When did AV Club go to the dogs?

[steveh]

From what I understand, the union-negotiated contract between journalists and G/O Media expires at the end of February and the company hasn't yet come up with proper proposals and has spent more time instead on union-busting activities. Seems likely a lot more writers across all their sites will be gone.

[samadriel]

Has all this writer-losing stuff had the same effect on Clickhole? I've just noticed the last little while it's seemed like a sad imitation of the mad originality that's served it well for years.

[steveh]

Clickhole was sold off to the people behind Cards Against Humanity two years back and has had a couple of hiatuses during the pandemic I think. Occasionally it seems to come up with spells of better stuff - there were some bits that made me laugh with the recent Kidhole thing - but it seems pretty variable compared to the early days.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Sold!

https://www.thedailybeast.com/go-media-continues-fire-sale-dumps-av-club-and-takeout?ref=wrap

Sam Barsanti, who had been there for a decade, has been fired, but I can't say that I'll miss him much, as his attempts at snark were simply grating. At this point, the site is 90% slideshows and 10% updates about the various Rust lawsuits.

Paste, however, tends to try to restore some luster to long neglected sites that they've bought. First step would be to constitute a pool of talented writers who explore unexpected paths, rather than farming content like they did under G/O Media, with barely an interesting TV show still properly reviewed.

[dissolute ocelot]

As we've seen with Pitchfork, there's just not the market for any quality, commercial, free-to-read cultural site. I don't see how this will change anything. I recently got a cheap subscription to New York Magazine to read The Vulture, which is slightly better (and has good puzzles) but still not worth whatever the full price is.

Will be interesting to see what happens to the Onion; it's hardly essential reading but can still be funny, and it would be a shame if it was entirely destroyed or turned into something that does sponsored content for KFC. Maybe Reductress can buy it (actually Reductress is now owned by Kamala Harris's niece, as part of Phenomenal Media - how's that for satire?).

[Shaxberd]

It's interesting seeing the "magazine model", for lack of a better word, creeping into online media - if you want quality content, pay monthly. Fair enough, I suppose.

Which led me to thinking about how at least when magazines go under, the physical copies still exist and can be re-read. Who's archiving Cracked or the Onion or the AV Club? When the servers are finally turned off, will anything remain?

[idunnosomename]

Well archive.org

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

Some of the content is already lost. At some point G/O Media wasn't sure about the rights on the images, and they simply deleted every picture hosted on the site until then, which makes a few articles hard to understand now.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I certainly miss reading "it can be two things" in every single comment section