Digest 8/17/2020

Former employees on racism at the Public Radio Exchange and Public Radio International; upheaval at Bon Appétit; comings and goings

STUDY HALL ORIGINALS Last week, Rea McNamara memorialized her time making anarchic image macros and video compilations at the Boomer content farms of Toronto-based company ZoomerMedia. Rainier Harris checked in on newcomer paper The Queens Daily Eagle, which saw its readership expand but lost most of its staff during the coronavirus pandemic.

FORMER EMPLOYEES DISCLOSE A RACIST WORK ENVIRONMENT AT PUBLIC RADIO EXCHANGE

On August 7, the contents of an email sent by a Black woman who worked as a Community Manager at the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) that explains her decision to leave the company was published on Twitter by anonymous account @freepublicradio. The thread revealed that the woman, who the account did not name, had chosen to leave PRX after a series of incidents made clear it was a toxic workplace for people of color. She claimed CEO Kerri Hoffman touched her hair without permission; that PRX refused to compensate her fairly, despite colleagues in similar positions making $5,000 to $7,000 more than her; and that the company failed to acknowledge the killing of George Floyd, only instituting a social media policy against making political statements. Four Black women had left before her, all in less than a year. 

Nick Quah at newsletter Hot Pod News reported on the incident, linking to the original letter and identifying the departing employee as Palace Shaw (with her permission). As is often the case, Shaw — and the publication of her email via the anonymous Twitter thread — opened the floodgates for other employees of color at the company to describe similar incidents. Former employees of Public Radio International (PRI), recently acquired by PRX, also disclosed that PRI had problems with racism before the acquisition. Former PRI employee Lizzy Tomei wrote that “white supremacy and incompetence were entrenched qualities in the company and newsroom leadership.” 

Maria Murriel, now the co-founder of podcast production company Pizza Shark Productions, wrote her own thread about enduring racism while working at PRI before the PRX merger. “no job ever made me more unwell,” she wrote. “for years, i’ve been processing the racism, gaslighting and unrelenting white supremacy that drove not only the editorial decisions but personnel shakeups [at the company].” She detailed how PRI used her identity as an immigrant to score diversity points while she was dismissed and harassed in the workplace. One colleague asked, “Where are your papers?” and she was asked to provide an “outsider perspective” while covering the 2016 Republican National Convention (she has lived in the US since 2000).

When I spoke to Murriel, she described PRI exhibiting a pattern familiar to workers of color in the media industry. While she was enthusiastically encouraged to share her perspective in personal essays, she was subjected to insinuations she couldn’t cover immigrant issues objectively. At the same time, she at times found herself shoehorned into covering immigrant issues exclusively, at one point asked to find an immigration angle in a political story where there wasn’t one. 

“I think my work [in personal essays] was good, but in retrospect, I see that that’s the kind of exploitation and exotization of marginalized stories that public media brings to the front, while [keeping] the people who make those stories way in the back of the room, at the bottom of the hierarchy,” she told me. “They continued to gaslight us and be like, ‘You’re too close to this, you can’t cover this or that because of your background,’ but when you bare your soul because of how hard it is to exist in your identity, that’s when [they] want you to talk.”

On August 10, PRX CEO Kerri Hoffman published a response to the outcry from former staffers, in which she pledges an independent investigation of accusations of racism.

Reckonings are happening elsewhere in the world of public media. On August 7, the same day the Twitter thread summarizing Shaw’s letter was published, the staff at St. Louis Public Radio published an open letter to Medium detailing racism within the station. Employees have since circulated a call for donors and listeners to sign a document committing to support anti-racism at the station. 

Public media, noted Murriel, has something of an “earnest reputation” — of bringing marginalized stories to the public. But behind that do-gooding are the structural flaws of a mostly white workplace that caters to a white audience and exploits workers of color. That earnestness makes underlying racism all the more insidious because it is veiled by an outward appearance of valuing diversity.

