Am I the Coal Miner Who Should Learn to Code?

The #Content factories keep getting shut down. The Wire predicted this. I've got the click-lung. Now what?

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.

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HBO

We’re prepping for a new Pod Yourself The Wire this week, so I was watching The Wire season five, episode one. Season five is probably the most maligned season of The Wire (unfairly so, in my opinion), but it’s also the one about journalism. It introduces the newspaper storyline mid way through the first episode, with the great Clark Johnson (above) as Gus Haynes (the gruff but caring editor all writers all wish we had) standing outside the Baltimore Sun offices blowing butts with his co-workers.

I heard they're closing the foreign bureaus--Joburg, Beijing, everything.

I heard layoffs. As bad as in Philly.

Bullshit. They're not gonna lay off. They'll offer buyouts first.

Season five of The Wire debuted in 2008, which doesn’t seem that long ago on the face of it. Yet if you’ve worked in media since then, you half expect the beings speaking these lines to have woolly mammoth tusks. Buyouts? A “foreign bureau?” In… JoBurg? As in… South Africa?? Did they travel from office to office in flying cars???

The Wire creator David Simon, a former Sun reporter who took a buyout himself before setting off on his career as a TV writer, expanded on this scene just a few days ago on Twitter:

“Foreign bureaus in Johannesburg, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow, London, Paris, Jerusalem and Mexico City at various points. Usually six or seven bureaus rotating. And a ten-reporter Washington bureau. But once we were chain-owned, Wall Street made clear there's profit in a lesser paper.”

Foreign bureaus, expense accounts, book leave — shit, even buyouts (they didn’t just fire your asses en masse via Zoom??). There are so many once-accepted aspects of media work from not that long ago that us modern media folks think about with as much awe and disbelieving envy as if they were the Hanging Gardens of Babylonia. Tell me again about the “kill fees,” George!

Simon’s tweet was, of course, partly inspired by the latest bleak news about his former employer, the Baltimore Sun. The paper was recently purchased, by some rich asshole (David Smith), from a hedge fund (Alden Global Capital) that had already basically sold it for parts. Per the Baltimore Banner:

“In a tense, three-hour meeting with staff Tuesday afternoon, new Baltimore Sun owner David Smith told employees he has only read the paper four times in the past few months, insulted the quality of their journalism and encouraged them to emulate a TV station owned by his broadcasting company.”

That broadcasting company is Sinclair Inc, by the way, a massive broadcasting chain that owns the second-most television stations in the US. Now, there are a lot of people who don’t think smaller-market newspapers are a big money maker, but for my money, this is the first time I’ve heard “be more like local TV news” floated as the solution to fixing them.

The piece went on:

“Smith seemed to try and pit reporters against each other, asking them to rank who was the best in the newsroom. Several times throughout the meeting, he said he has ‘no idea what you do.’”

This phenomenon is nothing new, and as David Roth at Defector has wondered aloud on many occasions, one of the big questions about the current media paradigm is why guys like Smith keep buying things that they seem to hate.

I feel compelled now to include a little more of the story, simply because it’s too funny not to:

Clad in a suit, Smith spoke glowingly of Fox45, which is known for segments like “City in Crisis.” The news station, Sinclair’s flagship, regularly conducts unscientific online polls — with results that are likely not representative of the region — to gauge viewer interest.

Smith told Sun employees they were “in the poll business” now, and that they could expect to conduct polls every day. He said they would ask readers on the front page of the newspaper to go online and participate in the polling.

Pivot to polls! That’s another new one. First as tragedy, then as farce, and so forth.

Elsewhere on the same day, Condé Nast announced that they were laying off most of the staff at the storied music site Pitchfork and folding the brand into GQ (a publication I still have the privilege of writing for on occasion, though not for a full-time wage). Numerous elegies to Pitchfork followed, and while I wasn’t enough of a Pitchfork reader to write one of those myself, I deeply commiserate with any folks laid off from some of the last few media jobs.

One of the things that added insult to injury when I got laid off from Uproxx last April, aside from having been the second employee (after Matt Ufford; I think the guys from The Smoking Section were in there early too) at a place that was created partly as an outlet for my own writing, was that it didn’t really come during a massive wave of layoffs. It came after the new CEO of Warner Music Group (which had owned Uproxx since 2018), Robert Kyncl, who’d been on the job since last January, announced that WMG was “positioning itself for this new phase of growth at the intersection of creativity and technology.”

