Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 39
Facebook News, Elon gives, lots of words about basketball, Top Chef, & Recipe Corner.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
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Facebook is up to something in news
Washington Monthly asks Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times? This piece goes on to detail how under the cover of launching a little-known feature, the social media giant has been funneling money to America’s biggest news organizations—and hanging the rest of the press out to dry.
This is a fascinating and important story.
Under the cover of launching a feature called Facebook News, Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019.
Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.”
So what’s $3M annually to the Times? Apparently, it’s meaningful.
For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant. And once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet. You’re kind of beholden to them.” It’s not exactly payola, Ingram told me, searching for the right metaphor. Nor is it a protection racket. “It’s like you’re a kept person,” he said. “You’re Facebook’s mistress.”
The author illustrates three key points about the arrangements:
First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. In the pre-internet days, independent newspapers wouldn’t have considered accepting gifts or sweetheart deals from entities they covered, under any circumstance. Facebook, which took in $86 billion in revenue last year, is a hugely controversial behemoth having profound, highly newsworthy, and negative effects on society. Accepting money from them creates a conflict of interest.
Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. Journalists, critics, and congressional investigators have amply documented how Facebook has become a vector of disinformation and hate speech that routinely invades our privacy and undermines our democracy. For The New York Times and other pillars of American journalism to effectively partner with Facebook creates the impression that Facebook is a normal, legitimate business rather than a monopolistic rogue corporation.
Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. One such effort would allow the industry to bargain collectively with Facebook and other tech giants by withholding content from the platforms unless they received a fair price for it. But for that to work, small newsrooms would need the biggest and most influential companies to sign on. With those organizations receiving millions of dollars from Facebook through their own side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.
The big takeaway:
Joshua Benton, the director of the Neiman Journalism Lab, described the big downside: The Facebook News deal, he wrote, “lets them (1) pick the publishers they want to pay, (2) pick the amount of money they want to pay them, (3) get publishers to stop complaining, at least hopefully, and (4) get headlines like ‘Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year,’ in the hopes that they can stave off government regulation or taxation.” Facebook isn’t spending the money “because they think News Tab will be profitable,” Benton wrote. “It’s a way to solve a PR and policy problem.” The vaunted new product, he noted, consists of “a new tab buried so deep in Facebook’s interface you need a spelunker’s headlamp to find it.”
Of course, no story about Facebook would be complete without a corprate-speak quote that actually says nothing:
Facebook is suspiciously evasive about how many people use Facebook News and how much traffic it generates for publishers, refusing to provide any indication of its scale at all. “We don’t have hard numbers,” the Facebook News spokesperson, Mari Melguizo, said when I asked for data on its performance. “It’s definitely grown and continues to grow. It is on an upward trajectory.”
A reminder that FB is not to be trusted when it comes to its relationship with publishers:
Prior to Facebook News, the company had repeatedly proved to be an unreliable partner for news publishers. The platform established an “Instant Articles” feature in 2015 that “restricted advertising, subscriptions and the recirculation modules publishers relied on” in exchange for a better user experience. It was a bad bargain, and, as a result, many outlets abandoned the feature. Facebook promoted a “shift to video” in 2016, but inflated its video use metrics and then refused to pay publishers. This prompted layoffs at many companies, including Vox, Vice, and Mic.
And Grandex.
“I think it’s a dangerous situation for news organizations to count on anything when it comes to Facebook,” Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy says. “You pull all this together, and Facebook is just the worst possible partner,” Kennedy says.
Facebook stinks.
Elon Musk’s $150 million charity spending spree
I’ve been critical of Elon Musk in this space. In the aftermath of the Texas winter storm, I commented that he and his companies seemed absent in the recovery. So it’s only fair that I give the devil his due. Apparently, Elon is opening the bag for charity.
In the last few months, the Tesla founder appears to have been on the most aggressive streak of charitable giving in his life, moving so fast that he sometimes fails to give the recipients a heads-up. He is making his largest public donations ever and at a pace that seems to outstrip any other point in his career.
Last fall, the head of Musk’s family office, Jared Birchall, “reached out of the blue” to Feeding Texas head Celia Cole after seeing a tweet about her organization. Musk was interested in making a $100,000 donation for Covid-19 relief. When the winter storms struck Texas this winter, Cole’s team reached back out to Musk’s — who added another zero to his first gift.
