Study Hall Digest 11/11/19

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs) (And welcome to our new managing editor Erin Schwartz!)

Interview’s Freelance Payment Problems

The relaunched Interview Magazine is no better than the old one, according to several former staffers, who quit their jobs over the magazine’s chronic failure to pay contributors. The legendary magazine founded by Andy Warhol temporarily folded in May 2018 when it filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which turned out to be a maneuver to allow owner Peter Brant to buy it back from himself in order to avoid paying $3.3 million owed to hundreds of contributors and former employees. The magazine relaunched the following September under the leadership of Kelly Brant, the former owner’s daughter. As Women’s Wear Daily reported in January, employees at the new operation were already worried about the new iteration’s ability to pay contributors by the end of 2018.

It turns out those fears were well-founded. Three former employees of the Interview relaunch told Study Hall that the publication was chronically behind on payments; that unpaid invoices piled up in a neglected “accounts” email account overseen by Brant herself; and that clients who did end up getting paid either complained insistently or refused to deliver content before receiving payment. All three former employees said they left their positions because they feared staying with the magazine would damage their reputations.

When new staffers raised concerns about the defunct magazine’s mistakes being repeated, Kelly Brant reassured them that enough money had been raised by investors to allow upfront payments to contributors for about a year, or long enough to reestablish good will, at which point the publication would supposedly be self-sustaining — but that very quickly proved not to be the case. The magazine had fallen months behind on payments by the end of 2018, and unpaid invoices continued to pile up throughout 2019. “This [relaunch] was pitched [to new staffers] as, ‘We know we have a lot of bad press, a reputation issue, and we’re here to let you know we have the money to fix it and you won’t be having to wade upstream against that,’” said one former staffer. “And that was a lie from the outset.”

Employees found themselves buried in long-overdue invoices, and when they pressed management about late payments, they were given excuses: Interview was awaiting payment from advertisers or they were waiting for a brand partnerships to come through — issues familiar to any magazine team. “These were people who had been in magazines their entire career,” said another former staffer. “I kind of knew right away they didn’t know what they were doing…it seemed to me they didn’t understand the process so they were using this ignorance as an excuse.” When the employee would ask about paying contributors, they were told in a patronizing manner that there were other priorities to be paid off first.

Interview is currently on a net 60 payment plan, meaning contributors are supposed to be paid within 60 days of the publication date — but that rarely happened. As of the release of the September issue, outstanding 2018 invoices remained, and the majority of 2019 invoices had not been paid.

Another employee said the magazine required freelancers to pay for projects out of their own pockets, forcing them to chase down reimbursement for the budgets in addition to their rates. “It was a squeaky wheel situation where if you freak out, you get paid faster,” said the former employee. “But a lot of people aren’t willing to freak out and write a threatening email, because who wants to do that?” Payment issues made working with contributors difficult: that employee attempted to pay off overdue invoices in order to get a photographer to work with the magazine again; they also described a client the magazine wanted refusing to work with Interview due to payment issues.

Today, the magazine’s money issues are a mystery to workers who spent months relaunching the disgraced brand. “I don’t know if there isn’t money, or if because there’s no proper accounting system things are falling by the wayside,” said one former staffer. We haven’t gotten a response to a request for comment sent to Interview Friday, but we’ll post an update if we do.

The only good internet was the internet ten years ago, say internet veterans

We can all agree that the death of Deadspin at the hands of the dumbest people in media makes the internet a worse place, and that it is just the latest of many beloved blog deaths. This moment has produced an outpouring of eulogies and post-mortems not just for Deadspin and Splinter but for a golden age of blogging that has passed away. Alex Pareene at The New Republic wrote about the death of the “rude media,” while Phillip Maciak at The Week declared the death of the “good internet,” a term borrowed from Gawker founder Nick Denton. Something glorious has been lost, they argue, that can’t be recreated. This nostalgia, largely for Gawker itself, has popped up on media Twitter a lot lately (former Gawker writer Emily Gould has taken issue with it).

There doesn’t seem to be much acknowledgment that this golden age of the rude, good internet had a dark side, that Gawker had a stunning capacity for cruelty and was plagued by misogyny and a lack of diversity. Pareene’s piece holds up an older iteration of Vice as an example of rude media, but there’s no acknowledgement of the company’s culture of sexual harassment or their habit of underpaying women. Where are the heroes who facilitated rude media now? Shane Smith jumped ship after that damning New York Times expose and continues to be disgustingly rich. Nick Denton, who was paid $500,000 a year as Gawker’s owner, was compensated after the site’s Peter Thiel-induced implosion, paid $16,666 a month to not work as part of a non-compete clause. His Twitter account notes he’s working on a “storytelling app.”

None of this voids the ways in which Gawker was good, or negates the awfulness of a vindicative billionaire killing a website he thinks is mean. But maybe instead of yearning for a golden age of the internet we’re so sure has already passed, we could work towards a better future for media where everyone’s interests are better represented.

Longread of the Week: Leslie Jamison for the New York Times went long on the “cult of the literary sad woman,” a phenomenon she fell in love with in her tumultuous early twenties and then out of love with as an older writer. She reflects on Maggie Nelson documenting her own contentedness in The Argonauts: “This rumination on happiness points toward the vast range of aesthetic alternatives to sadness as a default narrative posture. It acts as an invocation — or, at least, an invitation — to think of happiness as something that might sharpen our thinking into focus, rather than blunting it.” In other words, being happy isn’t going to make you a bad writer.

Everything Else

— At least ten staffers and contributors were laid off at Bustle last week, and a spokesperson for the company said they would be replaced by “marquee hires” as part of a “major site relaunch” slated for next year. So Bryan Goldberg’s abject shittiness and chronic inability to treat workers well continue apace.

— Speaking of rude media: Jezebel exposed how the sexual misconduct of Eric Sundermann, first at Vice’s Noisey (during the good old days!) then at The Fader, was ignored by bosses at both companies for years. Thanks to the Jezebel report, Sundermann is now out at The Fader, as is publisher Andy Cohn, who hired Sundermann despite being aware of his behavior and who was himself accused of creepy behavior.

— Absolutely everyone is starting a podcast. The NYPD has launched a true crime podcast, the target audience for which I can only assume is…the NYPD. (Also, NYPD, no one’s clamoring to hear from you right now! Stop terrorizing people in the subway!)

— Netflix provides a baffling, hilarious “skip politics” button that pops up during Seth Meyers’ new standup special when he starts talking about Trump. It’s unclear to me if this is for people who hate Trump and are tired of hearing about him or for people who love Trump who want to pretend their favorite comedians don’t hate him…or both.

— In some good media news, staffers at Hearst’s portfolio of twenty-four magazines are unionizing — a group that includes Elle, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and Town & Country. As Haley Mlotek observes, this will be a very large union.

— Why become a journalist if you’re an anxious mess? This is a question I ask myself often, and one that apparently resonates with many other denizens of media Twitter. Washington Post reporter Gene Park captioned a very funny TikTok video by @allison.lorraine agonizing over a cold call as the experience of “introverted reporters,” while USA Today reporter Ashlee Burns simply asked, “How did everyone with anxiety end up becoming a reporter?”