fades in low and REIHAN begins tapping his foot, though he acts as though he barely notices the music. SHEA is very confused and looks around for where the music is coming from.* - - #### REIHAN - I think of being a conservative a bit like being part of a family. That’s not necessarily a healthy impulse, there are a lot of people who think of that as an unhealthy impulse. That’s how I think of it. I sometimes joke that when I’m in a room with other people who are like me — like children of immigrants — I feel very comfortable. And also when I’m in a room full of conservatives, including no one who’s from that kind of background. It’s like being in a room of people I went to high school with or something. Because there’s an immediate rapport. There’s an immediate sense of mutual understanding, which I find very powerful and kind of fun. - - *The music cuts out abruptly.* - - #### SHEA - You’ve worked in both liberal and conservative media. Do you feel that — beyond ideology — there are any structural, fundamental differences? - - #### REIHAN - One thought is that to some extent it’s more a difference between big institutions and small ones. It’s between institutions that are profit-oriented and those that aren’t. So for example I imagine that a place like The Nation and a place like National Review have a fair bit in common. Because both of them lose money. Both of them are very mission-oriented. And I can’t speak for The Nation, but National Review has many people who are very keen to support it because they believe in its mission. So to some extent that means that it’s going to be a less commercially-minded place. I actually think there’s a lot of space for innovation and that’s a tricky question for older incumbent institutions that came of age in a different time. - - #### SHEA - How is National Review going about that? - - #### REIHAN - It’s a work in progress. I think we have a loyal audience but our audience tends to be a bit older. - - #### SHEA - Is that for print and online? - - #### REIHAN - The online audience, relative to new media brands, is older; I’d say in part because we are still trying to figure out how to get to where our younger people are. There are many 29 year olds who think of themselves as really young, and they’re not. They’re of a completely different media consuming generation than 22 year olds. People I know think, ‘what is the point of using Snapchat?’ Of course I as a 35 year old man don’t understand it because it’s not for me. - - #### SHEA - That’s how I feel about Snapchat. - - #### REIHAN - Well that’s not good, you need to be less alienated from your generation. - - #### SHEA - From Snapchat? - - #### REIHAN - Or your generation period. If you embrace the folkways of old people, you will find yourself obsolete a lot faster. - - #### SHEA - I don’t think it’s about embracing the folkways of old people. With Snapchat I feel like I’m wasting a lot of time. I feel this way about all social media. I think it’s just my personality type. - - *Enter WAITER with prosciutto and mozzarella.* - - #### REIHAN - Thank you. - - *WAITER exits.* - - #### REIHAN - Do you eat dairy? - - #### SHEA - Yes, I do. - - #### REIHAN - You’re very welcome to have some. - - #### SHEA - I’m okay, thank you though. - - #### REIHAN - But also, about wasting time. It’s incredible how much time people waste period in life. I’m competing with people spending time with their friends. And it’s amazing when you think about it that way. - - #### SHEA - Sometimes I get overwhelmed because I feel like I have to see and read everything, every column in order to weave everything together, or else I’ll miss something. - - #### REIHAN - Yeah, I mean we’ll steal as much of your time as we can. You fall down a rabbit hole. But you know, this world is all going to shake out in a certain way. You have a punctuated equilibrium. An asteroid strikes the earth — - - *Flying asteroid explosion sound. SHEA and REIHAN duck under the table for a moment, then sit up again.* - - #### REIHAN - All the dinosaurs die, and then suddenly you have the questions of which different tiny mammal will emerge. That’s what we’re living through right now. - - #### SHEA - We’re living through which tiny mammal is going to emerge from the media landscape? - - #### REIHAN - Yeah, and become a dolphin or a tiger. - - *Dolphin sound and tiger sound.* - - #### REIHAN - That’s exactly what’s happening right now. There’s this huge shock and some people are hustlers and are making it work, and some old brands will adapt and others won’t. We’ll see what happens. - - #### SHEA - And another part of it is, what is media and what is not media? - - #### REIHAN - Give me an example. - - #### SHEA - I’m thinking about advertising. - - #### REIHAN - Isn’t everything advertising though? I’m advertising that I’m a cool person that’s smart. - - #### SHEA - That’s it though. I’m a walking media unit. - - #### REIHAN - Which is a very dark way of thinking, but sort of makes sense. And then the cringe inducing thing is, what am I trying to say? And then I feel like I have a very specific idea. I feel like I know what I’d like to be like. - - *While REIHAN speaks, IMAGINARY REIHAN and IMAGINARY WIFE enter on a tandem bicycle and ride in circles around the table. They are followed by the three IMAGINARY DAUGHTERS whispering amongst themselves in French. When REIHAN mentions “buying bread” IMAGINARY WIFE steps of bike and picks up the bread in the basket on the table. She gets back on the bike and they continue riding.* - - #### REIHAN - And I specifically have this image of myself with white hair, on a tandem bicycle, wearing a rain coat. And I envision myself in the future having a wife with a streak of white hair, and just, I don’t know, buying bread. And just having a bunch of daughters who are really smart and are all speaking French. I don’t know, thats a version of my brand. But it’s like, no, that has nothing to do with me actually. That has literally nothing to do with my life. But it’s interesting. What I just said, I was half joking. - - *IMAGINARY REIHAN, IMAGINARY WIFE, and IMAGINARY DAUGHTERS exit. WAITER dodges them on his way in carrying food. He places the plates on the table and exits.* - - #### REIHAN - Is there advertising that works on you really effectively? - - #### SHEA - Oh, I’m sure it all works so effectively. - - #### REIHAN - There are these ads, I think it’s Mountain Dew. This is an example to prompt you, but there’s this basketball player named Kyrie Irving, and there’s this video of him dressed as an old man. He plays basketball with a bunch of young people, and they’re like ‘whoa, this old man is so good at basketball.’ - - *UNCLE DREW (old Kyrie Irving in the ad) steps out holding a basketball in one hand and a bottle of Pepsi Max with a straw in the other. REIHAN continues talking and stands up, which prompts SHEA to stand up. REIHAN hands UNCLE DREW a little notebook and a pen for a signature. UNCLE DREW signs and gives REIHAN the basketball, then moves on to SHEA. She doesn’t have paper, so she points at her forehead. UNCLE DREW signs SHEA’s forehead, leaves the Pepsi Max on the table, and exits. SHEA and REIHAN sit.