Media News You Need - Theoretically
I'm ashamed at the gaps between updates. I appreciate the interest . I have started a new section: Curated World, where I will put my take on the big news each week.
Vice and the peaks and troughs of media
Reading through the schadenfreude and grief that characterised the inevitably self-indulgent coverage of the demise of Vice I was reminded that I had witnessed the peak of Vice and the idea of “new media” it represented.
Here goes: I recall dancing vigorously in Marathon in Greece on an outdoor dancefloor with the founder and editor-in-chief of Vice at an amazing annual retreat put on by Sir Martin Sorrell and his then world-leading advertising network, WPP.
Now that I think of it, for me at least, that was a sort of peak: WPP, then the most imaginative advertising company in the world, wanted to draw in exciting media outlets like Vice, Etsy, and others to see what might be “the future”. It was the first place I saw first-person drones and much more we now take for granted.
Seeing Shane Smith, the founder of Vice dancing with his shirt off and sweating wildly with his Scottish-born editor in a kilt pogoing with him was at the time just funny and sort of cool. I am a frenetic dancer. I get it.
A decade or so I can recall that the editor went long ago in one of the many “Me Too” scandals that characterised the macho attitude in the Vice HQ in Brooklyn. Shane’s office had a spectacular wet bar in the corner which seemed well used. He too is long gone but with tens of millions of dollars extracted from what is now a bankrupt media firm that at one time seemed to be the future of media.
Shane’s Wikipedia page describes him still as the executive chairman of Vice and rather nicely as a “former billionaire”. I doubt he ever was but it has a ring to it.
Here’s how The Hollywood Reporter rather deftly put the situation with Vice going down the tubes a year after declaring protective bankruptcy: “How did a Brooklyn media giant valued at $5.7 billion just a few years ago wind up going bankrupt and folding its newsroom? Look no further than its brash (and still highly paid) founder.”
I did a little business with Vice in those days and know several people who have worked there over the years, from their gonzo journalism period when they sent young buckaroos on stupidly dangerous assignments, to a slightly more sober period when they brought in people who actually knew what it meant to look after reporters in the field — not to mention not burning sources or getting scammed.
James Murdoch, both when at his father’s News Corp and on his own initiative, invested in Vice. The brand was shopped around to all the big media companies who at one time wanted to dance with Shane (not literally as I did maybe). Its model wasn’t totally crazy since it had a strong video production team doing mostly commercial tie ups and was an early entrant in what we grew to call “native advertising”.
Ultimately, however, it was a house of cards and people lost their shirts, apart from Shane who like so many entrepreneurs who flame out did just fine himself.
“Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye,” zeitgeist detector Cory Doctorow wrote.
A journalism site that bets on its own stories
There’s seldom anything genuinely new under the sun in media. Founders generally rehash the last best idea (see Axios and Politico — both brilliant but mirrors of each other) or the last worst idea (see the death of The Messenger.)
Hunterbrook Media, however, really is new and different and is challenging some of the ethical principles in journalism as well as how to pay for reporting.
The site launched this week with an investigation into the gigantic American mortgage broking company UWM. It was a solid piece of investigative reporting and included the byline of a former UWM staffer-turned whistleblower.
The radical aspect of Hunterbrook, however, is not so much its journalism which appears solid and supervised by some of the best names in quality reporting. The radical element is that Hunterbook has both a media arm and an investment arm and stands to make money by betting its reporting on UWM will hurt its stock price.
No one, literally, has done this before in journalism. Maybe the closest comparison is with research-led shortsellers and activist investors like Muddy Waters Research and Hindenberg Research which take — usually short — positions in companies they publish damaging research on. As Muddy Waters says it is “Doing the Work Wall Street Won’t”. CEO sphincters tighten whenever these guys turn up.
Into that ethically gray area comes Hunterbook, going further and deeper into an ethical morass by combining market-moving research with journalistic principles but also taking part in legal actions in the UWM case that may also have big pay offs.
Most “normal” journalists are horrified.
One of the most unusual experiments in media ethics — and in news business models — is now live,…” media commentator Joshua Benton wrote in the NiemanLab journalism industry site. “Reporters dig up a story about a publicly traded firm. But before the story runs — and the market moves accordingly — their corporate sibling will buy, short, or otherwise trade the firm’s stock in anticipation of the move. Step 3: Profit!
“This is, from a traditional journalism perspective, rather bonkers,” Benton wrote.
I have a sort of interest to declare about Hunterbrook. One of its founders is someone I consider a friend. Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz is an astounding young man who has already launched a bioscience start up and is described as an investor. He is also the son of two close friends of mine: the Australian-born author and journalist Geraldine Brooks, and Tony Horwitz, an equally successful writer who died in 2019 — too young. I was one of the eulogists at a memorial service for Tony.
Nathaniel is the CEO of Hunterbook. I intend to interview him about the venture. We have exchanged emails about it but he has been preoccupied with the set up. Not unreasonably. The project has been reported to have $100 million at its disposal — more than double what the gormless founders of The Messenger pissed away.
I admit that I find the concept of a site that bets on its the financial impact of its own journalism to be highly questionable from an ethical point of view. Yet, apart from Nathaniel, several journalists I admire — including former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger — are involved. It is also true that Hunterbook is absolutely transparent about what it is trying to do and the kinds of direct and legal bets it may take.
As Benton at Niemanlab noted: ‘Whoa. Prepping a class-action suit, filing a whistleblower claim, shorting UWM’s stock (and buying that of its rival Rocket Mortgage) — it brings new meaning to the term “activist journalism.”’
Watch this space. It is interesting to see such a direct bet on market-moving journalism. We all know that reporting can move markets — especially commodities and sometimes equities if bad news is not known by the whole market. (I once triggered a rather large movement in the price of oil when I reported, exclusively, from the oilfields of Kuwait in the first Gulf War and detailed the extent of damage.)
I was once also approached by Muddy Waters because its boss was impressed by the Panama Papers investigation into global tax dodging and offshore banking by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with which I once had a connection. I felt uncomfortable about that then but will watch Hunterbrook.
Ends/PGB - Let me know if this hits the spot for you. Some of you may have noticed that I have also started a weekly item putting together big news stories of the week: Curated World. It, like this, is a bit of an experiment so let me know if it works.
My interest these days is how we rebuild society street by street, village by village, city by city, province by province, country by country. During my lifetime I have observed the big get bigger in every sector in the name of "efficiency". The small get swallowed up by the bigger and die inside the monster which "bought" them. I had a friend pose a question to me recently when he asked, "what part have I played in where the world has ended up right now?" I think that is a question which all of us have to consider. When we apply this question to the media are the solutions you are looking at examples of the old rot, or they something special and exciting would be my question. As somebody of an older generation I spend time with young people who haven't been tarnished by neo-liberalism thinking (yet) and I talk to them about the Commons, which exists everywhere. I have purchased a number of copies of a book published by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics by David Bollier called "The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking" with a subtitle of "Tools for the transitions ahead". I wonder how many journalists are reading this?
This was an extremely interesting read. I thoroughly enjoyed it!