Fox News won’t drop Tucker Carlson over a commercial boycott cause it’ll be short term and in the long term he’s making the turn by which they (as a political machine or profit-seeking enterprise) renew their 65+ audience with 18-49s
At a unionized site, there’s some attempt to control the editorial line, prevent the editors from covering some figure, or covering them favorably, with threats that they won’t put up with this
The money files a complaint
A capital-friendly NLRB finds the union implicated in illegal “secondary action”, the union is decertified and its strike fund and operating accounts seized
(since Taft-Hartley ‘47, American labor law is directly oriented against allowing labor to leverage its position in keystone industries to turn other entities and ultimately the country leftward)
Writers are on notice they get economic security and entry into the middle class OR they get to be rabble-rousing ruffians
So as far as I’m told there are three ways left in which more than a handful of people can survive as workaday writers, they are
Women’s blogs that cover supermarket checkout topics
Algorithmic content, creating crappy 20 minute how-to listicles from and for the internet, forever
Recapping television shows
(Technical writing is still okay if you have a security clearance, everything else is going to India)
Now as an American without a security clearance who is not yet a beloved Hollywood darling and might like to work by writing anyway, that sucks but it’s a lot of other posts.
What I want to raise here (and leave dangling, without much resolution) is that last point, TV recapping. It is now a thing! But I don’t really hear anyone thinking or talking *about* it. Maybe ‘cause it’s not one of those three. Maybe I read the wrong tumblrs.
But isn’t that weird?
That we’ve outsourced TV watching? Moreover that we’ve outsourced TV-watching-for-cultural-fluency-and-status? The business of sitting through an episode, and developing opinions about the action, and the characters, and the writing, and the performances, and rendering those opinions witty?
Maybe it’ll turn out like book reviews were from the ‘50s-'90s, half way for people to pretend to have consumed esteemed culture they hadn’t, half weird and nonobvious form where for economic reasons all the best essayists pitch all their best ideas pegged to tenuously related (b/h)ooks.
Like how modern blockbusters are stories pegged to tenuously related internationally bankable stars.
And another way to look at it is that just like medical care, or childcare, or cleaning, or sewing, or food preparation, or the ur-example, food production, television watching is a domestic activity we less and less find worthwhile to do ourselves - Baumol’s cost disease cheapening it minute-for-minute and pushing it under the respectable threshhold - yet still find worthwhile enough to Have Done.
Just wanted to mention that two of the coolest magazines from the 1980s-1990s, Black Belt magazine and the Weekly World News, are now readable in their entirety from archives at the Google Books service.
So Penthouse Magazine is relaunching with an antiwoke editorial line, opening with a package going after Judd Apatow for, basically, betraying (his own) comedy to perform wokeness in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the mob
Penthouse Australia I hear has been running a while as a lad mag with an alt-lite tone, I don’t know whether there’s a relationship, Penthouse has been bought and sold and licensed out a few ways in the last decades
This represents the second publication (after Quillette) I can recall to specifically launch as antiwoke (since Trump’s election there has been a subtler shift in tone from The Atlantic and Harper’s and NY Mag, and indeed the linked author’s has a column at NY Mag’s women’s vertical), meanwhile you may have noticed woke brands shedding writers as they slim or close
Again, I don’t know the relationship to other institutional manifestations of “Penthouse”, but when you think of publications capable of keeping their funding and distribution channels open even in the face of moralizing activist pressure, you do kinda think of Penthouse, so I suppose there’s a synergy there.
Wonder if it’s possible to merge the left-journo “online journalism is in dire straits because it’s all ultimately run for the personal gain of oligarchs” with the right-journocritic “online journalism is in dire straits because no one wants all this leftist pap”
Into like, “a central purpose of journalism is manufacturing consent to the regimes its owners are aligned with and online journalism is failing at that role because it lost the social technology of balancing ‘afflict the comfortable’ idealism with grizzled veteran editors who internalize the money’s interests and keep the kids in line accordingly”
(Remember the dawn of online-first journalism was like, Bill Gates pouring money into Slate in the ‘90s so it could hire experienced editors from like the explicitly-for-its-owners-whimsy TNR to make a publication that assured us that dispassionate, clever white Gen X men had everything under control)
And maybe under current conditions they can’t rediscover it; with institutions shrinking there’s no room to rise the ranks and promotion is by lateral transfer, add in Twitter’s “national newsroom” and attention economy and workers at other pubs have a greater influence over your career course than managers at your own