We love to grow at the intersection of abstract concepts, don’t we, folks? That’s business 101. Anyway, pursuant to that positioning, he wrote, they would be laying off 4% of their global work force. Gotta be lean and nimble to hold a corner in this economy. Shoulda learned that from The Wire.

Not much of Uproxx seemed to fall under that 4%, and as far as I could tell, me and a graphic designer were some of the only Uproxx employees to get the axe. The rub was that, in the absence of a major publication going away, I didn’t even get to bask in any of those possibly-disingenuous Twitter elegies that the Pitchfork writers did. The gall!

A calendar invite, to “discuss” that email, with my boss and an HR rep, arrived shortly after the email. Naturally, I panicked. In the three years prior, I had acquired a wife, a stepson, a mortgage, and a son, who had recently entered daycare.

“Hey, uh… am I getting laid off??” I asked my editors after I saw the calendar invite. “Nahhh, couldn’t be. I haven’t heard anything,” they all assured me.

And yet laid off I soon became, in one of those infuriatingly boilerplate business calls. It had nothing to do with my actual work (and I had seen the traffic numbers, they were still good), they assured me. It was just that the job I had been doing wasn’t a thing they would be doing anymore. I guess that’s just how it goes in media these days; fired by a vowel-less man you’ve never met thanks to the whims of your company’s fourth parent company, who owned the thing you built for reasons you never really understood in the first place (the intersection of what and what, now??).

TMI? Perhaps. I’m not asking for your pity. I just was inspired to revisit the memory once again by the Sun story and Pitchfork and by this tweet:

“It's pretty insane to have been a guy in his early 20s with some aspirations of becoming a culture writer and then it turns out 15 years later they just canceled that job. That's not a type of guy anymore, I was graduating college with the very last ones.”

Insane it is. That hit home, and even made me feel lucky, in a way. 15 years is almost exactly how long I’ve been a “culture writer,” since when we started FilmDrunk back in 2007 (“we” being Ryan Perry, then-owner of the Fat Penguin Network and I, after an intro from Matt Ufford, who I met over email). It was a job that I had, that I thought I was pretty decent at. Things were going pretty well, and I even managed to build some stability into my life, in spite of the undergrad and grad school student loans that I’m still paying off more than 20 years later.

I still do culture writing, it’s just… as the tweet says, not quite a job anymore. Now it’s more like a habit that I try to support with other jobs. I have this newsletter, I write stuff for GQ and The Ringer and BBC and for Luke O’Neil sometimes, I was copywriting on the side for a bit, and even learning to teach. I was writing copy for a living when I started the movie blog, and it was actually kind of fun at times to reflex those brain muscles, 16 or so years later. Or at least it was, until the company I was copywriting for got disbanded in a merger, Pitchfork-style.

That company was not a media company, by the way. And I guess that’s part of the reason I find myself writing this, or that I wasn’t compelled by self-awareness not to write this. Because even if you don’t weep for Pitchfork, or for FilmDrunk, or Gawker, or Deadspin, or Splinter News, or Mel Megazine, or Noisey, or Gawker again, or Film.com, or Bustle, or Cinematical, or…. whatever (and many of us alums of those sites don’t expect you to, as good as it sometimes makes us feel), it’s a weird thing we’re doing now, isn’t it? Where instead of hundreds of small companies that do one thing well, we’re whittling them down and smooshing them together into three or four companies that try to do everything badly? What was the title of that first episode of The Wire season five again? Right, “More With Less.”

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Later in that episode, Gus Haynes looks out the window of the Sun’s offices and sees a plume of smoke. “Looks like a fire over on the east side.”

He looks around at the skeleton crew of journalists still in the office and chides them that no one’s running off to see what the fire is (“What kind of people stand around watching a fire? Some shameful shit right there.”).