* - - #### REIHAN - But he’s actually 22. I just think it’s so fun to watch. But the thing is that I’ll probably never drink that soda. I just don't drink soda. But it does create immensely positive associations, because I will spend time watching these ads. Is there anything — and don’t narrow it to video — but I’m curious, do you see this thing are you’re like, ‘Yeah. Right on.’ - - #### SHEA - It’s great you have that Mountain Dew thing. - - #### REIHAN - It might even be Sprite. - - #### SHEA - That’s good you don’t remember. It’s some white liquid. - - *SHEA takes a sip of the Pepsi Max.* - - #### SHEA - This is something that makes me cringe, but I know I’ve bought into it so far already before I even knew what it was is. That hipster rustic urban aesthetic. It’s everywhere. - - #### REIHAN - That’s an incredibly astute observation, yeah. It’s kind of like it’s this matrix. It’s very disciplining and very, very interesting. Do you subscribe to any Youtube channels? - - #### SHEA: No. - - #### REIHAN - That’s bad. I subscribe to Youtube channels. That’s really weak. You should do that when you go home. Just find one, subscribe to one. - - #### SHEA - What happens when you subscribe? - - #### REIHAN - Nothing really. Just when you go to Youtube, it will show that the thing has been updated. - - *Enter WAITER with a plate of cookies.* - - #### WAITER - Here are some complimentary cookies. Enjoy. - - *REIHAN hands him his credit card. WAITER clears plates and exists.* - - #### REIHAN - Do you eat cookies? - - #### SHEA - I do, yeah. - - #### REIHAN - Okay, good. I might only have one so I’m happy that you’ll eat them. - - #### SHEA - Oh, I’ll eat them. Whenever there’s someone around who orders vegetarian or vegan, people are like ‘oh shoot.’ - - #### REIHAN - Are you vegetarian? - - #### SHEA - I am. But, I’m anti-cookie...kidding. - - #### REIHAN - I mean I sort of am, but when in Rome. - - #### SHEA - You’re anti-cookie? - - #### REIHAN - Look I mean, I used to eat so many cookies. I used to eat like an entire family pack of Chips Ahoy. I would eat it in like a day. I would really pack those away. I remember when my mom would buy non-Chips Ahoy cookies, like actually good cookies, and I had no interest in them. I still kind of don’t. I actually remember when I was a kid, calling Nabisco and saying ‘I’ve had two bags of Chips Ahoy that taste different than the usual.’ And they were like ‘oh, I thank you for noticing. Like we’re going to send you a gift certificate for Chips Ahoy.’ And I was like, cool. But it was very sincere because I was very concerned. I was like, hey, what’s going on here you guys? I’m your biggest fan. I was very committed to my products, to my brands. Do you ever eat seaweed snacks? - - #### SHEA - Yes, I do. - - #### REIHAN - Those are the bomb. - - *SEAWEED SNACK SALESMAN carrying a giant package of seaweed snacks tries to enter, but the WAITER grabs him by the shirt and pulls him off stage.* - - #### SHEA - I would endorse that product. I would advertise that on my podcast. - - #### REIHAN - You could do a whole series of articles about the virtues of seaweed snacks. You could do like native seaweed snack advertising in your articles. - - #### SHEA - Terrible. - - #### REIHAN - I would happily promote people eating seaweed snacks. They’re so delicious. I would happily do that for free. - - *SEAWEED SNACK SALESMAN tries to enter again, and again the WAITER pulls him off stage.* - - #### SHEA - This’ll be my last question, so you can get going. I read in this one article about you that you feel like when you started identifying as a conservative it opened up a lot of things for you intellectually. I’m curious about that because I don’t have a desire to do that. I don’t want to define myself in that way. With a term. I feel like I’m constantly struggling to figure out where I lie. I have a lot of questions I’d like to ask people. - - *Lights quickly fade to one bright spotlight over the table. REIHAN holds up the basketball like Hamlet holds up Yorick’s skull.* - - #### REIHAN - To some extent it was a way to give me a vocabulary for the things that I believed. And in giving me that vocabulary, it gave me access to a larger tradition of ideas that suddenly felt more relevant, or I came to understand them in a different way. - - *REIHAN stands with the basketball and moves in front of the table. The spotlight follows him. He spins the basketball on his finger.* - - #### REIHAN - There’s a book called On Fraternity by a guy named Danny Kruger. It’s an extremely short book by a guy who used to be an advisor to the UK Conservative party. His observation was that the triptik of the French Revolution was liberty, equality, fraternity. We think of liberty as the party of the right, and equality is generally associated with the left. But fraternity, first of all we don’t think of it all that often, or solidarity, the mutual connections we have to other citizens. So you can think about the vertical connections you have to the state, or hierarchies. But what is our fellow feeling? Are we a cohesive society or not? And he was talking about how in a way that’s the most interesting terrain because right and left have different attitudes toward that terrain, and solidarity, and how we relate to each other. That just made a lot of sense to me, and what he took to be the conservative perspective on cohesion and solidarity, and where it comes from - what are the sources of it? It struck me as very compelling. And then that gave me access to a lot of other people like Robert Nisbet, and people that I don’t actually agree with all the time, but it exposed me to a kind of counter-history of the world. The thing is like, do you really think that people who disagree with you just hate poor people? Which is sort of an answer I get. Do you really think that’s the issue here? And the thing is, if you really believe that, life is super simple. It would be amazing to live in your world in which things are that straight forward. I just don’t buy it. - - *When SHEA speaks the spotlight abruptly shuts off and the main lights turn on. * - - #### SHEA - What you’re talking about doesn’t seem liberal or conservative. Its just being more considerate. - - *Main lights abruptly shut off again and the spotlight return to REIHAN. He spins the basketball.* - - #### REIHAN - So, my thing is just a very basic subsidiarity kind of thing; it's easier for those human scale institutions to learn and change based on those textured understandings of people, then it is for formal institutions. By the way, there are all kinds of contractions with that kind of view. It’s a fair argument. And I think that it could be like you’re bringing together different values that matter in different kinds of ways, and trying to kind of reconcile them. One really smart argument that is made by people like Elizabeth Anderson on the left is that governments and corporations are the same. They’re both corporate entities. But governments, at least in a democratic society are democratic. They’re accountable. Corporations aren’t. And so that’s why governments should have wide authority and corporations are kind of suspect for that reason. My view is a little different. My view is that corporations can go out of business. So, if it’s a failed experiment, they can cease to exist and we can start another one. That doesn’t mean that they’re good, but the fact that they can be wound down in that way is very valuable. - - *WAITER enters and main lights go up. He holds out the check for REIHAN to sign, then starts walking away. REIHAN throws the basketball overhand to the WAITER and the WAITER exits. REIHAN walks back over to the table. SHEA stands.