The Reading List
Streaming Finally Kills Hollywood — Ben Smith — NYT
It is darkly satisfying to know that the wake of destruction that digital media has wrought now includes something as fancy, wealthy, and dumb as Hollywood. Welcome to the ‘disrupted’ club, you glittering nerds.
Walmart Just Explained the Future, and I Suddenly Realized What's Been Missing — Bill Murphy Jr. — Inc.
In the midst of more and more people buying knick-knacks online, it’s amazingly easy to forget that big retailers like Walmart still have a ways to go before they can make it profitable.
Complex Networks Has Named New HR and Social Media Heads After Investigation Into Complaints About Workplace Culture —Lauren Johnson — Business Insider
As employee complaints and allegations of misconduct increasingly become public affairs, employers need to show seriousness and discipline when addressing internal issues and communicating them to the public.
She Created Netflix’s Culture and It Ultimately Got Her Fired — Vivian Giang — Fast Company
From 2016, but new to me. While this article could be read as a bit of a critique of Netflix as being too cold, the philosophy the company took strikes me as ultimately more humane than that of Airbnb’s fake ‘we’re all a family until we ask you to clear out your desk’ approach that was detailed in the NYT more recently.
iOS 14 Redirects Web Links From News+ Publishers to the Apple News Platform — Anthony Ha — Tech Crunch
The people who work at Apple are smart. My guess is that they knew publishers would get pretty pissed about this, but they did it anyway because they desperately need to find some way, any way, to get more people to use Apple News+. Let’s check back in a year and see if this service is still around.
I Worked in Retail Before It Was Cool
Two articles published in Digiday this week crystallized something I have long felt to be true; I’ve never really stopped working at my first job.
Kayleigh Barber laid out in her piece, A New Order of Commerce, how digital media companies are taking advantage of a surge in e-commerce to stem losses from the ad-sales side of their businesses. Lucinda Southern reported on the same trend but focused in on Hearst UK specifically and their wild 322% increase in e-commerce revenue in Q2 of this year. The long and short of both articles is this; traditional advertising is down, but media brands that are experts in recommending products and organized enough in their affiliate business have managed to increase an existing line of revenue to help stem some of the losses other parts of the business are taking.
The funny thing is that this expertise that successful publications exhibit looks a whole lot like the skills any halfway successful retail sales associate has to have.
As a pint-sized sales associate working at a local dry goods store, I quickly learned that there were two main types of interactions with customers.
The first type was when a customer came in with a very specific idea of what they wanted. My job was to then find the exact product they were looking for or if we didn’t have it, a close approximation that we had in stock and directions to the nearest store if that didn’t if they weren’t satisfied.
The second type of customer was someone who came in with an idea. They had a cousin, husband, daughter, uncle — whatever — that they wanted to get something for. My job in those scenarios was to use my knowledge of what we had in the store to help them figure out what they wanted.
As Covid-19 has accelerated the adoption of online shopping, it’s hard not to think of the role that media companies are playing as modern-day sales associates. Successful editorial teams will be the ones that can create content that can be useful to people trying to search for the right product by doing the internet equivalent of telling a sales associate that they’re looking for, “That-one-thing…I forget what it’s named but it’s blue and about *gestures hands* this big.”, or just “Something for my daughter. She loves k-pop”.
Of course, doing that all without undermining other editorial efforts or coming off as a shill is another skill entirely.
Listen to This Podcast
The Ezra Klein Show - What Would Keynes Do?
A fascinating discussion with Zach Carter, the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, about the history of Economics and how it’s purpose has changed over the years. One character that really caught my attention in the conversation was John Kenneth Galbraith. In addition to popularizing the term ‘conventional wisdom,’ Galbraith believed that advertising was so powerful that it made it impossible for markets to accurately reflect the true wants and needs of consumers.