This week: Has New York media has gotten dull, just in time for Graydon Carter to come back? Plus, the NBA off-season spectacle is the most entertaining media business moment of the year. And tidbits on Vows, obits, Bernie, teens, Netflix and more! Favor: Is this newsletter going to your Promotions tab in Gmail? Either move one Stupefy email from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab or add mgardner@gethighfield.com to your Google Contacts. And remember to tell your friends to sign up right here. Thanks!
On the question of New York, and its media, being dull
When Graydon Carter announced the creation of his first post-Vanity Fair media endeavor, a newsletter called AirMail, he told the Times that it's “designed to live in a Trump-free world.” When he said that, I immediately felt why we need Carter's new venture and why he's absolutely right to start it. And I was reminded again this weekend, while reading FT Weekend. American daily, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly media outlets are stuck chasing the same news cycles. It's making them incredibly similar, constrained to the same narrow set of opinions and subjects...and boring. Nothing I come across is as different and weird as two opinion columns in the foreign paper mentioned above. One, titled "Why We Need to Turn Down the Volume," is a vitriolic takedown of loud people with no manners by Jo Ellison.
Ellison complains about a pair of loud parents on a train, a style she calls "presentational," writing that it's "enacted purely for the benefit of others to demonstrate how very, very good at [parenting they are]."She goes on to describe, on another train ride, a "cacophony of kidults" who had the nerve to embark on a "rumbustious parlour game, an exhumation of past japes called: 'every funny thing that has ever happened to me in my lifetime'...It is all conducted at the kind of volume one might save for Wembley Park. And is uniquely unamusing. One woman in particular, the leader of the merriment, deserves a very special place in hell."The writing is funny, cutting and divergent from the groupthink that dominates social media and digital publishing dictating that we all agree and celebrate how much we agree with each other. This type of critique is outside the typical range of accepted thought here. Carter has called AirMail “the weekend edition of a nonexistent international daily.” And as someone who is still enamored with New York and its romantic media history, it makes sense that he's pinpointed this gap here. "We’re not after clickbait,” Carter says.
AirMail could not come at a better time. Yesterday, the new company announced its start date with an inaugural Instagram post. It's a carousel post made up of two quotes, one of which, from Warren Buffett, reads: "Graydon is an editorial genius and I very much miss his writing and editorial touch (a view that is universal among those I talk to)."The absence described above by Buffett brings me to the other column from this weekend's Financial Times that made me as nostalgic for Carter as that tycoon. It's called "New York, Once the City of Dreamers, is Now Dangerously Dull." In it, columnist Robert Armstrong bemoans the losses of the Four Seasons restaurant, Gloria Vanderbilt and Ricky's. But he identifies those lost icons as symptoms of a homogeneity that is reflected in the media here, too. Armstrong writes: "It is easy to complain about gentrification. I’ve no quibble with the rich. But I can’t be alone in thinking New York attracts a duller strain of rich folk than it once did."Hopefully Carter's AirMail is one step to getting us, and the media we produce, back on the right track.
