Study Hall Digest 6/24/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

“WE CANNOT AGREE TO PERMIT OUR CONTRIBUTORS TO SAY THAT VOX MEDIA PAYS ‘X’ RATE,” reads the Vox legal department’s response to freelancer Daisy Alioto’s negotiation attempts over contract terms. Last Tuesday, Alioto tweeted a screenshot of the emailed response, which garnered hundreds of likes and prompted a massive response from Media Twitter

The ensuing argument was that transparency around rates is key to freelancers organizingand negotiating higher fees, and that suppressing it harms mostly marginalized writers. Many expressed shock such a clause exists in a freelance contract (“I’ve seen a lot of freelance contracts in my time, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” tweeted Felix Salmon of Axios). The Industrial Workers of the World Freelance Journalists Union encouraged freelancers to send them their Vox rates, then the union tweeted them outanonymously.

“Some people think it’s an infringement on the First Amendment,” Alioto told Study Hall. “I would say that’s definitely the case, but I’m more concerned about what it says about their values and how a lack of transparency can perpetuate a lack of equality in the media industry, and how that’s at odds with their publicly stated values.”

Writer Zan Romanoff tweeted that she had stopped pitching Vox sites The Goods and Eater in light of the contract. “I think it’s just really clear that asking people not to share how much money they make only benefits the company — it just doesn’t benefit workers,” she told Study Hall. “The only thing I’ve ever learned from rate sharing is that I can ask for more money, and I understand why companies don’t want me to do that.”

The clause is not new. A Vox contract from 2017 has identical terms around keeping contributors’ rates confidential. But the landscape has changed a lot since then — freelancers have made attempts at organizing collectively and an openness about rates has been a significant part of that. At the end of last year, Study Hall led a push for freelancers publicly sharing their rates on Twitter in the name of transparency. Workers are also reading their contracts more closely. Alioto said she had been encouraged by other freelancers to closely read the Vox contract when it was revised earlier this year, mainly due to the existence of a “morality” clause allowing Vox to terminate agreements with writers who “insult or offend the community or public morals” (that clause has since been removed).

A Vox spokesperson told Study Hall the company is reviewing the contract. “We have heard the recent feedback regarding our freelance contracts, specifically the confidentiality obligation around pay rates, and are currently reviewing our policies to ensure they are fair and reflective of industry standards,” said the spokesperson in a statement.

Alioto noted that freelancers should not be burdened by the obligation to negotiate their way back from unfair standards. “Hire an actual First Amendment editorial consultant or another lawyer or have an agent look at it,” she said of the contract-drafting process. “Don’t put the onus on all these initial freelancers to negotiate with you in a silo because you know your contract is shitty.”

Media Twitter was preoccupied a few weeks ago with The $4 / Word Discourse, afterTaffy Brodesser-Akner spoke about  her rates in an interview. The conversation about Vox’s contract is about systems that, assisted by a forced secrecy, reward some and punish others, and stifle the creation of equitable industry standards.

Alioto recalled discovering she had been paid a $1,000 less than a male writer for the same amount of words at a Vox site. “I never held it against [Vox], I continued to work for them,” she said. “But I know that this is something that happens at Vox because it happened to me.”

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If Bryan Goldberg is going to keep buying up every struggling media company until we are all his unwilling underlings, it’s probably good that we become familiar with his management style — which is why the new story on Goldberg from CJR’s Lyz Lenz feels so necessary. The piece details unsettling behavior from the Bustle Digital Group founder, who has snatched up The Outline, Mic, Elite Daily, Gawker, and The Zoe Report.

Maya Kosoff, who had initially joined the new Gawker operation and left when the company failed to adequately deal with inappropriate behavior from editorial director Carson Griffith (still at the company), recalled Goldberg calling her after hours at home to try and talk her into staying. She called his tone “intimidating” and characterized him as a “loose cannon.” Goldberg didn’t do himself any favors by replicating this behavior with CJR’s Lenz, calling her repeatedly at odd hours and accusing her of being part of being part of a conspiracy because she had Venmo’d Kosoff once. Can’t wait til he’s everyone’s boss!!

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E. Jean Carroll’s horrific account of being raped by Donald Trump from her upcoming book “What Do We Need Men For?” which was excerpted in The Cut, has not been treated as hard news, as media critics have noted. Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton expressed shock that the New York Times chose to cover the revelation in its Books section and that it was nowhere to be found on the homepage the following day. CJR’s Jon Allsop weighed in this morning, noting the criticism around the coverage is not that the media failed to cover the story, but that the magnitude of the coverage does not match the severity of the allegation and the objective importance of the president being accused of rape by a well-known journalist. It could very well be a case of fatigue, since there are so many accusations of misconduct against Trump, which offers some disturbing commentary about how awful treatment of women is considered banal.

Longread of the Week: THIS LOOK INSIDE THE NOW-DEFUNCT BABE.NET FROM THE CUT?! There is A LOT going on here, from the amusing (staff engineering and performing a pitch meeting for the NYMag reporter) to the upsetting (abuse of power from male managers). It all shakes out to be a pretty bleak portrait of a place that made its primary goal driving traffic at all costs and replicating the style of Gawker, sans the reporting chops.

EVERYTHING ELSE

— The editor in chief of the Huffington Post has said the site will take down dozens of anti-vax articles and blog posts after Insider asked about them. Almost all the posts were published under Arianna Huffington’s leadership in the 2000s, Insider found, and made Huffington Post something of a leader in the promotion of anti-vax views, though they’ve now tried to position themselves as staunchly pro-vaccine.

— The Verge’s Casey Newton wrote a deeply disturbing deep-dive on conditions at one of Facebook’s content moderation sites, where an overnight shift worker died of a heart attack in March of last year. “The stress they put on him — it’s unworldly,” one of his managers told The Verge (the deceased worker has moderated such vile content as hate speech and child porn).

— Vanity Fair examined the complex relationship between departing press secretary Sarah Sanders and the White House press corps. They’re not shedding any tears, basically, but they’re also not celebrating. She was fairly accessible behind the scenes, one reporter told VF, and her replacement could be worse. “I’m not expecting it to be worse than Sarah,” another reporter told VF. “I don’t expect a reset either. I expect nothing to change.”

— Ebony, which had long refused to pay freelancers, leading to a push from writers under the hashtag #EbonyOwes, has fired its entire online staff without pay, according to The Root. The staff stopped working after receiving an HR email noting there would be a delay in payment, then were fired by phone shortly after. It would be great if the publication were purchased and revitalized, just…not by Bryan Goldberg!!

— Quillette, which published a bullshit study linking journalists to Antifa that directly led to far-right harassment of those journalists, is attempting to distance itself from the consequences of its work. Founder Claire Lehmann claims any resulting harassment has “nothing to do with us,” which is obviously not the case. It’s pretty standard for journalists to consider the potential harm that may result from their reporting and to weigh those ethical considerations. Then again, it’s also pretty standard for journalists to not use the work of a child rape advocate to promote skull-based race science so, you know, shrug emoji.