* - - #### REIHAN - Hopefully you can make some sense out of this. - - *SHEA and REIHAN shake hands. She looks rather stunned.* - - #### REIHAN - Let me know if you want to talk to anyone else. I know some people who you may enjoy talking to. - - #### SHEA - Thank you so much for meeting with me. And thanks for lunch, it was really good. - - #### REIHAN - My pleasure. Thank you for coming. - - *REIHAN begins walking off stage and SHEA follows. HILLARY CLINTON and JEB BUSH enter from the other side of the stage. SHEA turns to see them staring at her with puppy eyes. SHEA hurries off behind REIHAN.* - - *Blackout. End.* - - - - - - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/tariq-goddard.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/tariq-goddard.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 3bbc15a..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/tariq-goddard.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,89 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "Repeater Books’ Tariq Goddard About the Future of Non-Corporate Publishing" - -:markdown -An Interview with Repeater Books’ Tariq Goddard About the Future of Non-Corporate Publishing.
- - -The world of book publishing has been changing drastically over the past 10 years. Publishing houses and agencies have had to shift their focus from only print books to a broader spectrum because of the boom of e-readers and online/self publishing. There are less publishing houses to differentiate between: just last year Random House became Penguin Random House. Medium sized publishers are being bought out. One option for writers hoping to see their name in print are well — established, conglomerate publishing houses, but in order to be considered by them, a writer needs to have a well—connected agent. A different option is an independent or small house that cuts out the agent position and works directly with the writer, but that will inevitably print less copies of the writer’s work. This is assuming the writer doesn’t decide to just self-publish online.
- - This past year there has been a lot of transformations in the publishing industry, which has allowed for the rise of a new trend. New publishing companies (both agencies and houses) have the idea that not only can a writer write, but they also can have a close relationship with the final product, being the physical book, which is precisely what Tariq Goddard wanted in his career. - - Tariq, 40, is a British writer and publisher. In the beginning of his career, he focused on his writing. He has written five novels, the first of which was nominated for the Whitbread Book Award for First Novel. His appetite for books began with his writing, but as he continued his career he realized that he also had an urge to produce books. In 2007 he set out with the desire to publish works that have a lot of potential but haven’t been picked up by big publishing houses — books that don’t already have an agent, books that aren’t a popular concept, books that are written by a new author. He began this journey at Zero Books, a small publishing house in the UK, whose parent company was John Hunt Publishing (JHP). However, in the past year, the need to break out on his own drove him and a group of founders from Zero Books to their new project Repeater Books. - - The issues that led Tariq away from Zero, wasn’t necessarily with Zero Books itself, but more with the JHP. A side-by-side relationship with the writers and their works was not a top priority for JHP. Attempts were made to buy Zero out in 2014, but John Hunt Publishing refused, making Tariq’s and his team’s departure their only option. - - After seven years at Zero Books, Repeater Books was born and is beginning its first full year of publishing. Tariq and his team of six began a fresh start at Repeater carrying the same fundamental ideas they had at Zero. The ultimate goal, as laid out [on their](http://repeaterbooks.com) website, is “…bringing marginal, esoteric, idiosyncratic and necessary literature and thought into a mainstream that would otherwise ignore it.” Now funded by a different parent company that is on board with Repeater’s principles — to have an in depth relationships with each author and book that is produced — they are ready for the beginning of their first official year in business. - - ###### Cerise Steel: I would like to hear your perspective on how Repeater started. Was it your idea? Was it a group decision? What was the driving force? - - Tariq Goddard: The accidental is often overlooked in retrospect, and it’s tempting to make everything look like it was part of a plan, but Repeater came about very quickly — and not as the result of a long-term blueprint. The gestation period between deciding to do it and the official launch announcement was no more than a month. Although the situation between Zero Books and it’s parent company, John Hunt Publishing, had been very bad for some time, neither I nor the rest of the team planned to resign until the moment we did. From there, it was a question of deciding how best to continue, develop, and expand upon what we had already achieved with Zero Books. As a proposed buy-out of Zero had been rejected, we all agreed that beginning a new publishing project was the only way ahead. - - ###### What is Repeater’s business model? Is it based off of any particular company or concept? - - Repeater is a combination of the aspects of old style publishing we think work: close contact with authors, collaborative editing, face to face meetings whenever possible, and the benefits bequeathed by the internet — our “office” being online, submissions being sent to us through our website, and the ability to work from home. - - ###### What makes Repeater unique from Zero Books and what is the same? - - What Zero and Repeater have in common is that they both work with a parent company. In our case it is Watkins Media, who are wholly supportive and happy for us to operate however we wish. It would be disingenuous to pretend that there are no other similarities between our current and former project. A member of our team and our backer are both shareholders with Zero, but there are number of changes in emphasis and procedure that make Repeater qualitatively different. We are not interested in releasing vast numbers of books as an end in itself, charging authors subsidies for commercially unpromising material, issuing contracts that do not pay on the first thousand copies sold, or solely working through an electronic database or forum. - - However, so far as the titles that we take on is concerned, there will still be an aesthetic and political continuity between our new