“It was a quick ask and a quick yes,” Cole recalled. “He seems to be settling into Texas, and maybe he’s working to make Texas his focus.”
Let’s be real though, Elon has a long way to go before his name is etched among his generation’s great philanthropists.
While he is no longer the world’s wealthiest person, Tesla stock has skyrocketed and brought his net worth with it, boosting his estimated assets to $190 billion.
His $250 million or so in disclosed lifetime giving is only about 0.1 percent of those assets, as critics are quick to point out. He has said not to expect major charitable gifts — the types that would satisfy the Giving Pledge he signed, for instance — until decades from now, when he may feel free to finally sell some Tesla stock.
But for the first time in a while, Musk appears to be doing the work. Change may be afoot.
The NBA’s GM Kingmaker
As the NBA has become Big Business, the game has changed. This excellent profile from The Ringer looks at ace pro-sports headhunter Mike Forde.
“We went to the NBA and to the other owners and said that we’re looking to create the front office of the future,” Ranadivé said recently in a phone interview. “We asked, ‘Who is the smartest guy in the business, who is the best at doing this?’ And there was just one name that came up.”
Mike Forde.
A 45-year-old Manchester, England, native, Forde told him about his previous career as an executive for some of Europe’s premier soccer clubs, including Chelsea. He told him about Sportsology, the consulting firm he founded and runs. He explained that his job is to help professional sports organizations—in all sorts of leagues, all over the world—perform internal analysis and assessments but that sometimes he also helps fill GM vacancies.
Often with most high-level business matters, being able to speak the same language as an executive is half the battle. Forde is apparently an expert at this skill.
“Mike understood the pressures, challenges, and complexities that one faces when owning a sports team,” he said. “But he’s also an entrepreneur, and because of that knows how to relate to other entrepreneurs.”
“When you’re in a position like mine, there are very few people you share your personal cell number with,” Ranadivé said. “Mike’s the kind of guy where you do so very quickly.” It’s one of Forde’s many skills. It’s what has made him the most powerful person in the NBA that you don’t know.
As billions of dollars have flowed into the game, front offices are unsurprisingly operating much more like other giant organizations.
The influx of money—from billion-dollar TV deals to billion-dollar team sales—has transformed everything. Constructing a roster that wins games is still the primary job. But how teams go about doing that has completely changed. Staffs have ballooned: Today’s teams have analytics departments, coaches who deal strictly with player development, training staffs full of experts in specific fields like nutrition, and scouts devoted to scouring the college ranks while others focus on the pros. There are G League teams to manage, and even business operations to interact with and sometimes oversee, and multiple 24/7 sports networks covering it all, not to mention digital and social media. It’s no coincidence that most of today’s top executives aren’t even called general managers; instead, they carry titles like “president,” with teams of “executive vice presidents” reporting to them.
Predictably, with any corporate consultant, there's plenty of buzzwords, and of course, some internal skepticism.
Forde built a software app for the Spurs; he refers to it as a “corporate knowledge platform.” Most of his ensuing projects fell along those same lines. “I was into the world of transformation. How can we help teams get better and better,” Forde said. The word “transformation” is a favorite of his, a catch-all phrase that summarizes his goals, lending a McKinsey-like air to his work. Consulting? That’s “process transformation.” Search work? “The transformation of human capital.” Later, he’d tell me: “People are a part of transformation.”
He ran some meetings and workshops. “You see how everything works, what the organization looks like and what its internal processes are, and how the pieces fit with each other,” said one Nets employee from that time. “But it’s also a lot of regurgitating of marketing buzzwords.”
Forde is praised for being far more diligent than most other search firms, but he’s not immune to criticism. It’s an interesting look inside the business of sports.
Anthony Edwards seems like a fun young man
Rookie of the Year candidate Anthony Edwards made news last week when he claimed he’d never heard of Alex Rodriquez. (A-Rod has reportedly been in negotiations to buy the team Edwards plays for, the Minnesota Timberwolves.) This lead to a tremendous Q&A in GQ called Anthony Edwards Thinks A-Rod and J-Lo Should Get Back Together:
GQ: So...you really don’t know who A-Rod is, huh?
Anthony Edwards: Well...I do now!
What made you change that?
Everybody was texting me, tellin’ me ‘bout it, that’s it, forreal.
