Weird that this qualifies as a hot take

Media statistic of the week

Frequent TV series cancellations are altering viewer behaviors, according to a new survey from YouGov. The survey revealed that a quarter of? U.S. adults wait until the finale of a streaming original series before they start it , with 27% saying they fear the show will be canceled with an unresolved ending. Nearly half of respondents (46%) said they sometimes or always wait for the series finale before they begin watching the show.?

Julia MacCary of Variety has more details from the survey, and Lisa Schmeiser agrees with those survey participants: “Attention is currency. Why waste it on streaming-service shows that are canceled on their cliffhanger ending?”

This past week in the media industry?

A big loss

As NPR continues to grapple with revenue challenges, David Folkenflik and Mary Yang reported on the moves the network made last week to cut 10% of its staff: NPR cancels 4 podcasts amid mass layoffs .?

“A big loss,” tweets Brian Edwards-Tiekert . “Seasonal podcasts are where really ambitious reporting and storytelling happens, simply because trying to deliver at that level every week all year would burn most people to a crisp.”

Paul Farhi of The Washington Post has more reporting on the NPR podcast cancellations and notes that “its new round of cost cutting reflects a stagnant ad market, which has prompted other media and entertainment companies to shed employees despite a tight labor market overall.”

Everyone loses

Meanwhile, Sewell Chan and Brandon Formby of The Texas Tribune broke the news that the Texas Observer, the 68-year-old progressive publication, is closing and laying off its staff .

Chan shared, “EXCLUSIVE: The Texas Observer, the crusading liberal magazine founded in 1954, which Molly Ivins edited in the ’70s, is closing down and laying off its staff. The board voted on Wednesday, and again today, to proceed with the shutdown.” He added, “We had the sad duty this evening of informing @gabrielarana, the Observer’s editor in chief since April 2022, of the board’s decision. He told us: ‘This is the first I’m hearing of it, the board hasn’t communicated with me or the staff about this.’”

“This is a terrible, incalculable loss,” tweets Bradford Pearson . As Chan says, “Everyone loses whenever fact-based journalism disappears. No matter what your political leaning, today is a sad day for Texas journalism.”

Gabriel Arana has since shared, “The staff of the @TexasObserver have set up a @gofundme to ask for help after the board voted to shutter the magazine. Please give if you can’t and share even if you can’t.” Here’s the link to that GoFundMe: Save the Texas Observer and aid laid off staff .?

Chan has more on the staff’s response, Texas Observer editors protest layoffs, urge crowdfunding to save the 68-year-old magazine .

‘This make-believe game’

With more revelations about Fox News’s practices coming out every week from the Dominion lawsuit against the network, Mark Jacob shares, “I wrote this story for Harvard’s Nieman Lab about why journalism schools won’t stop dealing with Fox News on campus appearances, internships and jobs despite revelations in the Dominion lawsuit that Fox higher-ups knew the channel was spreading lies.”

Read that piece at Nieman Lab, Why journalism schools won’t quit Fox News . Despite all that we’ve learned from the court filings, “in interviews for this story, the harshest position against Fox News among journalism deans seemed to be a sort of double-secret probation,” Jacobs observes.

Dan Froomkin said, “Journalism schools should certainly teach about Fox News — as an example of what not to do. So I might not urge them to sever all ties. But they should definitely not ever invite Fox News people to appear as authorities on journalism.”

And NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen pointed out, “It’s not just journalism schools — the whole journalism profession in the U.S. has been involved in this make-believe game of Fox as a normal colleague. And now it’s slowly beginning to question that.”

On objectivity in journalism

Earlier this month, former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron gave a speech on objectivity in journalism as part of the Richman Fellowship at Brandeis University. The Post has published an essay adapted from that speech, We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too? ?

Paula Span calls it “A thoughtful argument for recommitting to objectivity (which may not mean what you think it means) in journalism,” while Tony Biasotti thinks “It’s weird that this qualifies as a hot take but I suppose it does.”

It’s worth a read. Jonathan Swan suggests, “Set aside the clicky headline and whatever your views are of WaPo and the author. The most important distinction is b/w the false idea of objectivity-the absurd notion that journalists don’t have political opinions-& an objectivity of method/verification.”?

On the trail of Instascammers

Instagram allows anyone to report an account for violating the company’s standards. And that’s turned into a lucrative business for some fraudsters.

For their new piece, A Scammer Tricked Instagram Into Banning Influencers With Millions of Followers. Then He Made Them Pay to Recover Their Accounts , ProPublica’s Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis followed the trail of one mysterious Instascammer, OBN, who says he made hundreds of thousands of dollars by exploiting Instagram’s security gaps.