releases and the books we commissioned with Zero, as we still wish to play a role in curating and creating a culture in the margins. I think this is especially timely, because as it becomes harder to identify a single area, unified movement, or cohesive system of ideas that reflects what is most interesting or vital about either the world or the small part of it publishers like us inhabit, the need to round up scattered and insightful voices in one place becomes more and more important. - - ###### Does Repeater have any rival companies trying to do the same thing? What makes Repeater different than them? - - If big publishers had been as effective as they ought to be, there would have been no room for a Zero or Repeater; our success basically is a comment on their caution and timidity. But that can’t go on forever, so I hope a general cultural shift towards titles like ours will help sustain interest in what will become an overcrowded market. The other small publishers have always been very supportive of us, and I don’t think of them as rivals, as our interest in culture as a whole and new writing in particular helps us not tread on too many toes, as does our eclecticism and willingness to take on any type of writing (fiction, poetry, or most recently a collection of essays on Prince). - -If big publishers had been as effective as they ought to be, there would have been no room for a Zero or Repeater; our success basically is a comment on their caution and timidity.
- - ###### What is going on with Repeater now? - - At the present we’re trying to keep up a presence and a level of interest in our project, without an actual product to sell, while behind the scenes building up a new list of writers. In the beginning, a publisher has to encourage potential writers, making them believe that everyone’s work will actually come to something, while at the same time as working out who will design the covers, how long will it take to print and release a book, and how much we will price them at, etc. - - ###### Where do you see Repeater going through 2015? Where do you want the company to be by the end of the year? - - Ideally we would like to have launched our first titles a year after we announced our existence, which would mean that our first releases would be scheduled for December. Naturally, that aim is contingent on the logistics of how quickly our first wave of authors complete their manuscripts and of how fast and efficiently we can get our infrastructure to function. As we have found that few authors hand in their work early, and that the practical difficulties to do with editing, design, and printing are never smaller than you think, January/February 2016 is probably realistic. - - ###### Can you explain Repeater’s process of contracts, editing, and publishing, when working with writers? - - Decisions on who to sign are usually made by us all and our backer in contentious and borderline cases, with fewer of us being involved when the decision is clear cut and obvious. Our contracts do not differ wildly from the industry standard, with modest advances being offered in some cases, where either an author’s circumstances or a previous track record require one. Our aim is to have a five month turnaround time between an edited manuscript and its release as a book. An author is assigned, or can choose between five editors, with me taking on the majority of texts at present. - - ###### How many writers do you already have, and are there any you think we should be keeping an eye on that you intend to launch with? - We have about 30 writers now, and we hope that we’ll settle into a rhythm where we’re able to release at least one book per month. Of the writers that we intend to launch with, we have three out of four places confirmed: Dawn Foster, who will be writing contra-corporate feminism, Mark Fisher on popular modernism, and Laura Oldfield Ford's illustrative record of her journeys through China’s New Economic Zones. The fourth place is still open. - - ###### Who would you say is Repeater’s target audience? - - Many publishers tend to share the same collective unconscious: they like and fear the same things, media keeps recirculating the same names with the odd new addition, and in effect they appeal to an already existing audience that has been catered to the point of saturation. Our potential readership are people as heartily tired of this state of affairs as ourselves — readers who have been put off reading, who wish to encounter writing that exists in between and outside given genre distinctions. Zero showed everyone that audience exist. But where it doesn’t, it can be created by challenging work that is rewarded and not marginalized for its courage and individuality. - - ###### What are your five favorite books of all time? And what are your favorite books that you have published? - - I don’t think you can compare and rank greatness against itself, and I don’t know how to list my own preferences in this way. So as far as my favorites are concerned, it would probably be easier if I gave the names of the five writers that most heavily influenced and encouraged me to be as singular as possible, and who I could never improve upon because no one could do them better than themselves: Norman Mailer, Marcel Proust, Emily Bronte, Henry James, and Friedrich Nietzsche. - - The five books I have commissioned that I have most enjoyed are Mark Fisher’s “Ghosts Of My Life,” Adam Kotsko “Why We Love Sociopaths,” Eugene Thacker’s “In The Dust Of This Planet,” Phil Knight’s “Strangled,” and Alex Niven’s “The Last Tape,” although I easily could have picked many more. - - ###### How do you get your news? - - I get very little news — sometimes reading The Guardian online football page and The Economist every week just to see what the free market fundamentalists are thinking. Having a very specialist focus and avoiding papers and magazines helps me find new voices online that we could publish the books of, and allows me enough time to keep up with my novel reading, which I need to do to remain in a creative literary space. Fortunately, the rest of our team is very well informed and media savvy! - - ###### I am a writer and am interested in publishing. How did you decide to do both writing and publishing? What kind of difficulties did you have breaching both fields? - - I wanted to be writer and have been writing since I was 16. I had no ambition to be a publisher and believed it would be a project that I would devote just a few years to, not realizing that it would become one half of my working life. Writing is a narcissistic activity, in which a god-like sense of one's own importance is the perquisite for the indifference, failures, and sometimes qualified successes that are the standard experience of good and bad writers. - - Conversely, publishing has to do with taking a back seat, compromise, and patience — an entirely different set of qualities, less fun perhaps, although in the long run useful for a writer who wishes to mature, just as a writers braggadocio and recklessness has to underpin some of the decisions that one makes as a publisher. My advice would be to start as a writer first, and then get into publishing