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The New Yorker gets an intense Mooch bump

No blocking here: A rush of attention and new subscribers after Ryan Lizza’s astonishing Scaramucci interview.

Trump Cabinet Officials Mingle With Journalists During Regional Media Day
White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci
Chip Somodevilla / Getty
Peter Kafka covers media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.

Donald Trump says the “fake news media” are “the enemy of the people.” His advocates at Breitbart say their goal is “the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media.”

But in the meantime, the Trump administration continues to be good news for much of the media world.

Since you are reading this, you are already familiar with the Trump Bump that has boosted subscriptions at newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and lifted ratings for CNN and other TV news programmers.

Which means you will also not be surprised to learn about the Mooch Bump: After the New Yorker published its astonishing interview/monologue with new White House talker Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday, the venerable magazine has been basking in attention, and dollars.

Via the New Yorker’s PR office:

  • Ryan Lizza’s piece generated 4.4 million unique visitors, making it the publication’s best-read piece of the year so far.
  • It also generated 1.7 million entries on social-media platforms, and 100,000 concurrent visitors in the first few hours after it ran on the NewYorker.com.
  • Most important for the magazine, whose business model is dependent on subscribers, the piece has attracted new sign-ups. While the magazine won’t spell out how many new subs the story has generated, it says it has “seen a 92 percent increase in the July daily average of new subs.”

This is normally the time to add the to-be-sure graph, noting that, anecdotally, media orgs that reported a Trump Bump earlier in the year are reporting an understandable tapering off. And that some news orgs have moved from an All Trump All The Time footing to something approaching normalcy.

But I’ve gone more than 282 words at this point, and I haven’t made a single reference to “cock-blocking” or autofellatio, and I have to give you guys something.

So here, via an NBC tweet of a Reuters photo, is a five-day-old photo of Scaramucci along with other Trump favs including Corey Lewandowski, Seb Gorka and, of course Omarosa Manigault.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.