Digest 07/06/2021

The mob versus the personal essay, a second chance for the Appeal, and more.

THE PERSONAL ESSAY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX CAN’T EXIST IN 2021 

We’re teetering dangerously on the precipice of the last ten years of media fully repeating itself. Blogging is back thanks to the rise of Substack. As someone who graduated into digital media in 2015, I know all too well what’s next: the personal essay industrial complex. 

I got my start in this industry by taking my perceived inadequacies and boldly declaring them beautiful in overwrought personal essays. Six years later, I’m lucky that you can only find these pieces of mine if you know what to look for. But with the omnipresence of social media, anyone writing this genre today does not have the privilege of being so anonymous, and those who want to stop women and minorities from ascending in media can use it to their advantage. 

Last week, 20-year-old Deanna Schwartz published a piece for Washington Post’s The Lily titled “I’m about to turn 21 and haven’t had my first kiss. I blame the pandemic.” The college student, who also works at the Boston Globe, spent the days following its publication battling online harassment after the article made its way onto the now-suspended Twitter account, Journalists Posting Their Ls. Her piece was posted without context, but the account’s staunchly anti-journalist following quickly found Schwartz’s Twitter handle and began attacking her appearance, accusing her of being an incel, and sending her antisemitic insults. 

Schwartz and journalist Tess Townsend reached out to the account via Twitter DM to ask for the post to be removed, citing its cruelty and the harassment it was instigating. 

“Nah ima keep it up I’m grown,” the account replied to Townsend, per a screenshot shared with Study Hall. In response to Schwartz, the account denied any responsibility for the harassment and promptly blocked her. The next day, @journospostls was suspended from Twitter for, per the message that now appears on the profile, violating its terms of service. 

Schwartz was still fielding harassment when we spoke on the phone on Wednesday, finally locking her Twitter in the middle of our conversation because it had all become too much. 

“It’s just like, was this worth it at all?” Schwartz says in our call. “I don’t know why I did this to myself.”

While Schwartz says her editor reached out to her following the harassment, and that the Washington Post later paid for her to download the privacy protection service DeleteMe, she wonders if any of this would have happened had the piece been given a different headline. 

“It wasn’t the angle I originally pitched,” she says. “I think my subject line was like ‘I’m turning 21 and I’m not ready.’ And it was really focused on feeling behind and feeling like I failed at being young and not so much the first kiss thing, which is what it became and to be honest, I don’t like the headline the story ended up with. I think that contributed a lot to the harassment.”

“Deanna’s piece was an open and bravely honest exploration of a deeply personal experience that gave readers valuable insight,” Neema Roshania Patel, editor of The Lily, told Study Hall in a statement. “It’s appalling to see how horribly she’s been attacked on social media, and we’ve taken steps to ensure that she is supported.”

The impulse to package a piece in the clickiest way is a familiar practice in media, but that now invites more than just hate-clicks. The personal essay industrial complex cannot safely exist in a social media age in which journalists are the subject of gossip forums and Twitter effectively facilitates bigoted mobs that bleed into every social media outlet — where a writer’s personal digital footprint makes them more vulnerable to those things than ever before. 

It’s no coincidence that Journalists Posting Ls seems to ridicule less-experienced journalists. The account and its followers take petty pleasure in picking on people it’s easier to hurt, often young women. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, with these accounts expressing their frustrations with the current state of the media industry by…scaring off any new voices that could potentially change it. 

It’s a shame, not only because Schwartz’s piece was thoughtful and relatable, but because the personal essay industrial complex was extremely effective as a foot in the door. But in 2021, her own attempt has Schwartz reconsidering everything. 

“I’m scared that now, no matter what I do, I’ve become an enemy of the mob,” she says. “No matter what I do, I’m just going to get hate.”

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THE APPEAL LAUNCHES A WORKER-LED LIFEBOAT

After a temporary victory in May in which The Appeal’s unionization efforts managed to reverse previously announced layoffs, founder Rob Smith, along with The Appeal Advisory Board, Tides Center and Tides Advocacy, announced plans to “sunset The Appeal in its current form at the end of June.” However, a majority of staff jointly announced plans to relaunch the outlet as an entirely worker-led operation via donations to Scalawag, a nonprofit newsroom assisting in The Appeal’s relaunch. 

While this new iteration of The Appeal has yet to determine specifics in terms of company structure and ownership, they’ve already begun rebuilding based on their experience with what doesn’t work. 

“Under previous leadership, The Appeal operated in a very top-down fashion,” The Appeal’s transition team tells Study Hall over email. “It was, as we outlined in our statement when we unionized, an explicitly ‘low-democracy’ workplace. We had little control over our coverage decisions and very little clarity on why we were getting assignments.” (In May, The Daily Beast published an exposé on the publication’s “cruel” culture).

In addition to subscription models, worker-owned and -led media has been presented as a solution to the common institutional problems borne out of the advertising and SEO-based landscape. Brick House, Discourse Blog, and Defector are among a number of newsrooms launched in recent years in which workers have equal ownership of the companies they write for.

“The problem is when things are bad and when things are unstable, what you get is the people who have the most institutional power and privilege basically just protecting their own,” Jack Crosbie, co-founder of Discourse Blog, told me in a previous piece for nofilter about how worker-owned publications can change media. 

The Appeal transition team points out that good stories “don’t come from the top down,” and that the success of any website has always been thanks to the work of reporters and editors on the ground.

“Going forward, we believe that we will create better journalism when all workers play a role in generating stories, refining pitches, and cultivating sources,” they say. “We also think that we can make better strategic decisions when our entire staff has a say in big picture items like setting editorial priorities and defining our organizational culture. That’s what we mean when we say this project will be worker-led. Building an organization around a commitment to transparency and equity can only strengthen the quality and impact of our work.”

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Shoshy Ciment is departing Business Insider after two years for a new role covering footwear and apparel. 

— Megha Majumdar has been promoted to editor-in-chief of Catapult, where she was previously a senior editor. 

— Patricia Hernandez has returned to Kotoku as editor-in-chief, where she last worked in 2018 as deputy editor. 

— Delia Cai joins Vanity Fair as senior vanities correspondent, pressing pause on her popular newsletter Deez Links.

— Nate Freeman is also joining Vanity Fair as art columnist and staff writer, leaving Artnet News.

— Julia Alexander is leaving IGN — and journalism! — to join Parrot Analytics as a Senior Strategy Analyst.

— Stephanie Nolen is joining the New York Times as their global health reporter. 

— Harper’s Magazine deputy editor Rachel Poser is leaving to join The Times as Sunday Review editor

— Nick Martin is departing The New Republic to join High Country News as Indigenous affairs desk editor.

— Melinda Fakuade joins Vox as associate editor of culture and features.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

—  Poynter wrote about how many newsrooms leave applicants on read without a formal rejection, in many cases meaning they don’t find out they haven’t gotten the job until they see someone else got it on Twitter. 

—  Bulletin, Facebook’s answer to Substack, is here and boasts newsletters from Malcolm Gladwell, Erin Andrews, and Mitch Albom, to name a few. Speaking of names, let’s try again with some of these, shall we?

—  I guess we’re writing these stories again. 

—  Vanity Fair took a dive into the little-known beginnings of Vice and Gavin McInnes, highlighting the magazine’s start as a Hatian publication called Voice of Montreal, later shortened to Voice before becoming simply Vice after it cut ties with its Hatian publishers. You know the rest. 

—  A good tweet.