if you’re ready to extend yourself. Publishing will eat into the time and energy that could be spent writing, while the practical thinking that it encourages is not always helpful when trying to switch into the imaginary space of a novel. But, the humility acquired from seeing things both on the side of the author and editor, as well as the pleasure of being brought into contact with real people (rather than one’s own creations), compensates for the surrender of pure autonomy. - - ###### What advice can you give to students coming into the book publishing field, both as writers and publishers? - - For writers — begin writing at once and don’t spread yourself thinly. Take one project at a time and don’t begin unless you’re ready to go all the way with what you’ve started. And don’t start at all unless you absolutely cannot stop yourself from doing so. - - For publishers — is there something great that will remain unpublished and never see the light of day unless you champion its cause? If there isn’t then there is every danger that you will simply be adding to more of the same, and could be better employed in some other role. - - ###### What is the future of book publishing? - - I don’t think there will be a publishing apocalypse, or that the meltdown of the past few years with bookshops closing and publishers lists being cut will continue. In fact, the moment of the tablet and blog is already passing and the hardcopy book, which is an unimprovable technology, will survive and make a comeback. Eventually, the major publishers will see that they have to be more flexible and responsive. I expect a proliferation of smaller imprints and independents like ours to appear in the next few years, with the distinction between a publisher and author being less stark than it was when my first book came out in 2002. Writers have been forced to take more notice of the production and marketing side of their work, which is an anachronistic luxury that a new writer can not afford. - -The moment of the tablet and blog is already passing and the hardcopy book, which is an unimprovable technology, will survive and make a comeback. Eventually, the major publishers will see that they have to be more flexible and responsive.
- - diff --git a/source-old/interviews/victoria-taylor.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/victoria-taylor.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 09e0a28..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/victoria-taylor.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,52 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "There’s No Place Like Reddit" -:markdown -A Short Dek.
-2015 is a big year for reddit. Next month will mark ten years since the company first launched its website and quickly became one of the world’s most popular online communities with millions of daily users. I met with reddit to discuss why “The Front Page of the Internet” is still going strong after a decade – and why they recently decided to enter new media territory.
- - It’s only 10 AM when we sit down to chat with reddit in their trendy coworking space in Lower Manhattan, but the company already has the Internet buzzing with excitement. It’s April Fools’ Day and reddit has posted a bright blue button on its website, which reddit users — or “redditors” — are only allowed to push once. Next to the button is a timer that counts down from 60 seconds, every time a redditor pushes the button the timer is reset. No one knows what will happen once the timer hits zero, which is driving people wild with anticipation — some users are trying to convince everyone else to “stop pressing the button every few seconds” while others (currently more than 800,000 people) push it and claim to “REGRET NOTHING.” - - While the button may be an unusual event, the buzz surrounding reddit is not. Since the company launched its website in 2005, it has become one of the most popular online communities in the world — one of the biggest highlights being a visit from President Obama, who did an AMA live blog (reddit language for “Ask Me Anything”) in 2012. Last month, more than 169 million people from more than 200 countries visited the website to share and discuss their stories, thoughts, and ideas; over time the online community also has managed to raise millions of dollars for charity. - - Thus, it would seem that the two reddit co-founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, who initially set out with the simple goal of making the world “suck less,” could easily say mission accomplished. But there is more to come. In January, [reddit announced](http://www.redditblog.com/2015/01/upvoted-reddit-podcast-for-all-stories.html) that it will now be creating original media content from the pool of stories that users share on their website every day. “There are so many media companies that are so good at harvesting that content,” Alexis Ohanian told Inc.com in [an interview this past January](http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/reddit-podcast-new-era.html), adding, “What I want to do is allow those stories — and the story behind their story — to be told by the people who are actually responsible for them.” - - The first content of this kind is the free podcast series “[Upvoted](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/upvoted-by-reddit/id954162809),” which was published in January. However, reddit isn’t limiting itself to audio, as they want to experiment in [other](http://www.redditblog.com/2015/04/announcing-upvoted-weekly-new-opt-in.html) [areas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyrrRMX0qlY) as well. We sat down with the company’s Director of Talent, Victoria Taylor, to talk about this new turn and explore some of the reasons for reddit’s seemingly never-ending success. - - ###### Sara Wilkins: What makes reddit stand out? - - Victoria Taylor: Well, it's very immediate but it also lasts a long time. Let’s say, for example, that I'm someone who has an ingrown toenail. You don’t necessarily want to broadcast that on Facebook or talk about that on Twitter, like, "Hey guys, anybody out there got an ingrown toenail?" That’s just weird. But you can go on reddit, do [a search for “ingrown toenail,”](http://www.reddit.com/search?q=ingrown+toenail&sort=relevance&t=all) and you'll probably find a lot of disgusting photos of people’s ingrown toenails. You can also talk to others and even read a two year old thread asking for advice about it: "Hey guys, I went to the doctor. He said that I don't need to get treatment. What should I do?" It's a combination of so many different things. You can learn about other people's experiences, you can ask for advice, you can share pictures of what happened to you — and it's all in an anonymous or pseudo-anonymous way. So it allows people to talk about or connect around issues that they might not necessarily be open to discuss, like ingrown toenails. It’s just a very versatile platform, because you have unlimited space to write, people can be sharing their stories and anecdotes. I get this kind of feedback from a lot of people who work in media, saying that reddit is where they go to be themselves. On other social