This was part of The Wire’s dire warning about the future of the news business — that none of the youngs in the office were hungry enough to do the basic work of going to see what’s causing a visible fire. It’s one of the first things your city readers would want to know, and one of the most straightforward services local news can provide. What’s on fire? But, as eventually personified by gloryboy weasel Scotty Templeton, no one gets famous writing up a why/what/where story about a local fire. All Scotty Templeton, the craven careerist character in The Wire season five, wanted was to write stories that went national so that he could raise his profile enough to jump to a better job in a bigger city (“the Times or the Post, where else?” as he puts it).

In the next scene at the paper, the city hall reporter comes in with the minutes from the council meeting that night, thinking it’s a boring story about obscure zoning business destined to fill column inches deep in the paper. Only during his last-minute edit, Gus discovers a name in it that sounds familiar. “Wait, isn’t that Fat Face Rick, the drug dealer?”

Gus does a quick search through the archives to discover that the boring council meeting coverage actually exposes a corruption scandal involving a million dollar property giveaway from the city council president to an ex-drug dealer. The details of the scandal aren’t especially important; The Wire’s purpose here (and David Simon was never ambiguous with his underlying theses) was to illustrate what newspapers and the citizens who relied on them would stand to lose when they lost the kind of institutional knowledge contained within lifers like Gus. No Gus in the newsroom, no one knows that “Ricardo Hendrix” is Fat Face Rick the drug dealer, no corruption story. Politicians can just give public property away to various fatcats without even the mild threat of bad publicity.

One of the most quaint things about rewatching The Wire now is how often the politicians and police brass do things just to avoid negative headlines. Where would those headlines live now? Who would read them? It’s hard to imagine a politician fearing one. Maybe a TikTok that goes viral at the worst. And they’d probably just assume we’d forget about it in a day anyway, which we probably would.

You get the feeling the 2008 news situation seemed dire to David Simon and The Wire’s writers at the time. Could any of them have even imagined how much worse it would get in the next 16 years? They were bemoaning corporate consolidation and downsizing, but couldn’t have foreseen private equity vulturing, the pivot to Facebook, the pivot to video, the waves of venture capital adding overhead and the waves of layoffs when that money ran out, the gaming of Google News, the pivot to AI-written chum, etc., etc. None of these shitty new paradigms seem to last more than 18 months anymore.

I never even really had a Gus. They were mostly gone from the media industry by the time I got in (I did have a great editor at The Del Mar Times who couldn’t pay me enough to keep me, which inspired me to go get a crappy copywriting job, which in turn inspired me to start FilmDrunk). And to be honest, I never especially dreamed of being the guy who trudges back from a City Hall budget meeting at 8:30 to write up the minutes. It does look pretty terrible. Probably Scotty Templeton is the ugly ambition we writers all recognize and try to deny in ourselves.

I never much cared for “the state of journalism” or its various bugaboos, I mostly just wanted to write stuff people wanted to read, and I kept doing it because it felt like I was suited to it. But the last few years have shown exactly what a society looks like when there’s no one getting paid to go see what the fire is anymore. For most of my life, that’s what our parents and grandparents were mostly concerned with — what was that fire? What was that siren? What’s happening in the community?

Only doing that work wasn’t that sexy or that lucrative, so the business pivoted to sexier, more lucrative things. Which seems now mostly to involve feeding our parents and grandparents a steady diet of stories solely designed to drive them insane. The kids are renaming a salad at Yale! The globalists want you to eat bugs! Donald Trump is set to be executed for treason! Harvard is at it again! You have to try to decipher which runic algorithm has targeted a grandpa’s particular dopamine receptors before you can even engage them in conversation. Civic trust has broken down in kind, as we don’t share the same communities that worry about the same structure fires anymore, so much as we worry about shifting Venn diagrams of overhyped panics, pushed by whatever cabal of despicable thems we fear the most. That’s when we aren’t using AI-generated listicles to soak up clicks from AI-driven search terms.

It’s… not good, folks!

But of course, I write this newsletter not only out of Culture Writer habit and semi-employed desperation, but with some sense of optimism. The media business seems so fundamentally broken in a way that’s plain to everyone, that building a new one — a subscription-based model with readers directly supporting writers and worker-owned collectives replacing shiny, venture capital-driven clickmills — genuinely seems like the only way forward. The readers haven’t stopped reading and the writers, poorer though we may be, haven’t stopped writing. Together, maybe we can make it suck less. Thanks, and happy Friday.