Digest 04/11/2022

Ashley Bardhan: digest writer extraordinaire, Elon Musk's Twitter buy, WNYC's plagiarism confusion, and more.

ARE YOU THERE MEDIA? IT’S ME, ASHLEY

Briefly: I live in New York, and I’m 15 ½ years old (23). I fully believe that Hillary Clinton gave me Covid two weeks ago, and that I, in turn, gave Barack Obama Covid (I’m lying, but wouldn’t it be funny if that were true?). I’ve been writing about tech, weird internet, and culture in publications like Futurism, Mel Magazine, and Vulture for two years, and I’ve been writing newsletters for Inverse for one year. Now, I’m writing this newsletter. Hi!

Sure, I have hopes and dreams, but I’ll spare you the details because no one cares. Really — no need to be polite, I have a gamer boyfriend and one Etsy favorites section to offload all my hopes and dreams onto. All you really need to know is that, while I’m writing this newsletter, I’m going to try my best to give you entertaining, critical commentary about our stupid industry each week. I care about accuracy and you, the reader. I’m excited to get to know you, and I hope you enjoy our time together.

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TWITTER GETS MUSK-IFIED

A statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 4 revealed that sentient bag of Cheeto dust Elon Musk had acquired 9.2% in Twitter stock, making him the website’s biggest shareholder.

Since the news hit, Musk has been meditating on all the different ways he could improve Twitter, although he will not be joining its board. He could add an edit button (classic), rename it to “Titter” (epic), improve the platform’s signal to noise ratio (genius), and, most relevant to this newsletter, introduce a ratings system to “improve quality of news greatly.”

Cue the red flag waving. Musk has, at best, a tenuous relationship to the truth, and he tends to sic his followers on any journalist that recognizes that. “Musk likes to amplify his own speech and quash whatever threatens his interests or makes him look bad,” Tim Higgins, journalist and author of Tesla book Power Play, told me.

“This isn’t a chill dude,” he said. “He knows how to wield power and isn’t afraid to do so.”

Twitter is already ruled by disinformation, and journalists on the website already have enough to worry about, what with our brain worms and all. Do we need to add a Berlin nightclub Berghain reject to our list of concerns?

“Well, I think if he gets his wish and Twitter adds an edit button, we’ll have to deal with a lot more misinformation on the platform, since edit buttons have been historically used to mislead people on social media,” tech journalist Amanda Silberling told me. Silberling notes that “I don’t think anyone should freak out at this point, but regardless of whatever Elon Musk is doing, I think that anyone working in the media should set up two-factor authentication on their social media accounts.”

“Literally, all I want in life is for every journalist in Study Hall to enable two-factor authentication on their Twitter,” she said (you heard her!).

Futurism writer Victor Tangermann echoed the sentiment, telling me that though he would “describe Musk as a bit of an opportunist when it comes to the topic of free speech,” journalists shouldn’t expect Musk to start stomping on their Twitter accounts anytime soon.

“Unraveling the rules that protect users, especially journalists, from harassment would take a lot of effort on Musk’s part, and I just don’t see him being committed enough to doing something like that,” Tangermann said. Good point — Musk is way too busy running 4/20 jokes into the ground.

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WNYC’S CONFUSING PLAGIARISM MESS

The Columbia Journalism Review has been reporting on the murky nightmare at WNYC for about a month now, though the public radio’s storm doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon.

WNYC’s recent crop of problems started growing in 2020, when former editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, Audrey Cooper, became editor-in-chief of the public radio station. CJR reported that WNYC staffers described Cooper as disconnected from her workforce, appearing to not even “listen to her own radio station,” and a source familiar with the matter told me that Cooper has been either firing staff members skeptical of her leadership or pushing them to quit.

After firing Fred Mogul, who had worked for WNYC for 19 years, for copying and pasting an Associated Press paragraph into an article (though the story ran without it), CJR reports, Cooper launched an internal audit into plagiarism at WNYC. On April 1, Gothamist released an editor’s note stating that WNYC had removed 45 articles from its websites for plagiarism. But curious readers would have to look to other publications to find that the author behind all of the articles was Jami Floyd, now ex-head of WNYC’s Race and Justice Unit.

