CNN: "The media is slashing jobs again as the Trump news cycle fades and the economy struggles"

You may not be interested in the DeVry Institute, but the DeVry Institute is interested in you.

Coding -- it's what's for breakfast.

First it was HuffPost, a 15-year-old publication that made deep cuts shortly after a major merger with BuzzFeed. Then Medium, a publishing platform known for frequent changes in its business strategy, pivoted once again and offered buyouts to all of its editorial staff. And then a lesser known but beloved men's lifestyle digital outlet, MEL Magazine, was shut down by its owner, Unilever's Dollar Shave Club. Vice Media also cut a handful of top jobs this week, positioning it as a restructuring rather than a cost-cutting move.

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"I think these media companies are looking at the dollar signs, and it's just not there," said Joel Kaplan, an associate dean for professional graduate studies and professor of magazine, newspaper and digital journalism at Syracuse University. "They have probably six months before it really gets bad. Once people are vaccinated and go back to doing the things that they're used to doing, I think it's going to fall off the cliff again."

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The detrimental effects the tech platforms, primarily Facebook and Google, had on influencing publishers' reach and ad businesses were materializing.

"The amount of data large platform companies collect and control enables them to offer far more efficient advertising than any publisher, and the business of making online content profitable is rigged against anyone who wants to run even a sparsely resourced newsroom with experienced reporters," Bell wrote in that 2019 Guardian piece.

Laura Bassett was a part of HuffPost's 2019 layoffs and cofounded the Save Journalism Project shortly thereafter to call attention to the Big Tech's "monopolistic" power.

"We're reaching a point of no return," Bassett told CNN Business in reference to the recent wave of layoffs. "There needs to a bigger, louder conversation and more public support behind holding Google and Facebook accountable and figuring out how to prop up journalism as an essential public service."

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That news, which MEL broke through its official Twitter account, sparked an outpouring of support online. MEL didn't mimic other men's magazines. It provided an honest, approachable take on masculinity...

Tim Pool pointed out that this alleged "Men's magazine" attempted to carve a nice for itself by being the anti-men, anti-masculinity "men's" magazine.

Some recent articles from this "men's" magazine, each providing an "honest, approachable take on masculinity:"

WHY FRAGILE MASCULINITY TURNS MEN INTO MONSTERS

Over and over, we see the violence that occurs when men's masculinity is challenged. Now we're starting to learn why.

'THE TRAGEDY OF HETEROSEXUALITY' IS AN ESSENTIAL PLAYBOOK FOR STRAIGHT MEN

Jane Ward's book is a vital read for anyone who wants to have genuinely good sex. What if men who profess to love women started by actually liking them?

The fourth chapter of Jane Ward’s new book, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, imagines a dinner party with 60 of Ward's queer friends and colleagues. They're in the middle of a critical discussion about straight culture and the boredom, obliviousness and bad sex they associate with it. Also discussed are oppressive straight rituals like bridal showers and parties announcing the shape of an unknown baby's genitals. Mostly, though, Ward and her queer comrades pity straight people who don't seem to like each other very much, evidenced by men shit-talking the mothers of their children and straight women constantly complaining about the men in their lives.

THERE's FINALLY A NAME FOR TRUMP'S MURDEROUS MASCULINITY


What do we call a machismo so horrifying it leaves a half million dead? An esteemed gender scholar has an idea

Much has been written about former President Donald Trump's distinct form of masculinity. Gender-equity educator Jackson Katz calls it "old-fashioned machismo"; Steve Bannon likens it to an American soldier "climbing the cliffs on D-Day"; and many, many, many others simply dismiss it as "toxic."

But James W. Messerschmidt, a distinguished professor of sociology and chair of the criminology department at the University of Southern Maine, sharpens the characterization in a recent article published in Men and Masculinities, calling Trump an exemplar of "dominating masculine necropolitics."

THE PRESSURE TO 'ACT LIKE A MAN' STARTS IN PRESCHOOL

Boys as young as three are more than happy to police the toy box and make sure that no little dude walks away with a Barbie

Feminists are crying about the death of this "beloved" "men's" magazine.

But who is it beloved by? Hardcore feminists who hate men and are happy this "men's" magazine is attacking men as the monsters they are?

Apparently there aren't enough men reading to keep it alive.

This is a good one:

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BOSTON BOMBER?

Liberals and conservatives alike use Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a boogeyman to deny prisoners their rights

The entire media is dying because of this: They do not have customers, in their minds. They have students, and reprobate students at that, who need to be chided/chastised/bullied into enlightenment.

And they're all going fucking broke. As they should

This article blames FaceBook and Google for the non-Silicon Valley media's collapse, with critics saying they've monopolized the ad market.

And that's true enough. And we should break their asses up.

Though they then demand we start "figuring out how to prop up journalism as an essential public service," which sounds like an opening move to get to taxpayer funding of all media (but with no taxpayer oversight), on the theory that the media is an "essential public service" like roads or fire departments.

The reason it sounds like a move to make taxpayers pay rent for stuff they do not want is because it is-- "media advocates" have been increasingly demanding public funding for years.

But note that if the media stopped treating its would-be customers as actual clients whose desires and needs must be satisfied as opposed to monsters they should club into submission, maybe they wouldn't have to be begging for hand-outs.

posted by Ace at 01:37 PM

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