media platforms they have to present a very professional version of themselves. "I can only be so and so on Twitter. I can only be so and so on Facebook. But when I'm on reddit I get to be myself.” - - ###### It's been 10 years since you launched. What changes have you gone through since? - - So many. It's like looking at a massive mosaic and trying to pick out individual tiles. You really can't do that. I would say that, obviously, having President Obama stop by and do an AMA a few years ago, that was definitely huge. I would also say being a part of so much social good. I think a lot of people don't realize that redditors are very generous and they've donated millions of dollars to help different charities. People will respond very quickly to those in need, so when you see a story that goes viral on reddit and it has a component of "this kid needs support," or "this organization needs support," people will rally around that very quickly and they'll donate. - - ###### Who is your biggest competition right now? - - I don't think of it as being a competition. I think of it as being a collaboration between so many people — media outlets, television programs, board games, you name it. reddit is really a way of keeping fandom alive. It's a way of helping people discuss your story, and bringing people to your journalistic outlet or your event and talking about your brand. It's about creating additional ways for people to get excited about something, and that is not always going to be predictable or controllable. I think that everyone likes to benefit from it — but not everyone likes to not benefit from it. For example, let's say you're a big yogurt brand and everyone is like: "Oh, I love your yogurt," and then one day an article goes viral on reddit that says "This yogurt brand actually contains these preservatives and it’s really bad for you." Obviously, that's not going to be nice for that company, but it’s an organic conversation; it’s a space where people are going to connect and discuss multi-faceted issues. It's a space that belongs to the community and that is very different from most social media platforms, which typically are controlled by someone or something. If I’m on that yogurt brand’s Facebook page, they can be taking down comments related to that article. They could be like: "Don't pay attention to that article, we are the best yogurt brand out there." If it was a Twitter chat, you don't have a lot of space and it is really easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of hashtags that are being thrown around. On reddit there is the opportunity to have a thoughtful conversation where people can present pros and cons. It can be a really interesting space for a dialogue, but it's definitely not like any other space because there is no editor. We have moderators, but moderators are essentially voluntary participants who moderate individual subreddits. Each subreddit has its own rules and policies just the same way that Salon has different editorial guidelines and a different voice than the New York Times. - -It's a way of helping people discuss your story, and bringing people to your journalistic outlet or your event and talking about your brand. It's about creating additional ways for people to get excited about something, and that is not always going to be predictable or controllable.
- - - ###### It’s been 10 years. Why is reddit still going strong? - - Basically, the goal was to make it easy for people to connect around what's interesting for them. It is very much driven by interest, so that means it can be very on trend and it can move a lot faster than anything else. So for example, when the TV show Better Call Saul launched, the Better Call Saul subreddit was the fastest growing television subreddit or community ever. That is pretty crazy. The thing is, if you were looking at it from a traditional perspective and you said: “OK, all these shows are launching, let's start a website for each show” — that wouldn't necessarily be sustainable as a traditional entity. But, if you are letting the fans do stuff, and letting the fans connect about what's important to them, it makes it very nimble and that means that people can essentially see what's interesting to them and connect around it. I think that that’s really what it's all about — the fact that there are 500 subreddits created every day. Obviously, not all of them are going to make it. Some of them are going to fall by the wayside because maybe it's something timely or random — like the shark at the Super Bowl. Obviously, that got tons of viral discussion and people started a subreddit devoted to the shark, but that's not something people are necessarily going to be talking about six months from now. And if you compare that to Better Call Saul — that's something they're going to be connecting around for months or years to come. So not all of the communities are going to make it, but it is very easy to create a community and to connect with other people who share your interests. - - ###### You also started creating original media content this year. What’s that about? - - Yeah, that's something due to Alexis Ohanian, our co-founder. He recently re-joined the company and we're really glad to have him back. He brought his own [passion for doing podcasts](http://www.nyrdradio.com/), putting content out there and sharing things that he finds interesting, and helping highlight different parts of the reddit community. reddit is a wealth of ideas, inspiration, funny pictures, and wacky things; this is just one way that we’re trying to highlight interesting events or stories that may have taken place on the platform. So all the things that are featured on the Upvoted podcast have to be connected to the site in some way. It's just digging a little bit deeper to why such-and-such occurred, or why it was so important for someone. It gives additional context and explores a specific story and by giving it additional dimensions. People on reddit will do all this stuff all the time too. There will be people who will post: "Hey, I recorded myself reading your poem. You can listen to that on my Soundcloud here." reddit is essentially whatever you decide that you want it to be. If people want to listen to podcasts, that is great. If they want to just go and watch funny videos that's fine too. - - ###### You’ve recently tightened privacy regulations on the site. How come? - - Well, we revealed a new community policy, which is that if people report photos that were taken of them in any sexual way without their consent, we will remove them. We were really the first people to put that policy out there and then other websites started doing it too. It is important because it’s changing the media landscape. Although this isn’t a new problem, as it was happening in the 1980s, it is not like anything anyone has ever seen before, so it's something that we are all learning together. - -We revealed a new community policy, which is that if people report photos that were taken of them in any sexual way without their consent, we will remove them. We were really the first people to put that policy out there and then other websites started doing it too.