Floyd resigned from her position after the articles’ removal, and a day later announced her intention to sue WNYC for “gender discrimination, age discrimination, retaliatory workplace harassment, defamation, and violation of my civil rights.”

Though WNYC’s mostly white newsroom certainly make Floyd’s discrimination allegations believeable, as does the radio station’s previous problems with workplace harassment, Floyd still hasn’t addressed her alleged plagiarism. CJR reported that in addition to the 45 articles removed from WNYC websites, it found “at least five more WNYC articles with Floyd’s byline that include strikingly similar wording to specific articles from SCOTUSBlog, Constitution Blog, Business Insider, the Times, and more, that remained posted in full on wnyc.org and were not highlighted in the newsroom’s audit or subsequent investigations.”

Meanwhile, Cooper continues to lose her newsroom’s trust and her staffers.

WNYC still hasn’t named Jami Floyd as the removed articles’ author and its press contact would not return a request for comment. Mike Paul, Floyd’s spokesperson, told me over email that “due to pending litigation,” the “answers to [my] questions” could only be found in “these two important links,” a YouTube link to Floyd’s April 5 press conference, and a link to the written statement she read at the conference. I did not find the answers to my questions in either of these links.

The source familiar with the situation told me that WNYC staff respected Floyd, but it now seems evident that she did plagiarize. I used a (free, not state-of-the-art) plagiarism checker on this removed article, for example, and found one phrase seemingly copied from NPR, which had published its article a week prior to Floyd’s (the phrase, if you’re interested in checking yourself, was “William Sulzer was the first, and to date only, New York governor to be impeached” — somewhat innocuous).

Since neither WNYC nor Floyd have approached the plagiarism allegations transparently, the severity of her alleged transgressions is blurry. The source also found it noteworthy that the New York Public Radio Union, which also did not respond to my request for comment, hasn’t spoken out in defense of Floyd, but against the “lack of clarity” surrounding the situation in general.

This whole thing is just confirmation that, as much as journalists and institutions like to identify themselves as modest pursuers of truth, self-interest almost always comes first. The undecipherable chaos at WNYC could have provided an opportunity for the public radio to clarify its editorial standards and practices, as well as an opportunity for Floyd to speak honestly about the pressures of being a Black woman in a mostly white, mostly male newsroom. Instead, both parties are keeping their cards close, readers and staff are kept in the dark, and nothing changes at all.

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— My ex-coworker Passant Rabie has left Inverse to join Gizmodo as a reporter (congrats, Passant!)

— Ex-Bloomberg News reporter Nico Grant and former-The Wall Street Journal staffer Tripp Mickle will join the New York Times as tech reporters

— Ben Mullin is leaving The Wall Street Journal to join the Times’ media desk, while Jeremy Peters rejoins the team after 12 years

— Furvah Shah will join The Independent’s lifestyle desk in a few-weeks-long apprenticeship

— Jesselyn Cook is leaving Huffington Post to join NBC as an investigative reporter

— Tony Tran is now deputy editor for The Daily Beast’s Innovation section (and he’s looking for pitches)

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet wants to cure Times writers of Twitter. In an internal memo released April 7, Baquet announced that Twitter was “now purely optional for Times journalists” (though, it technically was optional prior to the memo, too), and that the Times will now have a team dedicated to “help prevent and respond to online abuse.”

— Taylor Lorenz, who has often spoken of the New York Times’ supposed inaction when it comes to online hate, could not hear the Times’ announcement over the sound of her (?) satirical feud (?) with Birds Aren’t Real, the parody movement and elaborate way to sell $50 hoodies

— Substack still sucks

— Spotify still sucks as well

— BTW, base rates also tend to suck ass, so the Freelance Solidarity Project reminded writers on April 6 that it collaborates with publications on “Unilateral Agreements—documents that set standards for how the publication will treat freelancers.” In the same Twitter thread, the FSP shared details of its Unilateral Agreement with Hell Gate, a new, worker-owned New York publication.

— I would like a New York Review of Books subscriber to buy me twelve Peter Luger steaks