Meanwhile, the upset at Bon Appétit/Condé Nast continues apace. Bon Appétit editor-at-large and popular Test Kitchen personality Carla Lalli Music announced last week that she would no longer appear in videos in protest of Condé Nast Entertainment’s refusal to pay POC talent equitably. (Lalli Music will stay in her editorial role at the magazine.) Her departure is the latest in a mass exodus from the channel that includes Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly, Molly Baz, and Rick Martinez. In total, seven of the 13 Bon Appétit staffers featured on the magazine’s wildly popular YouTube videos have said they will no longer appear on the channel, though most are continuing in their roles at the magazine.

Last week, Condé has announced via the New York Post that the YouTube channel — which has been halted over the last two months due to the ongoing controversy — will resume in September with some “new contributors,” who will be announced soon. But it seems attempts to recruit new talent (specifically Black women) are going very poorly so far!! People are publicly ridiculing the company sliding into their DMs to try to get them to replace the outgoing talent that quit in protest of workplace racism. It seems BA had the chance to put itself on the road to rehabbing its image — by paying BIPOC talent fairly — and it chose to forego that. Now it seems that ship has sailed. Who is going to work for them now? And how will they be viewed by the now-distrustful fans?

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LONGREAD OF THE WEEK The London Review of Books wins my MVP for quarantine-era magazine subscription. The paper has a perfect mix of missives on utterly obscure topics (i.e. the vernacular lives of 19th-century seamen) and timely, voicey essays from a set of international writers. “In Ashgabat” by the pseudonymous James Lomax, identified as someone who “works in oil,” is more of a dispatch. Like an early novel by Gary Shteyngart, the diary is pitched somewhere between irony and absurdity as its narrator traverses Turkmenistan arranging for the ouster of a corrupt oil executive: a landscape of airplanes, black cars, empty hotels, daytime bars. “Phillips told me about the fraud the following day,” writes Lomax (who needs a fiction deal, stat). “He had made the fake drilling estimates so large that it didn’t take long for an accountant at corporate HQ to spot the unlikely increase in activity and start asking questions.” — Kyle Chayka 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Jazmine Hughes will move away from her role as an editor at the New York Times Magazine to write full-time for both the magazine and for the paper’s Metro section.

— Vice has hired and promoted 20 people to its teams at Vice News and Vice Audio, including bringing Arielle Duhaime-Ross onto Vice News as on-air correspondent and host of the Vice News Reports podcast.

— Anne Helen Peterson is leaving her position as senior culture writer at BuzzFeed News in order to focus full-time on her Substack newsletter, Culture Study. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Billionaire entrepreneur Sumner Redstone, who reigned over a massive media empire that includes CBS, Paramount, and Simon & Schuster, has died — something he vowed in 2009 he would never do. (Here’s a thread on the exploitation of freelance labor now a part of his legacy.)

— In a very Air Mail exclusive, Graydon Carter’s operation published Leon Wieseltier’s first interview since he left the New Republic following accusations of misconduct from women who worked under him. Anyway, he wants back in the media game, and he’s launching a new publication featuring six of the Harper’s letter signatories. If you think that sounds stupid, unfortunately you are an enemy of free speech.

— Justin Dearborn, the CEO of Tronc — which has played a starring role in the media jobs bloodbath of the past few years (it laid off half the Daily News staff after acquiring the paper) — is doing very well for himself: Dearborn now owns a $4 million home in the Hollywood Hills. 

— Enjoy this delightful interview with the woman behind the “Sopranos Out Of Context” Twitter account, a rare, purely enjoyable corner of the hell site.

— Mark Thompson, who stepped down from his role as New York Times CEO in July, is walking away with $7.4 million. Very cool!!!!

— It remains to be seen how the pandemic will impact media and reporting in the long term, but here’s one material change: the Daily News has permanently shuttered its offices as staff work remotely. Plans for a future workplace post-pandemic are up in the air. Is this the end of newsrooms? 

-Look at this tweet!!