Study Hall Digest 3/18/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Can “Freelance” Be “Full-Time”??? We Ask a Lawyer

Last week, David Tamarkin, site director of Epicurious, tweeted an “amazing” job (??) opportunity — a “full-time freelance position” as an Editorial Assistant, duties of which include newsletter management, writing articles, SEO, and recipe web production. The position has no benefits. Or wait — Tamarkin thought about it after getting trounced by the entire internet and the New York State Department of Labor and then uhh suddenly remembered there actually are benefits.

Unfortunately, what makes this posting remarkable is not the concept of a full-time freelance position but the brazenness with which Tamarkin openly advertised it as such — “permalancing” gigs, as Splinter permalancer Jack Crosbie pointed out, are the media industry standard, and it’s no secret that even prestige publications like the New Yorker depend on them. It’s a not-so-sneaky way of benefiting from someone’s labor on the cheap.

So when is an employer in danger of toeing the legal line? Study Hall spoke to lawyer Adam Braverman, whose practice specializes in employment law and unpaid wages. Here’s the basic rundown:

• It’s not as black-and-white as you’d think. The laws vary by state, but in New York, the courts will look at a variety of factors in determining whether someone is an independent contractor or a regular employee: How much control the company has over the worker; who has the opportunity for profit or loss (an independent contractor will bear the brunt of the profit loss if the work takes longer than anticipated); the permanence and duration of the working relationship; and the extent to which the work is an integral part of the company’s business.
• In New York, THE most important factor in determining a worker’s employment status is the degree of control factor — if your work is subject to review by the media company, said Braverman, that favors employee status. “If you had a guest blogger come onto a site and [the blogger] had complete control over what they were going to write about and there was really no editing of that person’s content, and they came on sporadically and whatnot, that looks more like an independent contractor than an employee,” said Braveran. “But if you’re talking about someone who is working full-time, presumably if they’re an editor that they’re presumably their work is subject to review from others, that looks very much like a regular job.”
• To the courts, the permanence of the work matters more than the time spent on it — a one-off project that takes six months indicates an independent contractor, for example, while ongoing part-time work that is integral to the company indicates employee status.
• In most cases, however, if a worker is putting in full-time hours, in the majority of cases they would be considered an employee, said Braverman. “If someone was getting paid full-time, working 45 to 60 hours a week, and was getting a paid a small wage, that would definitely a case I would take,” he said.
• If you are an independent contractor but think you may qualify as an employee, Braverman encourages workers to call a lawyer for a free consultation — most practices, his included, offer them.

Tech, Media and Terrorism

The massacre of 50 Muslims by a white nationalist in Christchurch, New Zealand, was, as the New York Times put it, “A Mass Murder of, and for, the Internet” — a chilling exposition of the ways in which hateful and bigoted ideologies are spread (though not necessarily created) on the internet, in the age of social media. The shooter live-streamed the attack on Facebook and posted a manifesto rife with meme references, both of which tech platforms struggled to scrub from their sites.

• The concern is not just that these sites can provide a platform for explicitly violent content, but that in more subtle ways that do not outright violate policies the sites can foster white nationalism. It has been documented that YouTube’s recommendations can lead viewers to extremist content surreally quickly. But Youtube has done nothing about it, because it doesn’t take the clear and present threat of white nationalism at home as seriously as, say, ISIS recruitment.
• Researchers saw the problem forming and tried to warn tech companies of the very real dangers posed by content shared on their platforms. Becca Lewis of research nonprofit Data + Society, for instance, told NBC she had attempted to warn YouTube about the dangers posed by its algorithm, even publishing a study on the topic in September.
• Will this tragedy spur tech companies to take action? Experts aren’t especially optimistic, because the algorithm has been profitable. “It makes sense from a marketing perspective; if you like Pepsi then you’re going to watch more Pepsi videos… but you take that to the logical extreme with white supremacy videos,” Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told CNN. “They’re going to have to figure out how to not completely scrap a system that has brought them hundreds of millions of dollars of ad revenue while not also furthering someone’s radicalization or recruitment.”
• Experts have urged journalists not to circulate the manifesto or the video. Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Kennedy’s Shorenstein Center, said the materials are essentially a “press kit”designed to dictate coverage. The focus should instead be on the tech platforms, and how and why they were vulnerable to this type of use.
• Frantically pulling violent videos is not eradicating the root of the problem. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook will have to examine the ways in which they welcome and facilitate white nationalist content — then they’ll have to decide if they give a shit.