You didn’t watch any games or highlights to verify that with your own eyes?
Nah, I ain’t watch none, nah. I know he date J-Lo [Jennifer Lopez], though!
He does not.
What?
He used to date J-Lo, but they just broke up.
Damn!
You look like you’re disappointed.
Yeah, I am.
Any reason?
He gonna be my owner, I want him to be happy.
You think he’s gonna be happier with J-Lo?
Yeah!!
When you put it that way....that doesn’t seem wrong.
Yeah! Like, for sure!!
You get a few haters along the way. Have you noticed in your rookie season that because you’ve decided to be a boisterous and open athlete who’s willing to speak on certain issues, that you get any negativity coming back to you?
Fasho. Being myself, I get more positive vibes than anything, ‘cuz people be like, “Yeah, I like him, he one of one, he original.” But, you know, some people gon’ hate. They say, “He’s not camera ready, he don’t know how to speak.” They just be hatin’. They don’t know I’m being myself.
That doesn’t bother you?
Nah. MmMm. Nawl.
You don’t care?
I don’t care how people be viewin’ me. As long as I’m being 100 at all times then I’m good.
What’s the dunk of the year?
That dunk Miles Bridges did.
Dunk of the Week
If you don’t know Miles Bridges yet, get to know him. Dude is wild.
Podcast of the Week
Narrated by Chuck D, Shattered: Hope, Heartbreak and the New York Knicks is a fascinating look into the past 20 years of Knicks history. Episode 2 is especially wild, as we learn about how Knicks Owner James Dolan’s father built a multi-billion dollar business as a cable TV trailblazer.
Podcast Promotion of the Week
Top Chef is back! We’re actually four episodes into the newest season, based in Portland. It’s fantastic. On Mind of Micah, Brad Kee joins me to talk about what we’ve seen so far, and why Top Chef is the best reality show going.
Subscribe to Mind of Micah and get new episodes sent to your phone as soon as they drop.
Grilling SZN Recipe Corner
Garlic-Caper Rub
This recipe suggests using this rub on lamb chops, and while I’m sure that’s delightful, I think it would work on just about anything you’re grilling this summer. Meats and vegetables included. Punchy anchovies and garlic mellow during their short cook time, adding umami to grilled meats.
Ingredients
½ cup finely chopped mixed tender fresh herbs (such as flat-leaf parsley, chives, and mint), plus more for garnish
6 tablespoons s extra-virgin olive oil, divided
¼ cup drained and rinsed capers, divided
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest plus 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, plus lemon wedges, for serving
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon crushed red pepper, divided kosher salt, to taste
8 medium garlic cloves
4 anchovy fillets, drained
Whisk together chopped herbs, 1/4 cup oil, 2 tablespoons capers, lemon zest and juice, black pepper, and 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper in a medium bowl until combined. Season with salt to taste; set aside.
Process garlic, anchovies, remaining 2 tablespoons capers and remaining 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper in a mini food processor until coarse paste forms, about 10 seconds. Add remaining 2 tablespoons oil, and process until creamy and mostly smooth, about 40 seconds.
Turkish-Style Grilled Eggplant Salad
2 medium globe eggplants (about 14 ounces each)
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, or more as needed
1 large ripe tomato, seeded and chopped
1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1/3 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves (from 1 medium bunch parsley)
1/4 medium red onion, chopped (1/4 cup)
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, or more as needed
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or more as needed
Preheat a grill on medium-high heat; lightly oil the grates. Place the whole eggplants on the grill and cook, turning them several times with tongs, until the skin is charred and blistered all around, the eggplants have collapsed, and their juices begin to bubble.
Transfer the eggplants to a colander set over a bowl or sink to drain for about 15 minutes, until they are cool enough to handle.
While the eggplants cool, place the minced garlic in a small mound on a cutting board and sprinkle it with the salt. Use the flat edge of a knife to work the garlic and salt together to form a paste.
Use your fingers to peel off and discard the skin. (It's okay if some bits of charred skin remain.) Coarsely chop the eggplant flesh (it will be soft; the pieces won't be clearly defined) and transfer to a mixing bowl. Add the tomato, pepper, parsley, onion, lemon juice, oil, pepper and the garlic paste, stirring gently to incorporate. Taste, add more salt, pepper and/or lemon juice, as needed.
Serve right away.
Where else can I find Micah content?
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