“The story of how OBN has manipulated Meta’s systems is a cautionary tale for social media platforms,” they write. Carolina Are notes, “Meta have often denied that flagging can be exploited against vulnerable accounts, and yet my research, my participants, and now this @propublica investigation by @CraigSilverman & @biancafortis shows just how gameable the system is.”

Daniel Golden calls it “A fascinating look by Craig Silverman into the world of OnlyFans models and online influencers who rely on Instagram for income--and the mysterious scammer who is destroying their livelihoods.”

On writing and more

In her Substack newsletter The Bluestocking, Helen Lewis has laid out Helen’s Big Rules of Writing . As she explains, “since I just signed off a longread for the Atlantic, now feels like a good time to reflect on the process of reporting and writing at length.”

There are so many useful nuggets in this. Corby Kummer appreciates the “Excellent advice on staying organized and moralized while researching and writing long pieces from @TheAtlantic author @HelenLewis. Extra credit for advice on being humane and helpful to fact checkers, if you're lucky enough to have them.”

And Oli Franklin-Wallis includes it among “Two great links on writing this morning. The first, a @helenlewis longform-writing masterclass. (There is more wisdom in this single piece than many courses you’ll pay a lot of money for.)” The second is David Owen’s peeve article from January in the New Yorker, The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve .

Soumya Sarkar says that one’s “A semi-attentive investigation into a confounding sentence type,” while Chris Thompson dubbed it a “good blog, i wouldn't say I share this pet peeve but i am a pet peeve enjoyer.”

We’ll leave you this week with Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life , Amanda Petrusich’s New Yorker interview with the artist on grief, faith and the creative process.?

Or as Petrusich puts it, “Had a big conversation with @nickcave about a whole bunch of terrifying things: love, death, God, writing, art, the shelf life of grief. This is a heavy one, but, I hope, useful to anyone who has ever felt alone in their suffering.”

More notable media stories

• For his last piece for The Washington Post, Nathan Grayson took a deep dive into How Twitch lost its way , and Aidan Moher sums it up this way: “It's money. It's always money. Every company loses its way when it chases profit over product and people.”
• Per Todd Spangler of Variety, Twitter to Revoke ‘Legacy’ Verification Badges in April, Leaving Only Paying Subscribers With Blue Check-Marks . Musk will also start charging businesses and organizations $1,000/month for verified status. “Ah well. It was fun, though largely useless, while it lasted,” David Daniel tweeted.
• Also at Variety, Brian Steinberg has the details on Anderson Cooper’s new CNN Sunday newsmagazine, 'The Whole Story.'
• Nilay Patel of The Verge spoke with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien about How to play the long game . “Insightful questions and answers in @TheVerge by @reckless: NYT CEO @meredith_levien walks through destinations, relationships, decision making & how the pieces of their audience strategy fit together,” tweets Josh Awtry .
• The New York Times has ended its Covid data-gathering operation and will report CDC data going forward on a weekly, instead of daily, basis. Wilson Andrews and Lisa Jones have more on the shift.
• Barry Malone links to “A good read on coverage of the Iraq War's 20th anniversary,” by Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review, Iraq and the limits of anniversary journalism .
• Ahead of ongoing WGA negotiations, CT Jones of Rolling Stone went Inside the TV Writers’ Fight to Keep Their Shows From Disappearing . Jones spoke with several TV writers who are worried about streaming cancellations and what it means for the future of the industry.?
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has named Leroy Chapman Jr. editor-in-chief, making Chapman the first Black top editor in the newspaper’s 155-year history . He replaces Kevin Riley, who announced his retirement last Thursday.
• For The New Yorker, Sarah Larson profiled Audie Cornish , host of CNN podcast “The Assignment with Audie Cornish,” digging into Audie Cornish’s Long Struggle to Remake the News . Or as Larson puts it, “I wrote about the great @AudieCornish and her humane, incisive approach to journalism.”
• Questlove Has a New Creative Pursuit: Publishing . He spoke with Alexandra Alter of The New York Times about his inspirations and his plans for the new imprint.

From the Muck Rack Team

Muck Rack hosted a panel discussion as part of the official SXSW 2023 program titled The State of Journalism: Funding, Safety and Trust. Muck Rack co-founder and CEO Greg Galant was joined by panelists Jodie Ginsberg , president of The Committee to Protect Journalists; Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, president of the National Trust for Local News; and Sara Fischer , senior media reporter for Axios and media analyst at CNN for the discussion. Head over to the blog to see the video of the full panel discussion and read 6 takeaways from our SXSW Panel: The State of Journalism - Funding, Safety and Trust .