Beto Gets the Vanity Fair Treatment

Beto O’Rourke is a dreamer, really. Like, he has a dream of everyone having healthcare but he won’t commit to a Medicare for All platform. Is he even a progressive? “I’m not into the labels,” he tells Vanity Fair at one point during a sprawling — and dare I say loving — profile, accompanied by a cover photo of the one-time punk bassist wearing blue jeans in the West Texas desert (why they chose to include his sad dog in the photo? IDK!).

He’s relatable, you see. He was in a punk band and he was a slacker in Williamsburg, where he drank beer and had a trampoline on his rooftop. He wandered. He doubted himself. The profile brings all this to the surface, in great detail, painting a picture of a fundamentally likeable guy who loves Texas and loves America but doesn’t have a whole lot of certainty.

Danielle Tcholakian at the Daily Beast noted that while his humility may be perceived as charming it’s almost impossible to imagine a woman candidate getting away with such ambivalence or receiving the same media treatment. But no one wants to read about a fallible, uncertain woman who got a DUI in her twenties. The Kerouacian trope is reserved for the male subject. And the admiring rendering of this male subject can better be understood once you know that the author, Joe Hagan, is a rock journalist who penned a book (touting almost exclusively male subjects) on the genesis of Rolling Stone magazine. Beto fits an archetype that a certain kind of male journalist finds irresistible, because he’s just like them! But how far can jeans and a smirk get you when you have very few coherent policy positions, and voted with Republicans for a lot of your political tenure? I guess we’ll find out!

Longread of the Week: The logical next step in the glamorization of cannabis culture: weed church! For Cosmopolitan, Jen Doll explores a movement that elevates weed as a spiritual experience.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— The staff of Gimlet Media has announced it is unionizing with the Writers Guild of America, East, months after the podcasting company was acquired by Spotify. The union hopes to work out a contract guaranteeing, among other things, fair treatment of contractors and transparency around pay and promotions. Nick Quah of Hot Pod notedthe move could set a precedent for the podcasting industry.

— First Look Media, which owns the Intercept, laid off 4 percent of its staff. Laura Poitras, who helped found the site and is on its board, said she was “sickened” by the decision to decimate the research team and shut down the Snowden archive that it supported. Don’t worry, they can supplement with “full-time freelancers.”

— The Writers Guild of America continues to take talent agents to task over what it says are harmful practices, like packaging TV shows with pre-existing clients, but negotiations are showing no sign of progress, with the WGA stating it wants its members to fire the agents unless they agree to a new code of conduct, and the agents stubbornly blaming the writers for being unwilling to budge. It seems like a strike is imminent, and since TV is the new film, such a move could have a profound impact on the industry.

— The New York Times Magazine has launched a column called Screenland, which serves to “make sense of viral video moments.” So far, it has dissected a TV appearance by Sean Spicer and the Netflix show Dating Around. I wonder if the magazine had taken note of Andrea Long Chu’s excellent Paper View newsletter.

— Axios, NBC and Facebook all paid a guy to clean up their Wikipedia pages! But can you blame them??

— Jordan Peterson is selling LOBSTER-THEMED MERCHANDISE which I take issue with because what if someone who isn’t a transphobe, hates cleaning their room, and enjoys a diet more varied than BEEF and WATER wants to wear a lobster shirt for totally benign reasons?? I’m not especially into lobsters or anything, but I’m trying to wear more patterns this spring and I like to keep my options open?? Another thing, ruined by the alt-right!

— MySpace (MySpace!!!) lost all music from its first 12 years in a server migration. Andy Baio, who helped launch Kickstarter, said the site lost over 50 million songs from 14 million artists (and he doesn’t think it was an accident). I feel for the artists who lost their fledgling forays into music, but if MySpace wanted to fully delete any record of my adolescent existence on the platform I’d personally be elated. On a more serious note: it’s extremely likely this will happen to other platforms when they go under, so don’t trust platforms to manage your content!

Bye from the Beto Dog!