Digest 11/22/2021

Sweet layoff pie, pivoting to not-journalism, saying no to PR people, and more.

FIRST THINGS FIRST: FREE PIE

Did you get laid off this year? You may be titled to pienancial compensation. In fact, so many journalists who were laid off in 2021 went to Layoff Pies on Instagram to claim their free Thanksgiving treat that baker Nick Robins-Early says they’re all out of pies. Robins-Early, a tech and disinformation journalist, is the mastermind behind it all, along with some fellow journalist friends who are in charge of the planning, order-taking, and graphics. We chatted with Robins-Early over email about how this (hopefully) future tradition came about. 

 

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Study Hall: What inspired you to start the project?

Nick Robins-Early: I got laid off earlier this year and it put me in kind of a precarious situation. A lot of other journalist friends and coworkers were incredibly supportive and helpful, so I decided to bake them a bunch of what I called layoff pies as a thank you. Later on I figured it might be nice to do something fun for other people who got laid off, and cobbled together the idea of a pop-up pie shop.

SH: Why pies? (“Why not pies?” is an acceptable answer.)

Nick: Pies tend to make people happy, they can feed a lot of people and they feel a little more special than a cake or some other baked goods. The short answer is also that I’m not actually good at baking a lot of other things. There’s never going to be a Layoff Kouign-Amanns. 

SH: What has the response been like?

Nick: It’s been really great. I didn’t really know what to expect and I’m glad everyone seems to be enjoying the idea and wanting to be a part of it. There’s also been a lot of journalists donating money to cover the costs of free pies, which I hadn’t planned on and is kind of a testament to how a lot of journalists are incredibly supportive and willing to help each other in this weird industry. I’m hoping this can become an annual tradition, and this has all definitely encouraged that.

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FORMER JOURNALISTS SHARE THEIR BEST PIVOTING TIPS

We’re well on our way to the season of new starts and resolutions, and the only sentence more cliché than “my diet starts tomorrow” is “this is the year I’m leaving media.” At least, among my circle of friends. The worst and best of this industry are constantly duking it out like the angel and devil on my shoulders, but let’s say the angel has won for now. Or, devil? What I’m trying to say is, it’s all well and good to want to pivot out of media, but even if you’ve decided to take that path, it can be hard to see how you can dress up your journalism experience in a way that’s enticing to brands, PR agencies, marketing firms, and other adjacent industries. So I turned to some journalists who had successfully made the switch, and got their advice for how to best market your journalism skills:

“Finding ways to tell stories quickly and package them in a shareable way is really all that marketing is now anyways, and the only stretch is learning the language and evolving to different timelines when u switch from newsroom to corporate life,” says Lexi Nisita, who pivoted from media into marketing and corporate editorial. 

“Right now my main focus is finishing a novel project, and thanks to the skills and connections I made working FT in media I’m able to do like, weird copywriting and web producing gigs and make basically the same amount of money I did working as a blogger,” says Sophie, who is pivoting to writing literary fiction. 

“I think people in digital media way underestimate how much collateral companies produce: Blogs, press releases, product announcements, internal communications, social posts, talking points, executive speeches, media pitches, infographics etc,” says James Dennin, who is now a content development chief of AI at IBM. “And despite all that, everyone still hates writing. They hate having their ideas put up for critique. They hate wrestling with the blank page. Even a short stay in digital media should be enough for you to have gotten over that, and you also likely produce at a volume that’s way higher. I think once you realize that the transition is a lot less scary. You also have a strong bullshit detector, are good on the phone, essential business things.”

You already know how to “[write] to fit a specific voice and [develop] a brand perspective,”  Nisita adds. “At Refinery29, where I worked, that was huge because the whole point of the site was to have this very specific and curated identity. We spent a lot of time thinking about who our audience was, defining the ‘R29 girl’ and trying to take what would normally just live subjectively in an editor’s head and codify it. That’s really important for working in brand marketing, and I think I have a better understanding of it than people with more traditional experience simply because we had to work that muscle multiple times a day instead of on one campaign every few months.”

“A lot of what you learn in the transition is process stuff, what needs a legal review, the quickest ways to get things approved,” Dennin says. “It’s stuff no one could be expected to know when they get in. For people looking at making the switch I’d say apply widely so you can learn some of the more niche jargon and how people behave and talk about their day to days and you’ll learn a lot even from that.”

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IS PR ABOUT TO HAVE A RECKONING?

