Study Hall Digest 3/30/2020

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

***Quarantine Edition: Issue 3***

Freelancers are keeping track of publications whose freelance budgets have been impacted by the pandemic. Study Hall members launched a Google doc listing publications currently undergoing a freeze on commissions. As of this morning, over 50 publications had been added to the list. Among them are several Bustle Digital Group publications — Input is decreasing its freelance spending for the foreseeable future and The Outline has frozen its freelance budget. A third Bustle publication not yet on the list seems to have frozen its budget as well — writer Madeline Muzzi tells Study Hall she has been negotiating a rate with Inverse when she was told the conversation would have to be put on pause.

“They said they’re being very tight right now with the budget and pausing everything and will get back to me April 13,” said Muzzi. BDG did not respond to an inquiry about whether such changes are companywide.

Muzzi added that she was fortunate enough to have inked a 12-week contract with another company before the pandemic hit, so she will not be without work, but she worries about the impact such freezes will ultimately have on the sorts of stories she tends to cover. “I primarily work in food and lifestyle publications and it seems right now that they feel like there’s no place for [those stories]. I think the cultural conversation right now has shifted so dramatically, it’s really changed the way we’re thinking about food and lifestyle.”

A freelancer who asked to remain anonymous says a Medium publication they write for will decrease its rates. Last week, the freelancer got a call from an editor asking if their rates being cut roughly in half was a deal-breaker. Their response was tempered by the ongoing crisis. “Normally I would say, ‘No, that is a deal-breaker,’ but in the current climate I don’t know what’s going to happen,” they said. “I’ve spent all of this time learning how to advocate for myself and ask for raises and now I just feel like those rules don’t really apply, because everybody’s affected by this. This is a situation where it’s not in this editor’s control.”

The freelancer added that they are worried about what the editorial budget cuts could mean for their ability to earn a living long-term. They had just wrapped up a handful of projects as the pandemic was hitting and now find themselves without work. “I was having a really good year last year and I was excited about it,” they said. “That’s when this hit, so I have almost nothing. Normally I would have a lot more things in the pipeline but I was finishing these big things and trying to get them out the door…so this is terrifying.”

On the bright side: Plenty of publications are still commissioning pieces from freelancers, and they can be found on the same document!

How Restaurant Closures Are Rewriting Food Media

Eater covered the restaurant world — then all the restaurants closed. How is it filling the void? The bulk of Eater New York’s traffic came from its maps feature, which allows readers to search recommended restaurants in their area. That feature has been put on pause for the foreseeable future, explains Eater New York editor Serena Dai, who, along with everyone else involved in the food industry, is waiting to see how the pandemic impacts restaurants in the long-term. “I have a whole roster of maps that just hasn’t been run, and once things are up and running, they’re going to have to be completely fact-checked again,” she said. “Who knows which restaurants are still going to be open?”

It’s a haunting question, but closures are foremost in the thoughts of those covering the industry at a time when restaurants have switched to delivery and takeout only, shuttered altogether, or laid off a large portion of staff. In response, Eater New York has been nimble in its pivot to covering how the pandemic is impacting the restaurant industry.

This has meant fundamentally changing the way the publication operates, including job descriptions. Editor and restaurant reviewer Ryan Sutton, for instance, is now on the labor beat, covering how paid sick leave laws impact restaurant and delivery workers and how the stimulus package will impact restaurants. Today, they launched Eater at Home, a vertical for home cooking.

And there’s plenty of interest to keep readers flocking to the website. Dai said that so far, traffic has not suffered; an audience of confused and anxious restaurant workers plus New Yorkers who love the industry are keeping the numbers up. “This industry is made up of people — there’s so many people in it,” said Dai. “I think people are scared and wanting to know what’s going to happen to their favorite servers and their favorite bartender and their favorite chefs and the place they go every Saturday. I think a lot of it is people in the industry as well, thinking, ‘What do I do?’”

“From our side, it’s been a weird time for us, but it’s been interesting to pivot to do more news stuff and to do stuff that would be more traditionally business [journalism],” she added.

Similar changes in coverage can be seen at New York Magazine’s Grub Street, where nearly every piece on the home page right now is coronavirus-related, including the story of an undocumented restaurateur unsure of how to survive without the safety nets documented workers have. It’s a reminder that everything is political, and during a pandemic, most stories are, in some sense, pandemic stories.

In Other (Still Mostly COVID-Related) News

— Eater New York broke the story about delivery workers crowding the sidewalk outside Carbone, an exclusive West Village eatery from which rich New Yorkers were ordering takeout en masse. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni referenced a photo taken by the story’s author Gary He in a subsequent column, but linked to a tweet from a BuzzFeed editor instead of the Eater piece…? Anyway, He and others called out Bruni, who eventually put out a tweet acknowledging He’s work, but the column has not been amended. The Times’ habit of not giving credit to other publications is extra fucked up at a time when journalists like He are putting their health on the line for the story.

— Fox News is now worried about legal action from the viewers it misled by continually downplaying the threat of coronavirus.

— Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker’s most beloved and feared interviewer of bullshitters, most recently took to task Richard A. Epstein, a professor whose articles questioning the threat of coronavirus influenced the White House’s response. It is, predictably, satisfyingly brutal, a balm in these horrific times.

— BuzzFeed is slashing its employees’ pay amidst revenue struggles due to the coronavirus pandemic. The BuzzFeed News union put out a statement acknowledging that the measure, however unfortunate, will at least spare job losses. CEO Jonah Peretti will not be earning a salary (not that he needs one).

— Want a Cameo from a Bon Appetit chef? It’ll cost you $45 to $350, depending on which one you want to tell your friend happy birthday. (This seems to have been a one-off thing to raise funds for charity, but quarantine is long — could happen again!)

— In other “food journalism in the time of coronavirus” news, The New Yorker’s Helen Rosner has a new advice column focused on quarantine cooking. Excellent questions so far, some of which I’ve struggled with myself, such as: “What is the best potato-soup recipe for filling the chasm of existential dread where my chest cavity once existed, and can I make it in a Crock-Pot?”