Digest 1/10/2022

What we lose when we lose Longform, and why we should work to lose the condescending 'voice' of some women's media.

GOODBYE TO THE WOMEN’S MEDIA VOICE

I entered the industry in the women’s media heyday. My friend and I were once at a bar in 2015 at the same time as an OG Jezebel staffer, and we had to look one another in the eye and promise not to say anything stupid that could be overheard and fuck up our chances of working there one day. I ultimately went, instead, to Refinery29, which managed to produce incredible work against the current of traffic demands and opaque executive visions. But what once felt so revolutionary about women’s media now feels like a stale shell of itself, with no real frontrunner leading the conversation.

My own waning interest in women’s media comes down to one thing: the women’s media voice. Five years ago, the conversational and internet-slang-filled headlines were perhaps annoying in retrospect, but at least felt fresh. Today, “Will and Kate Just Shared a Sexxxy Pic on IG” reads like it came from the mouth of a broken 2015 pull-string doll thrown in the back of a closet.

Lest anyone feel targeted by this call-out, here are some headlines my name is on: “Watching this dancer tell his mom he gets to tour with Taylor Swift will give you all the feels” and “The most surprising (and adorbs) animal friendship on Instagram.” No one in the moment should feel ashamed indulging in these trends, but it says something that women’s media hasn’t entirely been able to figure out how to move on from them.

For the first few years of my career, it was easy: If a woman did something, it was Good. That became complicated when the (white) world became clued into the fact that women could be just as toxic and racist and hateful as anyone else, and the usual blanket praise became disingenuous at best and harmful at worst. If women’s media can’t be defined by unilaterally championing things women did, what is it? Instead of grappling with the question, many outlets instead appear to have invented an audience that does not match any human woman I’ve encountered in real life: an imaginary persona of a pop-culture-obsessed z/millennial white woman that’s more Reductress caricature than living organism. We’ve resorted to headlines filled with internet clichés and appropriated slang that’s as awkward to read as it would be to hear from, say, your high school math teacher.

But even beyond headlines, most women’s media sites are still majority-fueled by aggregated pop culture in ways that men’s outlets like GQ and Esquire don’t touch. So how do we treat women as flawed humans, and differentiate between ‘women’s content’ and feminist analysis while still respecting female audiences enough to give them content beyond the same celebrity fluff?

It’s tempting to say the answer is to do away with gendered publications altogether, but despite women’s media omnipresence, I think there’s so much thoughtful, funny, women-centered content still left unwritten. Where is the MEL Magazine for women, I ask? Where’s the place for the weird, gross, deranged things that make up the uniquely women-identifying experience? And who, I ask, is still clicking on stories about Will and Kate’s sexxxy Instagram?

 

WHAT WE LOSE WHEN WE LOSE LONGFORM

After more than a decade, Longform is shutting down its article recommendations service. While the organization’s podcast will continue, the loss of volunteer-led initiative is an end of an era in media. Many writers credit Longform recommending their work with jump-starting their career, and writer Karen Ho even cited its recommendation of her 2015 Toronto Life story “Jennifer Pan’s Revenge” in her O-1 Visa application.

“Longform obliterated, in some ways, whether or not something appeared in print,” Ho tells Study Hall in a phone call. “My magazine story wasn’t even mentioned on the cover, but it didn’t matter because the internet found it and Longform found it.”

“Jennifer Pan’s Revenge” became Toronto Life’s most-read story of the last decade, per Ho, and she credits a large part of that traffic to Longform’s recommendation and shout-outs from other places like Today In Tabs.

Daisy Alioto’s life was similarly changed when Longform picked up her self-published essay “What Is Lifestyle?” in 2020. The piece was killed at its initial outlet, so Alioto built a website on Squarespace over the weekend and put it out herself.

“I was really hoping that publishing the piece would help me get a literary agent, but it’s difficult to attract attention if you don’t have a little kiss from daddy (the prestige of a byline) to go along with the idea,” she says over email. “Longform picked up my self-published essay and directed a lot of traffic to the website and I did end up connecting with my now agent in the aftermath of the piece’s success.”