Two weeks ago, The Verge significantly updated its guidelines so that on-background statements will no longer be the default with sources, and that they will expect “corporate communications professionals and people speaking to us in an official capacity to be on the record in almost every single case.” Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, came back a week later on Twitter to show the new policy in action, with several on-the-record statements from spokespeople at Meta, Google, Apple, and Amazon. The new pieces are stronger, clearer, and more informative with the addition of statements from real people with real legs to stand on. 

It’s not just tech publications that could benefit from a more equal relationship with PR, as Gawker writer Sarah Hagi pointed out in the midst of discussion about the decline in quality of celebrity profiles. 

“This is bc celebs and their teams are crazy and vindictive not bc writers are not empowered,” Hagi tweeted in response to a musing that celebrity profiles are too uniformly glowing nowadays. “I know writers and editors who’ve been screamed at by their teams for not doing exactly what they want, or been threatened to pull out of a profile for the dumbest reasons. The problem is that these institutions let them be in control, writers wanna be honest.”

As The Verge proves, when the company draws a hard line, PR is capable of meeting them there. If enough institutions draw it, then they’ll have no choice.

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Liz Farrell is joining FITS News, the outlet behind much of the reporting in Mandy Matney’s Murdough Murders podcast. (Mandy, if you’re reading this, I’d love to interview you!)

— Maya Kosoff has joined The Org as editor of its news platform Insights. 

— Rachel Monroe has joined The New Yorker to write about Texas.

— Sasha Belenky is moving into a full-time senior editor role at Type Investigate.

— Richard Collings has joined Axios as a reporter covering “the financial activities of retailers, including M&A, IPOs, SPACs, PE, VC, activist investing, distressed situations” and more things I’m too dumb to understand. 

— Emily Leibert has joined Jezebel as a staff writer. 

— Rachel Sanders has left her role as a local rep for NewsGuild of New York. 

— Elizabeth Hunt Brockway has joined The Daily Beast as editorial visuals director.

— Zing Tsjeng is now the editor-in-chief of Vice UK.

— Allegra Kirkland has been promoted to politics director at Teen Vogue. 

— Aylin Woodward is departing Business Insider to join Wall Street Journal Science as a reporter. 

— John Gonzalez is leaving The Ringer after five years

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— NPR books editor Petra Mayer passed away last weekend. Nancy Barnes, NPR‘s senior vice president for news, said in an email to staff that the cause of death appeared to be a pulmonary embolism. Mayer joined NPR in 1994 as an engineering assistant, and later worked as an associate producer and director for All Things Considered and a production assistant for Morning Edition and Weekend Edition Saturday before joining the books team in 2012. 

— New York Magazine published an extensive look into the ongoing situation between The Washington Post and reporter Felicia Sonmez. Sonmez has continued to work at the Post in the midst of a lawsuit she filed against the outlet for alleged discrimination based on her gender and protected status as a victim of sexual assault. The lawsuit comes after Sonmez was both barred from reporting on stories involving sexual assault after coming out herself as a survivor, and disciplined for tweeting a 2016 Daily Beast story about the rape allegations against Kobe Bryant shortly after his death in January 2020. 

— Vox Media moves further into audio with the purchase of podcast studio Criminal Productions. 

— Speaking of podcasts, after four years, For Colored Nerds is back with hosts Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings. 

— Page Six reports that following the tragedy at Astroworld, in which 10 people died and more than 300 were injured during Travis Scott’s performance, W Magazine is attempting to prevent a cover featuring Scott and Kylie Jenner from hitting stands. “W editors have cleared any planned coverage of Travis and Kylie from their website, but the magazine was already printed, and now they are trying to stop the delivery trucks,” a source told the outlet.

— Medium has acquired Knowable, an audio-based education platform. 

— Gawker got the scoop on the influx of departures from Jezebel. Unsurprisingly, former employees cited executive overreach by G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller, who was also the executive behind the 2019 mass resignation at Deadspin, and deputy editorial director Lea Goldman. 

— Despite the New York Times podcast The Daily’s policy against fossil fuel sponsorships, Heated writer Emily Atkin reported on how an ExxonMobil ad made its way into an episode last week, in the midst of 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). 

— A recent series of retractions at WNYC’s Gothamist is pulling the curtain back on larger unrest at the parent company. The SAG-AFTRA union, which represents the journalists at WNYC, has filed both a lawsuit and an unfair labor practice complaint against the company, according to The New York Times. ormer employee Jim O’Grady took to Twitter to comment on WNYC editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper, writing “no one I know who remains there is ‘psyched’ about Audrey Cooper’s reign of retribution.”