Digest 07/26/2022

Fact checker Jane Drinkard writes that the media's thirst to break stories has surpassed its ability to report without harming its subjects.

MYTHOLOGY BEHIND BREAKING STORIES PUTS MEDIA AND SOURCES IN COMPROMISING POSITIONS

by Jane Drinkard

The story went like this: the upscale Italian restaurant in downtown Manhattan had mob connections, and the sleazy manager acted just as you might imagine he would, putting his hands up one employee’s skirt, violently threatening another. It’s the kind of detail that magazine writers dream of digging up. But for this piece, which I was assigned to fact check, the more lurid allegations didn’t pan out. I had the employee who was threatened on record, but there was no eyewitness or documentation to back up his claim. In high-stakes reporting, you can’t run the risk of thin sourcing — the people making the allegations are left exposed, there could be a defamation lawsuit against the publication, and with the mob involved in that particular story, who knows what else. Ultimately, it wasn’t worth the risk, and the story was killed. 

More often than not, fact checking involves deeply uncomfortable conversations and a story that does ultimately run. That was the case for me when I checked stories like Natalie Beach’s essay about her frenemy Caroline Calloway, Rebecca Traister’s Cuomo exposé, and Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz’s deep dive on the January 6 insurrection. One editor described the task of fact checking to me as “making sources mad before publication,” and this often had to happen on a very tight timeline. So when I read the heartbreaking IndyStar story of the 10-year-old girl from Ohio who was raped and sought an abortion across state lines in Indiana — and then watched as far-right trolls descended on the piece — I thought immediately about similar stories I’ve worked on that the reporter, editor, and myself all believed to be true, but that couldn’t survive the harsh rigors of a fact check. The IndyStar piece, and the fallout from it, is a prime example of what can happen when good reporting is rushed out before being thoroughly backed up. 

To date, it remains unclear if the IndyStar story was, in fact, fact checked. I reached out to the reporter of the piece, Shari Rudavsky, who redirected me to a general public relations email associated with Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the country and the current owner of the IndyStar. Then to Bro Krift, the Star’s executive editor, and through a Gannett spokeswoman, I received the same vague response provided to Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post: “The facts and sourcing about people crossing state lines into Indiana, including the 10-year-old girl, for abortions are clear. We have no additional comment at this time.” 

What is clear is that the “fact-checking boom” the Duke Reporters Lab clocked in 2019 is now slowing down. Marry the loss of fact checkers with the gutting of local news and we have ourselves a real problem. According to a Pew Research Center Study, 1,800 print newspaper outlets closed in the US between 2004 and 2015. More than 100 local newsrooms closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seventy million Americans now live in “news deserts” — areas with no reliable news outlets. The local outlets that have survived lack essential resources. “Ghost newspapers,” publications that operate “as shadows of their former selves,” no longer having “the financial resources and manpower to fully cover their communities,” are the new newspapers. As of August 2019, the Star was reportedly down to 70 total employees, from 285 in 2000 when it was purchased by Gannett. Additionally, Gannett merged with GateHouse in 2019, in a billion dollar cost-cutting deal heavily criticized by the NewsGuild Union, who wrote that the sale “threatens journalism.” The IndyStar lists more than 50 reporters and editors on its site, but does not appear to have a dedicated fact checker. 

It’s important to remember that the IndyStar got the story right: a then-9-year-old was raped, became pregnant, and due to the Dobbs ruling, had to cross state lines in order to get an abortion. It was not, as The Wall Street Journal said, an abortion story “too good to be true.” The problem was that the Star didn’t sufficiently button-up that reporting — which is true whether there was a fact checker on it or not. Just a few weeks later, a reporter at The Columbus Dispatch attended the arraignment of the 10-year-old’s alleged rapist, further solidifying the facts. But, the original story ran with just a single source, leaving the 10-year-old, her family, and Dr. Bernard all vulnerable to threats. (Bernard is preparing to file a defamation suit against Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, saying that he wrongly accused her of professional misconduct and violating state law.) 

In recent weeks, the story had become so big that Biden included it in remarks on reproductive rights, Ohio’s General Attorney Dave Yost questioned the validity of Bernard’s account on Fox, and Kessler, the Post’s resident fact checker, deemed it “a very difficult story to check.” However, when it came to further reporting on the actual facts, it was again local news outlets like the Dispatch and the Star doing the work. 

Unfortunately, in a post-Dobbs world, there will be countless similar horror stories, and it will often be local papers breaking them. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board placed the blame on Dr. Bernard for not disclosing where the alleged crime occurred or identifying the doctor who referred the case, noting her “long history of abortion activism in the media.” (Bernard did report the abortion to law enforcement, another fact that was proven with further reporting, and her history of activism, especially in this case, has no bearing on the facts of the matter.) The board wrote in a follow-up piece that, post-Dobbs, media and politicians should “make sure that stories about abortion, from either side of the debate, can be readily confirmed.” But the idea that a reader — or an editorial board — can quickly verify the facts in abortion reporting undermines the entire enterprise of fact checking. This is highly specialized work that should happen out of the public’s eye, before publication, and with enough time, so that when the story goes to press it can stand on its own as a story, not a series of facts to be picked apart.  