- - ###### How do you balance that? So much of reddit's ideological core is freedom of speech, the open forum, and the idea that everyone has a voice. - - Right, but it's also comes back to respecting the individual. It’s obviously something that we're going to be helping everyone on a case-by-case basis. - - ###### You're not afraid that having more regulations now will scare some reddit users away? - - It's really not regulation. It's a responsive policy. It is not going out there and actively saying that "Your submission will not be approved unless we go through it." This is a huge important step because in the past it has been very difficult to reach out to help, and historically we’re such a small team. We have always had a contact form, but being able to go out there and say “If this happens to you, reach out to us and we'll help” — that is a huge step. That's not something that anyone else was really doing. So I think that's just one step towards fixing what is obviously a multi-faceted issue that affects all social media platforms, not just us. But it's a step in the right direction; I think the other announcements that are made by other social media companies are just showing that we're all working together. diff --git a/source-old/interviews/youtube-review.html.haml b/source-old/interviews/youtube-review.html.haml deleted file mode 100644 index 51426ac..0000000 --- a/source-old/interviews/youtube-review.html.haml +++ /dev/null @@ -1,49 +0,0 @@ -- content_for :title, "The New Face of Reviews" - -:markdown -Any review revolves around the same idea: a personal opinion about a product. However, this is changing. As a medium, YouTube has changed the way that things can be reviewed and has given reviewers greater stylistic choices and freedom. We still see channels that review things in a fairly conventional manner (with one or more people discussing something and giving their opinion on it), but now there are channels that are experimenting and doing weird stuff. For example, Youtube’s view-count promotes creativity to attract attention, which creates certain stylistic choices that haven’t been seen in traditional written reviews or review programs that air on TV. The reaction video is now a legitimate way for YouTube channels to review something. Reviews have been a static genre for such a long time, but now we are seeing their nature change and deviate because YouTube is a medium that was made with the intention of giving everyone their own voice. We’ve picked out seven distinct examples that illustrate how YouTube has incubated an evolution of online reviews:
- - ##### TheNeedleDrop ... Subscribers: 463,838 - - ###### Frank Ocean - Channel Orange Review - - Anthony Fantano is the self proclaimed “Internet’s busiest music nerd.” His channel proves this, as he pumps five to six reviews a week. His reviews are balanced by his thoughtful and well articulated opinion on the album or piece of music that he is reviewing. He balances this seriousness with silliness; he plays different characters or just does silly things like chopping up the video and slowing it down. He also uses the popular YouTube video editing method where he cuts every other sentence or important point and then refocuses the video. Any music fan who either wants validation about their opinion or wants to find new music would enjoy Fantano’s channel. - - ##### EvanTubeHD ... Subscribers: 1,411,326 - - ###### Review of the Largest Gummy Worm - - The remarkable thing about EvanTubeHD is the fact that he’s eight years old and makes almost 1.3 million dollars a year from his YouTube channel. In this review, we can see how well he articulates his thoughts (for an eight year old reviewing a giant gummy worm). - - ##### BuzzFeedVideo ... Subscribers: 5,872,311 - - ###### Professional Baker Reviews Cheap Doughnuts - - BuzzFeed has a huge YouTube presence and they have a bunch of review videos that often juxtapose reviewers and products in an interesting way. For example, with this video they brought a professional baker to review cheap doughnuts. They are combining high brow with low brow in video form, which yields an entertaining mix of professionalism and amateurism. - - ##### RegularCars ... Subscribers: 170,256 - - ###### Regular Car Reviews: 1990 Lexus LS400 - - This channel is interesting because it’s reviewing something that is retro and clearly out of style. However, this automotive car review is more than just that. RegularCars is able to translate his knowledge into genuinely funny insight with his dry sense of humor and POV filming techniques. The videos also feature vintage YouTube pictures of floating cars accompanied by lovely word art to give this channel a true retro feel. - - ##### Daym Drops ... Subscribers: 471,162 - - ###### Five Guys Burgers and Fries Review - - The classic reaction video. Daym Drops reviews mostly fast food products in his car as he’s eating them. The level of intimacy, being in his car concealed from the outside world, is what sets this video apart, along with his humorous commentary. This video places you in the passenger seat as Daym is chowing down on a Five Guys double cheeseburger. - - ##### Channel Awesome ... Subscribers: 72,480 - - ###### The Nostalgia Critic - - In this video, The Nostalgia Critic, whose motto is “I remember it so you don’t have to,” gives us his top ten cereal mascots and their stories. We get the mascots’ histories with old commercial footage, but we also get his sometimes cringey commentary. He managed to combine the one-man-show review style with actual historical information that can be hard to find. It would have been easy for this video to only contain The Nostalgia Critic’s opinion, but he goes a step further and does the work of adding historical material. Compare his video with this article and the difference is overwhelming. - - ##### Lazy Game Review ... Subscribers: 264,852 - - ###### The Sims 3 Pet Review - - Lazy Game Review’s username pretty much sums up what he’s all about. The review shows a gameplay of whatever game he is reviewing: for this video it’s The Sims 3 Pet Expansion Pack, with his dry commentary over the gameplay. There’s a distinct monotonality to his voice that adds to his persona and makes his commitment to the Lazy Game Reviewer character more convincing. He’s playing the part of a lazy critic while simultaneously making his reviews weird and funny. diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/all.js b/source-old/javascripts/all.js deleted file mode 100644 index 22b01ee..