This Vows piece has nothing really to do with media but is filled so many insane details it's worth sharing: the Swedish rapper groom, the hand sanitizer, Boxed Water and a Google AI assistant included in the swag. (NYT)
This fantastic obit of Min Hogg, editor of World of Interiors, includes this nugget: “When Condé Nast purchased Architectural Digest, Min declared ‘Now we know for certain that Condé Nast has no taste.’” (NYT)
Bernie is on Twitch! And this Snapchat post pushing to his channel is very well done. (Twitter)
Speaking of gaming, this WSJ op-ed is completely crazy and apparently not ironic or a viral marketing stunt: "Fortnite doesn’t hold a candle to my boyhood games of ‘fort night.’" (WSJ)
Zion Williamson filed a patent for his seemingly off-the-cuff reaction to being drafted by the New Orleans Pelicans live on the air: "Let's Dance." (Twitter)
NBCUniversal has an extremely valuable asset in the streaming wars: The Office. (THR)
Last week I updated you on Netflix sharing the audience size for its Sandler/Aniston hit movie Murder Mystery, which reached 30.8 million accounts in three days and was a rare moment of ratings transparency for the company. Well, last week Netflix continued the trend by sharing numbers for Ava DuVernay's mini-series When They See Us: 23 million accounts. (Twitter)
This Taylor Swift vs. Justin Bieber/Scooter Braun/Yael Cohen beef is getting messy. (CoS)
HBO's Euphoria - a debauched teen drama - has led to a lot of handwringing about just how bad the kids are behaving today. (Mother Jones)
The creative execution on this Bleacher Report video post about Kevin Durant's flagrant Instagramming is very nicely done. (Twitter)
The top three podcasts this week are inadvertently hilarious microcosm of the political divide in this country. (screenshot)
It seems like Netflix is having no problem drawing huge stars. (Deadline)
The NBA off-season is the most entertaining media business spectacle
If you’re someone who is interested in the explosive personalities and explosive behind-the-scenes moves that shake the media business, you may have been interested in Showtime’s Roger Ailes/Fox News dramatic mini-series The Loudest Voice this weekend. But that was not the most entertaining or enlightening story to follow this weekend if you want a peek into how the media business influences everything from politics to sports to technology and apparel. This weekend’s NBA free agency climax was the biggest stage yet for what truly makes the NBA and, more importantly, its stars so influential and so fun: the media business motives and the media business ambitions of its star players. Superstars like Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving chose the teams that give them the best set-up to grow their media, tech and entertainment interests in the future. Sure, the Finals ended last month. And ostensibly winning on the court has a lot do with why the biggest free agent stars choose which teams they join. But it's becoming increasingly clear that which team these players choose to play for is simply one part of building media and tech business empires.
Winning a championship helps bolster those empires. LeBron James was obviously the blueprint. James is now a certified mogul. He has a show on HBO, a production company with almost a dozen other shows in the works and his own multimedia venture. Now, Kevin Durant and his business partner Rich Kleiman are following that game plan. Durant has his own show on EPSN, The Boardroom, and his own media venture shingle that's based in New York. When you consider that Durant has ambitions to be an investor in and face of several media properties, of course he wants to play in New York, even if his former team probably guarantees more success on the court. And then there's Kyrie Irving, who also decided to go to the Nets with his friend Durant. Irving's already been the star of a hit Hollywood movie. But recently he signed on with Roc Nation last month, a media powerhouse with close ties not only to the Brooklyn Nets but also to the high-powered decision makers in the music, entertainment, content and tech worlds. The shake-ups of this past weekend will be much more influential for much longer than anything that happened on the court in the Finals.
And if you're like me, it was a little more fun.
Further reading: — Yada Yada Yada: ‘Seinfeld Experience’ to Come to New York City
The immersive exhibit bills itself as a chance for fans to truly tap into the city-based sitcom’s world
Richard Dreyfuss Says Bill Murray Was a “Drunken Bully” on Set
Dreyfuss was not complimentary about Murray's behavior during "What About Bob?"
How Ambient Chill Became the New Silence
For nearly a century, background music has transformed the way we experience public spaces. Now, companies have a new mission: to brand every quiet moment of your day.
Joni Mitchell: Her Art and Life in 33 Songs
The music that defines an icon
How the Santana and Rob Thomas Song 'Smooth' Became as Essential as Sex
The song turns 20 on June 29, 2019. The people who made it happen explain how the song came to life, and why, according to Santana, it "belongs with something that people need every day."
David Lynch: ‘It’s important to go out and feel the so-called reality
The cult director of Blue Velvet is soon to bring his creative vision to Manchester international festival. But how does he get his ideas?
Streaming Overload?
Nielsen Report Finds Average Viewer Takes 7 Minutes To Pick What To Watch; Just One-Third Bother To Check Menu