The internet is still here, of course, so recommendations and other viral boosts won’t go away. But a key voice behind them is gone.

 

COMINGS AND GOINGS (ME, KATE LINDSAY, EDITION)

This my last digest for Study Hall! I have had such a blast crash-landing into your inbox on Monday mornings, and I know work is evil and bad and we should not aspire to it but I’ve genuinely loved every second of my time at Study Hall. I’m headed over to The Atlantic as an editor on the newsletter team, and you can still find me on the internet culture newsletter I co-run called Embedded. Please still tell me your media gossip, even if I can’t publish it here anymore.

 

COMINGS AND GOINGS (EVERYONE ELSE)

— David Fahrenthold is leaving The Washington Post after 21 years to join The New York Times as an investigative reporter.

— Lindsey Stanberry is joining Fortune as an executive editor of a new vertical, Select, leaving her role at CNBC.

— Kerry Flynn has joined Axios as a media deals reporter.

— Kim Truong and Ashley Reese are joining Netflix, leaving their roles at InStyle and Jezebel, respectively.

— Zoë Schiffer and Sarah Jeong have rejoined The Verge. Schiffer briefly left the publication for NBC, and is returning as a senior reporter covering labor and workplace organizing in the tech industry. Jeong is returning to the publication as a deputy features editor after three years at The New York Times.

— Mimi Zeiger is now the books editor at Landscape Architecture Magazine.

— Audie N. Cornish is the latest NPR host to depart the company, which staffers like Ari Shapiro and Sam Sanders point out is a list made up of exclusively hosts from marginalized backgrounds. More on this from The Verge.

— Patrice Peck is now Cosmopolitan’s senior opinion editor.

— Gabby Fernandez has joined Vox as a senior audience strategy editor.

— Miela Fetaw has joined Capital B as Director of Live Events.

— Emma Garland is leaving VICE UK to freelance.

— Steffi Cao is now a social news reporter at BuzzFeed.

— Charles Pulliam is joining The Verge to write about film and television.

 

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Two former employees at Feedfeed, a crowdsourced recipe and food inspiration media platform, have filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against Feedfeed’s senior management. Rachel Gurjar and Sahara Henry-Bohoskey allege the company’s founders, Dan and Julie Resnick, and editorial and test kitchen director Jake Cohen, facilitated a corporate environment in which women of were paid less than their colleagues, and also “verbally abused and retaliated against when they complained,” per the Washington Post. Both the founders and Cohen denied the accusations in a statement.

— Starting to think it’s not a good idea to quit your New York Times job to run for governor of Oregon if you’re not positive you’re eligible to run for governor of Oregon.

— New York Times media columnist and former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith is striking out with Bloomberg Media’s chief executive Justin Smith to launch a global news organization. The pair have provided few more details than that, other than the much-quoted line about their imagined audience being the “200 million people who are college-educated, who read in English.” I don’t have much breathless or skeptical to say about this either way, other than it’s hard to be excited about media right now. I would, however, direct you to this piece by Alex Sujong Laughlin, who was laid off from BuzzFeed during Smith’s (the Ben one) tenure: “I see those media workers who were overextended, underpaid and eventually laid off from companies run by this industry’s so-called heroes,” Laughlin writes. “I wonder what it would look like if they took a moment to look around at the people who’ve been left behind, and extended a hand.”

— After many whispers, The Information reported that The New York Times is acquiring subscription sports site The Athletic for a hefty $550 million.

— G/O management previously told A.V. Club employees they had until January 15th to decide if they were relocating to Los Angeles to work out of the new office or depart the company. None of the seven A.V Club employees have made their decision, but Onion Inc Union wrote on Twitter that management has already published job listings for a number of their roles. “To be clear, these positions are NOT vacant,” it writes. “But G/O isn’t being particularly subtle about whether or not it wants many of its longest-tenured employees to remain in their jobs.”

— Jewish Currents has ratified their first union contract.