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PRIVATE EQUITY FAILSONS SEND MEL MAGAZINE STAFF HOME WITH ONE LAST DISMAL MONEYSHOT

by Evan Kleekamp

A damning feature of private equity investment made itself known to media workers again last Friday, when staff at men’s lifestyle and culture publication MEL Magazine were ambushed with news that their jobs would no longer exist during a routine staff meeting. (All former MEL employees who spoke to Study Hall for this story were granted anonymity so our reporting would not interfere with the unexpected severance negotiations these workers found themselves in over the weekend.)

Multiple sources told Study Hall some MEL employees were suddenly ejected from the Google meeting led by the CEO of Recurrent Ventures while details about the layoffs were still being shared when staff access to company accounts like Slack and email was revoked. Recurrent Ventures acquired the online publication from Dollar Shave Club last year. 

“I had to rejoin the meeting using my private email,” one source told Study Hall.

“I had so many sources I was supposed to interview. Now they’re never going to hear from me unless I can find them,” said another.

The backhanded firings demonstrate that even in startup environments, where promises of partial ownership, innovation and creative flourishing, and having a voice in business decisions hold sway, workers have no real seat at the table so long as investors can pull the plug without any warning. The layoffs at MEL are clearly a symptom of private investors participating in the media space without a coherent plan or the ability to fairly communicate expectations to their new employees. 

“I personally had no indication the layoffs were coming,” a source said. “The site was performing well and in my opinion on the road to even greater success with new offerings.” Another said that even MEL’s editorial leadership — namely Editor-in-Chief Josh Schollmeyer, Executive Editor Lindsay Schrupp, and General Manager Ryan Brown — seemed blindsided by the layoffs. “I feel so naive thinking we didn’t need to form a union here,” the source said. “It just sucks how Recurrent can just throw our work away out of nowhere without us having any bargaining power.”

Asked about their severance package, multiple sources said employees were given seven days to sign an agreement that offered them six weeks of pay — an offer that they said not only paled in comparison to the several months of severance they had received when Dollar Shave Club shuttered the publication in 2021, but also lacked clear instructions for how to proceed. 

“During the Dollar Shave Club exit, there were so many more resources,” a source said. “Like, this person will walk you through getting COBRA. This person will walk you through getting your contacts and any files you need. It just seemed much more graceful.” 

“At this point, we’re just just trying to get a fair shake,” a source said. “We upheld our side of the bargain.” 

Several sources close to the issue told Study Hall that, although editorial staff had set record levels of site traffic, and increased their publication rate and workload in the process, Recurrent never hired a dedicated sales team or created new infrastructure to monetize the publication’s growing audience. 

“A lot of the writers were shielded from the logistics of making money,” a source said, noting that the editorial team’s strategy changed to satisfy web traffic demands. “I personally shifted to a much faster beat, writing multiple stories a day that were topical. But the main metric we had in our hands was our performance as workers. In terms of metrics, we went above and beyond.”

Speaking to the larger pattern of media businesses with talented editorial staff shuttering under misguided and uninformed venture capitalists, one source said, “It’s always the journalists who are smart and creative and have opinions who pay for the sins of the business.” 

“I take some comfort in knowing that everyone who made MEL MEL still exists,” said another. “We will be out there doing the MEL thing somewhere else.”

Sources blamed the “general ineptitude” of Recurrent’s leadership for the layoffs, saying they had come to expect very little from MEL’s new owners. “Recurrent told us that they made a mistake when they bought us and that they were being overly ambitious,” one source said. “But that’s been a throughline during my time at the company. They’ve been overly ambitious with all the publications they’ve been buying.” 

“It seemed like every week they were buying more media entities,” said another. “We would consistently have meetings with updates from the editorial side, but Recurrent would never have updates. They would just hire more people at their other businesses.”

“Maybe in two years they’ll be an Amazon Referral LLC where they just write SEO and sell power saws,” said one source. 

Of the more than twenty media brands Recurrent owns, recognizable and recent acquisitions like Popular Science and Saveur stand in direct contrast to the company’s bread and butter military publications such as Task & Purpose, The War Zone, We Are The Mighty, and MilSpouseFest, (née MilitaryOneClick) which “offers modern military spouses helpful content.” (One would think that such a reverence for the armed forces would influence a company to act honorably toward its staff, but the shakeup at MEL indicates that is not the case.) It’s unclear whether or not Recurrent plans to close any of its other brands — the media company issued a statement about the layoffs, but Study Hall has no real intention of speaking with lamewads on the layoffs, and Study Hall has no real intention of speaking with lamewads — but sources said employees at other outlets were concerned they could be next. 

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Maris Kreizman will join Vulture as the books editor starting August 1. “I can’t wait to put some cool shit out into the world,” she said. 

— Chavie Lieber joined The Wall Street Journal’s Styles News desk where she will cover fashion, style, celebrity pop culture, and internet culture.

— The New Yorker fired Erin Overbey, likely because of the Twitter thread she wrote last week detailing her negative editorial experiences at the magazine.

— Julia Alexander joined Puck where she will cover “the inside story of Hollywood’s streaming wars: the data tactics, content strategies, and the power players behind it all.” Alexander was previously a journalist for The Verge. 

— Former New York Magazine Madison Malone Kircher joined The New York Times Style desk. Former Buzzfeed online culture writer Joe Bernstein will follow suit in August.