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/all.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -//= require jquery -//= require_tree . - -$(window).load(function(){ - if ( $('body').is('.d7')){ - // do - $( '.menu ul').addClass('collapsed').toggle(); - } -}); \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/footnotehandler.js b/source-old/javascripts/footnotehandler.js deleted file mode 100644 index 9414807..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/footnotehandler.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,39 +0,0 @@ - -function footnoteHandler() { - - $('return to text').appendTo('.fn-block'); - - $( 'sup' ).click(function(){ - - var reference_id = $(this).attr('id').split("_").pop(); - var footnote_id = "#foot_" + reference_id; - - // Hide any visible footnote - $('.footnote').fadeOut(); - - if ($(footnote_id).hasClass('active')) { - $(footnote_id).fadeOut(); - $(footnote_id).removeClass('active'); - } - else { - if (!$(footnote_id).hasClass('active')) { - $(footnote_id).fadeToggle(); - $(footnote_id).addClass('active'); - } - } - - $('.fullscreen-fn').dblclick(function(){ - $(footnote_id).fadeOut(); - $(footnote_id).removeClass('active'); - }); - - $('.fn-close-button').click(function(){ - $(footnote_id).fadeOut(); - $(footnote_id).removeClass('active'); - }); - - }); - - - -} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/landinghandler.js b/source-old/javascripts/landinghandler.js deleted file mode 100644 index cc1fea2..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/landinghandler.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,15 +0,0 @@ -function landingHandler() { - if(!window.location.hash && window.location.pathname.split(/\/(?=.)/).length == 1){ - if( $('body').is('.d7, .d6')) { - $( "#about" ).show(); - console.log("landing on narrow view"); - } - else { - if( $('body').is('.d5, .d4, .d3')) { - $( "#about" ).hide(); - console.log('landing on wide view'); - } - } - } - console.log("landing handler loaded successfully!"); -} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/maphandler.js b/source-old/javascripts/maphandler.js deleted file mode 100644 index 09eb20f..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/maphandler.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,29 +0,0 @@ -function mapHandler() { - $( ".pin:not(.active)" ).click(function(){ - $('.detail').hide(); - $(this).siblings().show(); - $(this).addClass('active'); - }); - - $( ".pin.active" ).click(function(){ - $(this).siblings().hide(); - $(this).removeClass('active'); - }); - $( '.detail .close').click(function() { - $(this).parent().hide(); - }); - - $('.map').mousedown(function(){ - $(this).addClass('dragged-map'); - }); - - $('.map').mouseup(function(){ - $(this).removeClass('dragged-map'); - }); - - $('.map').dblclick(function(){ - window.location.href = "/"; - }); - - console.log("map handler loaded successfully!"); -} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/menuhandler.js b/source-old/javascripts/menuhandler.js deleted file mode 100644 index 6154cab..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/menuhandler.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,38 +0,0 @@ -function menuHandler(){ - - $( '.d7 .menu-toggle').click(function(e){ - e.preventDefault(); - $( '.menu ul' ).toggle(); - }); - - $('.menu .menu-button').click(function(){ - target = $(this).attr("href"); - window.location.href = "/" + target; - }); - - $( '.menu-button').click(function(){ - // $( '.menu ul' ).toggle(); - }); - - $( '.hide-modal').click(function(){ - $( '.modal').hide(); - $( '.menu ul' ).toggle(); - }); - - $( '#toc_button').click(function(){ - $( '.modal').hide(); - $( "#toc" ).toggle(); - }); - - $( '#panorama_button').click(function(){ - $( '.modal').hide(); - $( "#panorama" ).toggle(); - }); - - $( '#about_button').click(function(){ - $( '.modal').hide(); - $( "#about" ).toggle(); - }); - - console.log("menu handler loaded successfully!"); -} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/seriesd.js b/source-old/javascripts/seriesd.js deleted file mode 100644 index 3ff0171..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/seriesd.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,14 +0,0 @@ -function assignSeriesD() { - var width = $(window).width(); - $(document.body).removeClass('d3 d4 d5 d6 d7'); - new_class = - width > 1441 ? 'd3' : - width > 1081 ? 'd4' : - width > 822 ? 'd5' : - width > 641 ? 'd6' : - width > 0 ? 'd7' : ''; - console.log('adding class to body:' + new_class); - var className = $('body').attr('class'); - console.log('body class:' + className); - $('body').addClass(new_class); -} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/teamhandler.js b/source-old/javascripts/teamhandler.js deleted file mode 100644 index b01f795..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/teamhandler.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,12 +0,0 @@ -function teamHandler() { - $( '.bio-trigger' ).click(function(){ - - var team_member = $(this).attr('id'); - var bio = "#" + team_member + "-bio"; - $('.bio-trigger').removeClass('active'); - $(this).addClass('active'); - $('.bio').hide(); - $('.bio-container').show(); - $(bio).fadeToggle(); - }); -} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/urlhandler.js b/source-old/javascripts/urlhandler.js deleted file mode 100644 index cbc8ad7..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/urlhandler.js +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -function urlHandler() { - var className = $('body').attr('class'); - console.log('body load class:' + className); - if(window.location.hash){ - var hash = window.location.hash; - $( hash ).show(); - } - console.log('url handler loaded successfully!'); -} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/source-old/javascripts/vendor/dragscroll/bower.json b/source-old/javascripts/vendor/dragscroll/bower.json deleted file mode 100644 index 0e7bf9b..0000000 --- a/source-old/javascripts/vendor/dragscroll/bower.json +++ /dev/null @@ -1,31 +0,0 @@ -{ - "name": "dragscroll", - "version": "0.0.5", - "homepage": "https://github.com/asvd/dragscroll", - "authors": [ - "Dmitry Prokashev